How can you travel to Denmark and not learn about Vikings? We spent an afternoon in Roskilde to visit the Viking Ship Museum. It was pretty remarkable. Wikipedia gives a nice brief history of the museum: Around the year 1070, five Viking ships were deliberately sunk at Skuldelev in Roskilde Fjord in order to block the most important fairway and to protect Roskilde from enemy attack from the sea. These ships, later known as the Skuldelev ships, were excavated in 1962. They turned out to be five different types of ships ranging from cargo ships to ships of war. The Viking Ship Museum overlooks Roskilde Fjord and was built in 1969 especially to exhibit the five newly discovered ships. In the late 1990s excavations for an expansion of the museum uncovered a further 9 ships including the longest Viking warship ever discovered, at 36 metres.
We tried out some games played by Vikings, including throwing bones into a basket…
and “Kaste Thors hammer”:
There were tours on Viking ships:
And demonstrations on how ships were constructed:
We climbed aboard the Havhingsten fra Glendalough, a reconstruction of one of the Skuldelev ships which was originally built in 1042.
On our way home we stopped to see Roskilde Cathedral:
And enjoyed a traditional Danish dinner at a pub:
Just another reason to love Denmark:
