Gjermundbu helmet

• 1. Introduction

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  The Gjermundbu helmet is named for the farm in Norway where it was dug out of the ground in 1943. On the 29th of March that year, a farmer named Gunnar Gjermundbo set out to level a rise of ground on the Gjermundbu farm. The farm sat near Haugsbygd, in the municipality of Ringerike in Buskerud, Norway. Gjermundbo wanted to build a home for his parents and plant a new orchard there. He already knew that a large Iron Age burial mound, a tumulus, stood nearby in a spot called Vesleenga. The ground he actually needed to clear was a smaller, elongated rise just to the west of that mound. As he dug into the rise, artifacts began to surface. He had struck a Viking Age burial containing weapons, armor, and the crushed remains of an iron helmet. Who was the man buried there, and how did that wreckage become one of the best known helmets to survive from the Viking Age?

• 2. Word Spreads

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  Local historian Jon Guldal telephoned the Collection of Norwegian Antiquities at the University of Oslo the very next day. Two days later, on the 31st of March, the newspaper Ringerikes Blad ran the story alongside an interview with Gjermundbo's father, Lars. The university sent archaeologist Sverre Marstrander and museum assistant Charlotte Blindheim to examine the site in person. Their follow-up digging turned up no further artifacts, but Marstrander confirmed the site held an exceptionally rich Viking Age man's grave. He carried the recovered pieces back to Oslo for study. In May 1943, Gjermundbo uncovered a second grave inside the same mound. Marstrander returned and determined this was a separate burial from the same period as the first. The two graves were designated Gjermundbu I and Gjermundbu II. The ground holding both graves would soon prove far larger, and far stranger in shape, than that first survey suggested.

• 3. The Ship-Shaped Mound

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  Surveyors first measured the embankment at about 25 metres long, 8 metres wide at its widest point, and up to 1.8 metres high. They took it for a single burial mound. Closer study showed it actually held two separate human graves, both cremations dating from the Viking Age. Revised measurements later stretched the earthwork to 29 metres long and as much as 9 metres wide, a shape built to resemble a ship. The smaller of the two large mounds on the farm turned out to hold the richer of the two burials, Gjermundbu I.

• 4. Norway's Richest Warrior Grave

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  Archaeologist Helge Braathen dates the Gjermundbu I grave to the latter half of the 10th century. In terms of grave goods, it is probably the richest man's grave from the Viking Age in Norway. It ranks behind only three richer graves. Those were the ship graves at Gokstad in Sandefjord and at Haugen farm in Rolvsøy, plus a chamber grave from that same farm. One archaeologist has theorized a connection between this grave and the Vikings' ties to the Kievan Rus'. Alongside the helmet fragments, excavators recovered fragments of chain mail and a ceremonial sword of Jan Petersen's type S. They also found two spears, two axes, four shield bosses, two spurs, and five or six bits. No other Viking Age grave find in Scandinavia or Western Europe contains both a helmet and chain mail. None of that wealth said anything yet about what the crushed helmet actually looked like once restorers went to work on it.

• 5. The Helmet Itself

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  Restorers pieced the Gjermundbu helmet back together from nine excavated fragments. The restored piece is round in shape, made of iron, and built from four separate plates. It now stands on display at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. Only four other Viking helmets are known anywhere: a fragment from Tjele, the Yarm helmet, a fragment from Lokrume, and another fragment recovered in Kyiv. Of that small group, the Gjermundbu helmet is one of only two complete enough to have been reconstructed. Not far away, within that same stretch of embankment, lay a second, humbler burial that told a very different story.

• 6. The Quieter Burial

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  A double-edged sword of type M lay inside Gjermundbu II, the second grave uncovered in that same mound. Excavators also found a battle axe and a spear head alongside it. This second grave dates from the 10th century, close to the same period as Gjermundbu I. The other large mound on the farm, the tumulus Gjermundbo once noticed beside his building site, has never been excavated. It does carry a stone perimeter, known as a foot chain, a feature common to burial mounds from the early Iron Age.