Ladby ship

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ladby ship rests at the village of Ladby, close to Kerteminde in Denmark. It is the only ship burial from the Viking Age ever discovered within the country's modern borders. Every comparable grave lies elsewhere. The boat chamber at Hedeby and the ship burials at Oseberg, Borre, Gokstad and Tune sit in Norway or in territory now part of Germany. All of them date to the 9th and 10th centuries. What sets the Ladby grave apart from all of them is not just its location. It is what happened to it after the funeral, and why. The evidence stayed buried at Ladby for close to a thousand years before anyone worked out what it meant.

• 2. A Grave Undone

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  A gilded bronze link from a dog harness, decorated in the Jelling style, is what lets archaeologists date the burial to the early 10th century. Only a few small human bones remained inside the grave by the time researchers excavated it. That scarcity led researchers to describe the grave as a translation, meaning a conversion from a heathen grave into a Christian one.

  King Haraldr Blátönn and his heir, Sveinn Tjúguskegg, are central to a rival theory about the desecration. Their struggle for dominance may have driven the destruction of the grave rather than any religious conversion.

  Sitting in the open, visible to travelers and locals throughout the region, the ship functioned as a monument to power. It glorified the minor king buried inside it. Within a few years of the burial, raiders reduced every grave good to fragments, a blow researchers read as an attack on the family's prestige.

  It took a chance discovery, decades later, to finally confirm what had happened beneath that mound.

• 3. An Amateur's Discovery

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  On or around the 28th of February 1935, Poul Helweg Mikkelsen, a pharmacist and amateur archaeologist, discovered the site near Kerteminde in northeastern Fyn, Denmark.

  Gustav Rosenberg, a conservator at the Danish National Museum, worked with Mikkelsen on the original drawings. Those drawings remain the primary source material for everything known about the find.

  Mikkelsen personally paid for an arched building to be constructed over the burial site. Workers then covered the structure with earth and grass to protect it.

  The National Museum took charge of the ship and held full responsibility for the site until 1994. That year, responsibility passed to the Department of Archaeology and Landscape at the Viking Museum at Ladby, part of the Museums of Eastern Funen.

  That museum would eventually rebuild the burial scene itself, giving visitors something no excavation report ever could.

• 4. Inside The Museum

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  A new building, completed in 2007, now houses a full-scale reconstruction of the ship burial at the Viking Museum at Ladby.

  The reconstruction shows the burial scene as it may have looked right after the funeral. Inside it, the chieftain lies on a bed within a replica of his ship, surrounded by grave goods, his dogs, and his eleven horses.

  An interpretive movie inside the museum explores Viking beliefs about the journey to the realm of the dead. It draws on Norse myths and the imagery carved into the Gotlandic Picture stones.

  A scholarly account of the find appeared in 2001, written by Anne C. Sørensen. It remains the fullest published record of what the ship revealed, produced with the National Museum of Denmark and the Kertemindeegnens Museer.