Warning, rant on: BTW, just in case you wonder why some of my images are turned sideways. Blogger.com, while wonderful in many ways, turns most vertical images sideways as I upload them and offers NO tools or mechanisms to let me fix them. I have looked through their help lists, etc. and people say fix the image and then reload it. But the trouble is when the image is fine, right side up in my computer but gets turned sideways in the process of uploading. Oh well. Rant off:
I wanted to start with this image which is one of the first things you see in the museum. How can you not love a comical viking gravestone, with an interlaced beard, planted for good old Fúl, by his buddy Rolf and friends. It actually reads this way:
- Gunnulfr and Eygautr/Auðgautr and Áslakr and Hrólfr raised
- this stone in memory of Fúl, their partner, who died
- when kings fought.
Or an equally interesting stone with an image of Viking trickster god Loki. (Most cultures love a good trickster god -- read The Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman for a nice recent example or read stories of Coyote from the Navajo. They do well demographically, too. Good old coyote now lives on the edges, house cats and leavings of people from LA to New York.)
The museum, in south Aarhus, has an amazing number of things from the Viking age, as well as much earlier stuff, including the remarkably well preserved image of a guy sacrific
ed by having his throat cut and being tossed into a bog, which preserved him remarkably well from when it happened around zero B.C..There were later findings of weapons, jewelry and all kinds of things that warriors would carry in a bog at Illerup ådal. The defenders of a town beat off attackers and then to thank the gods for their victory threw all their stuff into a bog. (A pretty significant sacrifice of a lot of valuable things -- they were pretty serious about their religion, it seems.) The photo s
hows the things more or less how they were found, not as they look in the museum now.There is also an outside component of the museum, built around some graves that were actually on the site, as well as others that were moved there and reconstructed. This shows one where a goat is defending his turf from Sandy who wanted a closer look, but was mindful of the fairly impressive horns on the goat. Didn't
want to play king of the mountain with the billy goats gruff, apparently.More Moesgård later. Stay tuned.
2 comments:
That reminds Kristy of the mounds in Britain where kings are buried with their treasure. They're near Stonehenge--she's having trouble with the name. Mom, help?
Would that be Sutton Hoo? That's in Suffolk, though, which is kinda far from Wiltshire, which is I think where Stonehenge is. But there was also one in Bucks (Buckinghamshire), which is a lot closer. It's the one Susan Cooper refers to in _The Dark is Rising_. (Which is going to be an awful movie with no connection that I can see with the books, but that's another matter.) I can't remember the name of it. It was a royal ship-burial, though. Susan Cooper grew up in Bucks and Wales, and it was referring to a dig they found in her childhood, I think. (Sutton Hoo was excavated in the 1930s I think, and this other one a bit after that.)
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