The Viking trail in Roskilde

Saturday we decided to come back from Copenhagen via Roskilde again, this time to see the Viking ship museum and the cathedral. (The day would have been a lot easier if the luggage lockers in the train station had not been closed because of "the terror," according to a clerk. So we dragged the luggage all over town. Like Viking raiders fresh from shopping in Copenhagen, whose name means shopping harbor, after all.)

Here is a side view of the cathedral. It was the first grand Gothic cathedral to be made in the 1200s out of 3 million red bricks rather than big blocks of granite or something similar.

The next photo shows the cathedral interior, with its amazing vaulted Gothic ceiling. Most of the interior was plastered over, with the red bricks actually making a nice contrast. Much of the plastered area had been painted with frescoes, some of which are visible in this next picture with Sandy.



The next photo shows you the red brick cathedral on the right and the red brick city hall (rådhus) on the left. (Danes have been very fond of red brick since the 1100s -- almost all of Århus and most other cities are red brick, very solid and all, but just maybe lacking in a bit of variety.) Where you see two people standing is the Rådhuskælder (the basement restaurant and bar under the city hall -- a pretty common institution in Denmark and Germany), where we had lunch later. As is common for lunch, the daily special was smørrebrød, several artistically arranged open faced sandwiches, which had pickled herring on one, beef on another and pork on another. Very tasty. (I am even coming to like pickled herring, which always used to seem one of the more bizarre things from Scandinavia.)

From the cathedral we walked (and dragged the luggage) down what was otherwise an extremely pretty path among trees and a park to the Viking ship museum. This was pretty exciting. One of the first things we did when we moved to Washington, D.C. in 1979, with one year of marriage and baby Julia in tow, was join the Longship Company, which maintains and rows a repro- duction of a Viking longship. (Imagine a bunch of college kids, plus us, rowing a Viking ship around the Baltimore yacht harbor, getting a lot of very strange looks from people with more conventional 20th century (as opposed to 10th century) boats.

Here is a picture of the fragments from one of the original Viking ships that was sunk in Rosklide harbor as part of a defense barrier against invading Norwegians. (Roskilde was one of the major merchant cities of Denmark in the 11th century, so it was a prize for raiders.) Five ships were sunk as part of the barrier. Their remains form the core of the museum.

The museum has used the original ship remains in a very clever way to create an extensive program of researching how they were made, how they operated, and building a series of replicas of the original ships as part of the learning experience. They do workshops for others who want to build and operate them. So the new Viking ship recently built (since our day) for the Longship Company (which we still belong to and support -- but haven't helped row in many years) is a replica of one of the Roskilde ships, built in California. You can see it in the last photo here, looking almost more like a work of art than a highly functional craft based on real ones used by Viking raiders 1000 years ago. Personally, it is both odd and very satisfying to come see the origins of what seemed like an endearingly goofy hobby almost 30 years ago, rowing a real Viking longship.