Lindholm Høje, Viking rise and fall

We walked across Aalborg today to get to Lindholm Høje, one of the biggest Viking grave sites in the world. On the way across town from our hotel, we walked by this building, considered the finest 17th century building on town. This far north, even at 9:30 in the morning, the lighting is pretty horizontal and dramatic.

After that, we walked across the Limfjord, an arm of the ocean that cuts clear across all of Denmark, so we are heading toward what is in some ways a really large island, northern Jutland (the western part of Denmark). As you can see in the photo, it was a clear, cold pretty day.

It was a good long walk, 3-4 miles from hotel to the Viking grave site. But really worth it. The site was occupied as a burial ground for a series of neighboring villages from 400 AD to 1000 AD, from Iron Age through the Viking Age.

This next shot shows one view of the hill that the graves cover. Some are mounds like the one in front, where someone was buried without being cremated. Most are circle (for women) or ship (for men) shaped, which held in the burial pyre over which someone was cremated. They were cremated with the best clothing, jewelry, weapons, and often their dogs.

The next photo shows Sandy sitting up in one of those kinds of graves. The Viking poetess rises from the grave?

The hill of the grave sites is huge, with almost 700 graves. It was a farm, if a steep and rocky one, but a benefactor paid to buy it and save the grave sites, which were discovered in the late 19th century. Before it could be excavated, WW II interrupted most things in Denmark and the Nazis dug defensive trenches across the hill, in among the graves. Archaeologists were able to excavate 625 eventually.

This last shot gives a sense of how big the site is. All the visible stones mark graves. Some in the rings or ship shapes favored for Viking era cremations, some just single standing stones that mark burial sites that came before and after the Viking era.

This place was interesting. It gave me a better sense that almost anything I remember of how a culture can rise, have centuries of history with specific customs and then fall again, or simply change, as the Viking culture changed after Christianity to slowly become part of the European middle ages after 1000 AD. People as proud of the cultures as modern Europeans or Americans would do well to remember that they don't always last. Will some future visitor look across the ruins of my neighborhood in Austin this way, or will we be clever enough, as the Chinese have been so far, to make the culture last for thousands of years? (Another post for another day is the profound culture shock I felt going to a really large Chinese art museum for the first time, realizing how many thousands of years it had had a continuous cultural tradition in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc. and how little I knew about it.)