Viking houses in Aarhus, Denmark

Model of early Viking Aros

I am in Aarhus, Denmark for a 3-day conference on early cities. Papers are focusing on cities and methods for studying cities, particularly for the Viking era, Medieval Europe, the late Near East, and the East African coast. I had a couple of hours free before the sessions started, so I visited the Viking Museum in downtown Aarhus. This is a gem of a museum that marks the spot where some Viking houses and deposits were excavated several years ago. It is a small self-guided museum in the basement of a modern building.

Reconstructed plank road

Aarhus, called Aros in the Viking era, was an important craft and trading center. The site was fortified, and then the fortifications were expanded by King Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century. I posted about Harald Bluetooth and his planned circular structures previously.  He founded a church, in the plaza here, and eventually the Cathedral was built in its place. Inside the fortification wall ran a plank road. The archaeologists recovered several of the planks intact, and a portion of the plank road is reconstructed in the museum. You can still see the cart tracks in the original boards, and they are shown in the reconstruction.

House outlines drawn on the floor.

Pit house with skeleton, reconstructed

Pit house excavation with skeleton

One of the things I like best about this museum is that the locations of the excavated houses are shown drawn on the floor.  There were several rectangular pit houses here. In one, a skeleton was excavated in the middle of the floor. This find is reconstructed in the museum.

Urban houselot in Viking Aros

The museum has a painted reconstruction of an urban houselot from the Viking period. Notice the yard around the house, something shown in the town model at the top here (Soren Sindbaek, Viking archaeology specialist and co-organizer of the conference, thinks that the houses in the model may be shown with a more regular layout of the town than actually existed). These houses showed evidence of regular domestic activities, as well as several kinds of craft production. People produced craft goods in their homes,; dedicated workshops separate from houses were a later development.

Runestone from Aros

The museum also shows some nice carvings found in Aarhus (although not at this particular excavation). The runestone says, "Toke Smith raised this stone
after Trolle Goodman's son, who gave him gold and redemption." Was old Toke an ancestor of mine? I love these old runestones. I was impressed at the numbers of them spread over the landscape, still standing, when Cindy and I visited Uppsala a few years ago.

Carving of Loki

There is also a small carved stone with an image of the Norse god Loki. Harald Bluetooth introduced Christianity to Denmark, and Viking carving show both indigenous and Christian images and messages.

The Aarhus cathedral

The museum is just across the street from the Aarhus Cathedral. The church has very nice centuries-old paintings preserved, and it is full of large old gravestones. I could not resist taking a photo of a gravestone that must mark the burial of an archaeologist or a bioarchaeologist.

Grave stone in the cathedral

We took a break from the conference sessions today to make a trip down to the Moesgaard Museum, just south of Aarhus. This is a fantastic museum of anthropology and archaeology, focusing on the Danish past.. The building is brand-new, with a large gently sloping roof planted in grass. Kids were sledding down the hill - that is, the roof of the museum - today. The exhibits on the Iron Age, the Viking period, and the bog-people exhibits are first-rate. There are some innovative features in this museum; its well worth a visit .

I have really enjoyed Aarhus: the conference, the museums, and people, and the food. Thank you to the conference organizers, Rubina Raja and Soren Sindbaek. They direct the "Centre for Urban Network Evolutions" at Aarhus University.

Viking Urban Planning

Fig 1 - A Trelleborg fortress today

The very phrase "Viking urban planning" may strike some as an oxymoron. The Vikings are famous for raiding, conquering, and pillaging, hardly activities that resonate with the the careful design and planning of cities. Yet a group of geometrical fortresses exhibiting exacting planning were built in Denmark by the Viking king Harald Bluetooth around A.D. 980, and these give us insights into cities and planning in the Viking age. Most of my discussion here is based on Roesdahl (1987), an excellent discussion of these fascinating sites.

Fig 2 - Plans of three Trelleborg sites

At least four of these fortresses are known. They are often referred to as the "Trelleborg fortresses," after the first one to be discovered and excavated. Figure 2 shows plans of three of these settlements. These sites are clearly planned; they correspond to both of the measures of urban planning for ancient cities: standardization among cities, and coordination of buildings within cities (Smith 2007). The main features they share are: outer circular walls  with ditches; with four gates at the compass points; two axial roads that link the gates; a ring-road inside the rampart; and large standardized long-houses arranged in quadrangles (Roesdahl, p.211). Within each site, the houses are identical in size and form.

Fig 3 - Reconstruction by Holger Schmidt of Firkat

Fig 4 - Reconstruction of a house

Based on artifact dating and dendrochronology, all of the Trelleborg fortress sites were built in or close to A.D. 980, and they were only used for a very short time. Although the housing at first glance looks like soldier's barracks, excavation shows that men, women, and children lived in the sites, and that some were craftsmen. Roesdahl interprets these as "very special and very organized royal manors" (p. 217). Several reconstructions of the houses have been made (Fig. 4).

Fig 5 - Realm of Harald Bluetooth

King Harald Bluetooth ruled Denmark from around A.D. 958 - 985. His realm covered a sizable part of southern and western Scandinavia (figure 5). He was the first Viking king to convert to Christianity, and he set up elaborate rune stones at Jelling (fig. 6), in association with several large burial monuments. In case you were wondering, Harald Bluetooth provided the name for the Bluetooth wireless communication technology, developed by the Swedish company Ericsson. The Bluetooth logo consists of the runic characters for King Harald Bluetooth's name.

Fig 6 - Harald's runestone at Jelling

Fig 7 - Bluetooth runes

These circular fortresses are unique in Scandinavian urban history. They do not have clear predecessors or successors. In the interpretation of Else Roesdahl, they were built in a time of decline and crisis, "primarily to control a country ready to revolt." (p. 226). Within a few years, Harald's son, Sven Forkbeard, revolted, and Harald was killed in one of the resulting battles.

The Trelleborg fortresses are important as monuments of Harald Bluetooth's reign, and as a good example of the unusual practice of circular urban design (Smith 2007; Johnston 1983). But perhaps most importantly, their discovery and excavation overturned existing ideas of the urban accomplishments of the Vikings. In the words of Roesdahl,

[The discovery of] Trelleborg causes a sensation. Nobody had thought the barbaric Vikings able to plan, organise or construct such a sophisticated structure, and the learned world conseequently had to rethink their concept of Vikings. (p.208)

References


Brink, Stefan and Neil Price (editors)
2008    The Viking World. Routledge, New York.

Johnston, Norman J.
1983    Cities in the Round. University of Washington Press, Seattle.

Roesdahl, Else
1987    The Danish Geometrical Viking Fortresses and their Context. Anglo-Norman Studies 9:208-226.

Smith, Michael E.
2007    Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning. Journal of Planning History 6(1):3-47.


*** ONE of my favorite historical novels is The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson, which starts with the end of Harald Bluetooth's reign and follows its Viking protagonists for several decades. According to a book review by NPR.org:   "Even though The Long Ships was first published in 1941, it remains the literary equivalent of an action-and intrigue-filled adventure movie that won't insult your intelligence...Bengtsson is an infectiously enthusiastic and surprisingly funny writer--even readers with zero interest in the Europe of a millennium ago will want to keep turning the pages." How can one not like a book whose characters have  names like Sven Forkbeard and Ragnar Hairy-Breeks?