Having set myself the task of discovering how Denmark went “from powerhouse to posing” (see last week’s post), I took myself on a little trip to Roskilde, Denmark’s Viking-age capital city, a mere 45 minutes on a (double decker!) train from Copenhagen and covered under the auspices of a Large City Pass, which gives you free access to all public transport within the western side of Zealand island for a mere 200kr (£22.86 for 24 hours. No faffing around buying tickets or worrying about whether you’re on the right train or whether you’re allowed to be on the (double-decker!) train and you get to use it for getting to Copenhagen Central in the first place when you’re staying a 17-minute walk (or 2 minutes on the S-Bahn) away and then I could do what I liked with it all that evening and the next morning up until the time I activated it in the app the morning before.
I didn’t find much in Roskilde that would help me figure out my question about Denmark’s aggressive maritime past. I found the alleged grave of Harald Bluetooth (whose name we use today for… well, Bluetooth) and the tomb of Margaret I, who united the Scandinavian nations, both in the 12th century cathedral, but Roskilde today seems to be a pleasant and fairly quiet smallish town where, even on a Saturday, all the shops and cafes close at 4pm. There was an event in the cathedral, so I couldn’t actually get in there for three or four hours but I spotted a sign pointed down a tree-lined hill with the word Viking in it and that was enough for me to follow it. It led me down to the harbour and to the Viking Ship Museum, which does seem to be Roskilde’s premier tourist attraction.
The centrepiece are the ruins of five Viking ships deliberately sunk to form a barrier in the Roskilde Fjord to control the sea routes into Denmark’s powerful capital. Two are warships, one of them a chieftain’s ship capable of carrying up to 70 warriors and the other a small warship with about half that capacity. The other three are a huge cargo ship, a small trading ship and a fishing boat and it took a month in the summer of 1962 to raise them all without damaging them. Then they had to be preserved, because after 800-odd years underwater, quick drying out would mean disaster. I remember the Mary Rose, a much younger wreck, and how long it took to get her safely dried and she still lives in a climate-controlled glass box. The five Viking ships, on the other hand, are sitting out in the exhibition hall, with nothing stopping anyone touching them other than Danish good behaviour. I have to say, I felt a little vindicated to discover a sign that said they needed to build a new hall for them because the sunlight from the massive windows forming one side of the hall was degrading them. They’ve been fitted into metal frames so that you can get an idea of what the whole boat would have looked like, but honestly, it really just shows you how little of each boat is left and how little sense the fragments would make without the frames.
It’s not not interesting seeing these genuine surviving Viking-era wrecks but it’s not the most interesting part of the museum for me. The interesting part is that this is an open air museum on the opposite side of the harbour from the exhibition hall that you can just wander around. There’s a maritime archaeological workshop that you can poke your nose into or be taken on a guided tour into, there’s a ropemaking workshop, there are reproduction Viking boats in the harbour which you can either look at or, for a price, take a trip out on, there’s a boatyard where they’re actively building new reproductions, there seem to be pop-up stalls – there was someone whittling figureheads when I was there – and there’s the build your own boat workshop.
The week I was there happened to be the week of or before a massive Scout Jamboree in Sweden (it was one of the trips on offer when I did INTOPS last year, so four of my fellow interviewees and 20-ish Guides/Rangers from Region were there) and as Copenhagen is the nearest major airport, a lot of participants were flying into Denmark and adventuring their way across to Kristianstad. A group of them were spending some time at the Roskilde Viking Museum. There was a big lavvu, a nomadic herders’ tent, set up next to the exhibition hall and some of them had been sleeping on the water in one of the bigger boats. There were activities set up on the field opposite for Scouts only – would have liked to have had a sword-fighting lesson myself! I couldn’t figure out whether the rowing trips were Jamboree-people or whether they were general visitors but I stood on the pier and watched as a group got in, got their oars set up and then rowed really badly out of the harbour and onto the fjord. This was less than a week after the World Cup final, so Norway’s “Ro! Ro!” thing was echoing in my head as they flailed their way out and I had to remind myself that I row really badly on my own, let alone when there are that many other people to keep time with and the oars are twice the size of the little river rowing boats I’ve been on. I kind of wish I’d looked harder into the possibility of joining a Viking rowing lesson or at least a pleasure cruise on a reproduction boat.
One thing that struck me, as I looked at the boats from the harbour and tried to imagine I was Harald Bluetooth or Sweyn Forkbeard standing in my capital city ready to go and take an entire country by force, was how small the boats seemed. Sure, the big warship could seat 70 people but it felt like they’d be sitting the whole time and really close together. Were these literally for the sort of smash-and-grab raids or is this the kind of boat they’d have taken across the North Sea to Kent? How long would it take to get across? Could you sleep at all on a boat like this? Were the Vikings really in any condition after even a relatively short trip to start attacking?
The reproductions are built right here on site. Each of the five ships has been built at least once, with two of them done twice, the trading ship and the fishing boat. They also have a collection of 40-plus other ships from across the Nordics, some of which are in use in the harbour and some of which are in storage. They’re not all Viking-style; some are quite modern in order to show the development of boat design in this part of the world over the last millennium and to illustrate that some Viking design principles are still in use today.
Ok, time to make my own boat. In reality, this was my first stop. I’m not a huge woodworker and I had no idea what this was going to involve but I’ll never turn down a chance to try something for myself. It felt fairly unlikely I was going to make a proper working Viking ship, especially if I wanted to go the cathedral and get back to Copenhagen before midnight, and if I did, it wasn’t going to be getting home in my hand luggage-only Ryanair allowance (I treated myself to a little upgrade beyond merely a personal item since it was my birthday trip!). It turned out to be a three-sided shed packed with workbenches and at one end, a big box full of scraps of wood. You help yourself to some wood, you find a space on a bench and with the help of a saw and a hammer and some nails, you make your own miniature boat. Then there’s string and paper so you can add a sail to it. It’s very crowded and almost entirely filled with children under about 12 and dads – dads love an opportunity to pick up a saw and hammer!
I found a space eventually, along with an American girl who has no concept that there are five times as many people in here as tools and if you put your saw down for a second, someone else (me!) is going to pick it up instantly. Trying to be quick, I made my boat as simple as I could I had a piece of vaguely rectangular wood and I cut the front corner off to make it kind of pointy. I’d found a long baton-like piece which I cut down for a mast and I coaxed the vices into holding it at the right angle for me to nail the two together. One more nail half-hammered into the top of the mast and then I went outside with my paper and string to free up space inside to figure out my sail. Yep, took two attempts to realise the sail needed to billow outwards, not inwards, and then I took it to the big tub of water where everyone was trying out their boats.
It worked! Well, of course it worked. You’d have had to really mess it up to turn a few scraps of wood and nails into something that didn’t at least float, but in the faint breath of breeze, I’d pretty sure my sail caught the wind. I took it home. A lot of people did but there were a lot of boats abandoned in the water and around the tub and on any shelf or surface inside the shed. I then had to get it home in the aforementioned Ryanair hand luggage and it survived that too. I had to give the mast a bit of a tap back into the right angle when I got home and the sail is permanently dented but my very own handmade Viking boat is sitting on the mantlepiece.
I think if you know about it in advance and figure out the right ticket, the sailing trip would probably be the highlight of a visit to this museum. To actually take to sea in a Viking ship would be amazing! Even better, there’s a day-long sailing course. I’ve done some basic dinghy sailing but I think it would be very different in a Viking ship with a square sail rather than the Bermuda rig you see on modern sailing boats (had to look that up, obviously – I’m a kayaker, not a sailor) and in a boat big enough that you don’t have to spend 90% of the trip crouched in a confined space to avoid being concussed by the boom. Oh, the more I think about it the more I wish I’d done enough research to realise that was something I wanted to do while I was in Denmark! Oh well, there’s always next year.
If you’re in Copenhagen, it’s definitely worth taking a day trip out to Roskilde. Enjoy a much more peaceful town, have a drink in the square, visit the cathedral and stop by the Viking Ship Museum to see both the originals and the reproduction. You don’t even have to be into sailing to find the atmosphere of the place sort of festival-esque, what with everything being out in the open and you’ll get sucked into the joy of Viking ships.