AT BORRE, ON THE EASTERN ARM OF THE OSLO FJORD, not far from the ancient town of Tønsberg, there is a pre-Viking Age cemetery. I doubt whether I have ever come across a more peaceful resting place for the dead. In its leisurely forested depths, with its sleeping mounds and ancient rubbled cairns, it seems so much more suggestive of the idea of death as a rest and a freedom than the constricted allotments of our own cemeteries.
Once I discovered Borre I went back there many times – it was only a ninety-minute drive from Oslo. I remember in particular the first visit with my wife, to whom I had advertised the remarkable beauty of the place. It was a spring morning. There was a slight haze in the air that seemed to drift up from the fjord and hang through the branches of the trees. Presently we found ourselves wandering on separate ways along leafy paths, the more intently to savour the mood of the place, the more clearly to hear the rustling of the beech leaves, the more pleasantly to be surprised at rounding a mound and coming upon a small flock of ancient Jacob sheep grazing and dozing on its small slopes. Glancing across a stretch of open, glistening grass to a distant mound with six or seven giant oaks growing like antlers from it, I caught intermittent sight of someone between the swaying boughs of a tree. The person was standing quite still on the top of the mound and leaning forward slightly, face tilted upwards, arms stretched out to the sides, palms downwards, as though about to take flight. After a few moments it dawned on me that they were trying to commune with whatever kind of force or remnant of the dead that might still be living within the mound. I thought at once of that remarkable vision described in the thirteenth-century Eyrbyggja Saga, of the shepherd out tending sheep for his master, the Icelandic chieftain Thorstein Codbiter, who sees the north side of a mountain suddenly swing open to reveal great fires blazing within and the sounds of drinking and feasting as the dead celebrate the news that Thorstein and all his crew with him will drown in the morning and join them inside the mountain; and then of Þórólfur (Thorolf) Mostrarskegg’s beautiful and mystical injunction in The Book of the Settlements that none might look upon Helgafell, his ‘Holy Mountain’, with an unwashed face. It was not a response to the mood and mystery of Borre that had ever occurred to me, but it was one I instinctively liked. After decades inside rationalism’s cramped little room I had long since ceased to find anything comical in this subjective way of relating to history. Half-hidden behind a tree, I watched the person for some time as she – from the build I could see that it was a woman – tried to pick up some fringed ripple of mystery from the earth, some kind of wave or pulse. Or perhaps she was waiting for the sudden jolt of a word spoken in a foreign tongue inside her head.
Burial mound at Borre. Wikimedia Commons.
I had been looking for some time before the realization dawned that I was in fact looking at my own wife. When we later met back at the stone gateway to the park I made no mention of what I had seen. Hand in hand we strolled back up the tree-lined track to Midgard, the little museum and cafeteria dedicated to the site, where we bought postcards and coffee, which we took to a table outside. For a quarter of an hour or so we sat in the misty sunshine and listened to the singing of the birds mingling with the distant shouts and faint clattering of a half-dozen Viking re-enactors on the slope below us, practising fight scenes with realistically painted wooden swords and shields. Every so often one of the swordsmen or women would collapse with a loud grunt and the opponent stand astride the beaten duellist and finish the job off with a spectacular two-handed downward thrust to the heart. They were dressed in vaguely medieval clothing – leather pumps without soles or heels, leggings, cloth trousers gathered below the knee, belted tunics in dark reds and browns. None were wearing helmets, not the absurd and unhistoric horned helmets of the souvenir shops nor the leather skull caps that were certainly worn by real Vikings, nor yet the brimmed wooden helmets which may also have once been worn. Instead, most wore leather headbands to hold the long hair back from their faces. The exception was the last man standing, a youth in his early twenties with a haircut that reminded me of the singer from The Prodigy, a Mohican coxcomb running from the hairline to the nape of his neck, with a covering of dark blue stubble along both sides of his head.
The re-enactors rested from their exertions at the tables next to ours, laying their shields and weapons on the ground beside them. Falling into conversation with this particular youth, I learnt that Borre was hosting a Viking Festival that weekend. Thousands of visitors were expected. Re-enactors from all over Scandinavia, from Germany, Holland, even France, would be arriving and for three days they would dress like Vikings, live in tents like Vikings, eat Viking food, toil as blacksmiths at open forges, fight, fish, tell stories, make music, and get the chance to participate in an Ásatru ceremony of sacrifice and devotion for the most dedicated among them, those who had adopted in a slightly modernized form the ancient religion of the pre-Christian Scandinavians. It turned out there was a circuit of such sites across Scandinavia that took it in turns to host these gatherings. He told me that his speciality was a kind of Viking Age wrestling known as glimma. The way he described it, it sounded a lot like the Cumberland wrestling I had seen many years ago at the gypsy horse fair in Appleby, with a lot of holding and grunting and crab-like wheeling – a little dull for the casual spectator, but for the connoisseur no doubt offering a feast of intricacies and technicalities. I noticed his round wooden shield leaning up against the leg of the table. It was divided into quarters, with an illustration in each wedge. I recognized one as an image of the warrior-poet Egil Skallagrimsson, eponymous hero of perhaps the most famous of all Icelandic sagas. Bragi the Old, the earliest known skaldic poet, was depicted in another. There was an inscription in runic lettering around the rim of the young man’s shield, and I asked him about it. Odin – that was his name – hesitated a moment before telling me that it was a verse from the Hávamál (The Sayings of the High One), the pre-Christian wisdom poem attributed to Odin, the verse that says cattle die, the family dies, you’ll die yourself, but one thing that never dies is the name a man leaves behind him. It’s probably the most famous verse in the whole poem.
My wife and I don’t look like re-enactors of anything except what we did yesterday. I could see that my question had made him uneasy, and that he thought I might be about to say something he didn’t want to hear. Sure enough, a few moments later he launched into an apparently irrelevant complaint about how young men like him who were proud of their ancestors and their history were always having to field accusations of being neo-Nazis. But it’s our history, it’s our culture, he said. We have a right to be proud of it. Since he was the one who had raised the subject I thought it was fair enough to make the point that in one way it was understandable that Scandinavians, and in particular the Norwegians and Danes who had both seen their countries occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War, should have developed an antipathy towards such expressions of admiration. The ceremonial calligraphy used by the Waffen SS, for example, was a deliberate and self-conscious attempt to appropriate the Viking past of the ‘Germanic people’ for their own propaganda purposes, and the aesthetic of Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling (National Unity) political party in Norway was based entirely on a similar return to a remote past, even down to Quisling’s revival of the Old Norse word hird to describe his personal bodyguard. And yet even as I said this I could see the logic of his rebellion and of those like him, children and grandchildren of Scandinavia’s radical ‘sixty-eighters’, couples with idealistic hippie values who practised a tolerance so extreme that it might well have made teenage rebellion impossible had their children not discovered the provocation that the cultivation of Scandinavia’s Viking heritage could arouse. It also explained the passionate intensity with which young Scandinavian musicians cultivated different branches of what was once called Heavy Metal music, a name derived originally from William Burroughs’ novel The Soft Machine but now moved far beyond that literary root into an elaborate sub-world of genres that includes Death Metal, Black Metal, Thrash Metal, Speed Metal and, of course, Viking Metal, in most of which Norwegian musicians have been the acknowledged masters.
We spoke a while about The Sayings of the High One. I told him I thought there were many good things in it, a lot of everyday commonsense as well as the mystical and the plain enigmatic, at which his bristles softened a little. Our coffee was long drunk by now, and as my wife and I stood up to leave he urged us to come back to Borre at the weekend for the festival. The glimma wrestling started at two in the afternoon, he said, and he would be defending his title. It turned out he was the All-Scandinavian champion in his weight class. I told him we couldn’t, we had something else planned. He nodded, then added shyly that he was the youngest jarl in the whole country. The youngest what? He said it again. It was a simple straightforward Norwegian word, jarl, ‘earl’. I just hadn’t fathomed the context. He was telling me he was the youngest earl in all of Norway. We said goodbye and as we crossed the cinder car park to our VW Golf my wife remarked rather witheringly that aristocracy and titles had been abolished in Norway long ago, way back in 1821. And yet, I thought, how interesting that, even in a controlled egalitarian paradise like Norway, there are some who don’t feel right about it.
*
I’d almost forgotten about the incident earlier on that day, when I’d seen my wife apparently trying to commune with the spirits of the mound-dwellers. She was the one who brought the subject up in the car on the way home, mentioning the large V-shaped gashes she had noticed on several of the mounds, in some cases running from the crown almost down to ground level, and asking if I knew why these curious insertions had been made. I had been wondering about the same thing myself and felt obscurely defeated at being unable to provide an explanation. On the drive back to Oslo I had been trying to think of possible explanations. I knew one theory often mentioned in connection with the shafts dug into the mound that contained the famous Oseberg ship – just a ten-minute drive from Borre – was that the damage had been done by grave-robbers who knew or thought they knew that the dead had been buried with treasures in the form of swords, axes, spears and silver to help them make their way through the next life. But some of these mounds were 30 or 40 metres high and it took five minutes to walk around the base of even the smallest. Wedges or gashes that size would have required a lot of people, perhaps even a whole community, and would have taken several days of hard digging to complete. Not exactly a night’s work for a Viking Age Burke and Hare. A second possible motive for so-called haugbrott (‘mound-breaking’) was that it might have been done to retrieve the bones of especially brave or powerful men – bones that could then be used in the forging of a weapon that would, in a literal sense, appropriate the courage and power of a dead hero. To the same end of enhancing the spirit of the sword or the spear, the bones of bears or wolves were used in the firing process. The blacksmith’s is one of the very few trades explicitly mentioned on runestones, and beliefs like these might go some way towards explaining the blacksmith’s high and sometimes almost mystical status in the Viking Age. A third possibility was that the tunnels had been dug specifically to disturb or even remove the remains of the dead so as to make it impossible for them to haunt and harm the living. Sagas like Grettir the Strong contain vivid accounts of the trouble that restless heathen mound-dwellers could cause the living after their death. A fourth suggestion was that those living in the Christian era had made the entries and removed the bodies of their heathen ancestors for Christian reburial, hoping it might be a case of better late than never for their souls. I liked this last idea. I had recently read, probably in Skalk, a Danish archaeology magazine to which I subscribe, that archaeologists excavating the old church at Jelling had come across what were almost certainly the bones of King Gorm the Old, founder of the Danish monarchy. Their theory was that Gorm had been disinterred from his original resting place in one of the two great mounds at Jelling by his son Harald, after Harald’s conversion to Christianity late in the ninth century. There is a beautiful little old church right next to the burial park at Borre. Maybe the bones of Borre’s original mound-dwellers lay buried somewhere beneath it?
Traffic slowed then came to a halt as we approached the little harbour town of Vollen, about 15 miles (25 km) out of Oslo. A lorry with Polish number plates had got a punctured tyre and was blocking one lane of the road. As the driver waited for the breakdown truck to arrive, for the next twenty minutes we sat and listened to a CD of Øystein Sunde’s greatest hits. Sunde is a unique performer. He’s not only a brilliant guitar player but also a unique lyricist, who, unlike many Norwegian performers, sings in Norwegian. He sings so fast, and his lyrics are so convoluted and pun-filled, that even Norwegians have to listen hard just to grasp what he is saying. By the time we eventually got back to our flat in Majorstua that evening, I had forgotten all about the gashes in the Borre mounds.
Not until a couple of years later was I reminded of that forgotten quest for a satisfactory explanation for those disfiguring wedges. While researching for a short book on the Vikings, commissioned by an Oslo publisher for the English-language tourist market, I was browsing through a paperback copy of the Royal Frankish Annals, a chronicle of events between 741 and 829 involving Frankish rulers. It seems that well before his death in 813, Charlemagne had plentiful experience of the new and troubling neighbour on his northern border, following his subjugation of the Saxons and occupation of their territory in the 780s. According to the annalists, the Danes were ‘the most powerful people among the Northmen’. Of the three Scandinavian peoples, it is the Danes who, at all times in these early records, most resemble a coherent military power. Little is known of the administrative and social structures of Norwegian and Swedish society at the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries, but Frankish annalists convey a distinct impression that at the end of the eighth century a strong monarchy ruled over a Denmark that extended beyond the core islands of the archipelago to include Skåne, in the south of Sweden, and the eastern shore of the Oslo fjord that is now Bohuslän and part of Sweden. According to an entry in the Royal Frankish Annals for 813, a Danish army, led by two brothers who shared the kingship, crossed the waters of the Vik to the Norwegian Vestfold, ‘an area in the extreme north-west of their kingdom whose princes and people refused to submit to them’. It was at this point in my reading that the memory of the forgotten quest returned to me.
Sensing that an explanation might be no more than two or three sentences away I rose from my couch seat in the living room, called out my wife’s name, and realizing from her silence and certain unmistakeable hissing sounds that she was in the shower, I took the book with me into the bathroom. Leaning on the door jamb, now and then glancing up from my book at the diffuse whiteness of her outline behind the frosted plastic doors as she shampooed her hair, turning this way and that in the shower, I read the passage to her in a loud and authoritative voice, adding that it clearly showed that the purpose of the expedition was punitive. Mounds of the size of the Borre mounds were symbols of family power. They were built to be visible for miles around. And what is built to be symbolic may also be symbolically destroyed: those V-shaped defacements of the grave mounds were almost certainly the work of the army brought over by those two Danish kings in 813, to remind their Norwegian subjects of where the real power in the region lay and to persuade them to resume their tributary payments, or taxes as we would call them today.
‘That’s sounds pretty convincing to me,’ I said to her as she shoved the plastic door half-open and reached out for a bottle of conditioner from the hand basin. ‘What do you think?’ ‘Think about what?’ she asked, then stepped back inside her warm, ethereal world and slid the door shut before I could answer.
*
With Gorm the Old as its first incumbent, the Danish monarchy is the oldest in existence in Europe. Stretching the definition of the word slightly, one might say that when Harald Bluetooth ordered Gorm’s bones dug up it was an archaeological enterprise that made him the first in a long line of Danish monarchs with an interest in the study that continues to this day. The most recent exponent is Denmark’s current monarch, Queen Margrethe II, Gorm’s grand-daughter down twenty-nine generations, who spent a year studying prehistoric archaeology at Girton College, Cambridge. Her notable predecessors include Waldemar the Great, King of Denmark in the second half of the twelfth century, who, inspired by a local belief that a series of markings on the inner walls of a tunnel-like cleft in the ground at Runamo, in Blekinge, were actually runes describing the deeds of his legendary predecessor, King Harald Hildetand (‘War Tooth’), despatched experts in the study of the futhark to Runamo to investigate. In effect, he was sponsoring the first official archaeological expedition in Scandinavia. But the long rows of hieroglyphs defeated his experts. On their return his men told him the runes had weathered to the point of illegibility and could no longer be read.
The carvings continued to fascinate, and in the seventeenth century a priest and runologist named Jon Skonvig succeeded in making out the word ‘Lund’, the name of a town in southern Sweden, which was then part of Denmark. The rock was cleaned, more runes identified, and in 1843 a complete transliteration was made by the Icelander Finn Magnussen. He published a full account of his findings in a 743-page book. Alas, a further study carried out in 1844 by a young Danish sceptic named J.J. Worsaae revealed beyond any doubt that the mysterious markings were glacial striations – wonders in their own way but of no historical relevance to the Danish Crown. On hearing the news, Christian VIII, the king who had sponsored Worsaae’s investigation, was greatly amused. He is said to have laughed uncontrollably for minutes on end, patting himself on the stomach and crying out over and over again: ‘Oh the Scholars! The Scholars! And that enormous book on Runamo!’
Without doubt the most passionate, devoted and – in the primary and piteous sense of the word – pathetic royal exponent of archaeological investigation was Frederik VII, who ruled Denmark from 1848 to 1863. Two years into his reign he presided over the end of the absolute monarchy that had prevailed in Denmark since 1661, and the sheer intensity of his interest in the country’s remote and golden past must strike one as the therapy of regret. At the time he made a melancholy little joke about it, Nu kan jeg vel sove, så længe jeg gider (‘Well, now I suppose I can sleep as long as I like’); but for Frederik personally, the best result was that it gave him more time for his archaeological studies. He used it initially to study dolmens. In 1853, he addressed members of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries on the subject of how the ancients, with no technological devices at their disposal, had managed to raise the absolutely enormous stone caps that were used to finish off these burial chambers. In that first lecture he had assumed that the makers were limited in their choice of site by the occurrence of these stones in the landscape. By 1857 he had changed his mind and delivered a second lecture, in which he described in great detail and with appropriate illustrations a technique involving the use of rollers that would allow the giant stones to be moved about a landscape using people and oxen. The revelation obviously owed much to Frederik’s reading in Saxo’s Gesta Danorum of how his remote ancestor Harald Bluetooth had used the technique to transport the gigantic wedge-shaped Jelling Stone from the Jutland beach where he first saw it to his court at Jelling. Frederik even quotes the relevant passage in his lecture.
On the tram to the National Library in Solli plass* a few weeks ago, I was reminded by an article I happened to be reading in Skalk of just how serious Frederik was about these things, and of how powerfully his interest seemed to express his impotent regret at the long, slow diminution in Danish power since those days. The article was accompanied by several drawings of the king, strangely affecting sketches that look like a small boy’s dream of what a king’s life must be like. One showed him sitting at a table with the Swedish King Karl XV, sharing a bottle of wine and smoking a pipe so long that its bowl appears to rest on the tabletop. Karl’s servant John Panzio Toxon, who was technically the royal pipe-cleaner, hovers in the background, ready to serve a second bottle of wine. The meeting took place in June 1860, at Ljungbyhed in Skåne. Karl had invited Frederik over on the occasion of a military exercise being held there. King Karl was almost as keen on archaeology as Frederik, and one of the things they talked about may well have been the paper on dolmens Frederik had delivered three years earlier.
They may also have spoken again of one of triumphs of Karl’s early years as king, and the vindication of ancient Swedish history when he organized the opening of one of the great ‘Kings Barrows’ at Old Uppsala, just north of modern Uppsala, the ancient capital of heathendom in Scandinavia. He had ordered the mound to be opened with the aim of refuting a theory advanced by a group of Swedish natural scientists that, far from being kings’ graves, these barrows were merely naturally occurring phenomena in the landscape. He had a tunnel dug towards the centre of one of the mounds, using techniques familiar from mining operations, shoring up the walls and roofs with planking as he went along. Twenty metres (65 feet) into the mound they came across the evidence: a pile of stones in the centre of which was a clay pot containing the remains of a cremation, as well as a number of finely wrought items made of gold from Sweden’s Vendel Age.
Frederik VII of Denmark drinking with Karl XV of Sweden at Ljungbyhed, 1860. Drawing by Jacob Kornerup. Private collection, Nordic Museum, Stockholm.
A reminder of Denmark’s golden past was what Frederik seemed in such desperate need of. For most of the time the nineteenth century had been another chapter in the kingdom’s shrinking history. Although it tried hard to stay out of the Napoleonic convulsion, it was sucked in by the paranoias of war when the British convinced themselves that Napoleon planned to commandeer the Danish fleet and use it to replace his own, devastated at Trafalgar in 1805, to mount an invasion of Britain. The British response was to mount a pre-emptive strike against the Danes. The attackers used the occasion to experiment with the technology of the rocket as a weapon of war. Rockets had been tried before during a naval engagement in 1806 but had not reacted well to the vagaries of the sea and the wind. On that occasion most of the projectiles had landed harmlessly in the sea. With a target as large and stationary as Copenhagen, however, and a fine and windless week in September in which to demonstrate the technology’s efficiency, rockets proved matchless as a weapon of terror. Over three days of intense bombardment, 14,000 pieces of ordnance, including metal balls, explosive and incendiary bombs from cannons and mortars, and some 300 rockets, rained down over the city, turning large sections of its centre into raging infernos. An added horror was that the flames proved resistant to water, making the fires effectively unquenchable. People took to the streets in panic, their possessions hastily piled onto handcarts. The object of the exercise was achieved, and the entire Danish fleet was confiscated by the British.
A less dramatic but more deadly feature of the war was the seven-year blockade of Skagerrak and the Kattegat maintained by the British between 1807 and 1814. Norway was, at the time, wholly dependent on the import of corn from Denmark, and presently most of the south of the country suffered a famine. Fathers in their desperation attempted death-defying crossings of the stretch of open sea to southern Jutland, with little or no chance of evading the patrolling British warships. Thousands were captured and imprisoned on their desperate journeying. Some died, some were exchanged, some fled, and some joined the Royal Navy. The crisis reached its height in 1809, with nearly 4,000 Norwegians held in British prisons for attempting to run the blockade. The corn never made it back to Norway. Estimates put the total number of deaths as a direct result of the blockade at 100,000 men, women and children – over 10 per cent of a population of almost 900,000.
The scars left on the Norwegian psyche were still visible to Henrik Ibsen when he went to Grimstad on the south coast in the 1840s, to work as a chemist’s apprentice. Based on the stories of suffering he must have heard, which were still vivid in the memories of those living in that little coastal town, Ibsen’s epic poem Terje Vigen describes the fate of one man who attempted to beat the blockade and feed his family. Terje makes the crossing rowing alone in an open boat, reaches Frederikshavn on the north-east coast of the Jutland peninsula and buys the precious corn. On the return journey he is captured by an English ship skippered by a humiliatingly youthful eighteen-year-old and sent to prison. After five long years he is freed, but by the time he gets home his wife and small son are both dead. Terje Vigen is Norway’s national epic and, with the possible exception of the same author’s Peer Gynt, Terje himself is a figure more familiar to Norwegians than any of the characters from Ibsen’s more famous plays.
In an interlude of what seems like merciful light relief from all this, in 1809 a party of British traders led by a soap merchant named Samuel Phelps arrived in Reykjavik in the Danish colony of Iceland, lured by the legendary ‘mountains of tallow’ believed to exist there. The British carried licences to trade from the Privy Council but found their enterprise blocked by the colony’s governor, Count Trampe, a Dane who loyally reflected the tensions and rivalries of the larger world by posting notices about the streets of the capital warning its 307 inhabitants that the penalty for trading with the British was death. Phelps promptly arrested Count Trampe, and within twenty-four hours had installed his Danish interpreter as the new governor. This was a man named Jørgen Jørgensen, one of a number of privateers used by the Danes to try to evade the British blockade of Danish and Norwegian ports, but who had been captured by the British and taken to England. There, his unusual personality and good grasp of English made him useful enough to be appointed to Samuel Phelps’ small trading mission to Iceland.
Jørgensen took his sudden promotion to high office very seriously. The day after Trampe’s arrest, he issued the first of two revolutionary proclamations. One announced that Denmark no longer had any claim over Iceland; the other asserted that henceforth only those documents carrying his personal seal were legally binding in matters relating to Iceland. He offered the Icelanders the prospect of legal separation from Denmark and a resumption of the democratic principles obtaining in the commonwealth before it had lost its independence to Norway five centuries earlier. There would be a new constitution reflecting the spirit of the French Revolution of 1789, guaranteeing an equal share of power between rich and poor; there would be freedom to trade and to travel; and schools and hospitals would be improved. At a stroke of the pen, all debts owed by Icelanders to Danish merchants and the Danish government were cancelled. Furthermore, for the following year, until 1 July 1810, all taxes would be halved. The versatile Jørgensen even designed a flag for the new republic – three white cod swimming against a blue background – and promised to stand down once these measures were properly in place. In an Ubu Roi moment he appointed an armed militia consisting of eight men, several of whom had prison records, to protect his person and ensure conformity with his new laws. How pleasing to learn from William Jackson Hooker, in his Journal of a Tour of Iceland in the Summer of 1809, of the easy way the residents of Reykjavik responded to all this excitement: ‘idling about’, Hooker writes, and looking on ‘with the most perfect indifference’.
Jørgensen’s rapid emergence as a loose cannon meant that his Jarry-esque regime lasted all of five weeks, after which he was arrested by the captain of a visiting English warship, the Talbot. Trampe was released and reinstated† and Iceland, along with Greenland and the Faroe Islands, declared a neutral and friendly state under British protection and free to trade with whomsoever it wished. By the terms of the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, Denmark lost Norway to Sweden but was allowed to retain Iceland as a dependency.
As for Jørgensen, he was taken back to England, tried and sentenced to thirteen months in jail. He went back to jail many more times, usually on matters connected with his addiction to gambling, until finally a judge lost patience and had him deported to Australia. He died there a few years later, at the age of sixty-two, on the island of Tasmania. It brought to his life a strange symmetry, for as a boy-seaman in the British Navy Jørgensen had sailed to Australia on the Lady Nelson and been among those who established settlements at Risdon Cove and Sullivans Cove in Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then called.
*
In Kornerup’s famous drawing Frederik sits in the royal armchair atop the great southern mound at Jelling, smoking his pipe as his attendants secure their top hats and cornices against the strong wind that sweeps across the wide flat landscape and up the sides of the mound. It is 1861. The king was on an extended tour of Jutland but keeping in regular contact by telegram with J.J. Worsaae, the operational leader of the opening of the mound at Jelling. Periodically, Frederik visited the dig himself. Inspired, perhaps, by his friend Karl’s triumph over those natural scientists who would degrade the great King’s Mounds at Old Uppsala into ‘naturally occurring phenomena’ he had decided to find old Gorm’s bones and shake the firm hand of the far past. He may well have thought he needed the reassurance. Tensions over Slesvig and Holsten had flared up again.
Frederik VII of Denmark on the mound at Jelling, 1861. Drawing by Kornerup. National Museum of Denmark.
The two duchies, which stretch as far south as Hamburg, had been Danish possessions since the second half of the fifteenth century, but at the cost of several dangerous ethnic and cultural anomalies: the inhabitants of Holsten spoke only German, those of Slesvig a mixture of Danish and German. A tribal movement called pan-Germanism had emerged with the rise of the Prussian state, and in a confrontation in 1848, in the second year of Frederik’s reign, the Prussians had provided active military support to the German-speaking rebels in Holsten. Denmark prevailed on that occasion, but tensions continued to simmer.
Perhaps, as Frederik sat there in his armchair, puffing on his pipe, he was thinking back to the military exercise he had attended with Karl at Ljungbyhed two years earlier, and wondering whether he could count on the Swedish soldiers he had watched drilling to come to Denmark’s assistance in the event of a resumption of hostilities. Given the Danes’ and Swedes’ record of waging war with one another over the preceding millennium, the prognosis was not good. But under Oscar I, Swedish volunteers had fought side by side with the Danes to back Denmark’s right to the duchies in the earlier skirmish (1848–51), and both Karl and Frederik may have felt there was potency still in the idea behind the Kalmar union.
The old dream of Scandinavian brotherhood had never vanished completely, though by the nineteenth century it was usually the Danes who were dreaming it. In the midst of the Napoleonic wars it made a bizarre reappearance when Frederik VI of Denmark, desperate to persuade Sweden to join him against the British, devised a plan that involved releasing a large number of balloons from the turrets of the castle at Elsinore. Beneath each balloon a small basket was suspended containing copies of an address entitled ‘Stray Remarks on Sweden’s Situation Summer 1808’. Readers of the document were told that the spirit of Kalmar was still alive, and that the failure of the union was the fault of the incompetence and personal frailties of its leaders. The time had come for the brotherhood of tribal loyalties to express itself again, once more under Danish leadership. Wind conditions delayed the release of the balloons several times, and when at last a favourable breeze did carry them across the Öresund, their progress was monitored by Swedish cavalry troops on the other side, who rode and scooped them up the moment they landed and burnt them on the spot.
The rise of the Prussian state and the ideal of a pan-Germanic racial union had spurred a rival pan-Scandinavianism among students in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Kristiania (Oslo). ‘The time of our separation is past’, declared the great Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér as he crowned the Dane Adam Oehlenschläger poet laureate of the whole of Scandinavia. Students from all three countries began meeting annually to toast each other and swear undying brotherhood. In such an atmosphere, King Frederik may have hoped that, past enmities notwithstanding, Sweden-Norway would indeed come to Denmark’s aid in her hour of need when the tensions in Slesvig-Holsten flared up again. As verses from his poem ‘A Brother in Need’ made clear, Henrik Ibsen certainly hoped so too, though he had his doubts:
But you, my countrymen, safe hedged
Within your snug terrain
By virtue of a promise pledged
And straight betrayed again, –
Take flight, your ancestry disclaim,
You steered a craven course!
Flee port to port in Cain-like shame
And forge yourself a foreign name,
Deny that you are Norse!
Conceal your home, your infamy,
Your mother-tongue deny, –
Else comes the whisper: ‘Did you see?
A Norseman scurried by!’ –
Don’t ever to the top-mast tie
The lovely triple hue;
For any free man sailing by
Will think that Norway’s flag flown high
Means that a plague-ship’s due!
It was a dream. Wake bold and brisk
From folk-wide sleep to deed!
All hands on deck! There’s kin at risk!
Swift counsel’s what we need!
Still may the saga-record go:
Danes, Danes own Tyra’s hold!
Still Denmark’s tattered flag can blow
Above the North’s rich future, show
Its proud and rose-red fold.
(TRANSLATED BY JOHN NORTHAM)
But it wasn’t a dream, and once violence flared it was apparent that the appeal of pan-Scandinavianism had never penetrated much beyond the bubble of the student world. Early in February 1864, an army of 57,000 Austrian and Prussian troops crossed the River Eider. The 40,000 Danes manning the Dannevirke, which protects the neck of the Jutland archipelago, made a tactical retreat to Dybbøl, and there, in the last battle ever fought on Danish soil, they were heavily defeated. The victorious Prussians and Austrians advanced and occupied Jutland as far as Limfjord, in the north of the peninsula. Negotiations in the late autumn of that same year gave sovereignty of the two duchies, along with Saxe-Lauenburg to the south (which had passed to the Danish king via Sweden some years before) to the Germans, a move that reduced the size of Denmark from 22,000 square miles (58,000 sq km) to 15,000 (39,000 sq km), and her population from 2.5 million to just over 1.5 million. Of the thousands of soldiers promised by Karl of Sweden-Norway, fewer than 150 volunteered and made their way to Dybbøl to fight.
Dybbøl was a national trauma for Denmark. It marked the end of her thousand years as a military and political power in northern Europe and the final shredding of that intermittent dream of a political and military union at the head of the two other Scandinavian-language tribes. Frederik, as though the impending humiliation was too much for him to bear, had slipped away weeks before the invasion, dying unexpectedly in November 1863. One of Kornerup’s sketches from the excavation at Jelling shows him conferring the Order of the Danebrog on his Master Engineer Møller, the man in charge of the tunnelling. Following the informal little ceremony, Møller is shown saluting as the king holds out an imploring hand to him and, in Kornerup’s caption, pleads with his engineer: I maae finde mig den gamle Konge (‘You must find the old king for me’), as though the recovery of old Gorm’s bones might somehow make everything right again. But when they reached its centre, the great burial chamber turned out to be empty.
Frederik VII with Master Engineer Møller at Jelling, 1861. Drawing by Kornerup. National Museum of Denmark.
* Plass = ‘place’, ‘plaza’ or ‘square’.
† In Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne tells us that one of the first things Professor Lidenbrock does on arriving in Iceland in 1863, to prepare for his descent into the volcano, is to hand Count Trampe, the Governor of Iceland, a personal letter of recommendation from Christian Jørgen Thomsen, ‘Curator of the Museum of Northern Antiquities’ in Copenhagen. The real Trampe died in 1832, the real Thomsen not until 1865, so Thomsen might just have had time to write Lidenbrock’s letter for him.