Royal Jelling

The palisade consisted of 1,440m of oak planks, and was almost as high as the combined height of three adult men and therefore visible from a long way off as it towered before visitors. This was the Royal Jelling Household and King Harald’s final resting place. No one was to doubt the aura of this place and the power of the king. Harald Bluetooth was king at a time when inheritance of the throne was not guaranteed. Granted he was the son of Gorm the Old and Queen Thyra, but his power and might had to be hammered home. Jelling overawed and overpowered its guests and news of it soon spread across the land. 

The interpretive centre In 2015, a new interpretive centre was opened here that leads you right to the centre of the Viking Age. It tells stories about the Long Fire; you can be spirited away to Valhalla, and there are fantastic stories about Thor and Odin and the new god Christ. Plus kids and adults together can hang out with two great Viking kings – Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth. Very few artefacts have been found in Jelling, but digital trickery brings the objects alive, and you can even touch them. The tour ends on the large roof terrace where digital binoculars can turn you into a Viking lookout.

The monument area In the monument area, you really get the grand scale of Denmark’s biggest Viking compound. Artist Ingvar Cronhammer has recreated the vastness of the site using gigantic, concrete landscape sculptures – beautiful 3 to 4 metre high white columns rise up at points where the palisade in its time guarded the burial mounds and stone ship which is marked with large white concrete surfaces. Just think – Harald and Gorm walked around here more than 1000 years ago. The area was bounded by the palisade, traces of which were found by archaeologists in 2006-07. It forms a diamond-shaped frame around the monuments with a side length of approximately 360m. The North Mound is located right in the middle, where the diagonals intersect and divide the area into four equal right-angled triangles with the ratios 3:4:5. A so-called Pythagorean relation. The two imposing burial mounds at this site naturally attract great attention, which was the whole point from the start. The North Mound is 8m high and 60m in diameter. It’s surrounded by a 356 meter long stone ship; the largest of its type in the world. It was probably here that King Gorm was buried, in a chamber built 958-59. In 1820, the tomb was examined, but they found virtually nothing – the corpse had been moved, possibly into the building that stood where the church now stands. The South Mound is on the other side of the church. It’s 10m high and 70m in diameter and, thus, Denmark’s biggest Viking grave mound. For this reason it was assumed that the king was buried here, but today we know that the mound is empty and always has been. Jelling Church was built around 1100, but finds show there were several wooden structures here prior to that – all burned. Archaeological excavations in 1970 revealed a grave in the floor of the church. It contained the bones of a man of about 173m, about 3550 when the death occurred. The bones had been buried around 965 and it is assumed that this is the resting place of none other than the patriarch of the Jelling dynasty himself – Gorm the Old.

The Jelling Stones Between the mounds are the two famous Jelling Stones. The smallest stone was raised by King Gorm in memory of his wife Thyra. On the larger stone, King Harald declares his origins, boasts of his conquests and proclaims his Christianisation of the Danes. The large stone is a public record of Harald’s founding of the royal line in Denmark and the assertion of his dynasty. King Harald’s picture rune stone is probably the finest piece of art from the late Viking Age. The 2.43m tall grey stone of gneiss with red veins still stands in its original place between the two grave mounds and south of the church, which at that time was a stave church. The artwork is dated to about 965 and is adorned in the intricate Mammen style. This is a unique piece of cultural heritage, which was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1994.