The Viking Ship Museum

The Viking Ship Museum was pretty good.  However, they declined to give us our Copenhagen Card discount and we ended up spending more money than we intended which kind of colored our experience.  I think we both liked it but were not entirely sure that it was worth the $10 price tag.  It was a good day to go.  The sky was very blue and the clouds were very fluffy and the sun was very shiny.

Rows of model ships in front of the museums. 

These are the workshops.  They have a few displays here but mostly it is where they build life-size replica ships.  Some of them are for the museum and historical type places but, apparently, they have quite a business building viking ships for private individuals who want sail like their ancestors. 

A church boat--how you get to church if you live in
The Middle of Nowhere, Denmark

The Museum is set up around a huge collection of old sunken viking ships that were found twenty or thirty years ago.  They have all the bits of the ships that they found set up on forms so you can see kind of what they looked like.

The museum also had a series of little dioramas that depicted different things.  This set shows what typical Danish life was like in the viking era.

A large section of the museum was devoted to attacks on the Danes by the Norwegians.  Apparently they didn't get along.  This is the picture that introduced the exhibit.  They don't sugar coat history.  Below is a map of the attack..

There were, according to the exhibit, 108 war ships and 13 cargo ships that took part in the particular attack they were highlighting.  This shows the kinds of weapons that were probably on board the ship.  It looks like they were loaded for bear.  (Or for VIKINGS!  Ha!)

On the left is a diorama of the Danes lighting the signal fires to warn of the incoming Norwegians.

On the left they are skuttling a ship in the harbor to make it more difficult for the Norwegians to get in.  Below you can see the advancing Norwegian hordes.

They had a loom set up with information about the special way they wove woolen sails so that they stood up well to the weather and did not warp.
They also wove clothing.  And the museum had clothes available to try on so that you could look like an authentic Viking.  And, while Jael could have probably fit in the children's sizes, they had some cloaks and things which looked like they were sized for adult men.

Jael checking out the possibilities.  

Jael preparing to deal with some Norwegians. 

Jael beside a replica warship.  The room was set up with a video screen, which was showing a film about some guys who had lived on a replica ship for a couple of months.  There were two ships in the room that you could climb around on and which served as displays and as seating for people watching the film.  

You can see people watching the movie on the left.  I liked the picture because the still of the movie shows the Danish flag flying prettily.

On the right you can see some of the stuff that would have been brought with on a voyage.  The manikin is wearing the outfit of a monk and, if you look closely, you can see the head of a polar bear rug!

They had a display on burial rituals.  It wasn't the prettiest thing.  Abive is a picture of an actual grave.  The guy on the left was the dead Dane.  The skeleton on the right was a decapitated woman, probably a slave, who was killed specifically to be buried with him.  The other picture is an artists rendition of the burial preparations.  The horse looks unamused.

The Viking Museum Port area

The outside work-area where they work on building new replica old ships.

They even had specimens of all of the old varieties of trees that would have been used in old-fashioned ship-building, along with information about what they were used for and why.  There were at least a dozen different trees here, valued for different properties: growing tall and straight quickly, for masts, being flexible but strong and durable in water for the ships sides, etc.