Viking Dead

It is one of the most fascinating of all Viking discoveries. An amazingly well-preserved Viking ship full of extraordinary artefacts was found in a burial mound at Oseburg in Norway.

Jelling is a sleepy village in the center of the Jutland peninsula with a well-deserved UNESCO World Heritage rating. A series of Viking Age monuments were placed there more than a thousand years ago including rune stones, two huge burial mounds, the largest known.

During highway construction in 2009, a mass grave was found containing 54 headless human skeletons and a pile of 51 detached skulls.

between 2008 and 2012. Dated to around AD 750, these are the earliest known Viking ships to have crossed the Baltic and the earliest examples of mass ship burials.

There were four known, almost identical Viking ring fortresses in Denmark before the summer of 2012, including the namesake tourist destination at Trelleborg on the island of Zealand.

The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, holds the salvaged and reconstructed remains of five ships deliberately scuttled around AD 1070 to block the shipping channel and protect the Viking town.