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12 Feb 2004

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Gorm the Old

Not a character in Tolkien (at least not that I know, I've actually never read the books) but instead a pagan Viking king in the 9th century AD. We visited the site of his burial, a collection of pagan and Christian runestones and a later church, located on the Jutland peninsula in a town called Jelling. Gorm raised a famous runestone to the memory of his wife, Thyra, and placed it at Jelling on the Danish peninsula. The runestone reads:

Runic	ᚴᚢᚱᛉᛦ	ᚴᚢᚾᚢᚴᛦ	ᚴ[ᛅᚱ]ᚦᛁ	ᚴᚢᛒᛚ	ᚦᚢᛋᛁ	ᚨ[ᚠᛏ]	ᚦᚢᚱᚢᛁ	ᚴᚢᚾᚢ	ᛋᛁᚾᛅ
	kurmR	kunukR	k[ar]ði	kumbl	þusi	a[ft]	Þurui	kunu	sini
Danish	Gorm	konge	gjorde	kumler	disse	efter	Thyra	kone	sin
English	Gorm	king	made	monument	this	after	Thorvi	wife	his

Runic	ᛏᛅᚾᛉᛅᚱᚴᛅᛦ	ᛒᚢᛏ
	tanmarkaR	but
Danish	Danmarks	bod
English	Denmark's	adornment

Mouseover the transcription to see the normalized lexical form of each word in Old Danish.

When Gorm died in 959 AD, he was buried in a pagan grave underneath a massive earthwork. This burial mound was actually built on top of a much earlier Bronze Age site, indicating it had been a location for royal burials for perhaps thousands of years. (Tree-ring analysis of the beams used in the construction of Gorm's underground tomb helps us date the date of his interment precisely.) But this was not to be the last of Gorm's resting places -- when the mound was first excavated in the 1820's, an empty burial chamber was found with grave goods but no trace of a body. What had happened to the king?

Gorm's son Harald Blatånd, in addition to winning reknown as the being the first king of a united Denmark, was a convert to the new religion of Christianity which was sweeping Scandinavia around 1000 AD. Blatånd (often anglicised to Bluetooth) saw fit to remove his father's remains from the pagan burial mound and place them under a new church he had constructed to celebrate his -- and Denmark's -- conversion to the new faith. That chapel, and everal others after it, burned down, and a stone church from the 1200's now stands in its place.

During excavations in the 1970's, bones were discovered under the foundations of the church, still wrapped in delicate golden thread. Other articles, including part of a ornate belt buckle, support the theory that the skeleton was that of Gorm himself -- presumably re-buried by his Christian son Harald in the church. Despite the father's pagan beliefs, his son had him moved into consecrated ground after his death.

The interior of the church was renovated in the year 2000 as part of Denmark's millenium celebrations. Strikingly decorated according to the principles of 20th-century Danish Modern, it nevertheless preserves traces of frescoes from the 1200's, as well as marking the spot under which Gorm the Old's bones, returned from several decades in a drawer at the National Museum after their discovery, now rest. Because the Danish royal house has existed continuously from Gorm to the current Queen Margrethe II, the church at Jelling is seen by Danes as a living link to their Viking past. In 2000, at the re-dedication of the church at Jelling, Gorm's bones were lowered once again into the ground beneath the church and a marker was placed atop the casket:

Kong Gorm højsat 959 og siden gravlagt her
King Gorm mound-set in 959 and since gravelaid here