My last day of my travels took me to the National Museum in search of Viking history. The museum offers a free entrance, which is a nice change, and has enough different exhibitions to need more than a day to see everything. That's how, having seen only half of what I wanted, I realised I had spent almost all the time I had left.
I started chronologically with the Stone Age, and managed to reach the Renaissance -after that, I was lucky, as some of the history I absorbed in the Krongor Castle covers parts of the last centuries.
The exhibits are well presented, with some generic texts giving background on the era and the themes presented -burial, bog bodies, amber, flint daggers...- and specific explication including the artefacts present in the exhibits.
Running along the exhibition is a tongue-in-cheek commentary, part of contemporary works designed to accompany it. It gives explanations of some exhibits: the remains of a woman and child becomes a witch, who fell into a cauldron with the sick child; a sword was, in fact, a sword of queen, which killed seven men -and as many-women- during a single battle, and when it passed to the queen's grandaughter, well, she used it to support her growing beans in her garden. And so on.
The Gundestrup Cauldron is the Danish equivalent of the Cratère de Vix - obviously foreign in origin, nobody knows how it ended up there. By the way, the Cratère de Vix is mentionned in the exhibit. Since parts of the evolutions presented -bronze swords, bronze metalwork- are Thracian in origin, I could relate to the artefacts I saw just three weeks ago in Thrace... or Bulgaria, which covers a large swath of what used to be called Thrace. And I feel that it is a fitting conclusion to my three-weeks journey.
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| Cratère de Vix |
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