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The Nationalmuseet offers an extraordinary insight into the history of Denmark, from the lands of Jylland and Sjælland to the current territories that include the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
Denmark was a colonial power and is not only be witnessed by the Faroe Islands and Greenland, but also by the Indian city of Tranquebar.
The museum offers a fascinating walk from the Prehistoric era, with the bodies of the first Danish cromanyons; the Germanic and Viking eras; the Renaissance with the absolutist monarchies; the Modern era with industrialization and the Contemporary era with the independence of Norway, the war conflicts in Europe and the new paradigm of the European Union.
In addition, the museum also contains rooms dedicated to Egyptian, Latin and Greek cultures; as well as a collection of Romanesque works, among which stand out a Saint George and a brown-skinned Virgin Mary that are very familiar to us.
One of the most moving moments of the visit is the exhibition dedicated to the Vikings and Volvä, the Viking sibyl who predicted the future and who takes you into a dreamlike and magical world that helps you understand what life was like in Scandinavian lands hundreds of years ago.
Egil has been a great guide during this last day in Copenhagen. This afternoon, they will take a flight to Oslo to continue delving into the world of the Vikings and relax and rest for a few days in the middle of nature, in search of these Viking spirits, whose voices still resonate very strongly in these places, but which can only be heard by those who are willing to believe in them.
Let's go in search of Volvä and her people and try to invoke them with the same poems that the Norse sibyl left us as written testimony of a pivotal era for the history and culture of Scandinavia.
The National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet) in Copenhagen is Denmark's largest museum of cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures, alike. The museum's main building is located a short distance from Strøget at the centre of Copenhagen. It contains exhibits from around the world, from Greenland to South America. Additionally, the museum sponsors SILA -The Greenland Research Center at the National Museum of Denmark to further archaeological and anthropological research in Greenland.
The museum has a number of national commitments, particularly within the following key areas: archaeology, ethnology, numismatics, ethnography, natural science, conservation, communication, building antiquarian activities in connection with the churches of Denmark, as well as the handling of the Danefæ (the National Treasures).
The museum covers 14,000 years of Danish history, from the reindeer-hunters of the Ice Age, Vikings, and works of religious art from the Middle Ages, when the church was highly significant in Danish life. Danish coins from Viking times to the present and coins from ancient Rome and Greece, as well as examples of the coinage and currencies of other cultures, are exhibited also.
The National Museum keeps Denmark's largest and most varied collection of objects from the ancient cultures of Greece and Italy, the Near East and Egypt. For example, it holds a collection of objects that were retrieved during the Danish excavation of Tell Shemshara in Iraq in 1957.
Exhibits are also shown on who the Danish people are and were, stories of everyday life and special occasions, stories of the Danish state and nation, but most of all stories of different people's lives in Denmark from 1560 to 2000.
More information: Nationalmuseet
Vikings were a seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.
They voyaged as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, Greenland, and Vinland (present-day Newfoundland in Canada, North America). In their countries of origin, and in some of the countries they raided and settled, this period of activity is popularly known as the Viking Age, and the term Viking also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a whole during the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries.
The Vikings had a profound impact on the early medieval history of northern and Eastern Europe, including the political and social development of England (and the English language) and parts of France, and established the embryo of Russia in Kievan Rus'.
Expert sailors and navigators of their characteristic longships, Vikings established Norse settlements and governments in the British Isles, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast, as well as along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes across Eastern Europe where they were also known as Varangians.
The Normans, Norse-Gaels, Rus, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies. At one point, a group of Rus Vikings went so far south that, after briefly being bodyguards for the Byzantine emperor, they attacked the Byzantine city of Constantinople.
Vikings also voyaged to the Caspian Sea and Arabia. They were the first Europeans to reach North America, briefly settling in Newfoundland (Vinland). While spreading Norse culture to foreign lands, they simultaneously brought home slaves, concubines, and foreign cultural influences to Scandinavia, influencing the genetic and historical development of both.
During the Viking Age, the Norse homelands were gradually consolidated from smaller kingdoms into three larger kingdoms: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
The Vikings spoke Old Norse and made inscriptions in runes.
For most of the Viking Age, they followed the Old Norse religion, but became Christians over the 8th–12th centuries. The Vikings had their own laws, art, and architecture. Most Vikings were also farmers, fishermen, craftsmen, and traders.
Popular conceptions of the Vikings often strongly differ from the complex, advanced civilisation of the Norsemen that emerges from archaeology and historical sources. A romanticised picture of Vikings as noble savages began to emerge in the 18th century; this developed and became widely propagated during the 19th-century Viking revival.
Varying views of the Vikings -as violent, piratical heathens or as intrepid adventurers- reflect conflicting modern Viking myths that took shape by the early 20th century. Current popular representations are typically based on cultural clichés and stereotypes and are rarely accurate -for example, there is no evidence that they wore horned helmets, a costume element that first appeared in the 19th century.
The etymology of the word Viking has been much debated by academics, with many origin theories being proposed. One theory suggests that the word's origin is from the Old English wicing settlement and the Old Frisian wizing, attested almost 300 years prior. Another less popular theory is that víking came from the feminine vík cree', inlet, small bay. The Old Norse word víkingr does not appear in written sources until the 12th century, apart from a few runestones.
Another etymology that gained support in the early 21st century derives Viking from the same root as Old Norse vika 'sea mile', originally referring to the distance between two shifts of rowers, ultimately from the Proto-Germanic *wîkan 'to recede'. This is found in the early Nordic verb *wikan 'to turn', similar to Old Icelandic víkja 'to move, to turn', with well-attested nautical usages, according to Bernard Mees. This theory is better attested linguistically, and the term most likely predates the use of the sail by the Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe.
In the Middle Ages, viking came to refer to Scandinavian pirates or raiders.
The word Viking was introduced into Modern English during the late 18th-century Viking revival, at which point it acquired romanticised heroic overtones of barbarian warrior or noble savage.
During the 20th century, the meaning of the term was expanded to refer not only to seaborne raiders from Scandinavia and other places settled by them (like Iceland and the Faroe Islands), but also any member of the culture that produced the raiders during the period from the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries, or more loosely from about 700 to as late as about 1100. As an adjective, the word is used to refer to ideas, phenomena, or artefacts connected with those people and their cultural life, producing expressions like Viking age, Viking culture, Viking art, Viking religion or Viking ship.
The Viking Age in Scandinavian history is taken to have been the period from the earliest recorded raids by Norsemen in 793 until the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea for sea routes to the south.
The Normans were descendants of those Vikings who had been given feudal overlordship of areas in northern France, namely the Duchy of Normandy, in the 10th century. In that respect, descendants of the Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe. Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, had Danish ancestors. Two Vikings even ascended to the throne of England, with Sweyn Forkbeard claiming the English throne in 1013 until 1014 and his son Cnut the Great being king of England between 1016 and 1035.
Geographically, the Viking Age covered Scandinavian lands (modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden), as well as territories under North Germanic dominance, mainly the Danelaw, including Scandinavian York, the administrative centre of the remains of the Kingdom of Northumbria, parts of Mercia, and East Anglia.
Viking navigators opened the road to new lands to the north, west and east, resulting in the foundation of independent settlements in the Shetland, Orkney, and Faroe Islands; Iceland; Greenland; and L'Anse aux Meadows, a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland, circa 1000. The Greenland settlement was established around 980, during the Medieval Warm Period, and its demise by the mid-15th century may have been partly due to climate change. The semi-legendary Viking Rurik is said to have taken control of Novgorod in 862, while his kinsman Oleg captured Kiev in 882 and made it the capital of the Rus. The Rurik dynasty would rule Russia until 1598.
Christianity had taken root in Denmark and Norway with the establishment of dioceses in the 11th century, and the new religion was beginning to organise and assert itself more effectively in Sweden. Foreign churchmen and native elites were energetic in furthering the interests of Christianity, which was now no longer operating only on a missionary footing, and old ideologies and lifestyles were transforming. By 1103, the first archbishopric was founded in Scandinavia, at Lund, Scania, then part of Denmark.
The assimilation of the nascent Scandinavian kingdoms into the cultural mainstream of European Christendom altered the aspirations of Scandinavian rulers and of Scandinavians able to travel overseas, and changed their relations with their neighbours.
One of the primary sources of profit for the Vikings had been slave-taking from other European peoples. The medieval Church held that Christians should not own fellow Christians as slaves, so chattel slavery diminished as a practice throughout northern Europe. This took much of the economic incentive out of raiding, though sporadic slaving activity continued into the 11th century. Scandinavian predation in Christian lands around the North and Irish Seas diminished markedly.
The kings of Norway continued to assert power in parts of northern Britain and Ireland, and raids continued into the 12th century, but the military ambitions of Scandinavian rulers were now directed toward new paths.
In 1107, Sigurd I of Norway sailed for the eastern Mediterranean with Norwegian crusaders to fight for the newly established Kingdom of Jerusalem; the kings of Denmark and Sweden participated actively in the Baltic Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries.
More information: BBC
Egil's Saga
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