Jelling

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A flat-topped hill of turf rises beside the church, and a second mound faces it across the churchyard, the two of them so large that the small town seems to have arranged itself around their feet. Between them, in front of the white Romanesque church, stand two carved blocks of granite, now sealed behind plate glass against a thousand years of Danish weather. The larger of the stones is roughly pyramidal, taller than a man, its three faces crowded with runes and with figures. One of those figures is a man with outstretched arms, standing upright, his body laced into a net of interlacing tendrils. He is Christ — the oldest image of him carved anywhere in Scandinavia — and the runes around him announce, in the first person of a king, that the Danes have become Christian. The whole arrangement at Jelling is a single statement, made in earth and stone, about who ruled here and which god they now served.

The royal seat in Jutland

Jelling lies in central Jutland, the long peninsula that forms the mainland of Denmark, a little north of the modern town of Vejle. In the tenth century it was a royal center of the kings who were assembling, out of the scattered chieftaincies of the Danish lands, something that could be called a kingdom. The two men whose names the monuments carry are Gorm — known to later tradition as Gorm the Old (Gorm den Gamle) — and his son Harald, called Bluetooth. They ruled in the high tide of the Viking Age, the same generations whose longships were raiding and trading from the Irish Sea to the rivers of Rus; the wealth that built Jelling was wealth a sea-kingdom could command. At the trading town of Hedeby, on the southern frontier of Harald’s realm, the coins and goods of that reach passed through Danish hands.

The chronology at Jelling is unusually firm for the Viking Age, because the timber buried in the mounds can be dated by its tree-rings. The North Mound was raised over a burial chamber whose oak was felled in the winter of 958–959, which fixes the death of the king it was built for to around that year — almost certainly Gorm himself, the first of the dynasty whose memory the site preserves. The mound was enormous: roughly seventy meters across and some eight to eleven meters high, among the largest burial mounds in Denmark. Its chamber, when archaeologists reached it, was empty of a body, though it had once held a rich grave; a small silver cup, decorated in the niello inlay that gives its name to a whole style of Viking ornament, had been recovered from the mound as early as 1820.

The South Mound, of comparable size, was built about a decade later, around 970, and contained no burial at all. It was raised, it seems, as a counterweight — a deliberate twin, completing a monumental composition rather than covering a grave. Mound-building on this scale was costly in a way that is easy to underestimate: each was a hill of hand-cut turf hauled and stacked, a public expenditure of labor that advertised the king’s command of men as plainly as any inscription. To raise two such hills, one of them over no body, is to use the old funerary form for a new purpose — not to bury, but to declare. Underneath and between the two mounds ran a third structure, invisible today until it is marked out: a setting of standing stones in the outline of a ship. Recent excavation has shown this ship to have been vast, on the order of 354 meters from prow to stern — a length that corresponds neatly to twelve hundred Roman feet — with the North Mound sitting at its center rather than at one end. It is the largest stone ship known from the Norse world. Around the whole ensemble, archaeologists working from 2006 onward traced a palisade: more than a kilometer of oak planking enclosing a vast rhomboid precinct, tall enough to be seen across the flat Jutland country from far off. The mounds, the ship, the palisade — taken together they describe a royal sanctuary on a scale that no other site in Scandinavia matches.

The Jelling stones before the church and mound, Jutland. Photograph by Erik Christensen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The smaller stone: Gorm and Thyra

The first of the two runestones is the smaller, and it belongs to Gorm. He raised it in memory of his wife, Thyra, and its inscription is brief and formal in the manner of the memorial stones that stand in their thousands across Scandinavia. King Gorm, it says, made this monument in memory of Thyra, his wife — and then it gives her an epithet, tanmarkaʀ but, rendered “Denmark’s adornment,” “remedy,” or “salvation” — the exact sense still argued over by scholars.

What matters beyond the words is the name folded into them. The small stone carries one of the earliest occurrences of the name Denmark written within the country itself, in the local tongue, by the country’s own king. The name had been heard from outside before — a traveler’s account at the court of the English king Alfred, a generation earlier, had spoken of “Denemearce” — but here it is the Danes naming themselves. On a memorial for a dead queen, almost in passing, the kingdom announces that it has a name.

The great stone: the conversion in granite

The second stone is Harald’s, and it is the one that has become a national emblem. He raised it around the year 965, in memory of both his parents, and its three carved faces turn the modest grammar of the memorial stone into something close to a manifesto. The runic text reads, in translation: King Harald ordered these monuments made in memory of Gorm his father and in memory of Thyra his mother — that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.

Every clause is a claim. The first is dynastic: Harald sets himself in a line, the dutiful son completing his father’s work, planting his stone between the two great mounds his family had raised. The second is territorial: all of Denmark and Norway, a single king over both — an assertion of reach that historians read with some caution, since Harald’s actual hold over Norway was real but partial and did not long outlive him. The third is the one the stone exists to make: and made the Danes Christian. In a single inscription the king ties together a unified realm and a new god, as though the two were one accomplishment.

The carving makes the same argument without words. One broad face of the stone is given over to a great quadruped — a lion-like beast, its body looped about by a serpent that bites or binds it — rendered in the bold, deep-cut, ribbon-bodied style that takes its name from a richly furnished grave at nearby Mammen. The other principal face carries the figure of Christ. He does not hang on a cross; he stands frontally with his arms flung wide, the cross only implied, and his whole body is caught in a spreading tangle of interlace, the same tendril-ornament that runs through the rest of the stone. It is the oldest depiction of Christ in Scandinavia, and it shows him in the visual language of the world he is entering — a Christ wound into the northern beast-ornament, a god arriving in the dress of the place he has come to rule. For a viewer raised in the old religion of the North, the image of a divine man bound upright in a net of tendrils would not have been wholly strange: the gallows-tree on which Odin hung nine nights to win the runes was a figure already in the mind. The carvers gave the new god a posture the old one had made familiar.

The Christ face of Harald Bluetooth’s stone, c. 965. Photograph by MrsVanDort, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The stone was not always the grey, weathered thing it is now. Traces of pigment and a long study of comparable carvings have shown that it was once brightly painted — the figures and runes picked out in red, black, white, and yellow against the granite, so that the standing Christ and the looping beast would have read across the precinct like a painted banner. The National Museum of Denmark, which oversees the monuments, calls the great stone Danmarks dåbsattest, “Denmark’s baptismal certificate” — a phrase coined by an art historian in the 1930s — because it records both the naming of the country and the moment it changed its religion. In English the same stone is more often called Denmark’s birth certificate. By either name it marks a hinge: the precise instant, set where it cannot easily be moved, at which a Viking king claimed a kingdom and a creed in the same breath.

The conversion the stone proclaims did not happen in isolation. Frankish and German missionaries had been working at the edges of the Danish lands for more than a century, and the Saxon chronicler and churchman Adam of Bremen, writing about a hundred years later, preserved a story that the priest Poppo persuaded Harald by carrying a heated iron without being burned — a miracle-tale of the kind such accounts favored, to be weighed as the work of a Christian writer recording a Christian triumph rather than as plain report. What the stone itself attests is narrower and surer: that by the time Harald raised it, the king of the Danes wished it known, in granite and in his own voice, that his people were now Christian.

The conversion was also, plainly, a political instrument. To Harald’s south lay the Christian empire of the Ottonians, and a heathen king on its border was a standing pretext for invasion under the banner of the cross; a Christian king was a brother monarch, harder to attack on principle and able to staff his realm with literate churchmen. Harald’s reign shows a ruler organizing his kingdom with a sudden, deliberate energy — the great earthwork rampart of the Danevirke across the neck of Jutland strengthened, a long timber bridge thrown across a marshy valley at Ravning, and a set of precisely circular ring-fortresses raised at points across the Danish lands, all of them laid out with a geometric exactness that bespeaks a single commanding will. The conversion proclaimed at Jelling belongs with these works: pieces of one project, the assembling of a kingdom that could hold together and answer to one man.

The church between the mounds

Harald did more than carve the claim; he built it into the ground. Between the two pagan mounds, on the spot where the stone church now stands, he raised a wooden church — the first in a sequence of three timber buildings that burned and were rebuilt before the present stone church went up around 1100. Excavations beneath the church floor in the 1970s found, under the earliest of those wooden churches, an oak burial chamber containing the bones of a man between forty and fifty years old, laid in a grave furnished as befitted a person of the highest rank.

The reading that the National Museum and most scholars now favor draws the threads of the site together. The man had been buried first in the North Mound, in the rich pagan chamber dated to 958–959, and then — when his son turned Christian — translated from the heathen mound into consecrated ground inside the new church, reburied as a Christian where a heathen king had lain. The man is almost certainly Gorm. If so, the monuments at Jelling record not only a kingdom’s conversion but a family’s: the father carried out of the mound his own death had raised, and laid to rest in the church his son built to hold the new faith. In the year 2000, after long study, the remains were reinterred a final time, in front of the chancel of the present church, in the presence of members of the Danish royal house — the same dynasty, in unbroken legal descent, that Gorm and Harald founded.

Gorm’s smaller stone and Harald’s great stone before the mound. Photograph by Casiopeia, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE.

Ruin, recovery, and afterlife

For most of a thousand years the stones stood open to the weather of Jutland, and they suffered for it. The runes and figures, cut shallow and once protected only by paint, wore steadily toward illegibility. In 2008 an international panel assessed their condition, and the Danish heritage authorities held a competition — out of which came the solution now in place: each stone enclosed in a rectangular case of glass and bronze, climate-controlled to hold temperature and humidity steady, the anti-reflective glazing casting a faint green over the granite within. The stones remain where they were raised, between the mounds; only the air around them has changed.

The mounds and the vanished structures have been brought back into view by other means. The outline of the great ship-setting and the line of the palisade, both invisible at ground level, are now marked across the site by ranks of pale concrete posts, so that a visitor can walk the prow-to-stern length of the stone ship and trace the precinct wall that once enclosed the royal sanctuary. The whole ensemble — mounds, stones, and church — was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994, cited as an unmatched record of the passage of Nordic culture from heathendom to Christianity, the pagan mounds and the Christian church and the stone that joins them standing together on the same ground.

The great stone’s reach extends well beyond the churchyard. Its inscription and its image of Christ have become fixtures of Danish national identity — the figure of Christ reproduced inside the cover of the Danish passport, so that the oldest image of him in the North travels in the pockets of modern Danes. And by a stranger route the dead king’s name has gone further still. In 1997 an engineer naming a new short-range radio standard, having been reading Viking history, fixed on Harald Bluetooth: the king who had united the quarreling Danish lands seemed a fitting patron for a technology meant to unite quarreling devices. The name stuck, and so did the logo — a bind-rune combining the two runes that begin Harald’s name, Hagall and Bjarkan, the H and B of the king, set into the small blue glyph now lit on screens across the world. The wireless link by which a phone finds a speaker carries, unread by nearly everyone who uses it, the initials of the king who set his conversion in granite at Jelling.

What stands at Jelling, then, is a kingdom describing itself at the moment of its making. The mounds and the ship belong to the old religion, raised over a heathen king; the stone and the church belong to the new one, raised by his Christian son a few paces away; and between them, in the bones moved from mound to church and in the granite that names the country for the first time in its own voice, the two worlds are joined at the seam. The Danish kings recorded their own beginning here, and the record has held — in stone, in the passport, and in the small blue rune that connects the machines of a world the carvers could not have imagined.

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