22 Sept 2013
Koge to Roskilde to Koge
0 miles

We’ve arrived in Roskilde after a 26 minute train ride. Twenty-six minutes. This is the town we tried unsuccessfully to reach by bicycle for two days and now we’ve arrived after 26 minutes of virtually no effort on our part. Funny how it feels like we’ve worked so hard to come so far and yet we’ve hardly gone anywhere. Definitely not our typical bike tour in Europe. But it is what it is so today we are giving in to having a Cultural Experience: the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

As far as museums go, and coming from someone who rarely goes into one, I must say the Viking Ship Museum was worth the entrance fee. Back in the 1960’s, it was discovered that a heap of ships that had been scuttled in the town’s fjord were not from the mid-1400 or -1500’s, as folks had always thought, but instead dated back a thousand years. I thought it a little amusing that here in Europe, ships that are “only” 500 years old aren’t worth salvaging but adding another half millennium makes them interesting enough to recover. So the ships – or should I say, bits of ships – were dug up and ultimately became the world’s most complicated jigsaw puzzle – a puzzle that took 25 years to solve. (Clearly there is  an undiscovered future in this country for Cousin Cynthia, who no doubt could have solved it much faster.)

Now these reassembled relics have helped to debunk some of the common myths about The Vikings. Like they really didn’t wear helmets like these:

It is true, however, that they engaged in very little personal hygiene. From what I could tell, neither did the guy standing next to me on the museum tour. Maybe instead of having a Cultural Experience, he was there to research his family tree.