I love to search for traces of the Viking past in Denmark, and given the fact that there are thousands of various historical Viking monuments and structures of some sort around the country, you don’t have to drive far to find one! All of them are special to visit for one reason or another, but one particularly special place to me is the Højstrup Viking graveyard. This graveyard, near the Tømmerby Fjord in Thy, North Jutland Denmark, is an absolute gem for anyone (like me!) with a deep interest in Viking-age Denmark!
However, over the years I have learned that Danes are masters of understatement, so many of these sites are not easy to find. They don’t exactly advertise them along highways with huge billboards or signs, especially in the northern part of Denmark.
For anyone not familiar with Danish geography and wondering where the Tømmerby Fjord is located, it is here:
Calling it a fjord might be a bit of a stretch these days, because it is now actually a lake:
In the Viking Age, the water of the Limfjord was at a higher level, up to the edge of the burial site. However, over the years after the last the water levels of the fjord receded, exposing more land and creating what is now the lake.
From the road the burial site doesn’t look like anything special, just a field with some rocks scattered around. There aren’t any huge signs or billboards announcing a tourist attraction. No visitors center or trinket shop.
But years ago when I first moved to Denmark for my year abroad I was always looking for cool Viking things everywhere I went. One weekend a few months after we started dating Peter wanted to take me to meet his parents and spend the weekend at their summer house in Amtoft. As we were driving on a road along the fjord I saw a field of rocks next to the road and a small parking lot and asked what it was.
“A viking graveyard,” he replied as casually as he was saying “oh, just a McDonalds.”
Well, he quickly learned that was the wrong thing to say to me. We had to stop so I could look around. At the time there were no informational plaques or anything, just this stone, which roughly translates to “By the year 1000, Vikings were raising stones for the dead. In 1937, the fallen stones were rebuilt.”
Since then, every time we go back to Denmark, I have to walk around the graveyard. Nothing changes at all, other than in the summer there are flowers and in the winter the grass has shriveled and died. But to me it is comforting, and I often wonder about the lives of the Viking buried here.
There is little information found online about this Viking graveyard, so in the years since my first visit I have learned just a little bit about it. The graveyard dates back to the years 800 to 1050. It consists of about 37 small, round or oblong mounds and about twice as many raised stones. The graves are a combination of cremation graves and inhumation graves where the dead were buried in a coffin or something similar. For instance, in one of the graves dated to the first half of the 900s, a woman was placed in the barn of a wagon.
In the late 1800’s the National Museum of Demark carried out excavations of the graves and declared it a protected site in 1881. In the graves they found a mixture of grave goods in the form of knives, sharp stones, glass beads and iron axes. Some of these grave goods are displayed in various museums around Denmark.
A surprising thing I learned in my research is that many of the graves have in fact never been excavated! Who knows what, if any, treasures lay beneath the ground!
As you walk around the graveyard you will notice that some of the monumental stones form the shape of a ship. It is approximately 30 meters long – the size of a real longship – which had room for about 30 rowers.
Others are in the shape of low burial mounds, some outlined by stones, some not. Some are just single stones.
What really boggles my mind is that there are no fences, nothing to really protect the graves and stones. Here in the US I think people would be bringing in metal detectors and backhoes and there would be nothing left of this burial site.
If you ever find yourself in this part of Denmark, I highly encourage you to put Tømmerbyvej 105, 7741 Frøstrup in your GPS and head out for a little stroll among “just a bunch of rocks” and let your imagination take you back a thousand years as Vikings looked across the water as they buried their dead.
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