A
Story for the Ages
Wondering and Wandering through Oslo's Viking Ship Museum
by
Erin Caslavka
 "Since
A.D. 793, Norsemen have been seen as intrepid seafarers and fierce warriors
- a sort of Hell's Angels of the early Middle Ages," writes Andrew Curry in
Smithsonian magazine. "These adventurers also wove a network of trade and
exploration that stretched from Russia to Turkey to Canada, buying and
selling goods from places as distant as China and Afghanistan."
Able-bodied seamen, the fierce, wandering Vikings aggressively set sail out
of Denmark, Sweden and Norway 1,200 years ago in search of goods and land
worth taking. “They were people without boundaries,” says Wladyslaw Duczko,
an archaeologist at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. “I think that’s why
Vikings are so popular in America.”
By
paying a visit to the Viking Ship Museum, a short ferry-boat ride from
Oslo's city center, modern-day travelers can gain a better understanding of
some of the practices and beliefs of the Vikings, dispelling visions some of
us may hold from the 1958 movie The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas as a
warring Norseman.
 The main attraction of the
museum is the "Oseberg Ship," so named because of where it was discovered.
Excavated in 1904, the ship was originally hauled ashore in the 9th century
and buried in a trench, preserved for over 1,000 years in a bed of clay and
turf. The quintessential bow-shaped boat with the curling prow now sits
empty within the museum's cavernous room, but when it was originally
discovered in a hermetically-sealed barrow, it contained treasures befitting
the apparent high-ranking status of the two Viking women found inside a
tapestry-laden burial chamber mounted to the midsection of the ship.
Two
women? I wondered, as I wandered up and down the length of the
fully-restored 65-foot vessel. But I thought it was high-ranking Viking men
who were set atop a longboat, then sent out to sea while flaming arrows were
shot onto the ship, turning it into a giant, floating funeral pyre...
Silly
me; that was a scene from The Vikings. Apparently it was time to dispel with
the visions I had from a 50-year-old movie and delve into the truth.
When it
was first discovered by Professor Gabriel Gustafson, the Oseberg longboat (a
ship constructed of wood, and made waterproof with either pitch or
tar-soaked skin) was broken into thousands of fragments, so a naval engineer
was brought in to help put the pieces back together again; which he did -
using about 90% of the ship's original lumber. Archaeologists also uncovered
personal possessions that would have been used by the women for their
journey into the 'next world.'
Hoping
to solve the riddle about whether one of the two bodies belonged to the powerful
Viking Queen Aasa, the mummies were exhumed from the burial mound. Using DNA
samples to determine a possible familial connection as well as the cause of
death, it seemed that explorers in the 21st century would finally be able to
solve the mysteries of the past.
 But
when the tomb was reopened and the lid of the sarcophagus in which the
bodies were buried was lifted, it was found to be filled with water.
Nevertheless, tests were conducted and in the spring of 2008 it was finally
determined that the older woman had died of terminal cancer - the first
documented case of the disease in Norway. As for the younger woman, bone
tests revealed that she was not sacrificed to accompany Queen Aasa on her
journey to another world; however, her teeth show that she'd used a metal
toothpick - a luxury item that would have only been available to someone of
status.
So who,
exactly, was this Viking woman, and what was her relationship to the queen?
As it
turns out, there simply isn't enough DNA to determine whether or not the two
women were related. Which, like any good story, still leaves plenty of room
for speculation about the seafaring Vikings.
Fast
Facts
The
Viking Ship Museum
Website:
http://www.khm.uio.no/vikingskipshuset/index_eng.html
Address: Huk
Aveny 35, 0287 Oslo, Norway
Phone: Telephone: (+47)22135280
Photo
credits: iStockphoto.com; Courtesy of The Viking Ship Museum
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