Roskilde

Sunday, September 18 

We left our sweet apartment in Fredericia and headed back across the Great Belt Bridge to the city of Roskilde in Denmark’s Zealand region, where we did some sightseeing before heading to Copenhagen, which will be this trip’s final destination.  

We thoroughly enjoyed the hours we spent at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.  The museum was developed after five Viking ships were found submerged in a fjord near the town about 60 years ago.  An enormous effort to excavate, understand, preserve and partially reconstruct over 100,000 wooden pieces of the ships was undertaken over several decades and the results are on display in the specially-built Viking Ship Hall at the water’s edge.  The ships, both warships and trading vessels, were deliberately filled with rocks and sunk in order to construct a defensive barrier against attacks on the city, which was a commercial and political powerhouse. We were able to take an interesting guided tour that helped us understand some of the historical, archeological, and technical aspects of what we were seeing.

Another section of the museum was located on what’s referred to as the Museum Island.  Craftsmen and tradesmen work at constructing new ships based on the designs of Viking-era ships, using only the materials and techniques of the Vikings.  Their results of their efforts were to be found tied up along the museum’s docks, or being rowed by groups of visitors on boat tours.  The new ships are also used in the museum’s experimental archeology studies; they are actually taken on voyages along the routes the Vikings traveled in order to learn whether the assumptions about building techniques and seaworthiness hold water.

While in Roskilde, we also visited its cathedral, a massive brick construction housing the ornate sarcophagi of centuries of Danish kings and queens.  The tombs were ornate and opulent, as were the side chapels housing many of them, but our own lack of knowledge/interest in the royals’ family tree meant that their significance was pretty much lost on us.  The church itself was lovely, with the gilded King’s Box, pulpit, frescoes, and organ, caved choir stalls, and animated clock.

From Roskilde, we made the short drive to Copenhagen airport, where we dropped off out rental car -- and discovered what yesterday's refueling fiasco was going to cost (not as much as we'd feared).  We took the Metro 20 minutes to a station five minutes' walk from our apartment and settled in to spend four nights in Denmark's capital city.

Ribe

Saturday, September 17 

Today began with a good-news, bad-news (but could-have-been-so-much-worse news) story.  Bad news first:  we’ve been in three countries on this trip and, unusually in our travels, have had three different cars.  This was the first of the three to require diesel fuel – and you can probably guess the rest of the story from there.  IMMEDIATELY after filling the tank with gasoline, Tom realized that he’d used regular gas, rather than diesel.  (His slapping the roof of the car and “forceful” language alerted me that something major had gone awry.)  Now for the good news: he realized it before even getting back behind the wheel, and had not started the car.  I’ll abbreviate the rest – in relatively short order, the car was on a flatbed tow truck, we were inside the monster cab of said truck, car was dropped at some dealer who would “deal” with it, we were at a local Avis office with a clerk who’d evidently been called to work just to help us out, and in less than two hours, we were back on the road toward our original destination.  Of course, the piper has yet to be paid, but we’ll leave that chapter for another day…

Our destination for the day was Ribe, one of Scandinavia’s oldest towns, dating from 700; it was a key outpost during the Viking era.  With cobbled streets and tiny “slips,” or side streets lined with crooked, half-timbered houses clustered between a canal and the massive cathedral on the main square, the city’s heyday in the Middle Ages is easy to visualize.  

By the end of the 16^th century, the royal family had decamped to Copenhagen and a fire had destroyed much of the town. Because of its decline in commercial and political importance, most of Ribe’s buildings remained in their original states; now, more than 100 of its buildings are on Denmark’s register of historic sites. The facades of many of the buildings bear plaques explaining their significance; most were untranslatable (by us!), but we did recognize the birthplace of the American social reformer Jacob Riis on the cathedral square.












We wandered up and down the lanes using a self-guided walking tour brochure (which could have been better organized) and visited the only two churches remaining of the thirteen built before the Reformation, the huge cathedral (originating in the 10^th century, current building dating from the 12th), and St. Catherine’s, originally founded in 1228, when it was built on reclaimed marshland.  After it collapsed, it was rebuilt in the 15^th century.  It’s in a quiet neighborhood, bordered by a row of former almshouses (one of which is the town’s smallest home), a row of beautiful townhomes shaded by large trees, and a quiet square.

When we arrived in Ribe at noon, there was lots of commercial activity, with stores filling the pedestrian streets with their offerings. By the time we left several hours later, most of the businesses had closed for the day.  We’ve read that it’s traditional for small shops to have reduced or no hours on Saturday in this country.

Near Ribe, we found the spot where the canal enters the sea, after passing through a lock.  The land is very low lying and protected by dikes; even so, it is still prone to periodic flooding.  In Ribe’s cathedral, there is a line carved into a pillar marking the water level of a flood surge in 1634 – 20 feet above normal – that killed 16,000 people.

We’ve enjoyed driving through the Danish countryside during the last several days. There are lots of pretty small villages, with occasional houses topped with the most neatly shaped and trimmed thatched roofs we’ve ever seen; they look as if they were plucked from children’s picture books.

In cities, towns, and along rural roads and highways we’ve seen Danes on their bicycles. Roads have dedicated bike lanes, frequently physically separated from car traffic, and they even have their own traffic lights.  On one corner near our apartment, we spotted a mini-self-service bike repair station – a vending machine dispensing tire tubes, tools hanging on a chain, and pressurized air to inflate tires.

Perhaps the Danes are on to something; if we’d been traveling by bike, we’d never have encountered our problem at the gas pump this morning!

Aarhus and Jelling

Friday, September 16 

Aarhus may be Denmark’s second city, but it has its own charms.  The massive cathedral, in the town center has Denmark’s longest nave and soaring Gothic arches.  Pre-Reformation, the interior was richly frescoed, but its adornments were whitewashed in the fervor to erase all traces of anything “too Catholic”; many have now been restored.  

While walking behind the altar toward the apse, we began to hear soft, feminine voices singing and soon we saw several strollers lined up along a wall.  As we reached the apse, we found a small group of young mothers (and a grandmother) with their infants.  With the leadership of another young woman, they were singing quiet hymns, gesturing fluidly over their babies, who were cooing and smiling contentedly up at them as they lay on their quilts.  We later learned that it’s called babysalmesang or “baby hymns”, and it’s offered elsewhere as well. It was lovely – balm for babies – and their mothers, too, I’m sure.

Speaking of babies, as we were walking through the pedestrian center of Aahus, we noticed something we’d read about, but didn’t really believe.  We saw a baby in a pram, parked outside a small store, while his mother shopped inside; Danes score VERY high on their levels of trust in their fellow man!!

We walked on to the Church of Our Lady, built over the site of the original cathedral, whose crypt, dating from the 11^th century, was small, dark and candlelit. The crypt is the oldest stone church still existing in Scandinavia. The church cloister also gave entry to an abbey church, now used as a chapel for residents of the adjoining home for the elderly.

After a walk along Mollestein, a pretty cobbled street of small old houses right in the middle of Aarhus, we crossed the narrow canal that winds through the city center to reach the Art Museum of Aarhus, known as ARoS.

ARoS makes a visual impression well before any of its artwork is in view.  The top (tenth) level of the museum is a 360 degree rooftop walkway.  Titled Your Rainbow Panorama, it’s a transparent ring, shaded in hues of the rainbow, offering views over the city.  Inside, the museum is somewhat reminiscent of the (original) Guggenheim Museum, with a gently sloping staircase winding down through the center of the building. Descending, the galleries at each level present a chronologically arranged capsule summary of Danish art.  The levels of the building are also meant to be an architectural representation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with heaven represented by the rooftop’s rainbow halo and the bottom level’s Nine Spaces painted black and dedicated to several unusual installations.

We walked along the canal to the cathedral square and stopped to see the Viking Museum, housed underground in a space excavated during the construction of a bank building.  Aahus was originally a walled Viking settlement and the artifacts unearthed provided a  telling look at life there 1000 years ago.

En route back to our apartment in Fredericia, we stopped at Jelling, the royal seat during the Viking era and the birthplace of Christianity in Denmark. The monumental site consists of several elements: a simple white church dating from the 12^th century, surrounded by the loveliest cemetery we’ve ever seen; two massive burial mounds; and two rune stones, King Grom’s  bearing the first inscription of the word “Denmark,” the other, his son King Harald Bluetooth’s declaration of Christianity as the religion of the Danes in the year 965.  This is an important place, culturally, religiously, and historically, for the Danish people and the entire site is beautifully maintained and presented.  The original wooden palisade encircling the city is now represented by white posts and the outline of the ship that Norsemen believed would transport them after death to be with their gods in Valhalla is traced with white concrete tiles.  A new museum and visitors’ center is extraordinarily well done, with interactive exhibits that are entertaining, engaging, and educational-in English as well as in Danish. All in all, this is a don’t-miss spot.

We covered a lot of chronological territory today -- from the Vikings right up to avant garde artists – and still made it home in time for happy hour!