Denmark
Category archives for Denmark
UK, SE, DA Metal Detector Laws Compared
Posted by Martin R on February 22, 2011 My detectorist friend Svante Tibell pointed me to an extremely interesting term paper by Ingrid Ulst, one of Marge Konsa’s students at the university of Tartu in Estonia. The title says it all: The Regulation of Metal Detectors and Responsible Metal-Detecting: the Examples of the UK, Sweden and Denmark. Check it out!
Pond of the Plywood Vikings
Posted by Martin R on November 24, 2010 Re-run from 25 December 2005 (no, Swedes pay no attention to Christmas Day, preferring to get worked up about Christmas Eve). In Skive, Denmark, there’s a pond dug to accommodate a plywood Viking ship that was never set afloat. My friend Rud Kjems tells the story in local-history annual Skiveegnens jul 2005. Skive museum was…
Work or Play? An Unusual Stone Object
Posted by Martin R on September 19, 2010 Here’s a funny find. My buddy Tobias Bondesson sent me these pics of a gneiss or granite object he’s found, measuring 30 by 28 mm in diameter and 20 mm high. The find spot is near Lee church in northern Jutland (the current stone structure there goes back to shortly after AD 1100), and the…
Two Queenly Careers
Posted by Martin R on September 9, 2010 Through my reading I was reminded of two Scandinavian early-12th century queens whose careers are pretty amazing. Though originally probably unrelated, they became kin by marriage in several ways. ~1085. Margareta Ingesdotter born, daughter of King Inge I of Sweden. (Birth year unrecorded.) ~1100. Ulvhild Håkonsdotter born, daughter of the Norwegian nobleman Håkon Finnsson of…
Three New Halls at Jelling
Posted by Martin R on June 17, 2010 One of the most beloved novels in the Swedish language is Frans G. Bengtsson’s Viking story Röde Orm (1941), transl. Red Orm / The Long Ships (1943). And one of the most beloved scenes in the novel are the Yuletide celebrations at the court of King Harold Bluetooth at Jelling in Jutland toward the end…
Lejre Excavator Publishes His Views on the Figurine
Posted by Martin R on May 3, 2010 Tom Christensen, who heads excavations at storied Lejre on Zealand, Denmark, has a paper about the lovely Lejre figurine in ROMU 2009 (full text on-line) and another one in the new issue of Skalk. Here he offers some well-chosen comparative material and presents his arguments for the figurine’s gender and identity. Everybody agrees that the…
Lukewarm Normative Scandy Atheism
Posted by Martin R on April 19, 2010 Because of blogging and my involvement in the skeptical pro-science movement, in recent years I have come into close contact with Americans as never before in my adult life. More than half of Aard’s readers are in the US. It’s almost like when I met my wife and suddenly learned lots about China. A couple…
Recent Archaeomags
Posted by Martin R on March 25, 2010 Skalk‘s February issue was not up to the Danish pop-arch journal’s usual excellent standard. I am always keen to read interesting news from Jelling and Lejre, the country’s proto-historic centres. But in this case the editors have devoted 17 of the issue’s 30 pages to articles about Harold Bluetooth’s Jelling despite the fact that nothing…
Beautiful Vendel Period Jewellery
Posted by Martin R on February 26, 2010 I’m happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his “technical work”, which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people.…
Tripartite Names in Denmark and China
Posted by Martin R on February 5, 2010 Danes often have tripartite names, like famous Roman Iron Age scholar Ulla Lund Hansen or NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. And I’ve been wondering how these names are inherited. Specifically, which names get dropped and which ones get passed on to the kids. So I wrote my erudite buddy, osteologist Helene Agerskov Madsen, and…
