KLuck of fortune, wealth, a whole army of strong followers: the Danish King Hrothgar is at the height of his power. He decides to build a great hall, bigger than anything human has ever built anywhere on earth. He calls them “Heorot”. When she’s finished, he has a lavish party with his people. At some point everyone sleeps on the hall floor. Nearby, the monster Grendel crawls out of its swamp, enters the hall and drags thirty warriors away with it. This is repeated the following night. And now nobody wants to enter the beautiful hall, especially not when it gets dark.
This is what it says in “Beowulf”, the famous Old English epic, the author of which is just as unknown as its exact time of origin. Handed down in a single manuscript, it has long since become an icon of Germanic literature, especially in England. None other than JRR Tolkien studied it, published it and alluded to it many times in “The Lord of the Rings”. It was repeatedly re-composed and rewritten, filmed or used as a template for computer games and songs. And as in the case of Troy or Atlantis, researchers have long asked whether and to what extent history is anchored in reality.
How did the bear jaw get here?
The trail leads to Lejre, a group of several villages on the Danish island of Zealand, a few kilometers from Roskilde and around forty minutes by car from Copenhagen. The landscape is hilly, characterized by gently sloping fields, the sea is close by, and on the outskirts of Gammel Lejre there is a museum in an old, white-painted courtyard building, right next to a horse pasture and an Ice Age hill, from which one has a magnificent view has in the distance. A little further on, boulders are lined up in the meadow in the form of a Viking ship, in the vicinity of which more than fifty graves from around the year 900 have been discovered. A considerably large cemetery – but where did the people live before they were taken there?
Not only Nordic sagas and chronicles tell of Lejre’s former importance, but also finds from the area, which are exhibited in the two showrooms of the museum. For example swords, weapons or jewelry from the Viking Age, which suggest that power and wealth were gathered here in the early Middle Ages. Or a bear jaw, which apparently comes from Sweden – how did it get to Zealand where there are no bears?
One only has to take a few steps, across the street and then on signposted footpaths into the fields on the other side to find a possible answer. For while for centuries nothing at all of Lejre’s former greatness was visible, while the reports of the mighty empire that should have had its center here were often enough ridiculed, from the end of the twentieth century the outlines of this area gradually became more diverse , halls of different sizes to light: Not much, just what is left in the floor from the former wooden constructions, but it was enough to fire the imagination. From a society that was rich enough to erect mighty buildings and, when they were out of date, burn them down in a controlled manner and rebuild them a few meters away.
The monster comes every night
Nothing is grown around the halls anymore; their previous structures are marked by low earthen walls. Whoever came there went up a small hill, he approached his prince from below. In the largest “King’s Hall” discovered in 2009, a figure of Odin was found, very classic with the famous ravens Hugin and Munin on his knees. And the grave of a man who was the only one buried there a few hundred years after this hall burned down – why? When the great cemetery on the other side of the road, the land of the dead, was so strictly separated from this realm of the living?
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