April 3 - Eggebeck and the Viking Museum in Schleswig

Hoping to catch another Volksmarch, we headed north to a little town called Eggebeck located about 20 kilometers north-northwest from Schleswig. There are no good east-west streets thru Hamburg, so we had to zigzag our way north and west until we reached a main north-south autobahn that took us up to Eggebeck. The driving was hectic and after 500 kilometers of driving I was finally running out of gasoline, which combined to make me tense, tired, and in need of a bathroom by the time we reached Eggebeck and finally found a gas station there. There were no restrooms in the gas station, but fortunately the start-finish point was less than ½ mile away and restrooms were available there.

But the contrast with taking the train could not have been more marked. Each time we took the train I arrived rested, refreshed and ready to go—bathrooms were available on all inter-city trains and we got into the habit of using them. Driving the car I arrived tired, irritable, and searching for restrooms. My strong advice to anyone else traveling in Germany would be to take trains wherever possible and drive only when absolutely necessary. We thought second class tickets were just fine for day trips, but having more comfortable seats would probably help when taking overnight trains and trying to sleep on them.

In any case we signed in and started off on the walk in Eggebeck. The club had laid out three walking trails of 7, 12, and 20 kilometers plus a 30-kilometer bike route. We paralleled the train tracks for a short while, and I was once again surprised at how quietly the electric trains run. The sound they make when passing us was a combined whine of the electric motors plus a kind of whoosh from the air slipstream, which is a completely different sound than the pounding of a diesel locomotive or the pulsating thunder of a big steam locomotive. We had to walk through an underpass that was covered with graffiti.

We reached the choice point for 7 or 12 kilometers, but Lois felt she couldn’t really do the 12 so we turned off onto the 7-kilometer route. We curled around some farms and returned thru Langstedt to Eggebeck and the finish point. We saw ploughed fields, some of which looked like they had corn stubble, one dairy farm, and a couple of horse farms. Back in town we passed a yard that had a “Kloen-Bank” – chatting bench, that appropriately enough, had a place for beer underneath.

Back at the finish point we took full advantage of the hot meal options; I had a Frikadelle, potato salad, and split pea soup while Lois had the split pea soup and Monika had a bockwurst and potato salad. We also sampled the cakes and pies afterwards for desert so it was a great lunch for a quite reasonable price. Eating there also saved us time so we drove back thru Scheswig to try to see the Viking museum.

This was our third try to see the museum, and fortunately it worked out. The few signs that we could find directed us to the Haithabu Museum rather than to a Viking museum, but once we got that figured out we arrived at the parking lot without trouble. Just so you know, Haithabu is the name of the old Viking town that flourished nearby on the Schlei River from 800 to 1100 A.D. Museum admission was 4 Euro plus 1 Euro to see the 38-minute movie, which I would recommend paying. If you go to this museum and don’t have a really good grasp of German, you should ask at the front desk for the English booklet that gives the translated descriptions of (almost) all the numbered exhibits in the museum. The exhibits on the top floor covered almost all aspects of life at Haithabu, a major city of over 1,000 inhabitants, presenting the archeological artifacts excavated from the site as well as detailed written descriptions. Of course, it also included an excavated Viking ship and models of what the real thing would have looked like, as any Viking museum should.

I was most fascinated by the rune system of writing and the rune stones on display, one of which had been painted so that you could see the runes more clearly. But I had never seen the really finely-worked carving of runes onto small pieces of wood that were also shown in the exhibit. Apparently, the Viking language was still changing rapidly across those centuries as the letters of the alphabet decreased from 24 to 16. Translations of the rune stones are sometimes impossible because the meaning of a rune depended on how it was pronounced, and the same letter could be pronounced in different ways. Curiously, the messages on these carved stones reminded me of how the Greek also apparently also used carved memorial stones to convey different messages. Perhaps soon after a written language develops in a culture there is an urge in some of us, at least, to try to pass messages down to subsequent generations? In any case, the rune writing was in use as late as the 1400s, which was far later than I had suspected.

The Viking folks themselves were not that much different in size from modern folks, just a couple of inches shorter for both males and females. That would make them rather larger than the typical European of the era, I think, and formidable opponents in battle. Other aspects of daily life such as the construction of the Haithabu houses and forms of male and female clothing were also covered by the exhibits. The food sources were described as being mainly grains plus pigs and cows, and even a skull with worn teeth was on display to show the effects of the stone ground meal. Game boards and game pieces were also displayed, but it is a little hard to tell how the game was played from just those remnants—I mean, how would we figure out how to play chess if all we found was a board and the pieces?

One part of the Viking life style that I found utterly repugnant was their commerce in slaves. A male slave in Haithabu was worth almost exactly as much as a horse (a little over 300 ounces of silver, as I recall) and a female slave was worth about two-thirds of that. Since slaves would also be relatively compact to take home from pillaging, I guess there was a commercial justification for this, but particularly when you have a culture that has some pretensions to democracy like the All Thing assemblies in Iceland, it is puzzling to have slavery flourishing side-by-side. I am similarly puzzled by the ancient Greek Athenians who practiced relatively pure democracy and yet apparently felt no qualms about their slaves. I suppose their religion justified it in such a manner as to quell those small, still stirrings of their consciences. Similar to the Greeks, the Vikings performed human sacrifices according to the evidence left on some of the engraved stones, so that must have also been justified by their religion—such a convenient thing, religion.

The movie about the Vikings was shown every hour on the hour and was very informative and well worth the 1 Euro additional fee. If you ever get out this way, make sure to remind the docent when you see the movie downstairs to give you the earphones that allow you to hear the English version of narration for the film (on channel 3—I think Danish and French were on the other channels). From what I could hear, the English commentary was a really good translation of the movie’s German narration, very complete and well spoken. The movie covered Viking culture, trade, and explorations from the 800s to the 1300s or so and was fascinating. The essential act of “going Viking” seems to have been a rather spontaneously organized venture that combined ships and Scandinavian peasants that poured into the Swedish town of Birka each summer to man the ships—each peasant negotiated his percentage of the anticipated loot with the leader, apparently. The manned ships then coalesced into flotillas that became the raiding (or trading) parties, but there did not seem to be any central organizing agent, more of catch-as-catch-can. Corresponding to what I have read elsewhere, the primary emphasis seemed to be on raiding and looting using the thin, narrow “long ships”, but trade was also carried on over long distances using a distinctly bigger and beamier ship. The raids against Britain, Ireland, and later France and Germany must have been a real scourge for any coastal cities or even inland cities that could be reached from the inland rivers.

They chased us out when the museum closed at 5, but we had really seen most of it in about 2 hours. It would have taken, of course, a lot more time to read all of it (maybe 4 hours), but we were tired and glad enough to be on our way home after looking at the old church that was part of the Haithabu complex.

The traffic on the way back was light and most of the trucks were off the road already on Saturday evening, so the drive back was quite a bit more pleasant than the drive up. If you are planning driving in Germany, you might consider Sunday as a travel day because traffic is generally light and most trucks are off the road. The only problem with using Sunday to travel is that Sunday is also a major museum day and almost all museums are closed on Monday. Anyway, I was tired but not nearly as tense when we arrived back in Reinbek, and we were in time to have a normal Abendessen and relax with crossword puzzles before heading to bed.