Wanderung 30

The nice receptionist at our Danhostel was able to change a 100 kroner bill into a LOT of Danish coins, so our first stop of the day was returning to the ticket machine at the train station to purchase another "person + bicycle" ticket back to Niebuell, Germany. Having secured our passage back into Germany, we could both relax and enjoy our day out at the open-air type of Viking Heritage Center that is located on an old farm a couple kilometers south-southeast of Ribe. (Note: There is another, more traditional "Viking Museum" inside a building just across from the train station in Ribe, but we had to leave the next day and never even got a chance to visit that one!)

At the open-air Viking Center, I had expected a recreated Viking homestead with a longhouse and some outbuildings, and that was in fact the first part of it, but a second section included a recreated village of Ribe from about 825 A.D., and that was a totally unexpected bonus.

We started off inspecting the Viking longhouse, which appeared identical to the one we had seen up in Norway on Ausflug 38: A Midsummer Night's Dream. The weirdly curved walls, resembling an upside-down ship hull to me, contained a stable at one end, a communal cooking and eating room, a general work area, and finally at the other end the bedroom for the reigning family. Since the longhouse we had seen in Norway was based on an archeological dig and this one was identical right down to the statues of Odin and Freya flanking an inner archway, it felt quite authentic.

Beside the longhouse was an auxiliary barn, complete with cows and chickens, and it was stocked with enough hay to last at least a good part of the winter! Two Icelandic ponies were also saddled up and ridden around the area by two young women. I read that the Icelandic ponies were a quite authentic Viking breed, and unique to the breed was a fifth gait with a Norse name that was fast like a gallop but where the horse always had one foot on the ground so that the rider had a very smooth ride. The idea sounded like the special gait of a Tennessee walking horse, but with a much faster pace.

The next building was the farm smithy. Unfortunately, it was not being actively run on the day we visited, but all the everyday objects a farm smith would make were there on display. All of the major signs for each building or exhibit, by the way, were in Danish, German, and English, so I read the English while Monika read the German.

In back of the smithy, however, we found something rather creepy. Someone had draped the skin and head of a (real) horse over a set of wooden legs so that it stood upright. Next to that was a small carved statue of what I think was Odin, and in front of all this was a tree stump with a lot of quite recent offerings on it, including cash money. What the hey? It felt like either a Viking religious or burial shrine, but there were no plaques or explanations offered there. We also found a rune stone with runic carvings in a field out front, but that was a modern production and had an perfectly normal explanatory plaque.

The final farm building was a farmhand residence, with just a set of rude bunks inside but also a very nice floor-to-ceiling hand loom.

A final section of the Viking homestead was a small open field where we watched a demonstration of Viking fighting tactics being taught to a class of schoolchildren, which was a hoot! The "fighting" class was taught by strapping young Danish guys who clearly liked and were very careful with the children. The children were equipped with wooden swords and shields and were taught to thrust, parry, and use their shields as a "shield wall" that was 3 kids deep. The training was surprisingly authentic, but it was clear that some kids (most of the boys) were more enthusiastic about whacking away at each other and the adults than some others (most of the girls). One girl, in particular, waved her sword at her opponent rather politely, more like a conductor waving a baton to conduct an orchestra, and I was just in stitches. Although the instructors broached the kids' "shield wall" at first, for the very last trial combat of the day they carefully let the kids "beat" them so that the fighting lust they had so carefully nurtured had at last its reward in that the kids could turn the tables on the adults! I am very sure that Judson and Martin, at that age, would have really enjoyed the mock combat, and I think my grandchildren would also enjoy it.