Jelling Mounds

Where it sits. The Jelling monuments stand in the middle of an ordinary Danish village of a few thousand people, ten kilometres northwest of Vejle in central Jutland and about 25 from Billund. Everything is on one site: two enormous earth mounds, a whitewashed stone church between them, and beside the church two runestones. The setting is deliberately undramatic, which makes the scale of the earthworks harder to register until you climb one — the southern mound is about 77 metres across and 11 high, the northern one 65 metres and 8.5, and they are the largest in Denmark. UNESCO inscribed the ensemble as a World Heritage site in 1994.

Two stones, one dynasty. The smaller runestone was raised by Gorm the Old for his queen, Thyra, and calls her Danmarkar bót — Denmark's adornment, or her remedy — the earliest use of the name Denmark on a monument within the country. The larger stone was raised by his son Harald Bluetooth around 965 and is the reason Jelling is a national touchstone. Its inscription states that Harald had this monument made for his father Gorm and his mother Thyra, and that he was the Harald who won all Denmark and Norway for himself and made the Danes Christian. It is, in effect, a claim of statehood and conversion carved on a granite boulder around 2.4 metres tall, and it is regularly described as Denmark's birth certificate. The stone carries images on two of its three faces: a great beast entwined with a serpent, in the ornamental idiom now called the Mammen style, and the oldest depiction of Christ in Scandinavia — bound in interlaced ribbon rather than nailed to a cross, a figure adapted to Norse visual conventions. Traces of paint have been detected, so both stones were originally coloured. Since 2011 they have been housed in glass and bronze cases after frost and lichen damage.

Mounds, a ship setting and a palisade. The northern mound was opened in the nineteenth century and contained a timber burial chamber, dated by tree rings to 958 or 959 and emptied at some point in antiquity. A grave found under the chancel of the church in 1978 held the bones of a man of the right age and status, and the most economical reading is that Harald had his father moved out of the pagan mound and into the new Christian church. The southern mound has no burial at all: it appears to be a platform or monument in its own right. Excavations from 2006 onward transformed the picture further. Archaeologists traced a stone ship setting at least 350 metres long — the largest known anywhere — running through both mounds, and then a rhomboid palisade enclosing roughly 12.5 hectares, with sides around 360 metres, built of oak about three metres high and dated to about 968, with Trelleborg-type longhouses inside it.

Reading the site on the ground. Because none of that survives above ground, the interpretation is done with markers: white concrete posts trace the palisade line across roads, gardens and car parks, and low upright stones follow the ship setting. From the top of either mound the whole geometry resolves, and the scale of what Harald built becomes obvious in a way that no plan on a wall achieves. The church between the mounds dates in its present stone form to around 1100 and stands over the postholes of at least three earlier timber churches; it holds frescoes of roughly the same date and remains a parish church in use.

Kongernes Jelling. The experience centre run by the National Museum of Denmark sits opposite the mounds, was rebuilt and reopened in 2015, and charges no admission. Its exhibition covers the runic inscriptions, the conversion, the archaeology of the palisade and the wider tenth-century North Sea world, with a roof terrace giving an overview of the monument field. Guided tours run in summer and the village has a small café and a station on the Vejle-Herning railway.

Harald's other legacy. The Bluetooth wireless standard is named after Harald Gormsson, chosen in the 1990s by engineers looking for a figure who had united warring parties; the logo is a bind rune combining the younger futhark characters for H and B. It is a piece of trivia that reliably surprises visitors standing in front of the man's runestone in a Jutland churchyard.

Sagas, stones and screens. Jelling belongs to a small class of Viking Age sites where the evidence is contemporary and explicit rather than inferred: a named king, a dated monument, a stated political claim, all carved within a few years of the events. That is worth holding against the television version of the period. The dramas that gave the Viking Age its current look — including the series covering Harald's era and its successors — were filmed in Ireland, using purpose-built sets in County Wicklow. The stones at Jelling were cut by people who were there.

Getting there. Jelling is a 15-minute drive or a short local train ride from Vejle, which is on the main Jutland line from Copenhagen and Aarhus. The monument field is open at all times and free; allow two hours with the exhibition.