This Place Super SWE-et And It Really Rocked
To make for being very late on my Amsterdam post, I'm making two posts in one day!!
For my Nordic Mythology class we went on an excursion to southern Sweden! The landscape was so different from Denmark's. As the tour guide put it, "Sweden a giant rock, and Denmark is a bunch of dirt in the sea." From KU (København Universitet) we left at 8:45 in the morning. This does not seem very early, but that meant I had to wake up at 6am. With. No. Coffee. Then we hopped on the bus to head to Sweden! Our first destination was Ales Stenar. People guess this was the burial site of a really important person, probably a local king. The stones are all placed in the shape of ship, and they were laid there in about the year 500CE, so even before the vikings.
Ales Stenar is located along the southern coast of Sweden along the Baltic Sea. So I got to see rocks, the sea, and SHEEP! There were so many sheep. They were so cute! After walking back to the bus we went to our next stop on the tour: Vätterydsgravfält. This was a graveyard of other stone ships, but these people were not as important as the one buried in Ales Stenar. This site had much smaller stone settings and many more of them. Historians have two main guesses for why people were buried within these ship stone settings. The first being that what you had while you were alive, you should have in death, so if a person owned a ship, they needed to be buried with a ship. The other guess is that the ship allowed for smooth sailing into the realm of the dead.
After that we stopped in a small town for lunch. I, of course, brought waffles. And an apple. Then we were back on the bus to head to Västra Strö. This was a memorial located in the middle of a farmers field. It was seven large stones set in a circle, but what makes these stones special is that two of them have runes written on them. One of the stones mentioned the word "viking", this is either the first or second oldest writing of the word. It was so windy there it was hard to walk, so we left pretty soon after that to head to Lund.
For my Nordic Mythology class we went on an excursion to southern Sweden! The landscape was so different from Denmark's. As the tour guide put it, "Sweden a giant rock, and Denmark is a bunch of dirt in the sea." From KU (København Universitet) we left at 8:45 in the morning. This does not seem very early, but that meant I had to wake up at 6am. With. No. Coffee. Then we hopped on the bus to head to Sweden! Our first destination was Ales Stenar. People guess this was the burial site of a really important person, probably a local king. The stones are all placed in the shape of ship, and they were laid there in about the year 500CE, so even before the vikings.
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| Frankly, I'm glad I didn't have to move those stones. Wayyyy too much work. |
Ales Stenar is located along the southern coast of Sweden along the Baltic Sea. So I got to see rocks, the sea, and SHEEP! There were so many sheep. They were so cute! After walking back to the bus we went to our next stop on the tour: Vätterydsgravfält. This was a graveyard of other stone ships, but these people were not as important as the one buried in Ales Stenar. This site had much smaller stone settings and many more of them. Historians have two main guesses for why people were buried within these ship stone settings. The first being that what you had while you were alive, you should have in death, so if a person owned a ship, they needed to be buried with a ship. The other guess is that the ship allowed for smooth sailing into the realm of the dead.
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| Vätterydsgravfält |
After that we stopped in a small town for lunch. I, of course, brought waffles. And an apple. Then we were back on the bus to head to Västra Strö. This was a memorial located in the middle of a farmers field. It was seven large stones set in a circle, but what makes these stones special is that two of them have runes written on them. One of the stones mentioned the word "viking", this is either the first or second oldest writing of the word. It was so windy there it was hard to walk, so we left pretty soon after that to head to Lund.
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| One of the stones with the runes written on it. The paint used is an iron based paint that is very cheap to buy in Sweden due to their high concentrations of iron found. |
We were going to visit the church were the archbishop of Lund used to stay, but unfortunately all the roads were under construction so we couldn't even find a place to park the bus. So we got to drive around and see the beautiful city. Then we were on our way home.
To see my other pictures I took in Southern Sweden click here!
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