New Viking ship discovered in Norway
A large boat or perhaps a ship, archaeologists initially said. Now they are certain. There was once a Viking ship buried at Jarlsberg.
It all began when rivets were found with a metal detector in a field at Jarlsberg Manor in southeastern Norway in 2018.
Surveys with ground-penetrating radar confirmed that there was once a burial mound here.
Two weeks of digging this summer were supposed to find answers to what lay hidden beneath the ground.
Immediately after the excavation, Christian Løchsen Rødsrud was cautious in his statements. The excavation leader told Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK that there once lay a boat or a ship here.
After reviewing the material unearthed, however, he is confident:
“We’ve found a place for a ship burial,” says the archaeologist.
Despite the ship being plowed into pieces and its rivets scattered, Rødsrud expresses satisfaction:
“We can now say for certain that yes, here lie the remains of a Viking ship. This discovery adds a new landmark to the map, once a significant site during the Viking Age,” he says.
Large rivets = large ship
It is the rivets that reveal what kind of ship it is.
“The size of the rivets indicate that it was a large ship. Their similarity to those found at Gokstad and Oseberg leaves no doubt,” says Rødsrud.
The result of two weeks of digging was around 70 rivets. The dimensions suggest that they were used to hold together thick planks up to 2.5 centimetres thick.
“Then we’re talking about Viking ship size,” says Rødsrud, who was also the excavation leader when the Gjellestad Ship was excavated a few years ago – the first excavation of a Viking Ship in Norway in 100 years.
Also found horse crampons
But upon closer inspection, it turned out that two of the rivets were actually horse crampons. These are spikes that were attached to horse hooves in icy conditions.
“It’s interesting, as we’re now into grave goods. The ship and the horse are recurring themes in Viking Age burial customs and mythology, and are a typical phenomena one would expect in a ship burial,” Rødsrud says.
He explains that when metal searches are conducted on the site, it beeps everywhere. They are picking up signals from hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of rivets in the ground, remnants of a Viking ship plowed through over a thousand years ago.
“Finding horse crampons in the material suggests that the rest of the grave goods are also in the field,” says Rødsrud.
“Each year the plow passes over the field, it further damages the burial mounds and what little remains of the mound’s base. The objects in the plow layer take a beating from the plow every year.”
Now archaeologists must determine if it is worthwhile to try to collect more from this field.
“It would’ve been exciting to find out more about the person buried here,” he says.
The grave of a Viking king?
One theory is that this could have been the grave of the Viking king Bjørn Farmann – son of Harald Fairhair. According to Snorri's sagas, he was killed here at the Sæheimr estate by his brother Eric Bloodaxe.
A hundred years ago, in 1917-1918, another burial mound nearby was excavated, one called the Farmann mound.
“The old archaeologist A.W. Brøgger was completely convinced that he would find a ship here,” says Rødsrud.
"This was during the aftermath of the Gokstad and Oseberg discoveries, so the memory of uncovering a Viking ship was still fresh."
But Brøgger only found some spades and a stretcher.
"It would take another hundred years for solid evidence to emerge that a ship burial was not entirely far-fetched. He was simply searching the wrong mound," Rødsrud says.
An important site during the Viking Age
The most significant finding from this year's excavation at Jarlsberg indicates that this site was important during the Viking Age, according to Rødsrud.
“It’s situated in a fantastically intriguing cultural landscape, even though the ship has suffered from a harsh encounter with the plow,” he says.
On several of the forested hills around Jarlsberg Manor, there are both larger and smaller preserved boat graves.
"All signs indicate that they surround what might have been the focal point here. This landscape, with its numerous ship burial sites, remains somewhat unknown and could benefit from further exploration and research," says Rødsrud.
More will undoubtedly be found
Archaeologist Geir Grønnesby, who was not involved in the Jarlsberg excavation, is not surprised by the discovery of yet another Viking ship.
"It's no surprise they've confirmed a Viking ship was there. With new technology and renewed interest, we’ll uncover more in the future,” the archaeologist at NTNU says.
He himself was the project leader for the investigations around Herlaugshaugen in Central Norway, which confirmed the presence of a ship in a burial mound there as well. Once again, the discovery of rivets triggered further investigations.
The ship was comparable in size to Viking ships but turned out to date from around the year 700 AD, from what is known as the Merovingian period.
Last year, archaeologists at the University of Stavanger announced the discovery of a new Viking ship with the help of ground-penetrating radar in Karmøy.
The first recent find was the Gjellestad Ship near Halden, unearthed using ground-penetrating radar in 2018 and excavated between 2020 and 2021.
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Translated by Alette Bjordal Gjellesvik
Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
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