AARHUS: A warrior grave from the Viking Age appeared on Tuesday in Aarhus on the construction site at the former main library in Mølleparken.
The building and area of ​​the former main library to be turned into a hostel is currently a construction site. It is during the earthworks that the Viking find has appeared.

For more than 100 years, there has been speculation about where the Vikings from Aarhus buried their dead, and now a grave has finally been found, writes Moesgaard Museum in a press release. Archaeologists from the Moesgaard Museum have just excavated the area on the construction site, where they encountered the warrior tomb from the Viking Age.

It is a long-awaited find, because so far not a single real Viking Age tomb has been found in Aarhus. Only sporadic finds have been made where there has been no so-called normal burial. Archaeologists are thrilled. Moesgaard Museum has always had a vigilant eye on the extensive renovations of the old main library in Mølleparken in Aarhus. In particular, people have been looking for the missing medieval parish church Vor Frue, which must not be confused with the current Vor Frue church, which was called Skt. Nikolai in the Middle Ages.

- There is no doubt that this is a warrior from the Viking Age buried with a shield and ax. He is from the 900s. We can see this in his shield bulge, which has also been found. The maturity of the shields changes in the Viking Age - therefore we can time it, says archaeologist Mogens Høegsberg from Moesgaard Museum. How big is found on a scale of 1-10?

"It's a nine. If it was a tier, the tomb should have been huge. But it's wild. It's the first time we're finding a real corpse of a Viking warrior, even though for some reason he's missing his head and a bit of his body. ", Mogens Høegsberg

He is the first real buried we have from the Viking Age Aarhus. The other two known are not buried in the normal way. One person must have been murdered and then shot under the floor in a workshop cabin. You can see him in the Viking Museum under Nordea Bank at the Cathedral in Aarhus. The other we have only found the head of. It has violent and presumably fatal stab wounds in the skull and is at some point, after it has been skeletal, thrown into a well in Rosensgade. But now we have a warrior, says Mogens Høegsberg

Nervous constructor

Biblioteksparken A / S, which is the developer of Mølleparken in Aarhus, also finds the find exciting, although it also gives rise to a bit of concern.

- If there is something a builder fears, it is unforeseen events that can delay and increase the cost of construction. But we have a really good dialogue with the people from Moesgaard Museum and so far the delays are fortunately modest, says Jens Winther, who is a partner in Biblioteksparken A/S.

Moesgaard Museum writes that over time there have been many suggestions as to where the burial site or burial sites in Viking-age Aarhus could have been located. The northern part of Mejlgade has been proposed just like the area around Aarhus Cathedral, but nothing has been certain. Therefore, the find in Mølleparken brings a whole new piece into play about the earliest times of Aarhus city's history and will definitely give archaeologists something to think about at Christmas.

Many graves have been found in the entire Aarhus area in connection with construction work, but the church has never been found. Over the last few weeks, the archaeologists of the excavation in Mølleparken have dug countless search ditches in the hunt for the church, but without success. Only one grave has been created. Since the grave is completely isolated from previously found graves, the idea was that it could be an executioner who had been buried outside the cemetery wall. Exciting enough, but still a bit tame, when you as an archaeologist have now set your nose up for a missing church from the Middle Ages.

On Tuesday, December 18, the grave was excavated with a view to releasing the area to the developer, as there are major space problems on the busy construction site. And suddenly a warrior's grave appeared to the great enthusiasm of the archaeologists. For the sake of safety on the construction site, it is not possible to enter the construction site itself.

This article is written by: BY: MORTEN RAVN
Published December 19, 2018 at 10:28 in stiften.dk