A Trip to the Danish Nationalmuseet

One of the really neat things about the DIS program is that we don't have any classes on Wednesdays. It's not so we can goof off, it's so we can have awesome field trips, and today was my first one (also, the first Wednesday we've been in regular class mode).

So, today I went to the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen with my Nordic Mythology class. First off, I love my Nordic Mythology teacher. He LOOKS LIKE A VIKING. But he's actually incredibly nice and intelligent. Not saying that Vikings weren't intelligent. But they were definitely not nice.

Our trip to the Nationalmuseet was in order to look at artifacts from Danish prehistory. There were some really awesome things, some of which I took pictures of, and added to my photo album on Facebook, which can be found here. If you don't have facebook I'm not sure you'll be able to look at it, so here's the most awesome picture, which is of
a cauldron from the Iron Age or maybe a bit later. It was found in Denmark but it has depictions of very Celtic-looking gods, as well as what appear to be elements of Roman and Tercian mythology. It was likely made by Tercians. So overall, a pretty awesome thing, and a sign of the great amount of cross-cultural exchange (sometimes brutal and rather unpleasant - aka, the cauldron was either a gift or some Danish king totally stole it) going on. This cauldron is gigantic, also. A small person could fit inside it, and there's a scene on the inside that seems to indicate that this perhaps had some ritual significance.

Other awesome things included really sweet Bronze Age stuff, like the "Chariot of the Sun" which is kind of a misnomer, because the horse is not pulling a wheeled thing, but is on "wheels"/solar crosses itself. There were also gigantic musical horns which still play (our teacher said they were probably a bit like bagpipes, and they were actually designed to be taken apart, like a modern clarinet, only gigantic and metal), plus helmets with horns on them. Hint: it was Bronze Age Nordic peoples, not Vikings, who wore those things. In other words, the helmets with horns that Vikings are always depicted wearing were from thousands of years earlier. People just assumed they were made by the Vikings because they were incredibly intricate. The Bronze Age Northern Europeans had a thing with mixing and matching different animals/people, which was likely a significant part of their religion, though we really have no idea. Also, in the Iron Age they developed a way of burying their dead that has left us with lots of awesome stuff, including perfectly preserved clothing and hair!

So it was a great trip overall. In other news, today was super snowy in Copenhagen. I'm pretty sure it snowed all day! Sabina said it's very unusual for this to happen, and I could kind of tell, because hardly anybody shovels their sidewalks.