Here’s a publish appropriate for Halloween. It’s not a ghost story however fairly the story of two mysterious skeletons present in a Viking ship found in a big burial mound on the Oseberg farm close to Tønsberg in Vestfold og Telemark county, Norway. The ship itself, courting again to the early 800s AD, is among the many best-preserved vessels to have survived from the Viking period. As stunning and engaging because the ship is, what is really intriguing are the stays of the 2 people laid to relaxation contained in the ship.
Ship burials have been reserved for essentially the most highly effective and wealthiest of the elites of their time. However fairly than discovering that the Oseberg ship was the burial place of a king or mighty warlord, DNA research revealed that the partial skeletons within the ship have been the stays of two ladies. The elder is believed to have been roughly 80 when she died, whereas the youthful lady will need to have been round 40. The ladies have been discovered collectively in a single mattress.
Centuries earlier than the excavation in 1904, the mound had been robbed of valuable metals, however the grave items that remained instructed a high-status burial. These included textiles, a richly carved four-wheel picket cart, bed-posts, and picket chests, in addition to a bucket produced from yew wooden, held along with brass strips with a brass and cloisonné enamel ornamented deal with. There have been additionally the skeletal stays of 14 horses, an ox, and three canines discovered on the ship.
Who have been the 2 ladies buried within the mound? Historians have lengthy thought that the older lady was Queen Åsa of the Yngling clan, mom of Halfdan the Black, and grandmother of Harald Fairhair. Latest analysis has instructed that the queen outlived the girl in Oseberg, so there isn’t a consensus on who the girl could also be.
Another intriguing element — the older lady additionally had Morgagni’s syndrome, which might have given her a masculine look and beard. Some students consider that she could have been a shaman. She was clearly a person of excessive standing, however was she a queen or a witch? We’ll probably by no means know.
The Oseberg ship is presently housed within the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. The museum is presently closed and can reopen in 2026/2027 because the Museum of the Viking Age.
