Sixguns & Saga: Rollin' to Roskilde

Yes, we went to Roskilde. For those not familiar with Dark Age naval history (I can't even imagine), Roskilde is the site of the most significant Viking archaeological find. Like Oseberg and Sutton Hoo, it opened up a whole world for researchers.

For us, it was a side trip from a long weekend in Copenhagen. We took a cheap regional train from the capital west to the island of Zeeland. The twenty mile trip took about forty minutes from platform to platform. It's an ideal day trip if you happen to be spending time in the area.

A side note on Copenhagen and Denmark: it's wickedly costly. The exchange rate seems great. You hand over your dollars or euros for lots and lots of colorful kroner which seems amazing. Then you go to spend that and realize that everything, especially in Copenhagen, is fabulously expensive. On our last night there, I spent 144Kr on a single bottle of good American beer. A hot dog from a street vendor was was roughly $7.

Expensive as it is, it's still full of happy people riding everywhere on rickety bicycles, pleased with their quality healthcare and high standard of living. It's a real socialist hellscape.

In the town of Roskilde is the site of the cathedral where Denmark's royalty are married and buried, going back as far as Harald Bluetooth, the viking who famously made the practice of talking on a cell phone while driving legally despite it being just as dangerous as when one is actually holding the phone. Dammit, Harald.

This guy's the Danish Norm Abram.

It's also the site of the Viking Ship Museum. For dark age gaming fanatics, it doesn't get much better.
The museum has a collection of ships pulled up from the bottom of the fjord and a group of replicas that patrols can take out onto the water. They even have craftsmen onsite, building new replicas and fashioning ship fittings.

All in all, there were over a dozen ships in various stages of seaworthiness, with more than half of them being incredibly accurate replicas. That means that the Danes have built more real viking ships in the last decade than Gripping Beast has. To this day, I'm convinced that they only have those things in the catalog to round out the line-up. It's like Honda continually teasing the idea of bringing back the NSX just so that car enthusiasts will think the company is still capable of more than boring family cars.

Let it go, Rasmus.

My Danish friend Rasmus was caught looking longingly at the ships, no doubt thinking of a happier time when his people had a much rowdier, though less informed notion of what constituted a good day trip. I think he was ready to chuck his European sports coupe and Surface tablet for a longship and an ax.

His Australian girlfriend was present to remind us of what happened when folks put her people on ships. No more "green and pleasant land". Just Paul Hogan, Yahoo Serious, and drop bears. Pretty grim stuff.

One thing that did surprise me a bit was how low these things sat in the water and just how narrow they were. With the exception of the knarr, they all had relatively little freeboard. I'm fairly certain it was so the rowers could dip their hands down and make ripples in the water.