On the Hunt for Heorot
By Dena Bain Taylor
“And soon it stood there,
Finished and ready, in full view,
The hall of halls. Heorot was the name….
The hall towered,
Its gables wide and high”
—Beowulf, ll.76b-78, 81b-82a (trans.Seamus Heaney)
“It’s true, I was a lazy boy,” Beowulf answered. “But I became a great hero when I saved the hall of the great Shield-Dane Hrotharr from the vile monster Grendl. Hrotharr wanted me to stay and be his heir.”
—Bones & Keeps, p.329
The hunt for Heorot was the starting point of my adventure with my friend and colleague Margaret Procter. Professor Kristian Kirstiansen of the University of Göteborg had urged me in an email to “go to Lejre and visit the place of Beowulf, it is marvelous, and the great halls have been found and excavated.”
The site of Heorot near Gammel Lejre
Archaeological excavations over the last 35 years have proven that Lejre, about 10km west of Roskilde in Denmark, was the headquarters of the Skjoldung royal family for half a millennium in the Iron and Viking Ages. Here, under the grass near the village of Gammel Lejre, archaeologist Tom Christensen of the Roskilde Museum and his team have discovered the remains of three king halls. The oldest one dates back to the 6th century, the time of Beowulf’s journey to Heorot. At 47 metres long, it’s among the largest prehistoric Germanic halls yet found. And as Christensen himself wrote in 2010, “With its stout posts, as evidenced by the holes they left, and its position on the top of the hill with a panorama view over the surrounding countryside, this building was indeed large, high, and broad gabled.”
Goteborg from Tower Hill
On a rainy Thursday in July 2009, our first full day in Sweden, we set out after breakfast from Göteborg’s Nice Hotel (it wasn’t nice at all but it did fit our budget). Margaret drove our rental car heroically and I was the tragically flawed navigator. In the days before Google Maps’ nice talking lady (I know her as Dolores), navigating by local printed map was our only option, and I am directionally challenged at the best of times. Nonetheless, I managed to point us south on the highway to Helsingborg where a ferry serving fabulous shrimp open sandwiches took us past the castle of Elsinore, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to the Danish port of Helsingør. From there we drove the 80 km down the E47 to Gammel Lejre — our only choice of route and therefore safe from me — and quickly found the Lejre Museum. Here we feasted our eyes on the rich finds of iron, bronze and silver from the local archaeological digs, and admired the nearby burial mounds. But when we asked the very knowledgable curator who’d been showing us around if she knew where we could find the reconstructed Iron Age hall, she insisted that there was no reconstructed anything anywhere in the area.
Iron Age Village
From the museum we drove to the nearby Sagnlandet Lejre (“Land of Legends”). This non-profit organisation was established in 1964 as an archaeological research and experimental centre. Although researchers from all over the world work there, its 100 acres of woods, lakes and meadows are also the setting for an educational centre where families play while learning about 10,000 years of Danish history. The attractions include a reconstructed Iron Age village and sacrificial bog, which is what interested me and Margaret. We walked through the village, making note of cooking and husbandry techniques, then made our way past children petting sheep or brandishing wooden Viking swords at each other and the stoic sheep. We wandered away from the crowds, past woods and meadows to the isolation of the rather eerie sacrificial bog. It’s one of these places that seem to absorb sunlight and hope, and it was easy enough to imagine Grendel’s troll mother lurking in the depths.
Sacrificial Bog
As for finding the location of Heorot, we had a brief period of optimism when one of the researchers, waving her hand in a vague direction, told us the site was very close and we couldn’t possibly miss it. We drove up and down the highway, even venturing right into the town of Lejre, but had no luck. Had it not been so late in the afternoon and so rainy, we’d have driven around more, or even tried to track down Dr. Christiansen at the Roskilde Museum. Eventually we had to give up.
So we set off for Sweden in the sogging rain and here’s where I showed my true colours as a navigator. For some reason, indecipherable to me now, I took us on a highway that skirted the outskirts of Copenhagen. I believe I had some idea that we’d come this way in the morning. We hadn’t, of course, and the harder I tried to keep us from actually entering Copenhagen, the closer in we swirled, caught in a navigational vortex. We asked a number of locals for directions out of the city and by combining all the bits of well-intentioned but generally inaccurate advice we’d received, Margaret managed to figure our way out.
By the time we got off the ferry in Helsingborg, the steady Danish rain had given way to a chilling Swedish downpour. We stopped at a gas station around 8:30pm and made a sort-of dinner of chocolate bars and stale crisps. Everything was closed up tight for the night by the time we parked at our hotel and stretched our creaking bones.
Exhausted and curled up beneath the thin blankets of my hard bed, I couldn’t help but feel we were off to a very sad start. I hadn’t had the foresight to realize that one inch on a map does not translate into a short drive. With better planning, we’d have stayed overnight in Roskilde, been able to visit the Viking ship museum there and perhaps even connected with Dr. Christensen at the Roskilde Museum. And we probably would have found the site of Heorot after all.
Elsinore Castle