A fragment from a pre-Viking helmet that is one of the most magnificent ever found in Scandinavia have been discovered in Lejre, in the northwestern of the Danish island of Zealand. The fragment is gold-plated bronze adorned with red garnet gemstones and intricately engraved zoomorphic figure. The design of the animal figure — its pronounced teeth and large eyes — date it to between 650 and 750 A.D., the late Germanic Iron Age right before the dawn of the Viking Age around 800 A.D.
The helmet fragment consists of two adjacent pieces that fit together perfectly, forming most of the curved brown ridge. The pieces were discovered by two metal detectorists in the spring of 2024. The artifacts are classified as danafae (archaeological finds of precious metals) and therefore property of the state. The finders immediately handed them over to the National Museum of Denmark who documented the find with a quick turn-around so it could be loaned back to Lejre Museum for display.
For more than five centuries in the late Iron Age and Viking Age, Lejre was a royal seat and a major center of power. As there are no written records from the era, the only sources we have for the kings of Lejre are Icelandic sagas and eddas (13th century prose and poetry texts on Norse mythology), chronicles heavy on the legendary like the 12th century Gesta Danorum and poems like Beowulf. The literary sources cite Lejre as the first royal seat, the home of the Skjöldung or Scylding clan, the legendary first ruling Danish dynasty, but there was no historical evidence to confirm its significance.
Archaeological excavations stepped into the breach. The first remains of a royal hall were unearthed in 1986. Several more royal halls have been found in the 40 years since, including a massive one found in the 2009 excavation. At 200 feet long and 40 feet wide, it is the largest royal hall ever discovered in Denmark. It dates to the late 8th or early 9th century. These halls were where the ruler would sit on a high seat and receive his subjects and guests. The dates of the grand halls found there bear witness to Lejre’s status as a royal seat of ruling dynasties for 500 years.
Now the helmet fragment adds to the royal archaeological record of Lejre. The materials and craftsmanship suggest a ceremonial role rather than combat hardware, and Lejre was not a battle site in the Late Germanic Iron Age. The Danish elite converged there for religious and political purposes and for trade. There are decorative elements of the helmet fragment that are very similar to ones found in England and Sweden, suggesting Lejre’s helmet may have been an import.
The helmet emphasizes the grandeur and status that we see in Lejre’s hall buildings and funerary monuments from the same period. According to Julie Nielsen, it was a very special object dedicated to a king or a person who ranked highest in the site’s highly divided hierarchy:
“The deep red garnet has long been associated with strength. The detailed ornamentation on the helmet tells a story, a narrative, about the enormous power of the person who owned and wore it,” says the archaeological chief. […]
Archaeologist and senior researcher at Uppsala University John Ljungkvist has closely studied the helmet fragment from Lejre and highlights its unique construction:
“Where in other helmets we see three separate brackets that are put together, this helmet’s eyebrow arch is constructed in one piece. We haven’t found anything like this new variant of the exclusive helmet before.”
The fact that a helmet of that caliber could be produced is, in John Ljungkvist’s eyes, unique:
“It is craftsmanship of a very special quality – on par with the craftsmanship behind the famous helmet from the Sutton Hoo shipwreck in England.”
Old Lejre, a.k.a. “Gammel Lejre”, seems to have been important already in the Bronze Age. In the 4th century BC, Herodotus describes, how Northern Europa was reached by Mediterraneans. In the West via the “Tin Islands” (Britain), and in the East the Baltic via the Black Sea route and the rivers.
Then, Pytheas of Massalia (from what today is Marseilles in France) must have reached Denmark in the 3rd century BC, and seemingly also the Baltic although his later route is not exactly certain. A matter of debate may be, however, if “Latris” is identical to Old Lejre, or maybe to Zealand entirely.
Moreover, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens displays massive amber jewels from the 2nd millennium BC, which already had found their way from the shores of modern Poland down to Mycenae.
You are very knowledgeable. Are there any sites that inform us of when there are collections of artifacts to see? It would be great to see a collection of an era and geographic area instead of the somewhat random and distant museums and sites.
Thank you for your comment, wonderful to see how learned some are. I am just a firefly, searching for lights.
I am just a colorblind firefly myself, and of course one does not need to know everything, but it certainly helps to know, where to download it from.
As always, ‘context’ is useful. As an avid telly addict and web surfer, however, I can assure you that there is a lot of utter rubbish out there, which is particularly not helpful at all. Mainly, I comment on here to revive my crumbly English.
To put things into chronological and geographic context, is basically the whole idea of what a museum should do. In my case, it helped that we were taught Ancient Greek, that I once had a hardcover of Herodotus’ Histories (ca. 1000 pages) at a bookstore in hand, and the free version at gutenberg.
Also, I saw documentaries about the amber road. The amber at the NM in Athens I saw for myself, and I even went down to Mycenae, where they had been found. How the amber was identified as Baltic, I just read.
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PS: As far as Herodotus is concerned, I am convinced that he had been –in person– to Egypt and to what today is Ukraine. Other things he seems to have read elsewhere or apparently had been told.