Wanderung 30

Across the field and pasture of the Viking homestead was a set of buildings that recreated for the Viking-era town of Ribe, around 825 A.D. The first house was a typical residence, but a second, much larger building held a reconstructed inn and tavern. The front room had a fire and small oven for baking bread, but the next room in was the taproom where guests were served their drinks, and I saw some nice leather ale mugs on a shelf on the wall. I think the final room may have been the brewery, but that was closed.

The next building was the woodworking shop, where an older guy was making a board with an adze (a lot of work!), and a younger guy was carving out a wooden bowl. Apparently they were all set to give carving lessons to groups of school kids, because I saw about ten carving stations in the adjacent yard, each with a small model of a carved wooden pig on top. I had to think how Rowan, in particular, would have enjoyed that activity although the wisdom of letting her hack away with a sharp knife would have been questionable. Maybe someday.

The final house representing the town craftsmen of Ribe was the town shoemaker, where we saw wooden lasts for sewing up shoes as well as some complete versions. However, in another house we saw some wooden clogs like folks wear in Holland, and those may already have been used for everyday wear in Viking times just as they are to this day in Holland.

A town marketplace had been recreated on an adjacent field, and their we found a silversmith. For 30 kroner, we could stamp our own pure silver coin like those actually used in Ribe in the 800s--we couldn't resist making our own historical souvenirs that way! I had never minted a coin, and found out that the "by hand" method involved a cone-shaped lower die surface, upon which the silver blank was placed, and a cap-shaped upper die surface that fit down over the cone and securely held the blank in place. The actual minting was done by whacking the cap whith a big, heavy sledge to squish the silver blank between the upper and lower die and imprint the upper and lower pattern on it. The pictures I took make the coin look huge, but in reality it is a thin coin about 1/2 inch in diameter.

Monika also found a nice Thor's Hammer that we bought for 240 kroner or so from the charming young man who had helped us make our silver coins. I noticed that the Viking center employed a LOT of folks from the surrounding area to play in all the various roles, many of them young twenty-somethings but also some older folks as skilled craftsmen and leaders.

We wrapped up our visit to "old Ribe" by watching a falconry show. The falconry show featured an owl, a Harris hawk, and some kind of falcon from the Mideast. The owl flew from the glove of one assistant to the other, and was quite vocal about getting his food, almost like a cat meowing for dinner. The Harris Hawk, by contrast, was quite silent, but he seemed to actually enjoy flying right over the heads of the kids in the audience. The kids would kind of flinch as his wings would literally brush the tops of their heads and he had some really sharp talons, and truly the bird seemed to like getting that reaction. The last bird, the falcon, was definitely playing a game of "catch the lure" with the falcon master, and kind of ignored the audience.

The falcon master talked to us at length later, and he explained that he used different individual falcons to really hunt in the wild as falcons could only reliably learn to play one kind of "game" with him, and the serious hunting game was quite different from playing the "catch the lure" game in front of an audience. As is true of many Danes, the falcon master spoke Danish and English but not German, so a German couple had to translate what he said into German for their daughter. In general, we found that we were generally better off with English in Denmark, although German sometimes came in handy.

We had lunch at the kind of snack bar/cafe on site, and then picked up some beautiful stylized Viking-ship earrings for Monika in the gift shop on our way out. I always admire beautiful craftmanship, and these were something I really liked and had never seen before. Whenever I see handcraft that is really good and truly unique, I have learned to purchase it immediately because if I don't, I rue missing the opportunity for a long time afterwards! Although it was the middle of the afternoon, we still had many hours of sunlight left in the day as we were quite far North, and we decided to continue riding our bikes over to the North Sea coast, which was only a few kilometers to the West from the Viking Center.

We see many weird, unexpected things wherever we travel, but as we turned a corner on our way to the coast, I suddenly saw two goats laying on top of a rhinoceros, which was just utterly astonishing. The rhinoceros turned out to be a very realistic, life-sized sculpture that for some reason had been set out in a pasture with a herd of goats. The goats were quite real and alive, and they had somehow found some way to scramble to the top of the rhinoceros sculpture and lay there in the sunshine. As if to prove they were alive, they "baa"-d at me when I stopped to take a picture of the incongruous sight, but they didn't move from their perch.

Shortly thereafter we came to the tidal mudflats that line this part of the coast of Denmark. There was a low-tide-only road out to the small offshore island of Mano, but the tide was already coming in and the road was flooded, so we couldn't get very far in that direction! Instead, we turned North and continued on the cycle way just on the inside of a big protective dike like the ones I have also seen in Holland. Ultimately we turned back East to close the loop and get back to the Danhostel in Ribe. All together it was a tiring but wonderful last day in Denmark.