A Grave, Then a Church, on the Same Ground

Jelling's two burial mounds are among the largest in Scandinavia, and excavation of the northern mound in the nineteenth century uncovered a wooden burial chamber built in a style consistent with a high-status pagan Viking burial, its floor and walls once hung with textiles, though the chamber held no skeleton by the time archaeologists reached it. That absence has produced one of the more debated puzzles in Danish archaeology: whether the mound was built for Gorm and later deliberately emptied, its occupant moved to a new grave on consecrated ground once his son Harald had converted the kingdom, or whether the mound had a different history archaeologists have not fully reconstructed. A set of bones found beneath the floor of the stone church that now stands beside the mounds, in a burial chamber built to align precisely with the older pagan grave goods' orientation, is generally read by Danish archaeologists as supporting the reburial theory, physical evidence of a king's remains being moved from a pagan mound into Christian consecrated ground as part of the same transition Harald's runestone announces in words.

Whatever the precise history of any one set of remains, the site as a whole preserves an unusually direct physical sequence: a monumental pagan mound complex, a royal runestone proclaiming Christian conversion, and a church built directly beside, and arguably incorporating, the older pagan burial, all standing within the same small area of ground. Few sites anywhere in the Norse world let a visitor walk the actual stratigraphy of a religious conversion this literally, one building period stacked on the last rather than scattered across separate excavated locations.