Gevninge

Travelling from Lejre to Hornsherred, you pass Gevninge, today a very quiet little village. But it was the opposite of quiet in the Viking Age; for archaeologists believe that Viking Age Gevninge served as a land and sea transport hub for Lejre. The village is right beside Lejre River, about 2km from where it meets Roskilde Fjord. Today, the river is a very modest stream, and although it may have been deeper in Viking times, even then, travelling by boat would only get you as far as Gevninge where the river course changes, with many turns and shallow depth. This means that visitors to Lejre arriving by ship, laid anchor here and continued on foot or carriage. Since the 1800s, human skeletons thought to be from Viking times have been quite frequently unearthed at Gevninge. When a new nursing home was built in 2000, archaeologists got a chance to look more closely at Viking Age buildings here. They found a perfectly ordinary Viking settlement with two three-aisled longhalls and five pit houses. The residents were involved in modest handicraft activities like weaving and some iron work; the most common handcrafts on Viking farms. But the discovery of several magnificent objects shows that Gevninge probably wasn’t all that normal either: parts of a magnificent helmet, a unique gold bracelet, the top of a bronze bucket and a spearhead are not objects normally found on Viking farms. This could indicate that the Lejre king had a man stationed in Gevninge as a sentry and monitoring who came and went in the sacred halls – he was rewarded for his loyalty with unique and precious objects like those that were found. Today they are on display at Lejre Museum.