Kalvestene Grave Field: Viking Ship Burials Shrouded in Mystery

Scitech Daily ^ | June 1, 2021 | Flinders University

[SunkenCiv]

New detailed surveys of Viking age ship settings in Hjarnø, Denmark have been completed by archaeologists examining the origins and makeup of the Kalvestene grave field, a renowned site in Scandinavian folklore.

The archaeologists from Flinders University conducted detailed surveys to determine whether a 17th century illustration of the site completed by the famous Enlightenment antiquarian, Ole Worm, was accurate, as part of the first survey since the National Museum of Denmark discovered and restored 10 tombs on a small island off the eastern coast almost a century ago.

The burial site is made up of monuments that, according to legend, commemorate a king named Hiarni who was crowned after writing a beautiful poem on the death of the old king and who was defeated in battle on the island...

Ole Worm’s 1650 drawings showed more than 20 ship settings at the location, and while data collected by the researchers suggests that there were probably never as many ship settings as that, it is possible that they have identified two new ship settings.

[SunkenCiv]

[singing] Kalvestene, oh Kalvestene...

Credit: Flinders University

[SunkenCiv]

[Tennessee Nana]

Possible ancestors of mine...

[matthew fuller]

Here is the music-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LClTjcyNJSI

[Viking2002]

This type of thing is so cool.......just to have been a fly on the, erm......wall when this took place in real time.........this is history.

[SunkenCiv]

Good point, same here. British Isle roots means Scandinavian DNA, mine showed up as about 30% if memory serves.

[mass55th]

I'm 61% England and Northwestern Europe; 14% Norway; 11% Scotland; 8% Sweden; and 6% Germanic Europe.

My father was born in Holland. My mother was born in Canada. Neither of them knew anything about those DNA connections.

[SunkenCiv]

Those Vikings “horned in” all over the British Isles, and Scandinavian DNA isn’t uncommon in German ancestries, French ancestries, even, once in a while, southern Italy (the Normans ruled Sicily for a while, under a couple of rulers named Roger).

[mass55th]

Can’t prove it, but Ancestry.com directly connects me to the Plantagenets, Robert the Bruce, and Germanic Empire royal families.

[SunkenCiv]

Due to how long ago the Plantagenets are now, and how well-connected/well-married they were (and they were big families), I'd be surprised if most people with ancestry in the B.I. are not descended from them in some fashion.

I hadn't expected to be, at all, and holy crap, a couple of generations of tough political times here and there, and whammo, back to the hoi polloi with ya. Not so much as a passed-down story, leave alone any spendables.

I'm descended from Alfred the Great, William the C., various other crowned heads of England and whatnot, including Charlemagne (via his grandson, Charles the Not-so-good /jk), and of course mostly from people now found in history books, because, also surprisingly, most of the time their graves are long since lost or even destroyed, even those of kings.

[mass55th]

Somewhere along the line, we’re all probably cousins, and just don’t know it. I recently found out that a neighbor who has lived in this building about as long as I have (20 years), is related to my 9th Great-Grandfather George Soule, who came over on the Mayflower, and was a signer of the Mayflower Compact. It’s a very small world.

[SunkenCiv]

:^) Definitely.