By boat to the past

DR 2 - 28 August 2001 at 20.30.

2,350 years ago, a foreign army attacked the island of Als. The enemy was repelled, leaving behind weapons and a warship that the victors sacrificed to the gods.

A meeting between two wounded South Jutland soldiers in German military service at a hospital in Sønderborg during World War I revealed that there was probably an ancient find in Hjortspring Mose on Als. But it wasn't until after reunification in 1920, when Als became Danish again, that the National Museum was informed of the find. The famous conservator Gustav Rosenberg was sent to Als, where he spent two summers digging and brought back the remains of an ancient boat. Today it can be seen at the National Museum in Copenhagen. And it's actually a bit of a miracle. The preservation method used by the museum in the 1920s had disastrous consequences. The boat almost broke and had to be re-conserved using the same method as the VASA ship in Stockholm before it could be exhibited again.

In Als, some local people got together in a guild to build a 1:1 replica of the ancient boat, based on the drawings that a Norwegian marine engineer Fr. Johannsen made in the 1930s after studying the find. The guild used the same materials as in the original boat, and the tools were copies of Iron Age tools. It was Johannen's drawings that formed the basis for the layout of the boat in the National Museum's exhibition at the time. But was this layout correct? The National Museum's staff are trying to find out.

In collaboration with the Hjortspring Guild, Tilia, as the boat came to be known, has been out sailing several times with a team of elite oarsmen operating the paddles to test the boat's seaworthiness and how fast and how far it can sail in different wind and weather conditions. Tilia has also been measured and the results of the measurements have been entered into a 3D computer programme. This can now be compared to what the boat was thought to have looked like in the 1930s.

All this data can bring scientists closer to finding out how the Hjortspring boat was actually constructed. The equipment on board suggests that the crew was an actual army of around 100 men, which again suggests a society organising itself, capable of beating back such a large enemy. But the big questions are, who was the enemy? And what happened during the dramatic events when someone tried to conquer Als? 

Photographer: Thomas Frank Larsen
Editors: Anne Schoen, Anja Philip and Ulla Rønnow

• Newsletter, July 2001, no. 4.

The text in this article has been translated from Danish to English using the free DeepL translation programme.