look closer

The tall post at the front of the ship stands braced against a plank. The top of it is broken off. The pierced carving on its face came out of the clay still sharp after a thousand years.

In the summer of 1904 a Norwegian farmer at Oseberg, in Vestfold, told the university that the mound on his land had timber in it. Gabriel Gustafson, a Swedish professor in Oslo, came out to look, saw carved oak, and spent the rest of the season lifting the largest Viking ship burial anyone had ever found. The mound had been sealed with blue clay and turf, which kept the wood wet and airless. The ship came out of the ground close to complete: 21.58 metres of oak, a carved prow, 30 oar holes. The cargo list reads like a household moved intact into the next world. A four-wheeled cart, the only one to survive from the Viking age. Four sledges, three of them carved to the last centimetre. Beds, chests, looms with weaving still on them, tapestry fragments, a tent, buckets, kitchen gear. Outside the chamber lay 15 horses, killed for the occasion, along with dogs and cattle. Tree-ring dating later fixed the burial in the year 834 and the ship's construction around 820. And two women, laid on a bed in a timber chamber. One was in her seventies or eighties with badly arthritic joints, one about 50. Which of them the grave was for is unresolved, and so is everything else about them. She may have been a queen or a priestess. She was at least a woman whose people were willing to put a ship in the ground for her. What is certain is that somebody came back for them. The mound was broken into within a century or two. The chamber was cut open, the bodies pulled out of place, and everything made of precious metal taken. The ship, the cart, the sledges and the looms were left where they lay. Whatever the intruders wanted, it was not portable value. Gustafson's crew posed for this photograph in the trench, the carved prow standing behind them and shovels in their hands. Restoring the ship from its pieces took 21 years. It is the best-preserved Viking ship anyone has found, and neither of the women in it has ever been named.