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The spiral prow coming out of the clay after a thousand years. Blue clay and turf had kept the oak wet and airless.

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, and the ship came out of the ground in something close to complete: twenty-one and a half metres of oak, a spiral prow carved in interlaced beasts, 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, and outside the chamber 15 horses, six dogs and two oxen, killed for the occasion. 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 was the burial and which was the companion is unresolved, and so is everything else about them: a queen, a priestess, a woman who mattered enough that her people spent a warship. What is certain is that somebody came back for them. The mound was broken into within a century or two, the chamber cut open, the bodies dragged out of position, and the metals removed; the intruders left the ship, the cart, the sledges and the looms, which suggests they were not ordinary thieves after portable value but people making a point about the dead. 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 now the best-preserved Viking ship in existence, and the woman it was built to carry has never been identified.