Jelling is Denmark's Tara, the ancient site which more than any other fuels the Danish imagination by recalling past glories and pagan Viking kings. It is also where the name Denmark was first used, and where the introduction of Christianity is commemorated in a 10th-century runic inscription on a monumental eight-foot high stone erected by the first Christian king, Harald Bluetooth, to the memory of his parents, King Gorm the Old and Queen Thyra.
The present head of state, the elegant and popular Queen Margrethe II - a qualified archaeologist, incidentally - is actually a descendant of Gorm and, as such, belongs to by far the oldest royal family in Europe. Her Majesty, accompanied by her family, presided at a dignified but happy religious ceremony in the little whitewashed church at Jelling last Wednesday when King Gorm's remains were reinterred in a casket placed under the floor at the sanctuary end of the nave. Why all the fuss about this in Denmark? Why had the old king's bones to be reinterred? Are the remains really those of Gorm - and where are Thyra's remains?
Grassy mounds
The world heritage site which is Jelling today consists of two huge grassy man-made mounds with a small church and two runestones located on the flat ground between them. Set far back from the mounds are the public and private buildings which comprise the present small town. On public occasions the red-and-white Danish flag is flown from a pole at the summits of both mounds. These and the smaller flags near the church make for a most dignified atmosphere - a bit like St Mullin's in Carlow, a site not unknown to Gorm's contemporaries.
The earliest surviving monument at Jelling is under the southern mound. It is a setting of large upright stones which are thought to have formed an enormous boat-shaped grave, appropriate to an early Viking king, perhaps. The remains of a wooden burial chamber fit for two were found in the north mound. Its timbers have been dated by the tree-ring method to the decade of King Gorm's death in the 960s but no trace of human remains were found in the chambers, only a silver cup and some other grave furnishings. It was clear that the grave had been opened from the top. No burial at all seemed to have occurred in the southern mound.
The puzzle of the whereabouts of Gorm and his wife persisted until the spring of 1978, when archaeologists exploring the floor of the church found the bones of a man, 5ft 8ins tall and aged between 35 and 50, in a burial chamber under the floor of the first of three wooden churches which had preceded the stone church on this site, built around 1100. The first of the wooden churches was erected in the 960s. The bones were not laid out in skeletal form and are taken as evidence of the reburial of Gorm by his newly Christianised son, Harald, who about 965 probably caused his father's remains to be taken from the wooden burial chamber in the pagan north mound and placed under the floor of the first church. A silver cup was deliberately left behind in the chamber in the mound as a symbolic gesture.
Queen Thyra
But what of Queen Thyra? Not a trace; and the bones found in 1978 - and kept in a museum until last week's ceremony - do not include hers because they are those of a male.
This sequence of archaeological discoveries has really only clinched what the messages on the two runestones outside the porch of the little church had long proclaimed. The smaller was inscribed for Thyra by Gorm during his own reign. It describes her as Denmark's "ornament" or "penance" - depending on the translation. It may have been moved to its present position from the boatgrave setting. Could this also explain why Thyra's remains haven't been accounted for? The larger stone was raised by Harald in memory of Gorm, his father, and Thyra. An inscription refers to "Harald who won for himself all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christians."
"Heirs of Gorm"
"We are all the heirs of Gorm," Bishop Neils Henrik Arendt announced to the Queen and congregation who like me, one of a very few privileged outsiders, were honoured to be present for a historical event which linked the extremes of Denmark's Christian millennium.
One wonders what Gorm himself would have made of it all. He'd probably be glad to be out of the confined space of a Copenhagen museum laboratory, back in his own rural neighbourhood, probably bemused by the religion of his son and his descendants, and pleased that his own line had lasted so long on the throne of a nation first defined in his lifetime. By understanding him and his time we get a little nearer to knowing Denmark and why its vote for the euro in the upcoming referendum is anything but certain. The Danes are proud and independent and have very long memories!