Viking Market and Legendary King Festival

Every day throughout the fall holidays!

Meet merchants, warriors and skilled craftsmen when Lejre Land of Legends invites you to the Viking Market and Legendary Kings Festival at Kongehallen.

Get the wind in your hair, the scent of bonfires in your nose and explore among visiting Vikings and Iron Age warriors when Lejre Land of Legends starts a new tradition and opens the doors to the Viking Market and Legendary Kings Festival at the King’s magnificent mead hall. Let your senses take you back to the dawn of the Viking Age, a time when Iron Age warrior chieftains first began to rally around a common royal power, and when courage, martial prowess, diplomacy and perhaps most importantly, generosity and gifts of glittering gold transformed Iron Age society.

Enter a world where power was displayed through magnificent halls, gleaming weapons and an abundance of trade goods from near and far. Explore the Viking merchants who peddle everything from jewelry to weapons. Meet the bronze caster, wood craftsman and warriors in their glittering armor. Visit the King’s Hall and be impressed by the building masters of the time. Take a seat on the benches by the large long fire and listen to stories about kings and heroic deeds from the oldest legends and sagas or let the sound of bellows and hammer blows draw you past the thatched pit house where the blacksmith works on the king’s new spear.

Read more and see the full day program for the day you’re planning to go during the autumn holiday. (The day program will be updated throughout week 39. Remember to select the month and date in the calendar)

The last Iron Age and the first Viking Age

Throughout the autumn holidays, Lejre Land of Legends focuses on the period from 536 to 1050. The period covers the last part of the Iron Age – what archaeologists call the Early Germanic Iron Age – and the entire Viking Age.
It was a time of great change, when society went from consisting of small villages, each with its own local chief, to gathering under princes and kings, and where power was both strong and vulnerable. It was a time when bards played and told tales in large mead halls, and where many of the legends and sagas that medieval writers have preserved for posterity have their roots.
The end of the Iron Age is the time when the foundation for what we now call the Viking Age was laid. It is a time characterized by a climatic catastrophe so terrible that it is now believed to be the inspiration for the Vikings’ idea of the Fimbul winter, the prelude to Ragnarok and the end of the world. And it is a time when an impressive and grandiose warrior aristocracy takes shape. These are the warrior tribes that the Viking Age society grew out of, and they are the reason why, at the beginning of the Viking Age, we see for the first time something resembling an actual royal power in parts of what we now know as Denmark.

Buy a ticket and visit us during the fall break!

Fascinating find tells a real story

On a beautiful hill in Lejre Land of Legends lies the recreated version of the largest royal hall known from the Viking Age in Denmark. The remains of the original building were excavated less than three kilometers from Lejre Land of Legends, in a field in the village of Gl. Lejre. Here, archaeologists had been busy on several occasions excavating the remains of an impressive settlement stretching from the Iron Age well into the Viking Age.

In 2009, the remains of Denmark’s largest Viking Age house emerged from the rubble. At just over 60 meters from gable to gable, the hall was about as long as a modern football pitch is wide, and with its rows of large, thick posts, the structure could support a building with a ceiling height of over 10 meters. At over 600m2, the Great Hall of Kings is a unique testament to the culmination of Nordic architecture and craftsmanship in the Viking Age.

The huge royal hall and the many other impressive finds from the Iron Age and Viking Age indicate that Gl. Lejre had a very special position in its time. Perhaps even as the headquarters of the top of society at a time when Denmark was on the threshold of the Viking Age and royal power.

Even in sagas, legends and other written sources, Lejre’s importance has left its mark. The place is often associated with the mythical legendary royal family, the Skjoldungs, which according to legend and saga included the kings Skjold, Roar, Helge, Rolf Krake, Ragnar Lodbrog and Harald Hildetand. Stories that are myths in themselves, but which, together with the archaeological finds, testify to the importance of Lejre in the Iron Age and Viking Age.

The recreated royal hall is part of the reconstructed Viking environment in Lejre Land of Legends. A recreated environment that, with the King’s Hall as the heart of the area, will be filled with exciting activities and experiences for the whole family.

We look forward to taking you on a journey through time – back to the beginning of the Viking Age!

Denmark’s largest Viking Hall

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