JavaScript Menus and DHTML Menus Powered by Milonic

Vikingemuseet Ladby Show more photos

The Viking Museum at Ladby

Links
General Information
The Viking Museum at Ladby
Vikingevej 123
Ladby
5300 Kerteminde
Denmark
Ph. +45 6532 1667
E-mail: vikingemuseet@kertemindemuseer.dk
At the Viking Museum at Ladby, located on Kerteminde Fjord, you can visit Denmark’s only Viking ship grave, an attraction of international format.

The Viking ship grave, also called the Ladby Ship, lies in a reconstructed burial mound at the spot where it was found in 1935. Archaeological research has revealed that in around 925 AD the ship was dragged onto land, after which the dead chieftain, presumably the ship’s owner, was buried in it with his horses, dogs and other costly belongings.


The museum’s main exhibition

Vikingemuseet Ladby
Opening hours
March-May: Tuesday-Sunday 10:00 to 16:00
June to August: every day 10:00 to 17:00
September-October: Tuesday-Sunday 10:00-16:00
From November to February: Tuesday-Sunday 12:00 to 16:00
The ship grave is the main attraction at the Viking Museum at Ladby, to be sure. But the museum isn’t only “the world’s strangest maritime museum”, as a previous director of the Danish National Museum called it, but it’s the museum for the whole area of northeastern Funen, in terms of the Viking period. The museum’s exhibition building, which was renovated and expanded in 2007, also contains many of the prehistoric (mostly Viking) artefacts found in the area, with most of them originating in the ship’s grave itself. The exhibits inform visitors in general about the Vikings and about their activities in the region, and in the basement, an untraditional installation takes one back in time to the day of the burial. As an onlooker to the funeral, one can experience the chieftain’s journey to the beyond. A copy of the Ladby Ship in full scale, recreated Vikings and dead horses (and much more) plus a sound and light show are intended to build up a mood and a fantasy-inspiring sense of experiencing the events as they could have happened over 1000 years ago.


Special exhibitions and actualities

Vikingemuseet Ladby Foto: Werner Karrasch
1:10 model af Ladbyskibet, som kan ses udstillet på Vikingemuseet Ladby. Modellen er bygget af modelbygger Vibeke Bischoff.
The Viking Museum at Ladby is always developing. There are often special exhibitions about or related to the Viking period and hands-on activities for children and adults. We also show off and tell about the “new old things” that come to the museum regularly, as the result of our archaeological excavations, and convey other of our projects. (The Dept. of Landscape and Archaeology of the Museums of Eastern Funen (Østfyns Museer) resides at the Viking Museum at Ladby.)

Boat and shipbuilding

Part of our development as a museum is in the direction of boat and shipbuilding. Our goal is nothing less – with the expertise of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, and the trained work force called the Ladby Ship Guild – to build a full-scale copy of the Ladby Ship. First the group will restore a dory from the Faroe Islands and then build a copy of one of the Gokstad boats, found with the Gokstad Ship (another Viking ship grave, dated to 895 AD) in Norway in 1880.

With the exception of the Faroe dory, these shipbuilding projects will be carried out with the Vikings’ own tools and techniques. What a challenge! The Faroe dory and the Gokstad boat will be warm-up activities before the big Ladby Ship.

The plan is to launch the ship and possibly also the boats onto Kerteminde Fjord. Visitors will be able to go for a sail in proper Viking style!