Translation needed
It is no exaggeration to say, ´There would be no Viking Age without the Viking ship.´ All that has made the Viking Age a subject of fascination for scholars, lay people, and children depends on the simple innovation of setting a sail onto a rowing ship.
The raids that shook Europe in the late 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries, the conquests of Normandy and England, the military campaigns into the Ukraine and around the mediterannean, all came about because the Viking ship was faster, sleaker, and more mobile than any other craft of its day.
And the settlement of the North Atlantic, the islands of the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland, surely would not have been undertaken were it not for Viking Age settlers feeling that mainland Europe was not so far away. A four day trip on a stead of the waves, gliding over the water, was not so bad. The Viking ship made the world a smaller place, even as it expanded its horizon.
The trade of goods from far flung shores was sustained by Viking ships well past the Viking Age. Even in the late medieval period, knarrs were carrying walrus ivory from Greenland to master carvers in Norway, who then exported the finished product to the British Isles. The Viking ship maintained these links between peoples.
When I worked at the Smithsonian Institution, we had the honor of hosting First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to give our opening press announcement. I was so excited to help her staff prepare her speech, and thus fixated on her every word when she came to the Natural History Museum. Her staff warned me that she often made impromptu changes, and indeed, she did so on this occassion also. In her speech, she added in that Viking ships were the Internet of the year 1000. And that was exactly right, She absolutely understood.
The whole time we were preparing that exhibition--myself and the core exhibition team--we often lamented not having a full scale Viking ship to accompany the exhibition, since it was so essential to everything we wanted to say. The American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in fact added to the exhibition a portion of a hull of a knarr, just to try to overcome this inadequacy to the exhibition.
So when I heard that Reykjanesbaer was going to put Gunnar Marel´s beautiful Viking Ship Islendingur on display, I quickly realized the potential. It just so happened that this announcement came out only a few months before the Smithsonian exhibition Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga was set to close. A curator never really likes to see an exhibition they have worked on close, which is why so many museums have so many old displays! But the Smithsonian Viking exhibition really was a great exhibition, done by a team of over 25 international Viking experts and created by the best museum professionals in the United States. It was seen by about 4 million people over a 3 year period. As the assistant curator for that project, well, I really hated to see it close. Myself and my supervisor at the Smithsonian, William Fitzhugh, had already started thinking about ways to get a part of the exhibition to Europe, something he had done with a few of his other large shows. But it was a complicated, expensive thing to do. More tricky, though, was that an American perspective on the Vikings is perhaps not what Europeans want to hear.
Our exhibition had placed special emphasis on the Viking settlement of the North Atlantic, and on the Viking discovery of North America. This is not the blodshed and riches story most Europeans associate with the Viking Age. Rather it is a story of a late iron age farming society, who tried something really daring and new, because they had the means—the Viking ship—to do so. To head out beyond the horizon. This story is still the heart of the exhibition here, and is on display on the second floor. The objects of everyday use seen on the second floor testify to this remarkable seizure of lands, some of the last places on earth actually to have permanent human settlement. I think Icelanders sometimes forget how really very unusual it is to live somewhere, and to be the only people who have every lived on that chunk of land. For almost everybody else, if they dig down a little bit, they will see artifacts they do not recognize, that mean nothing to them at all. But the objects on the second floor show the continuity between the Viking Age and the Iceland of only 100 years ago.
When preparing this exhibition for Reykjanesbaer, however, I wanted to put more emphasis on the importance of the Viking ship than we had done at the Smithsonian. So the exhibition on the first floor, especially the section discussing Viking Age burial practices associated with Viking ships, is much different than it was at the Smithsonian. The Gotlandic Picture stone that welcomes visitors to Vikingaheimar is especially important in this context. This 1200 year old fragile piece of limestone was a tricky thing to bring here to Reykjanesbaer, not only because of all the special shipping and insurance arrangements, but also because of the installation challenges here. There is no loading dock in this building. We do not have an electric hand trolly or jack. Nope. Instead, four strong men lifted the stone up by straps, and lowered it down into the case. To say my heart was pounding and my palms sweating during this process is absolutely not an exaggeration.
So today, as we mark a turning point in the development of this project, I want to start by thanking those four men, who did not drop the stone. Gunnar Marel Eggertsson, who of course has been my trusted colleague in this project for three years, and who I first worked with 10 years ago when preparing the catalogue for the Smithsonian exhibition. Iceland has a remarkable living heritage bearer in this man, and I am honored to work with him. Smári XXson and Pall Gislason have been the two carpenters most responsible for installation of the exhibition, and Smári has put in more than a few very late nights. Plus he says he is finally getting to understand that I am not disorganized, I just have too many things I am trying to do. David, one of our two great new staff people, is perhaps still more interested in his electric guitar than Viking Age relics, but we are working on it. And we have high hopes for everyone here in Reykjanesbaer, becoming more and more familiar with and interested in the Viking Age, as Vikingaheimar becomes more and more a part of the community.
But I of course have to also thank the lenders, the lenders who took my word for it that Vikingaheimar was a museum. Just as in the Smithsonian show, everything on display here (except Íslendingur itself and the objects associated with that trip) are on short term loan from other museums. Statens Historiska Museum in Stockholm leant the stone, and the fragile Viking Age weapons on the first floor. The Viking Ship Museum, of Oldsaksamling, Norway, sent Jan Bill, a reknowned Viking ship expert, to bring us the carved beast head study copy from the Oseberg ship burial. Þjóðminjasafn Íslands lent the other beast head study copy, and we will continue to work with them to add to the exhibition in the near future. I had to fly to Greenland to get the artifacts on the second floor, because the curators there are busy preparing a new permanent exhibition. But they were very generous in lending us some of the finest preserved objects from their collection. We have the same replicas from Parks Canada as were on display in the Smithsonian show, and I am really very pleased how the case I added to the exhibition about the British Isles shaped up.
We have many things we would like to add and change in the future. In the very near future, in fact, we will have hands on computer interactives installed around the ship with a 3D model of the ship explaining many of the engineering specifics that make it so remarkable. Gunnar and I have spent the last six months working with Gagarin in Reykjavík preparing this material, and we thank Einar Bardarson for his leadership in making this part of the project possible. Obviously, doing anything at all the last six months has been difficult, to say the least.
But I cannot end without thanking a few other people. Árni Sigfusson is officially my favorite mayor, ever since that one email, back in 2002, when he jumped at the chance to get a part of the Smithsonian exhibition here. Margret Hallgrímsdóttir at Þjóðminjasafn has been incredibly supportive of my efforts, as has Valgerður Guðmundsdóttir. Sigrún Ásta of Byggjasafn Reykjanesbaer has been real godsend, giving valuable advice on many logistics and writing the Icelandic translation. William Fitzhugh, from the Smithsonian, has followed my efforts and lent support as needed, even while turning his attention to new projects in Mongolia and Quebec. But of course, I have to also thank my mom, Margret Guðmundsdóttir, who started sending me here to Reykjanesbaer when I was 7 years old, to visit my grandparents. My love for Iceland would never have blossomed without those trips, and the remarkable career I have enjoyed would never have been possible, if I were specialized in anything else.
It is thus with much professional and personal pleasure that I address you all today, and welcome you to the exhibition.
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