They did not wear horned helmets, they combed their hair every day and settled disputes in assemblies with laws recited from memory. They also raided monasteries and sold slaves. Both are true. Twelve stops from the lur players of City Hall Square, through the helmets, combs and runestones of the National Museum, the ruins of Bishop Absalon, Nyhavn, Amalienborg, the Gefion fountain and Rosenborg's throne of narwhal tusks, to the cathedral and the sunken ships of Roskilde. Approximate audio duration: 24 minutes.
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Copenhague: los vikingos sin los cuernos en el casco
No usaban cascos con cuernos, se peinaban todos los días y resolvían pleitos en asambleas con leyes recitadas de memoria. También saqueaban monasterios y vendían esclavos. Las dos cosas son ciertas. Doce paradas desde los tocadores de lur de la plaza del Ayuntamiento, por los cascos, los peines y las piedras rúnicas del Museo Nacional, las ruinas del obispo Absalón, Nyhavn, Amalienborg, la fuente de Gefion y el trono de colmillos de narval de Rosenborg, hasta la catedral y los barcos hundidos de Roskilde. Duración aproximada de audio: 24 minutos.
Tour stops
12 stops · ~24 min of audio · 6.5 km on foot (~1 h 40 min walking) · about 2 h 15 min in total
You are in Copenhagen's City Hall Square. Look, beside the building, for a tall column with two bronze figures at the top: two men blowing long, curved horns. It is the Lur Blowers sculpture, from 1914, and many visitors think they are Vikings.
They are not. Those instruments, the lurs, are from the Bronze Age. The ones found in Danish bogs are around three thousand years old. The Vikings came almost two thousand years later. It is like confusing a Roman with an astronaut.
Local legend says the lur blowers will sound their horns when a virgin girl walks beneath them. The Danes tell it with i…
2
The Horns from the Opera
You are in the National Museum of Denmark. Look, in the prehistory galleries, for two bronze helmets with long curved horns and bulging eyes. They are the Veksø helmets, found in 1942 in a bog on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Exactly what you imagine when you think of a Viking.
The problem is the date: they are about three thousand years old. They are from the Bronze Age, like the lurs in the square. They were probably ceremonial objects, not war helmets. No archaeologist has ever found a Viking helmet with horns.
So what were they like? The only nearly complete Viking helmet known was found …
3
The Saturday Bath
You are in the Viking Age galleries of the National Museum. Look for the cases with small objects: combs of bone and antler, tweezers, little ear-cleaning spoons, razors. They are among the most common objects in Viking excavations.
The dirty, unkempt Viking is another myth. Combs turn up in the graves of men and women, sometimes with their case. A thirteenth-century English chronicler, John of Wallingford, complained that the Danes living in England combed their hair every day, bathed on Saturdays and changed their clothes often, and that this was how they seduced English women.
There is a …
4
The Stones Women Commissioned
You are in front of the runestones in the National Museum. Look at the bands of angular signs winding across the surface: they are runes, the alphabet of the Scandinavians before Latin script. Most of these stones are monuments in memory of someone.
Read what the translations say: so-and-so raised this stone in memory of his father, her brother, her husband. And notice how often the person raising it is a woman. Many Danish runestones were commissioned by widows or mothers. Having one carved was expensive: it was a way of showing wealth and of staking a claim to an inheritance.
Women of the …
5
From Assembly to Parliament
You are in front of Christiansborg Palace, on the island of Slotsholmen. Look at the tower, the tallest in the city. This building houses the Danish Parliament, the Prime Minister's office and the Supreme Court. The three powers of the state in a single palace.
Beneath the present palace you can visit the ruins of the first castle, built by Bishop Absalon around 1167. Absalon was a churchman and also a military leader: he led fleets against the Wends, Slavic peoples of the southern Baltic coast. In that sense, he still had something of the Viking about him.
The name of the Danish Parliament …
6
A King with a Blue Tooth
You are in Højbro Plads, in front of the equestrian statue of Absalon, axe in hand, looking towards Christiansborg. It dates from 1902: another image from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Denmark was looking for founding heroes.
Absalon lived in a country that was already Christian. To understand how Denmark got there, you have to go back two centuries, to a Viking king: Harald, known as Blåtand, Bluetooth. Nobody knows for sure where the nickname comes from; one theory speaks of a dead, darkened tooth.
Around 965, Harald had a great runestone raised at Jelling, in Jutland.…
7
From Baghdad to Newfoundland
You are in Nyhavn, the new harbour. Look at the coloured houses, the moored wooden boats, the masts. The canal was dug in the seventeenth century, long after the Vikings, but it is the best place in Copenhagen to think about what made them unique: their ships.
A Viking ship was long, narrow and shallow-draughted. It could cross the North Sea and also sail up shallow rivers. With that technology, Scandinavians reached further than any other European people of their time.
To the west, they settled Iceland and Greenland, and around the year 1000 they reached North America. At L'Anse aux Meadows…
8
A Thousand Years of Kings
You are in Amalienborg square, surrounded by four identical Rococo palaces. It is the residence of the Danish royal family. Look at the guard, with their tall bearskin caps; if you are here at noon, you will see the changing of the guard.
The Danish monarchy presents itself as one of the oldest in the world with an unbroken line. Its king lists begin with Gorm the Old, father of Harald Bluetooth, who died around 958. Since 2024 the reigning king has been Frederik X.
Gorm and Harald were Viking kings. Danish kings of that time were not monarchs with palaces and bureaucracy: they were war lead…
9
The Myths Written Down by Christians
You are in front of the Gefion fountain. Look at the scene: a goddess, standing, with a whip, drives four huge oxen pulling a plough. Water spouts from the animals' nostrils. The fountain was inaugurated in 1908.
It represents a Norse myth. A Swedish king, Gylfi, promised the goddess Gefion as much land as she could plough in a day and a night. Gefion turned her four sons into oxen and ploughed a piece so large that she tore it from Sweden and dragged it into the sea. That piece is Zealand, the island you are on. The hole left behind in Sweden is Lake Mälaren.
Now comes the awkward question:…
10
The Unicorn Throne
You are in front of Rosenborg Castle, a Renaissance palace of red brick built in the early seventeenth century by King Christian IV. Inside are kept the Danish crown jewels. If you go in, look in the great hall for a very particular throne.
It is the coronation throne of the absolute kings, finished around 1671. It is made of narwhal tusks, from the Arctic whale with a long spiral tooth. For centuries those tusks were sold in Europe as unicorn horns, and they were worth more than gold. The throne was said to be made of unicorn horn.
Where did those tusks come from? From the Arctic, and in pa…
11
Where the Kings Rest
You are in front of Roskilde Cathedral. Look at the two slender spires over the mass of red brick: it is one of the first great brick cathedrals of northern Europe, begun in the twelfth century. It is a World Heritage Site.
Inside, around forty kings and queens of Denmark are buried. Since the fifteenth century this has been the Danish royal mausoleum. The chapels are crowded with sarcophagi of marble, bronze and stone from different eras, like a museum of the monarchy.
But the story of this place begins earlier. According to the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, writing around 1070, Harald …
12
The Ships Sunk on Purpose
You have reached the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. Go into the great hall with windows onto the fjord and look at the five ships: they are not reconstructions but the original remains, timbers almost a thousand years old held in metal frames that trace their full shape.
They are the Skuldelev ships, the ones the people of Roskilde sank around 1070 to block the channel. Danish archaeologists brought them out of the water in 1962 by building a cofferdam around them and pumping it dry. The museum opened in 1969.
Each ship tells a different story: there is a warship, two merchant ships, a fish…
How long does the "Copenhagen: the Vikings Without the Horned Helmets" audio tour take?
It has about 24 minutes of audio across 12 stops and a 6.5 km walking route (~1 h 40 min on foot). Plan roughly 2 h 15 min in total, or split it up: you can pause and resume anytime.
Where does the tour start?
At stop 1, "A Thousand Years Apart" (coordinates 55.6759, 12.5699). The app guides you from stop to stop with a map.
Is it free?
Trevurs is a free app for iOS and Android. There is also an optional Premium version, from USD 1.99, with unlimited offline downloads, access to every tour and no ads. It also helps keep an independent app alive.
Why use an audio tour instead of a guided group tour?
No group to keep up with and no guide to wait for. Start at any time of day, on your own schedule. Go at your own pace: pause, rewind or skip any stop. No need to commit 2 or 3 hours to a single tour: do one stop or the whole route. Works offline once downloaded.
What languages is this audio guide available in?
This tour is available in Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Italian. Switch languages anytime from inside the app.
Do I need wifi to listen to this tour?
No. Download the tour over wifi before you go, then listen without any data connection.
How do I access this tour?
Download Trevurs on iPhone (App Store) or Android (Google Play), then open Copenhagen and pick "Copenhagen: the Vikings Without the Horned Helmets". No account required to start.
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No wifi needed · Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Italian
