Shooter's Blog: Birka & How to Train Your Dragon

This post is dedicated to my trip to Sweden and the movie "How To Train Your Dragon". I originally put the pictures on this post after my trip to Sweden, but never got back to add the captions. However, tonight, after seeing the movie "How To Train Your Dragon" with my mom and sister I was inspired to come back and re, or rather originally, publish this post.

If you've seen the movie, you may have noticed in the last 5 minutes, the little boy mentions the weather "It snows 9 months of the year and hails the other 3". Around the same time he also says that the village is named Birka. Immediately I turned to my mom and whispered ... "I've been there!" Its always fun to relate to things like that. My mom asked me if the island looked anything like it did in the movie ... I won't spoil anything for you if you've not seen it and I'll let you decide.

I'd definitely recommend the movie. It is super cute. Its essentially the story of a little boy who could. I had only two complaints with the movie: 1st- the accents were Scottish/British instead of Swedish/Norwegian, what's up with that? 2nd- The main dragon "Toothless" didn't really fit my idea of a dragon. In fact, he was fashioned after the character "Stitch" in "Lilo and Stitch". But all in all, those are small things compared to the overall story which makes me love this movie.

But now, on to the pictures of Birka:

These mounds are some of the burial mounds where the vikings would have been buried. They say that thousands of vikings were buried here and the island is the oldest and biggest burial site in Sweden.

Me, taking a picture of myself and trying to get a burial mound in the background.

This character was our tour guide. He was really kinda funny and did a good job at staying in character as well as being very informative about the island and the viking way of life.

You can see some stones on the hill ... those are remnants of the oldest viking village. And the lighter ground, where the grass has been cut, they think is the wall of the city. It's all buried underneath the soil, but they have done sonar testing and have mapped out the old city boundaries.

The dip in this hill, that makes it almost look like two mounds, would have been a gate into the city. The city had boundaries (noted above) and then a wall that enveloped the city to keep it safe from potential attacks.

Birka is an island in the archipelago of Stockholm. We had to take a ferry ride out to it. This is another few islands in the same archipelago. Rumor has it (I say rumor because I haven't actually looked it up) that Tiger Wood's wife Elin Norddgren, who is originally Swedish, bought an island in the Stockholm archipelago after the stuff went down about 6 months ago.

Me on the ferry ride. I got so sunburned! It was so warm/hot. I knew I probably would when my friend asked if we could sit on the sun deck for the 45-60 minute ride back to Stockholm. Oh well, the view was awesome!

At one point in Birka's history, a monk came to the island to bring Christianity to the vikings. As I recall, not many converted. But he did establish a monastery there and has a monument over his grave too. The monastery is very hard to see. It is among the trees in the back of this picture about 1 cm right of the very visible house. It almost looks like 2 tree trunks that stick up almost to the top of the line of trees. I know what I'm looking for but I wouldn't be surprised if you can't see it.

This is a photo that shows an island off the coast of Birka. They have found archeological stuff there that suggests the king and queen of the Birka lived on these other islands as well as were buried there.

Just a pretty shot of the island and the sky and the sea ... ahh ... peaceful!

Viking combs. They, being the archeologists and anthropologists, believe that combs were big stuff to vikings. You didn't go anywhere without your comb. Kinda like keeping up with the Jones' I guess. They did have some really neat ones on display in the Birka museum.