The name says it all: Gudme means „home of the gods". On the Danish island of Funen lay one of the richest cult and power centres of the Iron Age – a place of gold, with a vast hall and the gods in the very soil.
Gudme (Old Norse Guðheim, „home of the gods") was a so-called central place from the 3rd to the 6th century AD – long before the Viking Age. The place-names around it already sound sacred: nearby lie a „gods’ hill" and an „elf hill". A whole sacred landscape.
Gudme is famous for spectacular gold finds – among them the Broholm hoard, one of the largest gold treasures of the Nordic Iron Age. At its heart stood a vast hall some 48 metres long, surrounded by workshops. Here resided an elite that combined wealth, craft and cult in one hand.
A few kilometres away, on the coast, lay the trading harbour of Lundeborg. The division of labour is telling: Gudme inland was the place of power and cult, Lundeborg by the sea the place of trade and import. Together they formed a power centre such as the North knew centuries before Hedeby and the Viking towns.
Gudme shows: the Germanic cult needed no temple like a church. Religion, rule, craft and trade concentrated at a „central place" – a model that later sites such as Tissø carried on.
Gudme on the Danish island of Funen is one of the most important central places of the first millennium. Its very name reveals its sanctity: Gudme means "home of the gods" – a place of cult, power and enormous wealth.
Around Gudme vast quantities of gold came to light – coins, jewellery, ingots, gold bracteates. Hardly any place in northern Europe has yielded so much precious metal from the Migration Period. Gudme was a gathering point of trade and rule.
At the centre stood a huge hall – seat of a powerful lord who united secular and religious power. The place names of the surroundings (Gudme, Galdbjerg, Albjerg) sound like a landscape of the gods.
To Gudme belonged the nearby trading harbour Lundeborg on the coast. Through it ran goods and gold from all of known Europe – Gudme was a hub of far-reaching networks, long before the Viking Age.
Tissø · Gamla Uppsala · Hedeby · The Norse pantheon.
P. O. Nielsen, K. Randsborg, H. Thrane (eds.), The Archaeology of Gudme and Lundeborg (1994). National Museum of Denmark (Gudme, Broholm). Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology.
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