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Menzlin lies on the Peene in today's Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a few kilometres inland from the Baltic. In the 8th and 9th centuries an important trade and craft place stood here, where the Scandinavian and Slavic worlds met. The Peene was a waterway into the interior – ideal for distributing goods from the coast further inland.
Excavations brought to light traces of workshops, imported wares and means of payment. Menzlin thus belongs to the same chain of Baltic trading places as Ralswiek on Rügen and Reric near Wismar: small but widely connected nodes through which silver, beads, furs and craft flowed between north and east.
Especially striking are the stone ship settings near Menzlin: cemeteries whose stones were laid out in the outline of a ship. Such ship settings are known from all over Scandinavia – they are an image of the "last voyage" of the dead. At Menzlin they stand as a visible sign that people with Norse customs lived and were buried here.
"Wits must he have who wanders wide, but all is easy at home."Hávamál 5, after Henry A. Bellows 1923 (public domain)
Menzlin is a further building block in the picture of a Baltic that in the Viking Age was one single, great economic space – and whose southern, German coast lay right in the middle of it.
Ralswiek on Rügen · Reric · Wolin & Jomsborg · Hacksilver – silver as currency · Viking traces in Germany.
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