When the archaeologist from Bergen Museum closed the burial mound at Myklebust in 1874, he wanted to leave a message for his successors. In doing so, he forgot some of the most important finds, but remembered to pay tribute to his girlfriend.
“This mound was excavated Anno Domino 1874
By Anders Lorange, Antiqvarius Norvegiæ.
The mound is built over fallen men. They were
burned in their ship with weapons and ornaments.”
This is how Bergen Museum’s first professionally employed conservator and archaeologist Anders Lorange began his message to posterity. Now his message in a bottle from 1874 has been found and opened.
Spectacular discoveries
Anders Lorange sailed from Bergen to Nordfjordeid in October 1874 to investigate the burial mounds at Myklebust. He wanted to open the largest of them, Myklebusthaugen.
In the mound, he found a burnt Viking ship of considerable size and a quantity of weapons and other equipment. One of the most remarkable finds was a bronze vessel stolen from a monastery or church in Ireland sometime in the 8th century. The vessel was filled with the cremated remains of a chieftain and his personal equipment.
Before Lorange closed the mound, he buried a message in a bottle. This fall, 150 years later, archaeologists from the University Museum in Bergen reopened the mound and found the message.
– It is incredibly exciting and surprising to find such a time capsule with a 150-year-old greeting from our first archaeologist. Such events tell us a lot about the long scientific tradition we are part of,” says Margareth Hagen, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bergen, who was involved in the excavation.
Amorous archaeologist
Inside the bottle was a letter, Lorange’s business card and five coins. Among other things, Lorange uses the letter to list what they found in the pile:
“Of shield dents were 26 – of swords 2 – an axe
and many arrows – in addition to many other antiquities.
The find is handed over to Bergen Museum”
Project manager and archaeologist Morten Ramstad finds it interesting that Lorange fails to mention the bronze vessel with remains. He was also wrong about the objects. Among other things, 44 shield dents were found (the wooden Viking shields had a metal dent in the middle), not 26 as Lorange claims.
– This tells us that although Lorange was the archaeologist from the museum, he did not do the actual digging. That was done by local farm workers. That’s why he probably didn’t have a complete overview when he put down the bottle post and the pile was backfilled.
At the bottom of the letter, Lorange has written a message in runes. But when Ramstad sought out experts in rune writing, they struggled to decipher what was written.
– Eventually, we realized that Lorange didn’t know any runes, and had only translated the sentence directly using the younger runic alphabet. So we translated it as “Emma Gade my girlfriend.” He wrote the same thing on his business card, which was also in the bottle,” says Ramstad.
Emma Gade from Bergen later became Lorange’s wife. But this was not the first time Lorange left a message in a bottle with a declaration of love.
– A similar bottle was found during the excavation of Raknehaugen in 1939. Lorange had written a declaration of love to Ingeborg Heftye, but we know that she ended up marrying someone else. Lorange was undoubtedly an amorous young man,” says Ramstad.
Mapping Viking graves
Myklebusthaugen is the only known cremation grave of a Viking ship in Scandinavia, but was almost forgotten in the shadow of the Viking ship burials from the Gokstad (excavated in 1880) and Oseberg ships (excavated in 1904).
Archaeologists from the University Museum have used modern methods to determine that much more of the mound has been preserved and that there are many traces of settlement under the ground around it. The assignment was given by the Directorate for Cultural Heritage as part of the mapping of ship graves from the Viking Age for inclusion on Norway’s World Heritage waiting list.
– “It’s thanks to Lorange’s work in 1874 that we chose Myklebusthaugen for a possible future World Heritage nomination. The fact that we also found a message in a bottle from him is a very nice bonus,” says Hanna Geiran, National Heritage Officer.
Lorange’s message in a bottle and its contents will now end up in the University Museum’s collections, where it will probably play a central role in the museum’s 200th anniversary exhibition next year.
– Investigations at Myklebusthaugen will undoubtedly give us a better understanding of a powerful and important Viking Age cultural environment with contacts that extended far beyond Norway. They also confirm that the ship Lorange found was of considerable size. And not least that the mound hides several burials,” explains Ramstad.
