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Viking Queen Raised from Her Rest


Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife.

As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.

“We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don’t know of any Viking skeletons that have been analyzed as we plan to do,” Egil Mikkelsen, director of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History, told Reuters at the graveside.

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Mikkelsen said he saw no ethical objections to opening the grave, partly because the two were buried so long ago and no one even knew their names.

This entry was posted on September 10, 2007, 12:28 and is filed under Admin, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.