Happy Saturday. The Nation of Denmark was a big part of our recent episode on Icelandic Bishop yoan Arison, but Denmark's role was almost as a faceless antagonist, so we thought we'd bring out an episode on Denmark as Today's Saturday Classic. It's the Yellingstones and the origins of Denmark's early royalty. This episode also talks a bit about the Christianization of Denmark, which is another connection to the episode on Yoan Arison. This originally came out March fourteenth, twenty sixteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm tra CYV Wilson. Hey, Tracy, do you want to time travel quite a ways today? I do. Put on whatever outfit works for that that's comfy. So we're traveling back in time about a thousand years or so to Viking Denmark. And we've talked about before. It's come up kind of in passing that the word Viking gets used to kind of lump together a lot of different things. So we're not gonna talk about Viking things a whole lot. Just know that this falls under that category. Well, and sometimes we will get emails from people that say, do you do a podcast on the history of the Vikings, And that answer is no, because well, it would be an entirely new podcast, brand one hundred part series called the History of the Vikings. It would be great. There's a lot of stuff, and part of it, as we'll discussed today, is that a lot of that history is still contentiously debated among historians. So, I mean, it's rich and fertile soil to do an entire podcast about. But you know, we cover all kinds of history. So today we're doing this one little narrow bit and we're talking about the Yelling dynasty of Denmark. If that's some you want to go do a search for on your own. Yelling is spelled to the J at the beginning, so it's like jelling if you look at it, and you're normally an American English speaker. So the Yelling dynasty is often referred to as the beginning of the Danish monarchy, and that point, just as many points that we'll talk about, is argued by historians, and rightly so, because there were certainly people there who had leadership of some sort before that but this is when it first started being called Denmark, and this is a time and place in history where our knowledge is really pretty fuzzy. So keep all of that in mind as we go forward. So part of the problem with this particular piece of history stems from the fact that around the year twelve hundred two, a different historians wrote the first known written accounts of Denmark's early royalty. Both ben Agason and Saxo Grammaticus described that people and events evolved in great detail. But those two accounts contradict each other in a whole lot of instances. We don't even know how much of the writing, and in each case is the recording of oral history that had been handed down, which would automatically include some shifts in its accuracy, versus how much could could have been author embellishment and the result of viewing the information through their own contemporary lenses. So there's just a lot of fuzziness there is. It's one of the reasons I'm sometimes reluctant to do things from this period. I feel like we have to caveat everything and go, you don't know this for sure, so that will happen. Just brace and to start off in a nebulous place. We do not know when Gorm de Gamle or Gorm the Old, who is often cited as the first King of Denmark, was born. As a personal side note, that is Gorm g r M for my nerdy friends out there. If you think I didn't type this geo r in every single time, initially rest assured that I did. But there is absolutely no Star Trek reference in the Estimates for Gorm's birth date are all over the place, from the late eight hundreds through the early nine hundreds, and we do not know as well who Gorm's mother was. Gorm's father, Hardikind, had left his son an estate of land that he had claimed through force, and Gorm augmented the family's property holdings. This was a time when Denmark wasn't one united kingdom. It was just this assortment of provinces and each was governed by a chief who served visits king. Eventually, Gorm had accumulated a really significant chunk of land, and Gorm married a woman named Tira or Tire sometimes you'll hear it pronounced in both this van Agason and Saxo Grammaticus accounts. She came from England, although we do not know if that is accurate. The identity of her parents is unknown, although she may well have been part of a powerful or wealthy family. There's certainly some indication of that and thus that she was strategically important in marriage. Her father has been guessed at as any number of historically significant figures, from ethelred Way Essex to the king of Jutland at the time, who was Harold Klack. According to legend, Gorm promised to give Tira all of Denmark as a morning gift, that is, a gift given by a husband to his wife the morning after their marriage is consummated. But according to customs of other Scandinavian cultures at the time, the morning gift was actually inherited by the wife only after the husband's death. So keep this bit tucked away in your memory, because toward the end of this episode we're going to talk about this establishment of lineage and inheritance. Gorm and Tira had children, and depending on what source you look at, the number and sexes of those children vary. You might see only Harold blatten Gormsen listed as a son, or Harold and his brother Knude dunna Ast. Sometimes there's another son and on occasion. There's also a sister mentioned, so somewhere between one and four children. According to one legend if it mentions, the brother Canudeknude was killed in a skirmish with another power, and Tira had the entire hall of the royal house either painted black or hung with black cloth, and walking in and seeing that darkened hall was how Gorm found out the news of his son's demise. As a side note, the name Latin in Harold's name translates to bluetooth. We don't know why exactly he had that name, although the most common speculation is that he had a visible, a visibly damaged or rotten tooth. And yes, we're going to come back to that name in modern technology later on. And I should mention I should have mentioned it at the top of the episode. This was suggested by a listener. I believe I'm social and I don't have the name attached to it. So whoever you are, thank you because this was lovely. And he specifically mentioned it because of the name Bluetooth. So going back in when his queen Tira died, Gorm had a rune stone erected in her memory. This stone is significant in that it's the first known time a king of Denmark referenced his country by that name. It's also the oldest known example of a Danish king's words, and this stone refers to Tira as the pride of Denmark. Sometimes you'll also see it written out as the adornment of Denmark. Some histories, though, indicate that Tira actually outlived her husband. They are also medieval texts that are really unclear as to this whole timeline. Tira's impact on the narrative of Denmark's early history as a monarch is also characterized in just a lot of different ways. Sometimes she's credited with saving the country from conquest. Sometimes she's credited with saving Denmark from a famine. She's also, in some writings, cast as the architect of a fortifying wall along Denmark's southern border, although archaeologists have determined that the wall that the tale refers to was built long before her time as queen, in the early seven hundreds or maybe even earlier, and so we don't know the exact year of Tira's death. But because Gorm referred to himself as king on her run stone, and again, as we said, this is all Nebulus, and we're going to talk a lot about the stone in the timeline in a moment, but based on his run stone, it appears to have been after his reign began, which was nine thirty four, and in the winter of nine fifty eight nine fifty nine, Gorm the Old died and at the time he was possibly laid to rest in the same burial mound as Queen Tira, now known as the North Mound, but again we do not know the exact location of Tira's burial, so this is another one of those hazy points. We are going to come back to Tira's resting place and this stone. As I said in just a bit, Harold blattin Gormson became the king of Denmark when Gorm died, and of a time the Viking kingdom was pilytheistic. But Harold perhaps knew that converting to Christianity would open the door to trade with other European powers, and so he decided that the Danes would be Christians. And as with all aspects of this story, this conversion to Christianity is characterized in multiple different ways in historical writings. By some accounts, he was more or less forced into transitioning Thek's religion to Christianity after having been bested in battle by a Christian nation, but in other writings he's described as coming to this decision through his own interest and eventual spiritual conversion. His reign was one of relative peace within Denmark, although he did meet with a mix of success and failure in his efforts to expand Denmark's lands through conquest. King Harold died in the autumn of ninet eighty. His son's Finn Forkbeard, may have been a rebellious upstart with eyes on the Yelling throne, and one of his supporters. Of Spinn's supporters may have been the one to have shot and killed the king dead with an arrow. Harold's body was interred at a church that he had begun construction on. In eighteen twenty, excavators working in the burial mounds at Yelling discovered an empty tomb. The only things inside of it were a silver cup and some other small items. Dating the beams in the tomb indicated that they were cut right around the time that Gorm the Old had died. But if the tomb meant was meant to hold the case, where was his body and that question actually wasn't answered until the early nineteen seventies. In nineteen seventy, Gorm's remains were found in the remains of a wooden church that had been built by Harold after he was christened, and as part of this shift to Christianity, it's believed that Harold had his father reburied in the church rather than the mound. After Gorm's remains were discovered, they were studied at Copenhagen's University and National Museum for several decades. Based on the studies of the remains, it's estimated that he was approximately fifty years old and he died, and that would have put his birth around the year nine oh eight. He was five foot seven or one hundred and seventy two centimeters tall, and he had rheumatism in his lower vertebrae. On August thirtieth of two thousand, Gorm was reinterred at Yelling Church and Denmark's royal family attended the ceremony. As we alluded to earlier, the exact location of Queen Tira's burial has been lost, and we'll talk more about the significance of that in just a few months. And that is going to involve a lot of runestone talk. But before we move on to those stones and the various interpretations around them, let's pause for a word from one of our sponsors. So there are two runestones usually mentioned at Yelling, and that's in the central part of the Jutland peninsula. And those two stones have been analyzed and interpreted by historians for years. There is not settled consensus about them. Part of their mystery comes from the fact that the practice of erecting commemorative runestones appears to have been a fairly brief trend in the big picture, so unlike some other old cultural practices, we don't really have a particularly large sample set to inform interpretations. Plus, their age means that a lot of them, having been sitting outside this whole time, have had some degradation. So the first smaller stone reads King Gorm made this monument in memory of Tira, his wife, Denmark's adornment, and the larger stone reads Harold the King bade do these sepulchral monuments after Gorm his father and after Tira his mother. The Harald who won the whole of Denmark and all of Norway and made the Danes Christian. These stones are located adjacent to one another between two nearly identical mounds. Each of the mounds is seventy meters or seventy six yards in diameter and eleven meters or twelve yards high. The north mound covers a burial chamber, but the south mound doesn't. The stone sit just south of a nearby masonry church that's still in use. It's not the original church, though, This is a church that was built around the year eleven hundred to replace a wooden church on the site that had burned down. It was rebuilt several times over before it was switched to a masonry church. And the smaller stone, which will call the Kingstone. The original position of that stone is not known. Its current placement is where it's been since approximately sixteen thirty and just prior to that we know that it was used as a seat outside the church for some period of time. And this stone features three vertical lines of ruins on the front and one vertical line of ruins on the back, and two snakes that are also on the back. A larger Harold stone has three sides, and on one of those there's what's believed to be the first image of Christ in Scandinavia. For a while the image was actually believed to have been a portrait of Harold himself, but early in the nineteenth century it was established that it was indeed Christ. This stone, during a restoration project in the early nineteen eighties, was determined to be in its original position, and there was actually a third stone found at Yelling in nineteen sixty four, but it appears to be unrelated to the Gorm Harold Tira stones. There are a couple of pretty interesting areas of discussion around these two stones. Did King Gorm raise a runestone to honor his queen or did Harold do it as part of sort of a historical revision. So this is where things get to me really fascinating in where they are very hotly debated. So the stones honoring Tira are notable because it was not really customary for runestones to be raised for women. Denmark has two hundred and seventy seven known Viking era runestones. Remember how we mentioned a little bit ago that they don't really have a huge data set to go on. Two hundred and seventy seven is really not that many. But of that number, only twelve of those stones commemorate women, and two of those reference Tira, so that's a significant situation. Although there has also been a case made that the reference to Denmark's adornment could actually be referencing Gorm, but that's not a particularly popular interpretation. The stones to Tira are even more unusual when you consider that these two are part of a group of only three known runstones that were created at the command of kings. Other runstones were raised by other people. It's possible that more than two of those twelve stones dedicated to women are actually in honor of Gorham's wife, Tira. At least two other runestones from the same time period also reference a woman named Tira, So is it very likely that there was another woman with the same name who was also inspiring the commissioning of multiple runstones, who just happened to be in the same area of Denmark at the same time. That, yes, seems a little bit coincidental, and it seems perhaps simply too coincidental for it to not all be the same woman. But on the flip side, even men weren't normally honored or commemorated in this way multiple times over. Either there's actually only one man that we know of with multiple runestones, So it's just weird in a variety of ways. And one explanation for the multiple but allegedly unrelated mentions of a woman named Tira is that it was a common name in Jutland at the time. Historian Brigitte Sawyer makes the case though, that the assumption of the name's commonplace nature is based on only seven or eight possible instances of its having been used. Four or five of those are on runestones, So the logic of claiming the runestones are honoring multiple women of the same name, it's pretty circular. Yeah, they're using data to support that assertion. That is the direct, the direct thing that they're trying to prove out. So it gets really really a little bit squarely at that point. And the smaller of those two yelling stones thought to be erected by Gorm also has some linguistic characteristics which might give it away as being younger than we are intended to believe. The stone credited to Harold, the larger of the two, has words that run together, whereas the runestones that gorme or the runestone that Gorm is supposed to have erected has dividing marks between the words, and that's a newer linguistic practice indicating that the Gorm stone may actually have come. Second, we'll talk about why that may have been the case in just a moment, but first we are going to pause for a brief word from a sponsor. So why would Harold have possibly erected a stone that seemed to be the work of his father, and that it appeared he may be trying to pass off as that. And again I'm referencing the work of Brigitte Sawyer, but according to her, it may have been a way in which people asserted claims of inheritance. So we mentioned early on in the episode that Denmark was new to Unification. Lord's under Gorm likely competed with Gorm for control of the lands that he eventually made his Tira would have been a very appealing marriage partner because she may have held significant power or prominence even before becoming Gorm's queen, most likely as the daughter of someone who had additional landholdings that would then become part of her husband's kingdom. It's entirely possible that she outlived her husband and remarried, and then that would have created some question marks about who should inherit her holdings after her death. The additional runestones that reference a woman named Tira may have been placed by the family she married into after Gorham died. Sawyer suggests that it's possible that Harold not only reconstructed the past by placing a run stone from his father to Tira, but that the unknown resting place of the queen is due to the fact that she may have been buried by another family in another place entirely after having been remarried. Harold basically had to prove his place as son and heir, and thus constructed the burial mounds at Yelling to establish himself as part of Tira's true or primary family and obscure the existence of another burial spot. Moreover, if the Gorm runstone was erected by Harold, it also serves as a precedent setter that Gorm was king, which literally carves in stone something that up to that point may have still been a matter of some dispute. And remember back to you at the top of the show, we talked about the morning gift from Gorm to Tira. If she did inherit Denmark upon his death as the culmination of this gift. It would very very much be in Harold's interests not to let another family then inherit literally the entire country after his mother's death. But and I know I keep saying this, it is important to note that these interpretations of the history of Gorm, Harold and Tira, and the runestones are just that their interpretations. Although they're definitely based in existing evidence, it's just viewed through different lenses. Historians continue to argue the various possibilities and details of this part of Denmark's history, but in any case, if the runestones and mounds were part of a carefully orchestrated edit of history on Harold's part, the plan worked. Because he is recognized as an early king of Denmark. It's entirely possible that excavations at Yelling will reveal additional information about Gorm and his family. The Yelling Mounds, runic stones, and church are all the UNESCO World Heritage Site, and since two thousand and seven, excavations have unearthed evidence of massive of a massive stone ship at the site, as well as a number of buildings that could indicate a fortress that was built by Harold and I believe that those excavations went on until late twenty fourteen, so a lot of those findings are still being analyzed and there could be big changes based on that analysis. We will just have to keep an eye on it. But we mentioned that we would talk about how Harold's name ended up connected to technology, and in nineteen ninety six, when a wireless technology being worked on by Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, and eventually IBM needed a name, that project borrowed the name of Bluetooth. And that was because just as Harold had united Denmark in many histories, Bluetooth was intended to unite technologies with this wireless range link. While it was intended initially only as a code name for the technology, like a development name, Bluetooth of course stuck, and that was more due to legal issues than anything else. The original name for this technology was PAN for Personal Area Networking, and it was too similar to many other trademark names, and the second choice, radio wire was already trademarked by someone else, so the project's code name eventually became its official moniker. And now when your mobile device has Bluetooth activated, you can see a small roune on your screen and you can thank Harold Bluetooth for that too. That logo for Bluetooth technology is actually a combination of the runes for King Harold's initials, So in a fun way, that history comes alive. You are carrying a reference to Denmark's Viking history in your pocket with you all the time. If you have a smartphone with bluetooth, that's pretty cool. Now, that's really like, now that you mention it, that does look like a rune. Yes, I almost felt foolish for never having had that thought. Once I read about it, I was like, well, of course that's what it is. Well, I feel foolish because I've been working at HowStuffWorks dot com for more than a decade talking about Bluetooth sometimes and I knew, like I knew at a very basic level who was named for. But the whole part where the logo little icon thing is basically a rune, did not know that. Yeah, it's cool stuff. So that is our discussion of the Yellingstones, which I really can't wait to see sort of what additional analysis comes out. We will link in our show notes to Denmark's National Museum has kind of an ongoing site that updates with the archaeological stuff. There hasn't been a lot of There haven't been a lot of updates lately. I think, like I said, they're still doing analysis. But you can see all of the stages of the digs that they've done and how they've been very carefully preserving the area because it isn't a place where I mean, there's also neighborhoods around it. It's not like just a place out in the middle of nowhere. There's been development in that area, so it's really pretty fascinating to look at all those pictures and see what they're doing and how they're they're handling it. The stones are actually now encased in like these glass I don't want to say cabinetry, but that's the only word coming to mind, but they're they're outside still, but they're in case to protect them so you can see them. They're basically on display because they're just sitting out there in between the mounds and in front of the church. It's quite cool. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. The Nation of Denmark was a big part of our recent episode on Icelandic Bishop yoan Arison, but Denmark's role was almost as a faceless antagonist, so we thought we'd bring out an episode on Denmark as Today's Saturday Classic. It's the Yellingstones and the origins of Denmark's early royalty. This episode also talks a bit about the Christianization of Denmark, which is another connection to the episode on Yoan Arison. This originally came out March fourteenth, twenty sixteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm tra CYV Wilson. Hey, Tracy, do you want to time travel quite a ways today? I do. Put on whatever outfit works for that that's comfy. So we're traveling back in time about a thousand years or so to Viking Denmark. And we've talked about before. It's come up kind of in passing that the word Viking gets used to kind of lump together a lot of different things. So we're not gonna talk about Viking things a whole lot. Just know that this falls under that category. Well, and sometimes we will get emails from people that say, do you do a podcast on the history of the Vikings, And that answer is no, because well, it would be an entirely new podcast, brand one hundred part series called the History of the Vikings. It would be great. There's a lot of stuff, and part of it, as we'll discussed today, is that a lot of that history is still contentiously debated among historians. So, I mean, it's rich and fertile soil to do an entire podcast about. But you know, we cover all kinds of history. So today we're doing this one little narrow bit and we're talking about the Yelling dynasty of Denmark. If that's some you want to go do a search for on your own. Yelling is spelled to the J at the beginning, so it's like jelling if you look at it, and you're normally an American English speaker. So the Yelling dynasty is often referred to as the beginning of the Danish monarchy, and that point, just as many points that we'll talk about, is argued by historians, and rightly so, because there were certainly people there who had leadership of some sort before that but this is when it first started being called Denmark, and this is a time and place in history where our knowledge is really pretty fuzzy. So keep all of that in mind as we go forward. So part of the problem with this particular piece of history stems from the fact that around the year twelve hundred two, a different historians wrote the first known written accounts of Denmark's early royalty. Both ben Agason and Saxo Grammaticus described that people and events evolved in great detail. But those two accounts contradict each other in a whole lot of instances. We don't even know how much of the writing, and in each case is the recording of oral history that had been handed down, which would automatically include some shifts in its accuracy, versus how much could could have been author embellishment and the result of viewing the information through their own contemporary lenses. So there's just a lot of fuzziness there is. It's one of the reasons I'm sometimes reluctant to do things from this period. I feel like we have to caveat everything and go, you don't know this for sure, so that will happen. Just brace and to start off in a nebulous place. We do not know when Gorm de Gamle or Gorm the Old, who is often cited as the first King of Denmark, was born. As a personal side note, that is Gorm g r M for my nerdy friends out there. If you think I didn't type this geo r in every single time, initially rest assured that I did. But there is absolutely no Star Trek reference in the Estimates for Gorm's birth date are all over the place, from the late eight hundreds through the early nine hundreds, and we do not know as well who Gorm's mother was. Gorm's father, Hardikind, had left his son an estate of land that he had claimed through force, and Gorm augmented the family's property holdings. This was a time when Denmark wasn't one united kingdom. It was just this assortment of provinces and each was governed by a chief who served visits king. Eventually, Gorm had accumulated a really significant chunk of land, and Gorm married a woman named Tira or Tire sometimes you'll hear it pronounced in both this van Agason and Saxo Grammaticus accounts. She came from England, although we do not know if that is accurate. The identity of her parents is unknown, although she may well have been part of a powerful or wealthy family. There's certainly some indication of that and thus that she was strategically important in marriage. Her father has been guessed at as any number of historically significant figures, from ethelred Way Essex to the king of Jutland at the time, who was Harold Klack. According to legend, Gorm promised to give Tira all of Denmark as a morning gift, that is, a gift given by a husband to his wife the morning after their marriage is consummated. But according to customs of other Scandinavian cultures at the time, the morning gift was actually inherited by the wife only after the husband's death. So keep this bit tucked away in your memory, because toward the end of this episode we're going to talk about this establishment of lineage and inheritance. Gorm and Tira had children, and depending on what source you look at, the number and sexes of those children vary. You might see only Harold blatten Gormsen listed as a son, or Harold and his brother Knude dunna Ast. Sometimes there's another son and on occasion. There's also a sister mentioned, so somewhere between one and four children. According to one legend if it mentions, the brother Canudeknude was killed in a skirmish with another power, and Tira had the entire hall of the royal house either painted black or hung with black cloth, and walking in and seeing that darkened hall was how Gorm found out the news of his son's demise. As a side note, the name Latin in Harold's name translates to bluetooth. We don't know why exactly he had that name, although the most common speculation is that he had a visible, a visibly damaged or rotten tooth. And yes, we're going to come back to that name in modern technology later on. And I should mention I should have mentioned it at the top of the episode. This was suggested by a listener. I believe I'm social and I don't have the name attached to it. So whoever you are, thank you because this was lovely. And he specifically mentioned it because of the name Bluetooth. So going back in when his queen Tira died, Gorm had a rune stone erected in her memory. This stone is significant in that it's the first known time a king of Denmark referenced his country by that name. It's also the oldest known example of a Danish king's words, and this stone refers to Tira as the pride of Denmark. Sometimes you'll also see it written out as the adornment of Denmark. Some histories, though, indicate that Tira actually outlived her husband. They are also medieval texts that are really unclear as to this whole timeline. Tira's impact on the narrative of Denmark's early history as a monarch is also characterized in just a lot of different ways. Sometimes she's credited with saving the country from conquest. Sometimes she's credited with saving Denmark from a famine. She's also, in some writings, cast as the architect of a fortifying wall along Denmark's southern border, although archaeologists have determined that the wall that the tale refers to was built long before her time as queen, in the early seven hundreds or maybe even earlier, and so we don't know the exact year of Tira's death. But because Gorm referred to himself as king on her run stone, and again, as we said, this is all Nebulus, and we're going to talk a lot about the stone in the timeline in a moment, but based on his run stone, it appears to have been after his reign began, which was nine thirty four, and in the winter of nine fifty eight nine fifty nine, Gorm the Old died and at the time he was possibly laid to rest in the same burial mound as Queen Tira, now known as the North Mound, but again we do not know the exact location of Tira's burial, so this is another one of those hazy points. We are going to come back to Tira's resting place and this stone. As I said in just a bit, Harold blattin Gormson became the king of Denmark when Gorm died, and of a time the Viking kingdom was pilytheistic. But Harold perhaps knew that converting to Christianity would open the door to trade with other European powers, and so he decided that the Danes would be Christians. And as with all aspects of this story, this conversion to Christianity is characterized in multiple different ways in historical writings. By some accounts, he was more or less forced into transitioning Thek's religion to Christianity after having been bested in battle by a Christian nation, but in other writings he's described as coming to this decision through his own interest and eventual spiritual conversion. His reign was one of relative peace within Denmark, although he did meet with a mix of success and failure in his efforts to expand Denmark's lands through conquest. King Harold died in the autumn of ninet eighty. His son's Finn Forkbeard, may have been a rebellious upstart with eyes on the Yelling throne, and one of his supporters. Of Spinn's supporters may have been the one to have shot and killed the king dead with an arrow. Harold's body was interred at a church that he had begun construction on. In eighteen twenty, excavators working in the burial mounds at Yelling discovered an empty tomb. The only things inside of it were a silver cup and some other small items. Dating the beams in the tomb indicated that they were cut right around the time that Gorm the Old had died. But if the tomb meant was meant to hold the case, where was his body and that question actually wasn't answered until the early nineteen seventies. In nineteen seventy, Gorm's remains were found in the remains of a wooden church that had been built by Harold after he was christened, and as part of this shift to Christianity, it's believed that Harold had his father reburied in the church rather than the mound. After Gorm's remains were discovered, they were studied at Copenhagen's University and National Museum for several decades. Based on the studies of the remains, it's estimated that he was approximately fifty years old and he died, and that would have put his birth around the year nine oh eight. He was five foot seven or one hundred and seventy two centimeters tall, and he had rheumatism in his lower vertebrae. On August thirtieth of two thousand, Gorm was reinterred at Yelling Church and Denmark's royal family attended the ceremony. As we alluded to earlier, the exact location of Queen Tira's burial has been lost, and we'll talk more about the significance of that in just a few months. And that is going to involve a lot of runestone talk. But before we move on to those stones and the various interpretations around them, let's pause for a word from one of our sponsors. So there are two runestones usually mentioned at Yelling, and that's in the central part of the Jutland peninsula. And those two stones have been analyzed and interpreted by historians for years. There is not settled consensus about them. Part of their mystery comes from the fact that the practice of erecting commemorative runestones appears to have been a fairly brief trend in the big picture, so unlike some other old cultural practices, we don't really have a particularly large sample set to inform interpretations. Plus, their age means that a lot of them, having been sitting outside this whole time, have had some degradation. So the first smaller stone reads King Gorm made this monument in memory of Tira, his wife, Denmark's adornment, and the larger stone reads Harold the King bade do these sepulchral monuments after Gorm his father and after Tira his mother. The Harald who won the whole of Denmark and all of Norway and made the Danes Christian. These stones are located adjacent to one another between two nearly identical mounds. Each of the mounds is seventy meters or seventy six yards in diameter and eleven meters or twelve yards high. The north mound covers a burial chamber, but the south mound doesn't. The stone sit just south of a nearby masonry church that's still in use. It's not the original church, though, This is a church that was built around the year eleven hundred to replace a wooden church on the site that had burned down. It was rebuilt several times over before it was switched to a masonry church. And the smaller stone, which will call the Kingstone. The original position of that stone is not known. Its current placement is where it's been since approximately sixteen thirty and just prior to that we know that it was used as a seat outside the church for some period of time. And this stone features three vertical lines of ruins on the front and one vertical line of ruins on the back, and two snakes that are also on the back. A larger Harold stone has three sides, and on one of those there's what's believed to be the first image of Christ in Scandinavia. For a while the image was actually believed to have been a portrait of Harold himself, but early in the nineteenth century it was established that it was indeed Christ. This stone, during a restoration project in the early nineteen eighties, was determined to be in its original position, and there was actually a third stone found at Yelling in nineteen sixty four, but it appears to be unrelated to the Gorm Harold Tira stones. There are a couple of pretty interesting areas of discussion around these two stones. Did King Gorm raise a runestone to honor his queen or did Harold do it as part of sort of a historical revision. So this is where things get to me really fascinating in where they are very hotly debated. So the stones honoring Tira are notable because it was not really customary for runestones to be raised for women. Denmark has two hundred and seventy seven known Viking era runestones. Remember how we mentioned a little bit ago that they don't really have a huge data set to go on. Two hundred and seventy seven is really not that many. But of that number, only twelve of those stones commemorate women, and two of those reference Tira, so that's a significant situation. Although there has also been a case made that the reference to Denmark's adornment could actually be referencing Gorm, but that's not a particularly popular interpretation. The stones to Tira are even more unusual when you consider that these two are part of a group of only three known runstones that were created at the command of kings. Other runstones were raised by other people. It's possible that more than two of those twelve stones dedicated to women are actually in honor of Gorham's wife, Tira. At least two other runestones from the same time period also reference a woman named Tira, So is it very likely that there was another woman with the same name who was also inspiring the commissioning of multiple runstones, who just happened to be in the same area of Denmark at the same time. That, yes, seems a little bit coincidental, and it seems perhaps simply too coincidental for it to not all be the same woman. But on the flip side, even men weren't normally honored or commemorated in this way multiple times over. Either there's actually only one man that we know of with multiple runestones, So it's just weird in a variety of ways. And one explanation for the multiple but allegedly unrelated mentions of a woman named Tira is that it was a common name in Jutland at the time. Historian Brigitte Sawyer makes the case though, that the assumption of the name's commonplace nature is based on only seven or eight possible instances of its having been used. Four or five of those are on runestones, So the logic of claiming the runestones are honoring multiple women of the same name, it's pretty circular. Yeah, they're using data to support that assertion. That is the direct, the direct thing that they're trying to prove out. So it gets really really a little bit squarely at that point. And the smaller of those two yelling stones thought to be erected by Gorm also has some linguistic characteristics which might give it away as being younger than we are intended to believe. The stone credited to Harold, the larger of the two, has words that run together, whereas the runestones that gorme or the runestone that Gorm is supposed to have erected has dividing marks between the words, and that's a newer linguistic practice indicating that the Gorm stone may actually have come. Second, we'll talk about why that may have been the case in just a moment, but first we are going to pause for a brief word from a sponsor. So why would Harold have possibly erected a stone that seemed to be the work of his father, and that it appeared he may be trying to pass off as that. And again I'm referencing the work of Brigitte Sawyer, but according to her, it may have been a way in which people asserted claims of inheritance. So we mentioned early on in the episode that Denmark was new to Unification. Lord's under Gorm likely competed with Gorm for control of the lands that he eventually made his Tira would have been a very appealing marriage partner because she may have held significant power or prominence even before becoming Gorm's queen, most likely as the daughter of someone who had additional landholdings that would then become part of her husband's kingdom. It's entirely possible that she outlived her husband and remarried, and then that would have created some question marks about who should inherit her holdings after her death. The additional runestones that reference a woman named Tira may have been placed by the family she married into after Gorham died. Sawyer suggests that it's possible that Harold not only reconstructed the past by placing a run stone from his father to Tira, but that the unknown resting place of the queen is due to the fact that she may have been buried by another family in another place entirely after having been remarried. Harold basically had to prove his place as son and heir, and thus constructed the burial mounds at Yelling to establish himself as part of Tira's true or primary family and obscure the existence of another burial spot. Moreover, if the Gorm runstone was erected by Harold, it also serves as a precedent setter that Gorm was king, which literally carves in stone something that up to that point may have still been a matter of some dispute. And remember back to you at the top of the show, we talked about the morning gift from Gorm to Tira. If she did inherit Denmark upon his death as the culmination of this gift. It would very very much be in Harold's interests not to let another family then inherit literally the entire country after his mother's death. But and I know I keep saying this, it is important to note that these interpretations of the history of Gorm, Harold and Tira, and the runestones are just that their interpretations. Although they're definitely based in existing evidence, it's just viewed through different lenses. Historians continue to argue the various possibilities and details of this part of Denmark's history, but in any case, if the runestones and mounds were part of a carefully orchestrated edit of history on Harold's part, the plan worked. Because he is recognized as an early king of Denmark. It's entirely possible that excavations at Yelling will reveal additional information about Gorm and his family. The Yelling Mounds, runic stones, and church are all the UNESCO World Heritage Site, and since two thousand and seven, excavations have unearthed evidence of massive of a massive stone ship at the site, as well as a number of buildings that could indicate a fortress that was built by Harold and I believe that those excavations went on until late twenty fourteen, so a lot of those findings are still being analyzed and there could be big changes based on that analysis. We will just have to keep an eye on it. But we mentioned that we would talk about how Harold's name ended up connected to technology, and in nineteen ninety six, when a wireless technology being worked on by Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, and eventually IBM needed a name, that project borrowed the name of Bluetooth. And that was because just as Harold had united Denmark in many histories, Bluetooth was intended to unite technologies with this wireless range link. While it was intended initially only as a code name for the technology, like a development name, Bluetooth of course stuck, and that was more due to legal issues than anything else. The original name for this technology was PAN for Personal Area Networking, and it was too similar to many other trademark names, and the second choice, radio wire was already trademarked by someone else, so the project's code name eventually became its official moniker. And now when your mobile device has Bluetooth activated, you can see a small roune on your screen and you can thank Harold Bluetooth for that too. That logo for Bluetooth technology is actually a combination of the runes for King Harold's initials, So in a fun way, that history comes alive. You are carrying a reference to Denmark's Viking history in your pocket with you all the time. If you have a smartphone with bluetooth, that's pretty cool. Now, that's really like, now that you mention it, that does look like a rune. Yes, I almost felt foolish for never having had that thought. Once I read about it, I was like, well, of course that's what it is. Well, I feel foolish because I've been working at HowStuffWorks dot com for more than a decade talking about Bluetooth sometimes and I knew, like I knew at a very basic level who was named for. But the whole part where the logo little icon thing is basically a rune, did not know that. Yeah, it's cool stuff. So that is our discussion of the Yellingstones, which I really can't wait to see sort of what additional analysis comes out. We will link in our show notes to Denmark's National Museum has kind of an ongoing site that updates with the archaeological stuff. There hasn't been a lot of There haven't been a lot of updates lately. I think, like I said, they're still doing analysis. But you can see all of the stages of the digs that they've done and how they've been very carefully preserving the area because it isn't a place where I mean, there's also neighborhoods around it. It's not like just a place out in the middle of nowhere. There's been development in that area, so it's really pretty fascinating to look at all those pictures and see what they're doing and how they're they're handling it. The stones are actually now encased in like these glass I don't want to say cabinetry, but that's the only word coming to mind, but they're they're outside still, but they're in case to protect them so you can see them. They're basically on display because they're just sitting out there in between the mounds and in front of the church. It's quite cool. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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