Qualla: Nonnebakken

Nonnebakken: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Someone cut a ditch here with an oaken spade around the year 980. In the late 1990s a crew laying heating pipes lifted that same spade back out of the ground, and dendrochronology placed the timber squarely in the working life of the fortress it had helped build. That is how Nonnebakken — "the nun hill" — keeps giving itself up: not through planned excavation but by accident, in trenches opened for cables, pipes and foundations. The ring fortress was about 120 metres across on the inside, with earth ramparts perhaps four metres high carrying timber frames and a palisade, and it stood on the south bank of the Odense Å. Above ground, almost none of it is left.

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Nonnebakken: Sweyn's Ring

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nonnebakken belongs to a set. Around 980 the Danish crown built a series of near-identical circular fortresses across the kingdom, geometrically precise, and the archaeology puts Nonnebakken's construction between 980 and 1000. It went up during the reign of Sweyn Forkbeard, who ...

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Nonnebakken: The Nuns Who Named It

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Viking name for the place is lost. The one it carries comes from the Benedictine nuns who occupied the hill in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, long after the ramparts had stopped meaning anything military. At the end of the twelfth century the community moved out to bui...

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Nonnebakken: Drawn Before It Vanished

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The single best picture of Nonnebakken predates archaeology by three and a half centuries. The earthworks are visible in the panorama of Odense engraved in 1593 and published as plate 30 of volume five of Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg's Civitates Orbis Terrarum, completed in 15...

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Nonnebakken: What the Trenches Said

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Finds were reported from the hill as early as 1775, when construction work turned up an arm-ring later known as Odin's ring, and again in 1889. But the extent of the whole structure was not established until 1953. Every advance since has come from someone digging for an unrelated...

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Nonnebakken: Heritage You Cannot See

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2023 Nonnebakken was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with four other Danish ring fortresses — Aggersborg, Fyrkat, Trelleborg and Borgring — as evidence of the strategic and military reach of the House of Knýtlinga, the Jelling dynasty. It is an odd sort of...

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