A New Völundarhús in Jutland
Gunnar Iversen
The sight of the Ulmekärr labyrinth at the fishing village of Grebbestad in Swedish Bohuslän, so closely connected with the impressive Iron Age graveyard at Greby, made such an impact on our receptive minds that my artist wife, Susanne Tvermoes and I, - a Danish playwright then working on a Bronze Age cult-drama - spontaneously decided to lay out a full scale copy of the c. 12 diameter big stone labyrinth back home at Korshøjgård (Cross Hill Farm) in Sindrup, in the northwest Jutland region of Thy, Denmark.
And so we did, in 1991. Yet, there was some method in our madness. An old Nordic name for the stone labyrinth was Völundarhús (house of Weland). Weland the Smith was a household name to the Anglo-Saxons and Viking Age Scandinavians, the story of his imprisonment by the Jutland king Nidhud or Nidhad, and his Daedalus-like escape with a little help from bird's wings, date as far back as 700 AD, when scenes from his almost mythical life were carved on the Franks Casket, now in the British Museum. A 13th century historian specifies that Weland was kept prisoner in Thy!
Actually, the landscape of southern Thy owes its fascinating physiography to an overwhelming number of burial mounds under its overwhelmingly high sky. Like pearls on a string, Iron Age villages connect the Limfjord with the North Sea. No doubt, Thy was densely populated in Weland's days. No doubt, Thy had a wealthy king. At Sindrup, where the disputed Amber Route, now the A11, crosses the Limfjord on its way to European markets, was the Herreds-ting, the District Thing, on a Thing Hill big enough and flat enough to hold a thousand people or more. The Thing stone circle was removed about 1810, but the maybe Iron Age Thing Mound and Gallows Mound are still there, stooping above the fjord as they did when Canute the Great, according to the saga-teller Snorre, entered the Limfjord from the west and, on this spot, put his young son, Hardeknut, on the Danish throne. Until the days of Canute the Great, when Theodger, an English-educated priest built the first Christian church in the nearby town of Vestervig, the people of this region must have kept up their seasonal heathen practices - such as building and walking or dancing the Trojborg-labyrinth, also named the House of Weland.
Believing in beginner's luck, my wife set out to construct the house of her artisan-colleague, after having first painted a small model of the Ulmekärr labyrinth on a piece of wood and put it in the field as a frame of reference.
  the plan of the Sindrup stone labyrinth, painted before construction on a wooden board by Susanne Tvermoes.
A piece of string, 6 meters long and attached to a field pole marking the centre, was her measure taken for delineation of the outer stone circle in the field.  Along each radius pointing East, South, and  West, 11 stones were placed with the distance of a pair of feet between them, thus marking the inner circles of the 'upper half' of the labyrinth; these were then laid out. Finally, the other half including the entrance to the North, was filled in.
  the laying out process
The labyrinth, 12 metres in diameter, now stands in the garden of the Lunaria Gallery (displaying the foliage collages of Susanne Tvermoes, inspired by the sagas and myths of the Thy landscape). Overlooking the fjord which delivered the building stones, the Völundarhús (House of Weland the Smith) is open to the public.
  Lunaria Gallery can be contacted at Sindrupvej 5, 7760 Hurup Thy, Denmark. Tel: 97 95 61 00.
  The Völundarhús stone labyrinth at Lunaria, Sindrup, Thy, Denmark. Built in 1991 as a copy of the Ulmekärr labyrinth, Bohuslän, Sweden. Photo by K.E.Jensen

Gunnar Iversen, Sindrup, Denmark