Qualla: Egtved Girl

Egtved Girl: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The British National Museum, Public domain. Someone picked a sprig of yarrow while it was still in flower and laid it on the blanket. That single gesture, made at a graveside outside Egtved in Jutland in the summer of 1370 BC, is how we know the season. The rest of what that person did - the ox hide, the folded woollen clothes, the small birch-bark box set beside her head, the bucket of fermented honey and wheat placed at the last moment before the lid went on - survived just as precisely, sealed inside a hollowed oak trunk under thirty metres of turf and stone.

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Image: The British National Museum | Public domain

Egtved Girl: What the Oak Kept

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. The barrow stood about 30 metres across and 4 metres high. When it was opened on 24 February 1921 the excavators found the oak coffin lying east to west, still sealed, and made the decision that saved the find: rather than open it in the field, they crated the whole thing and shi...

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0

Egtved Girl: The Cord Skirt

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Her clothes caused a sensation when they came to light in the 1920s, and they still look startlingly modern. She wore a loose woollen blouse with sleeves to the elbow, left her waist bare, and below that a skirt of twisted woollen cords, 38 centimetres long, hanging free. Around ...

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Image: Public domain

Egtved Girl: The Child at Her Feet

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The British National Museum, Public domain. She was not buried alone. At her feet lay the cremated bones of a child of five or six, and nothing in the grave tells us who that child was to her - sibling, kin, or someone whose connection to her nobody living can now reconstruct. By her head sat a birch-bark box holding a bro...

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Image: The British National Museum | Public domain

Egtved Girl: The Argument About Where She Came From

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The British National Museum, Public domain. In 2015 Karin Frei and colleagues measured strontium isotopes in her teeth, hair, fingernails and wool, and concluded that she had grown up somewhere like the Black Forest in southern Germany, married into Jutland, and travelled back and forth between the two in the last months o...

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Image: The British National Museum | Public domain

Egtved Girl: Standing at the Mound

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The British National Museum, Public domain. The mound at Egtved has been rebuilt on its original ground, and a small museum beside it shows copies of the garments, the jewellery and the great spiral belt plate, along with the story of the 1921 dig. The originals are in Copenhagen, where the Lejre Experimental Centre's reco...

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Image: The British National Museum | Public domain