The rivets are the ship. Everything organic — oak planking, mast, rigging, the wooden burial chamber set between the stern and the mast — has been gone for a thousand years, but iron endures in this soil, and the rivets held their positions as the timber rotted from around them. In the bow lies an anchor of about twenty kilograms with its iron chain. Ornamental fittings from the stem survive. And in the bottom of the hull, still visible, are the bones of the animals killed at the funeral: eleven horses, small by modern standards at roughly 1.25 metres at the shoulder, and at least four dogs. The chieftain who owned them is not there. That absence is not an accident of preservation.

The grave was extensively damaged in antiquity, and only a few small human bones were ever recovered. One reading is that the site was a translation — a body moved from a heathen grave to a Christian one as Denmark converted. The other is violence. The struggle for dominance between Harald Bluetooth and his heir Sweyn Forkbeard may have brought raiders to this mound. A buried ship was a monument, plainly visible to everyone who lived in the district or sailed past it up the Kerteminde inlet, and its whole function was to glorify the minor king lying inside it. By removing the dead man and chopping his grave goods into hundreds of pieces within a few years of the funeral, whoever came here struck directly at the prestige of his heirs. It worked well enough that we do not know his name. Forty-five arrowheads with fragments of their shafts were found outside the rail, and a shield boss survived, but the weapons that should have been in a burial like this are simply not there.

The burial has been dated to the first half of the tenth century — between roughly 900 and 950 — and the evidence for that is almost comically small: a gilded bronze link from a harness, decorated in the Jelling style, whose ornament places it firmly in that window. This is the only ship burial from the Viking Age ever found in Denmark. It belongs to a small northern family of graves that includes the boat chamber grave at Hedeby, which was Danish territory when it was dug and is in Germany now, and the great Norwegian ship burials at Oseberg, Borre, Gokstad and Tune. Ladby is the most thoroughly wrecked of them, and in one respect the most affecting, because the others were lifted out of the ground and put on display. Ladby stayed where it was put.

The find belongs to an amateur. Poul Helweg Mikkelsen was a pharmacist with an interest in archaeology, and on or around 28 February 1935 he located the grave in an otherwise unremarkable Viking Age burial ground near Kerteminde in north-eastern Funen. The drawings he made, together with those of the National Museum conservator Gustav Rosenberg, remain the primary source material for everything known about the find — a reminder of how much early excavation depended on a steady hand and a pencil. Mikkelsen then paid, out of his own pocket, for a vaulted chamber to be built over the site in 1937, which was covered again with earth and grass so that the mound would look much as it always had. He handed the ship to the National Museum, which held responsibility until 1994, when it passed to the archaeologists at the Viking Museum at Ladby.

The Viking Museum at Ladby is now part of the Museums of Eastern Funen, and it does two things at once. Below ground, the grave is left exactly as it was found: a stain, a scatter of rivets, an anchor, bones. Above ground, in a building opened in 2007, the original finds are displayed alongside a full-scale reconstruction of the burial as it may have looked on the day it was closed — the dead chieftain laid on a bed in a replica of his ship, his grave goods around him, the dogs and the eleven horses at hand. An interpretive film draws on Norse myth and the imagery of the Gotlandic picture stones to set out what the people at that funeral may have believed about the journey into the realm of the dead. The reconstruction is the ship you can see. The other one, twenty metres away and a thousand years older, is the one that is actually there.