The burial was not a warrior thrown into the ground with his gear. It was a staging. The dead man lay in a timber chamber on a bed of down, dressed in costly clothing decorated with purple and red silk and embroidered in red and blue — textiles so fine that they are among the best-preserved Viking-age garments anyone has recovered. Two large wax candles were placed with him, one set on the coffin lid. A bronze bucket and two wooden buckets stood on the lid as well. At his feet were two axes. The chamber's timbers can be dated by their growth rings to the winter of 970-71, which puts this burial squarely in the reign of Harald Bluetooth, and the man is thought to have belonged to the circle around that king.

One of the two axes is the reason the rest matters. Its iron head is inlaid with silver in patterns of extraordinary density and confidence, work far too fine for anything meant to split a shield. It is a parade weapon, made to be seen and probably carried on ceremonial occasions by a man of near-princely rank. The decoration reads two ways at once. Some see a Christian scheme in it, others a pagan one, and the argument has never been settled — which is itself the point, since this is precisely the generation in which Denmark was changing religion. The wax candles in the grave point toward Christian practice; the rest of the burial does not obviously agree.

Archaeologists needed a label for the ornament on these objects, and the axe from Mammen became the type specimen — so the whole phase, dated to around 970, is now called the Mammen style. Its signature is a large bird with a pelleted body, a crest and a round eye, its hip marked by a shell-spiral and its long thin wings looping back to interlace with its own neck and body. Look for the small semi-circular nick cut into the outer edge of the wing; that detail is diagnostic. The tail splits into three tendrils with open, hooked ends. Alongside the bird run interlaced knots, spreading foliate designs with pelleted tendrils, and a triangular human mask with a spiralling beard carried over from earlier Scandinavian work.

The contents of the chamber and the hoard both went to Copenhagen, and the objects are now held by the National Museum of Denmark, where the textiles in particular have been reconstructed and displayed to show what the man actually looked like. Almost nothing of the find stayed in Jutland. The mound itself is what remains at Mammen — a low rise in the farmland north of Bjerringbro, unremarkable to look at, which is roughly how it looked to the farmer who put a spade into it.

Modern Mammen sits about 7 kilometres north of Bjerringbro in Viborg Municipality, and if the name is familiar to Danes it is usually not because of Viking metalwork. Mammen is where Mammen cheese is made, a well-known Danish brand, and the dairy is the village's working identity. Two kinds of fame, then, a thousand years apart, attached to one small place in central Jutland — and one of them is on the labels in every Danish supermarket while the other sits in a museum case in Copenhagen.