The Museum of Don't Let the Truth Stand in the Way of a Good Story

So after yet another morning of being slapped in the face with my inadequacy at Danish, I was seeking enlightenment, and where better to become enlightened than at the National Museum of Denmark?

The problem is that it very quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary museum.

Naturally, museums have those little panels that tell you about what you're seeing. The Nationalmuseet is no different. There were lots and lots of little panels on the exhibits offering insights into Danish society at the time that the various relics were uncovered.

For example, amber is pretty massive over here, and one of the panels had a little story about how amber was actually solidified sunbeams. We assumed that it was just explaining how the ancient Danes understood seeing something as strange and wonderful as amber and were duly impressed by the artefacts.

Ancient amber carvings

Then, in the Iron Age exhibit, there was another panel about Danish medical knowledge, particularly their advanced knowledge of gynaecology. We were concerned and confused, but the instruments on the wall looked fairly legit, and hey, it isn't really a secret where babies come from, so it isn't insane that early people would have wanted a better look.

Ye olde gynocological equipment.
Don't tell me your knees didn't just close together.  

Next, we had the legend of the Bog witch, pictured below.

The Bog Witch and infant.

I started to get sceptical at this exhibit.

Looks interesting enough yeah? Maybe some kind of club?

With this placard.

.....

The next room had this installation, with similar markings on it as we had seen on a few of the stranger placards.

Also, the antlers have nail polish on them. 

It is strangely disorientating when you discover that you can't rely on everything that you read in a museum, although it does make it a great deal more entertaining. It is also a pretty excellent idea for an art installation - exploiting that people are just going to assume that everything they read is correct.

So once we cottoned onto the game, the museum became a lot more fun. We stopped reading the actual explanations about what we were reading and focussed solely on finding the most insane and hilarious art installations.

Just what it sounds like. 

I thought that Harald Bluetooth was also made up - but he's not!

"Sun Jewels"

These are bodies of ancient Danes in their burial clothing. 

Ahhh, the Asian branch of the mermaid family...

And then we saw this. 

Complete with Princess Leia. 

Multi-purpose swords. 

The sword/trellis

Valdemar

The amazingly well-preserved foot of a person who fell into a pit of clay (?) and died there. 

The warship from Hjortspring

 

See, this is an official museum brochure, but having walked through the entire exhibit, I have no idea if it's true. 

The best part, this was only half of the bottom floor. The museum is absolutely gigantic, and is also free so we decided to call it a day after this section (which took us over 2hrs to go through) and come back, refreshed and ready for more "facts" another day.