Close Mapping at Large Scales of “Trelleborg” Ring Locations and Orientations

Research on the locations and orientations of ring borgs in Denmark has yet to include “close mapped” land surveyed geometry that may have defined the group as a “system” – beyond ideas of road visibility and adjacency to water courses. Aside from accurate geometric elements and the possibility of random phenomena, revealed are more complex planning patterns of azimuths that locate seven sites, and orient the axes of four. The azimuth of the Jelling ship setting to Himmelbjerget, a key natural spiritual feature in the ring borg system, suggests political, territorial motivations, though this ritual alignment may have changed direction north to a point in a Yggdrasil-like earlier spiritual pattern of prominent natural features and largest memorial mounds in Norway and Sweden – not unlike Aggersborg’s meridian alignment to Snøhetta. Questions arise about a territorial, military interpretation of the Viking “fortresses”. Despite conversions to Christianity, the motivation of ring borg builders may have been less tied to new beliefs --- strikingly absent in the rings—than synchronic inclusion with and defense of a more ancient religious landscape based on ritual rather than textual forms of symbolic process.