Is Danish King Who Gave Name to Bluetooth Buried in Poland?

A view of a 2014 stone with runic inscription in memory of Danish 10th century King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, in Wolin, Poland, Saturday, July 30, 2022. (AP)
A view of a 2014 stone with runic inscription in memory of Danish 10th century King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, in Wolin, Poland, Saturday, July 30, 2022. (AP)
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Is Danish King Who Gave Name to Bluetooth Buried in Poland?

A view of a 2014 stone with runic inscription in memory of Danish 10th century King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, in Wolin, Poland, Saturday, July 30, 2022. (AP)
A view of a 2014 stone with runic inscription in memory of Danish 10th century King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, in Wolin, Poland, Saturday, July 30, 2022. (AP)

More than 1,000 years after his death in what is now Poland, a European king whose nickname lives on through wireless technology is at the center of an archaeological dispute.

Chronicles from the Middle Ages say King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson of Denmark acquired his nickname courtesy of a tooth, probably dead, that looked bluish. One chronicle from the time also says the Viking king was buried in Roskilde, in Denmark, in the late 10th century.

But a Swedish archaeologist and a Polish researcher recently claimed in separate publications that they have pinpointed his most probable burial site in the village of Wiejkowo, in an area of northwestern Poland that had ties to the Vikings in Harald's times.

Marek Kryda, author of the book “Viking Poland,” told The Associated Press that a “pagan mound” which he claims he has located beneath Wiejkowo's 19th-century Roman Catholic church probably holds the king's remains. Kryda said geological satellite images available on a Polish government portal revealed a rotund shape that looked like a Viking burial mound.

But Swedish archaeologist Sven Rosborn, says Kryda is wrong because Harald, who converted from paganism to Christianity and founded churches in the area, must have received an appropriate grave somewhere in the churchyard. Wiejkowo's Church of The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary stands atop a small round knoll.

Historians at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen say they are familiar with the “suggestion” that Wiejkowo is Harald's burial place.

Rosborn detailed his research in the 2021 book “The Viking King's Golden Treasure" and Kryda challenged some of the Swede's findings in his own book published this year.

Harald, who died in 985, probably in Jomsborg — which is believed to be the Polish town of Wolin now — was one of the last Viking kings to rule over what is now Denmark, northern Germany, and parts of Sweden and Norway. He spread Christianity in his kingdom.

Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson named its Bluetooth wireless link technology after the king, reflecting how he united much of Scandinavia during his lifetime. The logo for the technology is designed from the Scandinavian runic letters for the king's initials, HB.

Rosborn, the former director of Sweden's Malmo City Museum, was spurred on his quest in 2014 when an 11-year-old girl sought his opinion about a small, soiled coin-like object with old-looking text that had been in her family's possession for decades.

Experts have determined that the cast gold disc that sparked Maja Sielski's curiosity dated from the 10th century. The Latin inscription on what is now known as the “Curmsun disc” says: “Harald Gormsson (Curmsun in Latin) king of Danes, Scania, Jomsborg, town Aldinburg."

Sielski's family, who moved to Sweden from Poland in 1986, said the disc came from a trove found in 1841 in a tomb underneath the Wiejkowo church, which replaced a medieval chapel.

The Sielski family came into the possession of the disc, along with the Wiejkowo parish archives that contained medieval parchment chronicles in Latin, in 1945 as the former German area was becoming part of Poland as a result of World War II.

A family member who knew Latin understood the value of the chronicles — which dated as far back as the 10th century — and translated some of them into Polish. They mention Harald, another fact linking the Wiejkowo church to him.

The nearby Baltic Sea island and town of Wolin cultivates the region's Viking history: it has a runic stone in honor of Harald Bluetooth and holds annual festivals of Slavs and Vikings.

Kryda says the Curmsun disc is “phenomenal” with its meaningful inscription and insists that it would be worth it to examine Wiejkowo as Harald's burial place, but there are no current plans for any excavations.



Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter  waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
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Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter  waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)

The world knew Jimmy Carter as a president and humanitarian, but he also was a woodworker, painter and poet, creating a body of artistic work that reflects deeply personal views of the global community — and himself.
His portfolio illuminates his closest relationships, his spartan sensibilities and his place in the evolution of American race relations. And it continues to improve the finances of The Carter Center, his enduring legacy, The Associated Press said.
Creating art provided “the rare opportunity for privacy” in his otherwise public life, Carter said. “These times of solitude are like being in another very pleasant world.”
‘One of the best gifts of my life' Mourners at Carter’s hometown funeral will see the altar cross he carved in maple and collection plates he turned on his lathe. Great-grandchildren in the front pews at Maranatha Baptist Church slept as infants in cradles he fashioned.
The former president measured himself a “fairly proficient” craftsman. Chris Bagby, an Atlanta woodworker whose shop Carter frequented, elevated that assessment to “rather accomplished.”
Carter gleaned the basics on his father’s farm, where the Great Depression meant being a jack-of-all-trades. He learned more in shop class and with Future Farmers of America. “I made a miniature of the White House,” he recalled, insisting it was not about his ambitions.
During his Navy years, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter chose unfurnished military housing to stretch his $300 monthly wage, and he built their furniture himself in a shop on base.
As president, Carter nurtured woodworking rather than his golf game, spending hours in a wood shop at Camp David to make small presents for family and friends. And when he left the White House, West Wing aides and Cabinet members pooled money for a shopping spree at Sears, Roebuck & Co. so he could finally assemble a full-scale home woodshop.
“One of the best gifts of my life,” Carter said.
Working in their converted garage, he previewed decades of Habitat for Humanity work by refurbishing their one-story house in Plains. He also improved his fine woodworking skills, joining wood without nails or screws. He also bought Japanese carving tools, and fashioned a chess set later owned by a Saudi prince.
Not just any customer Carter frequented Atlanta’s Highland Woodworking, a shop replete with a library of how-to books and hard-to-find tools, and recruited the world’s preeminent handmade furniture maker, Tage Frid, as an instructor, Bagby said.
Still hanging near the store entrance is a picture of Frid, who died in 2004, teaching students including a smiling former president at the front of the class.
“He was like a regular customer,” Bagby said, other than the “Secret Service agents who came with him.”
Carter built four ladder-back chairs out of hickory in 1983, and Sotheby’s auctioned them for $21,000 each at the time, the first of many sales of Carter paintings and furniture that raised millions to benefit The Carter Center.
It was rarely about the money, though. Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who would have the Carters over to her home in Plains, recalled seeing the former president carrying out one of her chairs.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘It’s broken. I’m going to take it home and fix it.’”
He was at her back door at 7:30 the next morning, holding her repaired chair.
Carter compared woodworking to the results of his labor as a Navy engineer, or as a boy on the farm: “I like to see what I have done, what I have made.”
‘No special talent,' but his paintings drive auctions Carter employed a folk-art style as a late-in-life amateur painter and claimed “no special talent,” but a 2020 Carter Center auction drew $340,000 for his painting titled “Cardinals," and his oil-on-canvas of an eagle sold for $225,000 in 2023, months after he entered hospice care.
Carter’s work hangs throughout the center’s campus. A room where he met with dignitaries is encircled with birds he painted after he and Rosalynn took on bird watching as a hobby.
Near the executive offices are a self-portrait and a painting of Rosalynn in their early post-presidential years, hanging across from a trio of Andy Warhol prints showing Carter in office.
Carter’s earliest years predominate, with boyhood farm scenes and portraits of influential figures like his father James Earl Carter Sr., whose death in 1953 led him to abandon a Navy career and eventually enter politics in Georgia.
Some of his subjects, including both of his parents, are looking away. Carter's likeness of his mother shows “Miss Lillian” as a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India. Jason Carter said the piece was particularly meaningful to his grandfather, who lost reelection at a relatively youthful 56.
“When he got out of the White House, she was standing there saying, ’Well, I turned 70 in the Peace Corps. What are you going to do?” Jason Carter said.
One Carter subject who meets his gaze is a young Rosalynn — they married when she was 18 and he was 21. He described her as “remarkably beautiful, almost painfully shy, obviously intelligent, and yet unrestrained in our discussions.”
Another who doesn’t look away is Rachel Clark, a Black sharecropper who had hosted the future president after they worked in the fields. “Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me,” Carter wrote of his childhood.
'Just a word of praise' Carter wrote more than 30 books — even a novel — but was most introspective in poetry.
On his first real recognition of Jim Crow segregation: “A silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.”
On his Cold War submarine’s delicate dance with enemies: “We wanted them to understand ... to share our love of solitude ... the peace we yearned to keep.”
Rosalynn’s smile, he gushed, silenced the birds, “or may be I failed to hear their song.”
Perhaps Carter’s most revealing poem, “I Wanted to Share My Father’s World,” concerns the man who never got to see his namesake son’s achievements. He wrote that he despised Earl’s discipline, and swallowed hunger for “just a word of praise.”
Only when he brought his own sons to visit his dying father did he “put aside the past resentments of the boy” and see “the father who will never cease to be alive in me.”