National Museum of Denmark

Explore 9,000 years of history at Denmark’s largest cultural history museum, featuring exhibits from Denmark and around the world.

Planning your visit

The National Museum of Denmark covers 9,000 years, and its prehistoric collection is exceptional because of what Danish bogs preserve. Peat is anaerobic and acidic, and it has yielded objects that survive nowhere else: the Sun Chariot, a Bronze Age bronze and gold model of a horse drawing the sun across the sky; the Trundholm and Gundestrup finds; lur horns still capable of being played; and bog bodies, preserved human remains from Iron Age sacrifices.

The Viking galleries are the other draw, and they are properly done — weapons, ships' fittings, silver hoards, runestones and the evidence of trade networks reaching Baghdad, presented as a society rather than as raiders.

Beyond Denmark, the museum holds substantial ethnographic and classical collections, including Egyptian and Near Eastern material, gathered during the era of Danish exploration and colonial activity.

It occupies an eighteenth-century royal palace in central Copenhagen, and it is large enough to require selectivity.

Bookable options include entry tickets and guided archaeology and history tours, which help pick a route through the prehistoric and Viking material rather than attempting everything. Current availability is listed below.