Breddysse

Breddysse is a Danish megalithic monument in the form of a round mound, situated about 900 m southwest of Kirke Stillinge on Vestsjælland. The Neolithic megalithic complex was built between 3500 and 2800 BCE by the Tragtbægerkulturen. The monument is dated broadly from 3500 BCE to 500 BCE by typological estimate.

The round mound contains two well-preserved, parallel chambers, although some parts are missing. Each chamber is made up of five supporting stones, a threshold stone and a capstone. No shell middens or antiquities were found in the chambers. Together with Poskær Stenhus and Runddyssen i Vielsted, Breddysse is among the best-preserved examples of this type in Denmark. Two or more chambers within one frame are fairly common in long barrows but very rare in round barrows.

People of the Bronze Age evidently took an interest in the monument, which was already more than a thousand years old. On the capstone of the southern, larger chamber, they carved over 90 cup marks about one centimetre deep and three to five centimetres in diameter, as well as images of one large and one small ship. One ship shows 6 rowers and the other 20, if these are indeed rowers. Ship carvings on megaliths are very rare.

Local tradition held that a king was buried in the large chamber and a queen in the small one. The site was also used for offerings as late as the 1800s. A nearby farmer named Knud Larsen, who lived there in the 1840s, was said to acquire wisdom by visiting the mound. In 1936, his grandson Vilhelm Knudsen recalled annual offerings at Christmas, with food and money placed on a flat stone and always gone by morning. How true these stories are cannot be known, but the mound clearly retained a magical and mythic significance into the middle of the 1800s.

Breddysse is a megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones) in Slagelse Municipality, Denmark. Wikidata describes it as: dolmen. A typological estimate: 3500 BCE to 500 BCE. No English Wikipedia article exists for it; the full text below is the Danish article "Breddysse", shown in the original language.