Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  And of course, there are nine worlds, and nine layers of Hel, nine leagues under the earth. At the end, at the Ragnarök, the mortally wounded Thor will take nine great paces into death.

  Inside all these buildings and enclosures, there must have been a range of ritual activities going on, but central to them all was the blót, a term often translated as ‘offering’ but which meant much more than sacrifice. Closer in nature to a gift, the blót was usually an act of killing in which animals (and sometimes humans) were ritually slain and their blood poured into bowls or onto stones. Twigs were dipped in the liquid, and a red spray shaken over onlookers and buildings alike.

  The scale of the rites depended on the status of those participating and officiating. At the northern Icelandic temple-hall of Hofstaðir, oxen were decapitated in regular seasonal rituals over many years, and their skulls fixed to the walls of the building—a permanent, visible record of the respectful compact between the dwellers in the hall and the powers around them. Osteological analyses of the bone trauma revealed the animals had been dispatched with sword or axe blows to the neck, striking from the side as the beasts were immobilised by a second person. The method was calculated to produce a great arc of arterial blood—a graphically violent demonstration of commitment, something to be witnessed. The killing of birds, in particular, also seems to have been a common feature of Norse rituals, and there is a suggestion that their deaths functioned as a means of opening a path between the worlds, especially for the dead.

  At other sites, deposits of material clearly built up over time, as objects were repeatedly scattered or buried in and around the cultic structures. Examples include not only the weapons and amulet rings mentioned above, but also other objects such as ice crampons (perhaps a prayer for a smooth winter journey), spreads of broken beads, and metalworking slag. It is also clear that food was consumed at these ceremonies—presumably in ritual feasts—and the leftovers sometimes strewn about.

  Beyond these cultic buildings and sanctuaries, there is also ample evidence for rituals conducted in the open air and at natural places of sacred significance. Offerings were made in bogs and other watery areas such as marshes and tidal zones. Weapons were deposited in rivers or streams, and often at boundaries—behaviour that has also been observed in the Vikings’ overseas colonies. Rings and other costly metalwork were, by contrast, thrown into still water, into lakes and ponds, given to the beings that dwelled under the surface.

  In places that were neither land nor water, and thus a kind of liminal space ‘betwixt and between’, the Vikings built special structures on which to hold their sacrifices. Variants included platforms made of fire-cracked stone or wood, surrounded by the remains of ritual feasts. The animals have been found covered with reeds and rushes, and with bundles of flax. Offerings on the platforms most commonly include cattle, but also pigs, dogs, and especially horses. Most of them were killed with blows to the head, in some cases even with stone axes that date from the Neolithic, made thousands of years before the Vikings. Tools like these were evidently picked up in the fields by Viking-Age people just as they are still found in the countryside today, and there is folklore connecting them with the god Thor. Seeing them as ‘thunderbolts’, the Vikings may have believed these ancient stone weapons contained special powers, making them an especially charged instrument of sacrifice.

  Not all parts of the carcases were used, especially of the horses. In most cases, only the crania and the outer extremities have been found, suggesting these were in fact hides with the head and hooves attached. There are textual descriptions of these grisly artefacts being set up on scaffolds at the edge of sacrificial areas, and it seems that some of the platforms—such as that from Bokaren in Uppland province, Sweden—were ringed by them. On other platforms, ceramic vessels have been found with a hole cut out of the base. Anything poured or placed into these vessels, which stood upright on the inundated timbers, would slowly disappear, melting away as if being consumed by the powers of the water—proof of the offerings’ acceptance.

  Bog sacrifices had been a constant in Scandinavia from late Bronze Age times onwards, with weapons, items of equipment, precious metalwork, vehicles, and even whole ships deposited in the waters. The people of the Viking Age were thus continuing a long tradition, which significantly had always included the offering of humans. Some people were clearly ritually killed to accompany others in death. However, blood offerings could also be made outside the context of funerals, and it is relatively common to find human remains alongside the bodies of animals that had been given to the gods or other supernatural forces. In Sweden, many of the places where archaeologists have found human sacrifices also reappear in much later folklore and are often associated with a kind of water sprite called the Näcken. This being usually appeared either as a naked man, or sometimes a white horse with unnervingly human eyes, singing or playing a fiddle in a manner that compelled the listener to draw close. Unless appropriate offerings were made, the unlucky visitor would be drawn beneath the water by the Näcken, never to be seen again. Is this a dim memory of those Viking-Age blood rituals, where some of those who came to the place would remain there forever?

  Wooden figures of vaguely human form were also set up in the marshes, either as idols or perhaps as proxies for actual people, a kind of permanent sacrifice. These objects have been excavated from the bogs in some numbers and can be very large, taller than humans (perhaps appropriately, if they really are gods). They were often made from trees chosen for some quirk of natural growth in the wood that could be utilised to suggest anatomical detail—such as the male figure on which a jutting branch forms a huge penis. They can even be seen in the poetry. In the Sayings of the High One, Odin is wandering the roads in his outcast persona and makes a curious observation:

  My clothes I gave along the way

  to two wooden men;

  champions they thought themselves

  when they had clothing,

  the naked man is ashamed.

  Some of the most dramatic and public sacrificial sites are the sacred groves, the same as appear in the place-names. Adam of Bremen mentions one as part of his account of the Uppsala rituals, a cluster of “divine” trees in which some seventy-two bodies of male animals (nine of each)—including men and large beasts such as stallions—were suspended and left to rot. Similar scenes are depicted on the Gotland picture-stones and on the Viking-Age tapestries from Oseberg. It may not be coincidental that several of Odin’s names refer to him as the god of the gallows, and that some of the myths relate how he could wake the hanging dead and interrogate them about the future. Divination played a major part in Viking ritual, and this too may be connected with the sacrificial groves.

  The missionaries viewed such displays with particular opprobrium. The Christian cultures of Europe thought it normal to put people to death in a variety of foul and public ways, and yet recoiled in atavistic horror from a tree of hanging animal corpses.

  These sites are very hard to trace through archaeology, but something of this kind has remarkably survived at Frösö (the same ‘Freyr’s Island’ we encountered earlier as a place-name) in northern Sweden. When alterations being carried out inside the medieval church required the removal of the floor, directly beneath the altar archaeologists found the well-preserved stump of a birch tree, surrounded by hundreds of bone fragments. Radiocarbon analysis has shown that the tree was cut down in the late eleventh century—in other words, about the time the first wooden church was erected (and close to the date of Adam of Bremen’s tale of the Uppsala grove). The bone deposits date from the tenth century, thus dating the activities around the tree firmly to the Viking Age.

  The bones represented substantial numbers of animals of several species, and presumably had been offered there over many years—perhaps the bodies were even hung from the branches. In all, the remains of eleven pigs, two cows, and five sheep or goats were found, plus the heads of six elks (the North American moose) and two stags, together with the com
plete carcases of five bears. It must have been an extraordinary sight. Body parts from squirrels, reindeer, horses, and dogs also littered the ground. In a disturbing correlation with the texts, the assemblage included human bones—people were among the offerings at Freyr’s tree. Recent research on the animal remains from Frösö has shown how the killings were carried out seasonally, especially in the spring, which clearly suggests the rituals there may have been part of a vårblót, or spring sacrifice. Some of the pigs (Freyr’s sacred animal) were also selected for the unusual length and ferocity of their tusks—once again, the visual spectacle was important.

  The tree was certainly meant to be seen, as it was situated at the highest point of the island, with views over the lakes and mountains. The place-name of this spot is also telling: Hov, in other words hof, the word for the temple-halls. Similarly, it is no accident that the Christians built their church on this precise site (presumably they had the tree felled, as well), even down to constructing the altar over the stump. Specialists often speak of syncretic religion—the fusion of different traditions or faiths in an easing of transition—but it is rare to find such a thing in the archaeology, although here one might better read the evidence as indicative of violent appropriation. As in other similar situations, it is clear the Christians did not always directly destroy the spiritual customs of the North, but instead tried to convince their adherents that they were a poorly realised precursor of the new faith—that conversion required a movement, an adjustment, not a total rejection of who they were.

  The world of sorcery looms large in Viking spirituality, as do the women and ergi men who practised it. Their role in Norse life and thought was a crucial one, but it has been much overlooked. More so than those around them, these special women and men were familiar with the sutures of the world. They knew the places where different aspects of reality overlapped, and also the gaps sometimes left between. In their difference from others, these workers of magic seem to have been forced to the edges of society—but it was also there that they found their power. There is a sense in which they straddled the rivers between the realms, leaving footprints on both banks.

  It was through the medium of sorcery, not cult, that most of the conversations with the powers were conducted. Much ink has been spilled in vain attempts to classify or define Norse magic, which overlooks the fact that its practitioners probably never really did so, and therefore neither should we. At its simplest, sorcery was a means, or a method, a set of mechanisms by which people tried to influence or compel the Others to do their bidding. In the Viking Age, this was a field of behaviour that lay within the realm of ordinary communities rather than any kind of priestly or royal officialdom.

  The evidence for sorcery in the Viking Age is difficult to evaluate, as it comes overwhelmingly from the medieval sagas and poems, but on the other hand these are utterly saturated in magic. To a greater or lesser extent, it appears in almost every story, often in the most vivid terms. Thus, in an episode from the Saga of the Völsungs when sorcery was unleashed, we read how “the air and the paths were alive with magic”—it captures the weird power of the Old Norse, the crackling tension of the Other World at its intersection with our own. None of this is direct reportage or anything like it, of course, but it is striking how the literary world of Scandinavian magic is decidedly not a replica of medieval European witchcraft as it was perceived at the time of the saga-writers. In fact, the material culture depicted in the sagas is generally consistent with the Viking-Age world they describe, not the medieval one of their scribal production, arguing strongly for at least a basis in historical circumstances and oral memory.

  Another aspect of sorcery that comes through in the sources is its variety. There were different forms of magic—some relatively well defined, others as vague as the terms we use today. These were in turn performed by a huge array of practitioners, some of whom were very specialised indeed.

  The highest, most terrible magic—the kind that fell within the skill set of Odin and Freyja (who taught it to him)—was seithr. It could be used to see the future, predict fate, improve the harvest, or fill a fjord with fish. Seithr could both heal and harm. It could bring good or bad fortune. One could use it to talk with the dead. It could be employed to seduce, charm, or reduce a person to sexual submission. Seithr could confuse and distract at a fatal moment, or fog the mind with terror. It could strengthen the limbs or disable them, give someone godlike dexterity, or reduce them to stumbling uselessness. It could make weapons unbreakable or brittle as ice. Seithr could injure, it could kill, and with it one could raise the slain. It was the magic of the battlefield, the farm, the field, the body and bedroom, and the mind. There was nothing coincidental about its associations with the divinities of war, sex, and intellect.

  There was also galdr, a high-pitched singing that, it has been argued, survives to a degree in the cattle-calls that are among the staples of Nordic folk music. Still another magic, gandr, was often used by men, and there were many other forms of sorcery, with a reasonably differentiated terminology in Old Norse that we simply cannot translate. All of them could be used singly or in combination, including with seithr, to get the job done. Imagine a toolkit full of magical implements selected, in turn, for each stage of a task.

  15. Death of a sorceress. Chamber grave Bj. 660 from Birka, Sweden; the burial of a possible worker of spells, identified as such by her iron staff and necklace of amulets. Reconstruction by Þórhallur Þráinsson, used by kind permission.

  As the practice of magic was intensely diverse, so too was the range of its practitioners. We have nearly forty different terms for sorcerers from the sagas and poetry. Some have specific roles or connections—they carry staffs; they prophesy; a whole group of them ‘ride’ in darkness or cold; they use specialised kinds of magic. Other terms have more generalised meanings akin to the modern sense of ‘witch’ or even ‘wizard’. All of this was deeply encoded with sexual overtones.

  It is arguably possible to trace these kinds of people in the archaeology, as in the more than fifty graves that contain metal staffs closely resembling the saga descriptions of a sorceress’s main attribute, enshrined even in the name of the most common kind of magic-using woman—the völva, or ‘staff-bearer’. These burials have been gendered as women through the kinds of problematic artefactual associations mentioned earlier, and the bodies certainly wear the ‘conventional’ female clothing of the Viking Age. However, there was nothing conventional about the sorcerers, and it may be that some of the funerary staff-bearers are cross-dressing men, or trans women, or people who saw themselves in quite different ways. Besides the staffs, these graves include other ‘tools of the trade’, including hallucinogens, a variety of animal body parts, charms and amulets, and details of dress that are otherwise out of the ordinary. We cannot say for sure that the grave of a völva, or any other specific type of magic-worker, has been identified, but the sorcerous practices described in the medieval written sources do seem to have genuine support in the Viking-Age excavated data.

  One interpretation of magical practices such as seithr has been current for over 150 years, namely the idea that they represent some kind of Norse equivalent to what has elsewhere been called shamanism. The evidence includes the sending out of the soul, Odin’s trance, and the sexual rituals of the staff to bring spirits back to the “home of their shapes”. These debates continue, but the complex social world of Norse sorcery does seem to find a natural place as an independent cultural tradition within the larger pattern of Northern spirituality.

  All these varied practices, and their equally diverse arenas, ultimately concern the living and their attempts to communicate with other types of beings. But the living themselves could also cross one of these boundaries, into the realm of death. In any culture, the treatment of the dead can provide a valuable reflection of attitudes to life—and also of identity, gender, power, status, and much else. The Viking way of death was not only spectacular, but also spectacularly varied. In tracin
g the outlines of the Viking mind, in exploring the making of Midgard where everyone dwelled, the borders of life itself form the final frontier.

  8

  DEALING WITH THE DEAD

  THE ‘VIKING FUNERAL’ IS ONE of the most common tropes about these people today: heading into eternity on a burning boat—now that’s the way to go. Perhaps surprisingly, at least some early medieval Scandinavians really did exactly that. But they also did very much more, and one of the hallmarks of Viking-Age funerary ritual is that almost every grave is unique in its details.

  Reviewing the national registers of ancient monuments, some twenty-eight thousand cemeteries are known from the period from 100 to 1000 CE in Sweden and Norway, of which perhaps half date to the Viking Age. To this one must add Denmark, and then Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, and the colonies in occupied territories across the rest of the diaspora. Together this represents a number of individual burials in the low millions, presenting a ‘big data’ challenge all its own in terms of analysis and interpretation. This is a task to which archaeology is not yet fully equal.