by Neil Price;
The research potential of this massive corpus of information—effectively a huge repository of human action, emotion, and belief—is skewed in other ways too. The most dramatic and far-reaching bias in the understanding of Viking-Age death rituals is quite simply the fact that not everyone received a grave of a kind that can be detected archaeologically. Through the tentative correlation of identified settlements, population density on the farms, and the number of recorded burials, some scholars estimate that up to 50 percent of the population are ‘missing’ from the funerary record in this way.
It is similarly unknown whether these people were of low status, or enslaved, or if there was some other factor that determined their particular manner of disposal in death. Snorri’s Saga of the Ynglingas makes a rather muddled attempt at explaining the funerary customs of the pagan past, but there he actually says that many of the dead were cremated and their ashes thrown into water—perhaps he should simply be taken at his word, as this would certainly explain what is (not) seen in the archaeology. Children’s burials are also under-represented.
Most graves contain just a single individual. Occasionally there are two—usually male and female—and sometimes an adult burial might contain the remains of a child (perhaps the result of a difficult childbirth that killed both mother and baby). It is also not unknown for funerary monuments to be revisited, either to deposit a second, or even third, corpse in the same grave as the original occupant, or to make what archaeologists call a secondary burial—for example, by placing the ashes of another body in the side of a mound without accessing the main grave. With the exception of mass graves in connection with battles, executions, or epidemics (none of which are commonly encountered), the rarest of all are those with multiple simultaneous burials. A very few of them are in chambers, but the majority of these multi-person interments are in boats. The Viking way of death never ceases to surprise us.
The Old Norse textual corpus contains very few descriptions of Viking life and belief that are actually written to inform, rather than as narrative from which a scholar can hope to glean something along the way. But there are exceptions, and one such is the first book of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, his monumental history of the kings of Norway reckoned from a vague prehistoric past through to the twelfth century. Its introductory saga discusses the dynastic fortunes of the Ynglinga family, the rulers of central Sweden and Norway who were also one of the first of the ‘new elites’ from the sixth century to leave their mark in literature. Theirs was a Viking-Age success story.
Part of this narrative includes Snorri’s attempt to rationalise the pre-Christian gods, especially Odin, casting them as human figures from the remote past who later took on divine aspects in folk belief. It makes for a queasy mix, as Snorri tries to shoehorn pagan belief into Christian sensibilities, but the element of interest here is a list of the so-called Laws of Odin in which he sets out what was supposedly the proper treatment of the dead according to the ‘old ways’. It is worth quoting in full:
Odin established in his land the laws that had previously been observed among the Aesir. He ordained that all dead people must be burned and that their possessions should be laid on a pyre with them. He said that everyone should come to Valhöll with such wealth as he had on his pyre, and that each would also have the benefit of whatever he himself had buried in the earth. But the ashes were to be taken out to sea or buried down in the earth, and mounds were to be built as memorials to great men, and memorial stones were to be raised for all those who were of any account, and this custom lasted for a long time after that.
The Viking-Age truth in this medieval concoction, if any, is very hard to evaluate. However, the Laws actually bear close relation to the funerary world discernible in the archaeology. Among the interesting things to note: all the things burnt with the dead are their possessions, which would follow the deceased to the next world; things buried unaccompanied by bodies are also for use after death, and can be selected for that purpose by the living, who make arrangements for their own afterlives; burial mounds are only for special, ‘notable’ men (it is hard to know how androcentric this statement actually is meant to be); standing stones are for the commemoration of anyone of note; and not all of the dead are treated in the same way.
With this in mind, the whole structure of Viking mortuary rituals can be viewed at three overarching levels, each identified by archaeologists but also corresponding to something that must have been perceptibly real in the past.
The first funerary decision made after a death was the starkest—whether to burn the body, or bury it (or, alternatively, whatever it was they did that left no trace). What people chose to do clearly varied by region, but the reasons for this are unknown. In Sweden, cremation was overwhelmingly the norm everywhere other than in special kinds of places, such as the market centres. In Norway and Denmark, a mixture of cremation and inhumation was practised.
The second key aspect of burial concerned its outer form—what ‘type’ of grave it was. There was considerable variation here, but within a limited and essentially consistent set of choices that seem to have been made independently of the decision to cremate or inter the deceased. The most common grave form was the earthen mound, which could be constructed in a range of sizes. Stones could also be laid out in patterns—rectangles, circles, ship shapes, and more—and the dead laid to rest within them. Bodies could be interred in underground wooden rooms, or buried inside ships and other vessels. On occasion, these variants can be combined—thus stones in a curb around a mound or set up on top. Archaeologists have a more-or-less precise terminology for this repertoire of funerary choice, writing of ‘chamber graves’, ‘boat burials’, and the like. We have little idea what the people of the Viking Age called them, but the grave forms are sufficiently consistent that they must have had a nomenclature that at least approximated ours—or, to put it another way, they would have had a means of saying, “I want one of those for my mum”, and archaeologists would probably recognise what they were referring to.
The third level of Viking death rituals was the most complex; indeed, it was almost infinite. Inside each individual mound, boat, stone setting, or chamber (and the rest of the dozen or so familiar categories), what was actually done in the course of the rituals was unique in almost every case. The variations were usually very small, although sometimes enormous, but in every case, there is a sense of the individual, of the appropriate way to send a specific person across the border into a different life.
What did that look like? The women buried wearing the skins of lynx, or laid out beneath heavy bear pelts; the swords stuck vertically in a grave; a shield over the face or by the waist; a coin, just one, that was already a century old and worn thin; a line of burials in which every corpse clasps a smooth, white pebble in their hand; a horse led down into a grave, actually standing on the corpse, before being slaughtered; at the foot of the same burial, inside the grave, a standing stone over which the body of a dog has been squashed down, ripping it apart; the man and boy buried crossways to each other in the same oversized grave, their bodies forming a macabre X; the row of spindle whorls carefully arranged along a sword scabbard; a sorceress’s staff weighted down under a rock; two horses bisected through the middle, and the halves of their bodies exchanged; a pit full of murdered children, dug down into the side of an army’s mass grave; a man in a modest burial on top of which, decades later, a boat full of people would be placed so the keel exactly covered him—a ritual repeated with more men and more boats over the years. One could fill a book with things like this.
This degree of variation applies to both the artefactual assemblages and the rites or ceremonies themselves. The selection, combination, particular type, quality, quantity, and exact positioning of these objects are all factors within Viking-Age mortuary ritual. All across this spectrum of behaviour, details can provide information about the sequence of events, the time they may have taken to perform, and the spatial arena of ritual that in some cases
must have extended considerably beyond the grave itself. Some of this might have been spontaneous, some of it planned, still other parts dictated by custom or even law.
In addition to the variation between individual graves, at a larger scale there are also patterns of regional, even local, expression. All this, in turn, must imply at least a degree of variation in the meaning behind these practices, and therefore in the beliefs relating to the treatment of the dead.
Burning the dead was not an easy task, to be attempted ad hoc by grieving relatives. It required specialist assistance, not only in building the pyre of cross-laid logs and kindling in a manner that allowed for the best air circulation and consequent combustion, but also in keeping it going and adjusting the corpse alongside the other things to be cremated. The dead may have been prepared for the pyre, even eviscerated (archaeologists find diagnostic cut marks on some fragments of burnt bone), which would have made for a less gory final process. Once the pyre was constructed, the ready corpse could be laid on top of the wooden construction, sometimes placed inside it, or, most rarely (and inefficiently), burnt directly on the ground.
It was not an ambivalent experience. Poems such as Beowulf describe how the fire “consumed the house of bone”, how the flesh drew back and skulls cracked open in the flames. Unless held down by the ‘funeral managers’, a corpse might even sit up in the midst of the pyre. The human bodies were often accompanied by animals, sometimes in very large numbers in the wealthier graves; their corpses also moved, shrivelled, and burst. From the archaeology it is clear that sometimes flint was added to a cremation, and experiments have revealed how this can suddenly explode to produce showers of colourful sparks; this must have been intentional.
Fire and smoke could be seen over long distances, especially if the pyres were on high ground. There are Byzantine eyewitness descriptions of eastern Vikings burning their dead by the light of the full moon—in other words, at night. There are saga accounts of bodies sitting up in illuminated grave chambers, surrounded by ‘lights’, and the Eddic poem known as The Waking of Angantyr mentions ‘grave fires’ blazing around the barrows. Lamps have also been found in many graves, including several chambers and ship burials—illumination was clearly part of the rites, and the obvious question is why. One answer may be precisely the heightened visual impact of flame and firelight against the backdrop of the dark.
Few people today have seen the immediate aftermath of a cremation, and we tend to be relatively insulated from the corporeal realities of death. The Vikings were intimately acquainted with them. Once a cremation pyre had burnt out, the body was by no means reduced to convenient and tidy ashes. Soft tissue and clothing would have burnt away, but the skeleton itself might have been left substantially intact, though heavily charred and fractured. When excavating the remains of burials, archaeologists can see how the human bones have been retrieved, sorted, cleaned, and sometimes crushed. They are usually kept separate from the remains of the animals laid with them in the flames—also picked out from the debris and treated—but on occasion their ashes are mingled. The remains might be placed in a pottery vessel, or a bag, or a box; piled in a little heap; or simply scattered. This could be done directly on the site of the pyre or dug down into its remains, and a grave constructed over it all in situ. Alternatively, the bones and ash might be moved to a separate site, or several different ones, away from the pyre. There are examples where the same pyre event, for more than one person, resulted in different graves, with the ashes carefully selected and distributed according to a scheme we do not understand.
All this also raises another puzzle. We know that a sizeable proportion of the population did not receive a grave that archaeologists can detect, but added to this, however, is the fact that very few of the cremations we find contain anywhere near enough human remains to equate with an adult body. Only a small, sometimes very small, portion of the original burnt corpse was placed in the ground. A modern, professional cremation will reduce an adult male to about seven or eight litres of ashes and bone material, and slightly less for an adult female. The Viking-Age cremations rarely contain more than a litre of remains. Nobody knows what this means. Did the funeral involve a partition of the ashes—some to the family or onlookers and mourners, some for the earth, and so on? Maybe the dead were stored at home, although not in a permanent way that can be traced. Worryingly for the statistics, the remains of a single person might have been buried in multiple monuments, making a sort of distributed grave that has mistakenly been recorded as several individual ones. Perhaps the cremated dead were given to the environment, to Midgard itself—yes, some part of them for the land, but other aspects of their body going to the air and the water. It is hardly likely that all these possibilities will be resolved, but one is left with the nagging feeling that the very definition of what constitutes a Viking-Age ‘grave’ is open to question.
The dead, both human and animal, were of course not alone on the pyre. The corpses were at the centre of complex arrays of objects, starting with the clothes and personal ornaments worn on the body. At the extremes, these might range from the threadbare shift of the poorest farmhand, a copper brooch and eating knife, to the robes and jewelled regalia of a king. Beyond the body and its coverings, ‘grave-goods’ at their broadest might encompass almost any aspect of Viking material culture. Some were intact when placed on the pyre, while others—for reasons unknown—were smashed first. All these things found a place (or, by design, did not) in the final grave. Like the human and animal remains, they were picked out from the ashes, cleaned, sometimes broken and twisted in odd ways, and then incorporated into the ongoing rituals of which archaeologists find only the final result. This could also include the deposition of unburnt objects along with the pyre debris—yet another stage of the proceedings, and just as opaque to us. A recent study of Swedish graves has shown that birds’ eggs were occasionally placed intact into the ashes of cremations, for purposes unknown. At least some were the eggs of ravens, perhaps suggesting a connection with Odin, the god whose mind and thoughts were embodied in these birds.
It is not known why some Viking-Age people chose to bury their dead rather than cremate them. The custom is found to a greater or lesser degree throughout Scandinavia, although with some clustering in time and place. For some, the choice may have been emotional, almost instinctive, while for others it perhaps had clear spiritual overtones. There are saga descriptions of the interred dead ‘living’ in their graves, including a wonderful episode from the Saga of Burnt Njál where men walk past a burial mound at night only to find it somehow open, and inside sits its dead occupant happily singing and looking at the moon.
The Eddic poem mentioned earlier, The Waking of Angantyr, relates a daughter’s journey to the island of Samsø (equidistant between the Danish regions of Jylland, Sjælland, and Fyn), which is depicted as a strange sort of intermediate place set aside for the dead. Hervör is one of the most well-realised and dramatic shield-maidens in all of Old Norse literature, and she is depicted here seeking her father’s grave to retrieve his fatally charmed sword, Tyrfing, intending to use it as an instrument of revenge. The poem is difficult to understand, let alone date; it is not part of the conventional Eddic corpus, although clearly composed in the same style and therefore sometimes collected with the rest. It is notable for its information on attitudes to burial and the nature of life “below the tree roots”, as the heroine puts it, and it is worth a moment of our time.
The island appears as an eerie liminal space that is somehow simultaneously part of our world and another; the doors between the two open at night, ringed with flames. Hervör is guided to the grave-fields by a shepherd, who is plainly terrified:
The herdsman said:
“Foolish he seems to me, who goes there,
a man totally alone, through dark night;
fire is in flight, the mounds lie open,
earth and bog are burning—let us go quickly!”
Hervör said:
“L
et us take care not to be frightened by such noise,
though fires burn throughout the entire island!
Let’s not allow dead warriors
to quickly frighten us; we shall make conversation.”
Determined on her mission of ‘conversing’ with the deceased, Hervör walks through the mists of flame and smoke, past the corporeal dead standing by their graves, to the mound of her father, who was buried with his bodyguard of berserkers, warriors who fought in an ecstatic frenzy:
Hervarth, Hjorvarth, Hrani, Angantyr!
I wake you all below the tree’s roots,
with helmet and mailcoat, with sharp sword,
with shield and harness, with reddened spear.
You, sons of Arngrim, violent kin,
have changed greatly for the heaping up of earth.
The grave’s occupants are dismayed. (Dead) Angantyr replies in increasing desperation as he tries to protect his daughter from the consequences of her vengeance: “the door to Hel is open / graves lie open / all the island’s surface is seen to be on fire!”. Repeatedly the poem talks of the burials ‘opening’—the flames everywhere guarding their portals—and twice the grave is described as the threshold of ‘the hall(s)’. Nothing works, even when her father warns that the cursed blade will bring the ruin of her house. Hervör stands her ground with a magnificent verse that captures not only the power of Norse poetry but also the concepts of mind (the “hugr’s enclosure”). It is worth seeing the original for its intricate wordplay:
Brenni þér eigi bál á nóttum,
