Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  svát ek við elda yðra fælumk;

  skelfrat meyju muntún hugar,

  þótt hon draug séi í durum standa.

  You could not light fires in the night,

  so that I am frightened by your flames;

  the maiden’s thought-enclosure does not tremble,

  though she sees a ghost stand at the door.

  Importantly, Hervör threatens the slain that if she is not given the sword, they will stay fixed in the ground, “dead with the ghosts, rotten in your grave”. Clearly, the dead are meant to move on somewhere, at the same time as they also stay put in the burial mound—a contradictory picture that actually makes sense when one looks at the funerary evidence in the archaeology. The Waking of Angantyr is a much-neglected source for our understanding of the Vikings’ view of death and burial, as well as perhaps one of the best of the Eddic poems. A different translation captures the nature of the place, as Hervör stares unafraid into her doomed future, having already dared what few others have before her:

  Now I have walked between the worlds

  I have seen the fires circling.

  If you stroll through the cemeteries of the Viking Age today, unthreateningly gentle landscapes of grass-covered mounds that can make a nice place for a picnic, you might do well to recall Angantyr’s island and its night-time terrors of funeral fire, open graves at the gates of Hel. Hervör did not flinch in crossing this boundary, but on the other hand, her story is not a happy one.

  The rituals of inhumation most often involved depositing a body directly into a rectangular grave with or without a coffin or shroud. Different containers could also be used, including the detached cargo bodies of wooden wagons, which seem to have been connected to women of high status. Occasionally there are small piles of human skeletal remains, apparently buried in boxes; these may be the disarticulated remains of people who died while travelling, brought back home to the family. If this is true, it shows an interesting regard for the literal bones, distinct from the body as a whole.

  In the majority of cases, the bodies are laid out on their backs, but sometimes they are found on their sides, with legs half drawn up. There is a sense in which the dead are resting or sleeping, reinforced by the finds of ‘bedclothes’ in the form of pillows under the head, blankets, and coverlets. Sometimes bunches of herbs were buried, perhaps as a mortuary deodorant.

  Another feature of the burials is the occasional distortion of the body, with limbs unnaturally twisted or broken, or even missing; a head detached and placed by the torso, an animal jawbone resting on the neck; corpses laid face down in the grave or covered with heavy stones; and many more examples of what archaeologists call ‘ritual trauma’ in the absence of a better term. These practices used to be considered ‘deviant’ in the sense of a departure from the norm, but after prolonged study in recent years, they can now be seen as much more common than previously thought; their sheer variety concealed the scale of their collective presence. Whatever such actions meant, they were also a part of the regular irregularity in funerary behaviour.

  There were certainly regional preferences, and we see clear indications of a local way of doing things. In parts of Norway and Sweden, the dead were buried in what can hardly be called a coffin—more like an enormous elongated box up to three or four metres long. These were probably built in the grave rather than carried there, but they were nonetheless shallow (like a wooden casket) rather than making a true three-dimensional ‘room’ as in the chamber graves.

  In Iceland, especially in the north of the country, archaeologists have found evidence for wooden posthole structures over the burials—either little buildings or at least arrangements of posts. Were these mortuary houses, residences for the dead, or a place for the living to go and visit them? Beside some excavated Danish graves are postholes sloping inwards towards the burial at a forty-five-degree angle, so the timbers they contained would have jutted out over the resting place of the dead. There is no way to tell what, if anything, was attached to them, and often they have burnt right down to the base of the postholes. Several graves have indications of vertical posts erected over them, more along the lines of a conventional marker. At the close of his account of a burial on the Volga, ibn Fad.lān mentions that a post of birch was set up on top of the grave mound, and ‘cut’ (rune-carved?) with the name of the dead man and his king.

  Inside the inhumations are the same range of funerary gifts (or offerings, or mortuary possessions, or whatever they were) as in the cremations, although for obvious reasons they are better preserved. When one views the remains of the Vikings’ funerals in museums today, the contrast between the contorted fragments that had once rested on a pyre and the corroded but relatively intact items from inhumations should not blind us to the fact that the material repertoire of the different burial rites was essentially very similar. There is also what cannot be seen in the cremations, but which one can assume was probably there: the food and drink, the textiles, the furniture, the wooden implements, and containers of all kinds.

  The smallest burial mounds were probably never more than just bumps in the ground, less than a metre high. The largest would dwarf modern three-storey houses, roof and all. They sometimes appear singly, but more usually in clusters round a farm or in larger collective cemeteries that served a village or several communities combined. There are regional trends in the scale at which the dead were buried, but even in the biggest grave-fields it can be possible to trace ‘family plots’ more securely now that DNA can establish such relationships. At the larger market centres, these grave-fields can contain thousands of burials. Such cemeteries should probably be seen less as archaeological site plans and more in terms of landscapes of experience—places to more easily feel the presence of the Others and, perhaps, to communicate with them.

  The mounds might be enhanced with stone settings and curbs of various kinds, or rocks set in circles, rectangles, triangles, stars, and other patterns. Others were left either as bare earth that would quickly grass over, or with a thin covering of small stones that gave them the appearance of a cairn. Some of the barrows were surmounted by upright stones of all shapes and sizes, united only in their deliberate prominence. They are known as bautastenar in the sources. The best example of a cemetery as it originally appeared is found at Lindholm Høje in northern Jylland, where a grave-field was buried by wind-blown sand and has therefore survived intact. Almost every burial is marked by stones, often without apparent pattern but clearly an integral part of the funerary ritual.

  Other graves have no mounds over them, just the stone settings, following a similar range of patterns to those we have seen. There are also different forms, not least the outline of ships on a scale that can range from a metre or two up to the largest so far found, the 360-metre-long setting at the royal Danish site of Jelling. Sometimes the stones are seemingly randomly chosen, but there are also examples where they have been carefully sorted and arranged in order of size to reproduce the sloping profile of the ship, with the tallest stones at stem and stern. The stone ships occur singly, in pairs, and even in chains of three or four laid out end to end. Inside the ships are one or sometimes several cremations, positioned at varying points around the outline of the ‘vessel’, and also the remains of fires and feasts. These may not have occurred during the funeral(s), but might point to an ongoing relationship with the burial place.

  There are also odd triangular stone shapes with concave sides, known by the Swedish term treuddar, ‘three-pointers’. They are certainly (usually) graves, but the meaning of the settings is unknown. One archaeologist has speculated that the shape represents the roots of a tree—feasibly the great ash Yggdrasill, and thus a direct link to the mythology and wider ideas of the cosmos.

  A unique class of funerary monument, encountered several times already, is made up of the so-called picture-stones. Occurring only on the Baltic island of Gotland and in a handful of places connected with its inhabitants, these are upright slabs of the local limestone
, chosen for its ubiquity and also the ease with which it could be detached in flat surfaces eminently suitable for carving. The use of picture-stones on Gotland began early in the Migration Period and extended to the very end of the Viking Age, with a range of forms that changed over time from low rectangular stumps at the beginning of the sequence to massive stelae up to four metres high in the tenth and eleventh centuries. What set them apart from the runestones of the mainland is first their general lack of inscriptions (although these did appear towards the end), but primarily the fact that their surfaces were covered in carved images—hence the name. Outside Gotland, the only other such picture-stones known are one from Uppland, two from Öland, and one from Grobina in Latvia, all thought to commemorate Gotlanders who died there.

  The picture-stones were memorials to the dead, and have been found in cemeteries where they seem to have been raised either on or beside burial mounds. Like the conventional runestones, they were also placed along the roads and in other prominent locations where they would be seen. The Gotland stones served much the same purpose as their mainland counterparts, but utilising visual rather than textual media. On the Swedish runestones, the design and colours were enhancements, but the point was conveyed in the inscriptions and their placement (prominent names or words positioned so as to draw the eye, and perhaps picked out in different colours). On the picture-stones, the images told the story.

  They are hard to decipher, although many scholars have convincingly traced scenes and episodes from Norse mythology—Odin transforming into an eagle after stealing the mead of poetry; the tale of Völund the smith; Gunnar in the snake pit; and, especially, the epic of Sigurd the dragon-slayer. Not least, the stones thereby provide evidence of the genuine Viking-Age antiquity of the stories that are otherwise only preserved in medieval texts, and they also open up a unique window on the narratives through which the Vikings made sense of their world. The sheer scale of the Gotlandic picture-landscape confirms the importance of the narratives depicted, whether or not we fully understand what each image ‘means’. It is vital to acknowledge, however, that all this was bound up with the status of the dead.

  Broadly speaking, the picture-stones organise their images in two ways: either jumbled together without a perceptible pattern, or laid out in a stack of horizontal panels rather like a comic strip. These panels can be read sequentially, beginning at the bottom and following the story upwards. Picture-stones were sometimes set up around the borders of a farm, and the upper panel on one stone may be the same as the lower panel on the next in line following their placement around an estate border—in other words, a story ‘to be continued’. Because the stones are memorials to the dead, as each generation of monument was added they not only made the clear connection between family and land, but also drew all this together in what was effectively successive pictorial chapters in a dynastic saga. To add a final touch, the stones of this type had a distinctive keyhole-shaped outline that may have represented a door (by comparison with the portals of later, wooden buildings), and thus perhaps an entrance to… somewhere else.

  Imagine a walk around the land of a wealthy Gotlandic family, marked out by memorials to each generation of owners. That’s my father, and there’s his father, and the weathered stone by the brook is my great-grandfather. We’ve always been here, and when my time comes, I know what my story will show. Let’s go up to the doors. Shall we look through, and talk to them for a while?

  To be clear, not every picture-stone functioned like this, and archaeological understanding is also limited not only by the examples that have survived (only rarely still in their original positions) but also by our limited ability to read the images. They were stories in stone, but they also seem to have had yet another, perhaps simultaneous, purpose that may explain why particular images were chosen, and also the meaning of the apparently haphazard arrangements on some of them. On almost every Viking-Age picture-stone, of either type, the largest single motif is that of a rigged sailing ship, often depicted in careful detail with its crew, its figureheads, and even the design on the sail. On the ‘panel-type’ stones, the ship covers the lower half of the stone with the story-strips above it. On the deceptively random image stones, it is variously placed but always prominent. In trying to understand the meaning of the ship, it is worth noting that on Gotland—an island, and the literal centre of Baltic trade and its world of maritime contacts—there is not a single boat or ship burial. What if the picture-stones are in a sense pictorial ship burials, serving the same ritual functions but spelling out their message in images rather than objects? The mainland boat graves appear to have been only for the highest-status members of the community, which it is reasonable to assume applied to the picture-stones too. Gotland’s material culture and customs were different from those of the mainland in almost every other way, so why not in this?

  It does not stop here. If the ship-centred picture-stones were symbolic ship burials, some of the smaller grave monuments on the island may have similarly represented wagon burials—another class of funerary rite not found on Gotland. A set of examples comes from the elaborate burial monument of Ailikn, the wife of Liknatr, from Ardre. Four stones form the sides of a container, presumably for her bones or ashes, each stone shaped into a characteristic rectangle with a waving upper edge that is identical to the profile of the wagons depicted on other Gotlandic picture-stones, such as that from Grötlingbo parish. Just as a wagon body was a high-status burial container for women of substance on mainland Scandinavia, so its design equivalent served a similar function on Gotland. The parallel to the pictorial ship burials is exact.

  The picture-stones of Gotland probably represent the single widest window onto the thought-world of the actual Viking Age (as distinct from its mediation through medieval texts) that has survived anywhere in the diaspora. Scholars have devoted professional lifetimes to understanding their images, and every year brings new revelations.

  Such insular communities have other variations that can illuminate wider traditions. As is perhaps to be expected, the death rituals of Gotland, Öland, Bornholm, and Åland all differ from those of their respective closest mainlands. On Gotland in particular, there was a preference for larger grave-fields that stayed in use for centuries or even millennia, as well as a markedly higher frequency of individual burials with unusual mortuary behaviour that included varieties of ritual trauma. In the Åland islands between Sweden and Finland, the ashes of the dead were accompanied by a unique rite: on top of the ceramic urn containing the human remains, a miniature clay bear or beaver paw was placed. This rite is found only on Åland and in specific clusters of graves on the Volga and Kljaz’ma rivers in Russia—presumably the burials of travelling Ålanders. Thus the Vikings took their varied funerary rituals with them beyond Scandinavia, a diaspora of the dead.

  The burials that archaeologists refer to as chamber graves are in reality more like little wooden rooms, constructed underground and usually rectangular in shape. They can be up to four metres long and around two metres wide, and it is not uncommon for them to reach a depth of two metres—just enough for an adult to stand upright. They were roofed with timbered rafters, thereby making a sealed chamber of which the top was most often flush with the original ground surface or slightly lower. In the majority of cases, this was then covered by a mound.

  The ritual of chamber burial was known from the centuries before the Viking Age, especially in the Roman Iron Age and the Migration Period, but it reached a zenith in the ninth and especially tenth centuries. By a combination of their size and dignity, the effort required in their construction (especially in the frozen ground of winter), and the quality of the clothing and objects buried with the dead inside, the chamber graves were the resting places of the wealthy or otherwise privileged. Almost always inhumations, they also tend to exhibit a markedly wider frame of cultural contact than most other graves and frequently contain objects and dress accessories imported over long distances. This is usually taken to reflect either t
he contacts of the deceased (or those doing the burying), or as an indication that this was a travelled individual, or in some cases that the person was actually a foreigner.

  They are most common in Sweden, where 111 examples have been found at Birka alone; around 60 are known from Denmark and northern Germany. The latter cluster around Hedeby, and it seems likely the early towns were epicentres for the spread of what became an unusual but interregional burial rite. In Norway the custom was not as widespread, and no such burials have yet been found at Kaupang (the nearest equivalent to Birka and Hedeby). While several examples are known from Vestfold, chamber graves appear for now as a primarily eastern and southern phenomenon.

  Inside, the chambers were worlds in miniature. The dead lay in coffins, or on their backs or sides on the chamber floor (which in some cases was a proper deck of timber or at least birch bark matting), sometimes sat in chairs, or were even tucked up in a bed. Around them were often animals, including in some cases one or two horses positioned at the foot of the chamber on a raised platform. Chamber graves are also characterised by the profusion, variety, and quality of objects interred with the dead. Things were piled in the lap of the corpse or placed in their hands; items were propped against the side of the chambers, or rested against a chair; weapons and other pieces were hung from the walls; boxes were full of clothing and bed linen, which could also be piled on the chamber floor; the bodies were fully dressed in rich clothing and jewellery. It is particularly common for objects to have been laid down ‘in front’ of the dead person, as if for them to see.

  Most of the dead interred seated seem to have been female, at least in the chambers; occasionally there were seated men on the decks of buried ships. The seated corpses retained agency. In the burials of this kind at Birka, for example, the dead women were positioned—wherever their grave was located—so that their faces were looking to the settled area, presumably towards their home. The dead man of the Saga of Burnt Njál was singing in his chair, and there are other saga episodes where the deceased are sitting down. The Saga of Grettir, for example, actually describes the looting of a chamber grave that is a perfect match for the archaeology. When the thief digs down through the mound, he first cuts through the roof timbers and then falls into a foul-smelling space below, landing among horse bones at one end of a chamber. Stumbling forward and groping about in the dark, he feels the back of a chair, and then the shoulder of someone sitting in it—who then gets up and… Go read the saga.