Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Some of the other, more behavioural details found in his account may also have matches in the archaeology and in the Old Norse texts. It seems, for example, that the Scandinavians may have had professional mourners, akin to the keening women found in more familiar classical sources. The Eddic poem known as Guðrúnarhvöt, ‘Gudrún’s Lament’, is perhaps a record of such a performance, as the titular character weeps for her murdered daughter, Svanhildr, and encourages her sons to avenge their sister. From the archaeological record, some of the two-dimensional ‘female’ figurines have mouths stretched in a sort of howling pout, with deep lines etched into the cheeks. It has been suggested that these may be symbols of mourning—the women singing laments and raking their faces bloody. Beowulf also mentions women wailing at funerals.

  Even the food offerings lead deeper into the rituals. The remarkable range of bread from Birka has been sampled already, but the smallest sort of biscuits almost only come from graves and perhaps were made especially for funerals—bread for the dead. There must have been very specific reasons why it was laid to char on cooling pyres rather than being burnt with the corpses. Even more compelling is the evidence for how the loaves were divided up. Several of them preserve knife cuts in their surfaces, but in most peculiar patterns, marking the bread into many unequal portions in a mixture of radial lines and slices all on the same loaf. Was it measured out according to status, social role, family ties, or something else entirely? Did a ritual specialist apportion the pieces, naming each god or local spirit in turn? We are unlikely ever to know.

  The sequential family stories on some of the Gotland picture-stones prompt us to ask what role ancestors may have played in people’s lives. Some believe that their worship formed the bedrock of pre-Christian belief in Scandinavia and, therefore, that a relationship with the dead was of the utmost importance to the living. One of the functions of funerary ritual may have been to make a kind of formal introduction of the recently deceased to the collective of the ancestral dead—perhaps in the hope or belief that they could, in turn, aid the living.

  Simply being dead did not necessarily make somebody an ‘ancestor’, which was in some way to be elevated above the norm, effectively to be elected as a role-model for proper behaviour—and not only for the living, but in a curious way perhaps also for the dead. Ancestors were the guardians of tradition, all those ‘customs’ that the Vikings prized so highly and that were their closest approximation to the concept of religion, and also the arbiters of morality. Crucially, because ancestors were explicitly linked to individuals and families, they resided in the household (or close to it, in their burial mounds). The ancestors thus formed a much more personal avenue of communication between the worlds than ‘higher’ beings such as the gods and goddesses, and it may therefore be readily understood why it was thought vital to maintain that relationship.

  If later folklore can be believed, the family dead were also invited to important festivals among the living—notably the celebration of jul, or Yuletide. Elaborate meals would be made for them and set out on the table at night, the scene illuminated by specially made candles. This dinner would be preceded by a bastu, a rural wood-fired sauna in a cabin still very common in the Nordic countryside even today, in which the steam-filled room would be prepared and then emptied for the dead to cleanse themselves before eating. As in many other aspects of life in the Viking Age, maintaining good relations with the dead may have been just one more factor of vulnerable living in an unpredictable environment.

  How did someone become an ancestor? The answer may lie in the complexity of the funerals themselves. The services afforded to the dead may, in some cases, have embodied the process of fixing the departed in a kind of local ancestral pantheon. Even so, not all ancestors were equal, and social stratification applied to the dead just as to the living. It is significant that so many of the poetic and prose texts tell of human heroes who very much kept their status after death (Adam of Bremen mentions the same thing).

  Were graves places to tend and look after, perhaps to pass a few minutes there in contemplation or memory, or were they something else? The evidence tends towards the latter, connected to what the active conduct—the ‘service’, if you like—of the funerals may have meant in the first place.

  It is possible, even likely, that what archaeologists vaguely term ‘rituals’ were actually the literal performance of stories. The excavated record of burial may in fact document the remains of some kind of graveside drama, publicly conducted with a public message, or several messages, aimed in different ways at different segments of the audience. Think of the stage at the end of a production of Hamlet. What does the scene look like when the Dane is dead? It is a Shakespeare tragedy, so there are several bodies, but in material terms these are complemented by their clothes, weapons, and other props, and also the set pieces of the stage itself. This is a complicated environment if one imagines it as an archaeological site, which is the key point. Do the complex tableaux presented in the graves and their contents effectively represent the stage at the end of a play? The dead person(s), the killed animals, all the objects, including even the ships and other vehicles, are perhaps lying where they have ended up after they have played out their roles in the drama of the funeral itself. Returning to Hamlet, the scene at the final curtain is complex enough, but leading up to it is the rest of the play. What of all the actors who are not present in the final scene but have had major roles in the drama? The same applies to all the different settings, the hours of dialogue, the action, the historical narrative, the deeper themes of the writing, even the humour used to offset the grimmer themes. We may think again of ibn Fad.lān and those ten days of action: what were they really doing?

  And if each burial was a story, or a play, what of the connections between one funeral and another? This could be what is seen in the apparently dynastic stories of the Gotland picture-stones, and there may have been something similar on mainland Scandinavia though in material rather than visual form. At the cemetery of Gausel in Rogaland, Norway, for example, graves that appear superficially dissimilar (a female coffin burial, a male boat grave, etc.) are actually linked through consistencies between them—in this case, the deposition of a severed horse’s head in full bridle, one in each grave. I have referred to this as “funerary motif” while another scholar has called it “mortuary citation”, but the effect is the same: the continuation of a set of ideas, repeated between burials separated in time.

  Following the idea of materialised narratives embedded in the landscape of burial, it therefore seems these tales may have been connected to discrete social groups, such as families or clans. Individuals at the uppermost strata of society may have had more personalised funerals, the full ship burial, so to speak. Maybe the subject of the story was the telling of their deeds as a means of incorporating the newly dead into a larger, literally ancestral saga. Such performances could thus relate to the individual, their family and community, broader tales of identity and (spiritual) history, or to the great stories of culture heroes and myths: any or all of these elements combined, altered, and renegotiated into a unique funerary act specific to the deceased—for just this woman, here, now—in turn set within an environment of numinous power.

  There are still other layers of meaning that can be found in Viking burials. In some of the boat graves, the relative layout of the objects matches the relative position of different functions in the hall—kitchen equipment at one end, the ‘chamber’ of the lord in the centre, bedding opposite, and so on. Are the ships also houses or halls of the dead? In this interpretation it is important that the dead stay in the mound, protecting or serving their community with spiritual power—that duality with the opposing idea of death as a journey. There is also no reason why parts of the dead might not travel while other parts stayed; perhaps this is the same notion as lies behind the ‘missing’ portions of cremated human remains.

  All this did not end with the funeral, if one can even be sure when that was really
‘over’. Many cultures and religions even today have very long cycles of formal mourning and observance, and it seems the Vikings may have been similar.

  The first clue comes with the evident fact that graves were visited and used for a long period after the end of the initial funeral rites. In the great ship burial of Oseberg, it is clear from the excavation records that the burial mound covering it was originally only completed to half its eventual extent, creating a vertical face of earth over the middle of the ship, such as to leave one gable end of the grave chamber open. The environmental remains indicate it stayed this way certainly for weeks and probably months. During this period, the foredeck of the ship was apparently clear. People could access it, move about on it, and even enter the burial chamber to be admitted to the presence of the dead. One can also imagine the decomposition effects of an open grave. This was the situation when the deck was suddenly roughly piled with objects, and the chamber closed in frantic haste.

  The same arrangement has been proposed for some of the Valsgärde boat graves, although in their case they may have been housed within a sort of mortuary version of a boat shed, again left open at one end as it emerged from the cemetery hill.

  More humble graves were also opened on occasion and objects either moved around or taken. It is clear this could happen very soon after the funeral, because the corpses were still articulated and had not yet decayed. Equally, it is hard to imagine such ‘grave robbing’ (as it used to be termed) being a secret activity. How could one dig through metres of soil, dismantle stone constructions, and even cut through wooden components in silence, only a few metres from dwellings? Not least, in small communities such as these, it would have been impossible to walk about with somebody’s grandfather’s sword and expect no one to notice. There may be several explanations, of which one is a sort of sanctioned plundering, whereby things too valuable to really give to the ground would be deposited for form’s sake during a funeral but then discreetly retrieved afterwards, while the community agreed to look the other way. Another possibility is that these were aggressive acts committed as desecrating ploys in the context of feuds, or at a higher scale as part of dynastic warfare. The Norwegian boat graves were opened in this way, and recent dating of the spades used to dig the access holes indicates it took place during the reign of Harald Bluetooth, a predatory Danish king with his eye on Norway. Perhaps he was taking out rivals among his opponents’ ancestors, and thereby also weakening their grip on land and power through an attack on their family honour.

  One obvious factor in understanding Viking burials is the question of where the individual dead were thought to go. Despite the stereotypes of Valhalla/Valhöll, actually relatively little is known of specific afterlife beliefs, and what there is contains many contradictions. The graves provide small clues, although they are hard to interpret. For example, the buried dead, and even the accompanying horses, sometimes wore crampons on their feet—does this imply the funeral took place in winter, or are the dead travelling to somewhere cold? The written sources mention special ‘Hel-shoes’ to speed the dead on their way—is this something similar? One of the bodies in the boat burial from Scar on Sanday, Orkney, was that of a man whose feet had both been broken and twisted round to face backwards; was this to prevent him from following the others on their way, or to stop him coming back to haunt the living?

  The textual sources are very clear on beliefs concerning the restless dead—draugar in Old Norse. They were conceived in deeply tangible terms as reanimated corpses coming back to a kind of life. In the tales there is little rationale behind who returns in this way and who does not, although most often in life they were troublemakers, witches, and generally bad sorts. Some draugar grow in size, beyond the human, and gain strength and power from their undead state; in the sagas, they are often pitted against heroes, who rid a district of their haunting. A minority of these revenants are actually helpful—for example, dead women who return to cook and clean in a farmstead, usually to the horror of its living residents. It is usually ambiguous how the dead come back. They do not often seem to physically claw their way out of the grave, but more frequently just appear like ghosts, despite their corporeal state. On occasion they escape from living pursuers by sinking into the ground. Burials are sometimes discovered in which the corpse has been pinned down under rocks or mutilated, and archaeologists have speculated this may have been a means of ensuring they stayed put. The written sources also mention legal proceedings that could be used to formally forbid the door to draugar, summoning them individually to hear judgement and be returned to death.

  When vehicles, especially ships, are involved in burials, it is often assumed that death was therefore a journey, and that the deceased would travel by boat, wagon, or sled into the next world. This may be true, but these might just represent exceptionally expensive possessions of the dead (or their living relatives) alongside all the other artefacts. In the greatest ship burial of all, Oseberg, the vessel was actually moored in the grave by a hawser tied to a massive boulder; apparently the intention was that it should not ‘travel’ anywhere at all.

  There is no reason to expect consistency, because the Vikings themselves certainly did not. To take just one, by now familiar, example, a Rus’ bystander at the ship funeral witnessed by ibn Fad.lān says clearly to him that the dead are burnt (rather than buried) so as to enter ‘Paradise’ immediately, and that the ‘Lord’ of the deceased played a role in sending a strong wind to ensure this happened. There is no reason why we should not take this seriously; it would provide an entirely sensible rationale for the cremation rite.

  Funeral rituals probably included at least some kind of intentional preparations for the world to come, perhaps even arranged in such a way as to make one posthumous future more likely than others. This did not even have to involve a burial at all, or at least not of a body. One example of this is the phenomenon of hoard deposition, the concealment of wealth (usually silver) in the ground. Generations of numismatists have viewed these hoards essentially in economic terms—a very basic form of financial protection in the absence of banking, the earthen equivalent of stuffing your money under the mattress. To some extent this is probably true, and the cliché of ‘buried treasure’ is sometimes a reality. But in places like Gotland, where at least one silver hoard has been found on almost every farm, this cannot be the only explanation: it is simply not credible that virtually all homeowners concealed their family cash in the backyard and then died before telling anyone about it. There were probably many concurrent explanations for hoarding behaviour, but it may relate to mortuary ritual either in the absence of a corpse or in addition to one disposed of elsewhere. There is also an alternative, concerning the actions of a person in advance of her or his own death. Some ambitious individuals were capable of erecting runic memorials to themselves in their own lifetimes, which recalls Snorri’s suggestion that hoarded wealth could be buried by the person who had accumulated it in order to enjoy it themselves in the afterlife. Scholars have often been too ready to dismiss details of the Ynglingasaga account, and yet this is the kind of telling observation that is at least as likely to reflect Viking-Age reality as it is Snorri’s imagination.

  The divine realm of Asgard held two primary destinations for the dead: Valhöll and Sessrúmnir, the latter being Freyja’s hall in her fields of Fólkvangr. The poetry and later texts are clear that both of these were reserved for the warrior dead—half to Odin and half to Freyja.

  Sessrúmnir, ‘Seat-Room’, was “large and beautiful”, according to Snorri, and it does seem that this was truly a parallel Valhöll. In the Prose Edda he even calls the goddess herself Valfreyja, ‘Freyja of the Slain’, a similar formulation to that of the Valkyries themselves. This tallies with a passage in the Eddic poem Grímnir’s Sayings where Odin clearly states that each day Freyja chooses half of the slain, and that she does so first, while he ‘has’ the other half. Fólkvangr means ‘field of the host’, a kind of supernatural parade ground, where the poe
ms claim the goddess decides who shall sit on the benches of her hall. Freyja’s role as a deity of war is often overlooked.

  Valhöll appears in the sources as a remarkable place, rising on a plain and shining from a distance. Its rafters are the shafts of spears, “and golden shields covered its roof like shingles”, in Snorri’s words. Instead of blankets or rushes, its benches are covered in chainmail (quite uncomfortable, one would think). A wolf, the beast of battle, hangs over its threshold while an eagle circles above. There is a hint in the Eddic poems that Valhöll contains other halls within it, but this is unclear.

  Inside, there are animals. The goat, Heidrún, can be milked for mead of divine quality, producing it by the vatful. From the antlers of a stag, Eikthyrnir, drips dew that is the purest water in the worlds. It is clear that in Valhöll are all the trappings of hall life in Midgard, but writ large. Servants gather kindling for the fires; there are pigs to be fed; horses graze outside; and hunting dogs are at the ready. The einherjar—the immortal warrior dead—drink, play board games, and fight. If they are killed, they rise again each evening in time for supper: choice cuts of pork from the boar, Saehrímnir, roasted every day and whole again the next.

  Valhöll has 540 doors (the same as Thor’s hall), from each of which some eight hundred einherjar will pour forth to fight the Ragnarök. It has been speculated that this image may have been influenced by a dim folk memory of seeing the Colosseum in Rome—an imposing structure of staggering size, covered by arched openings, within which warriors fought in an endless show. The notion has gone out of scholarly favour now, but there might be something to it; Roman templates were nothing new in the North.

  Odin’s hall, and Freyja’s, hold “all men who have fallen in battle since the beginning”, but they will be too few “when the wolf comes”, as Fenrir inevitably will at the Ragnarök. Kings and their retinues are therefore especially welcome, with the Valkyries serving wine for such a royal entrance. One poem—among the earliest sources for the hall of the slain—sums it up. This is the Eiríksmál, ‘Words for Eirík’, composed on the orders of Queen Gunnhild, sorceress widow of King Eirík Bloodaxe of York. Killed in an ambush at “a certain lonely place” in 954, Eirík was one of the ultimate Vikings, in the best and worst senses, and his fame has not faded from the tenth century through today. In the poem, Odin and his servants hear a mighty host approaching Valhöll, a lord with kings in his train, the greatest of guests who has earned his place: