PEIRCE. Passing Into Poetry

Medieval Archaeology, 54, 2010
ANNUAL LECTURE TO THE SOCIETY FOR MEDIEVAL ARCHAEOLOGY 2008
Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology
Passing into Poetry: Viking-Age Mortuary Drama and the Origins of Norse Mythology
By NEIL PRICE1
THE BURIALS OF pre-Christian Scandinavia in the Viking Age can be broadly divided into a number of basic categories, yet within these the range of individual expression in mortuary behaviour is immense. This paper proposes a model to explain such variation, focusing on the evident deliberation shown in the precise selection and placement of objects, and in the treatment of animals (and sometimes humans) killed as part of the funeral process. It is suggested that Viking-Age burials may have involved complex elements of mortuary theatre, ritual narratives literally enacted at the graveside, providing a poetic passage for the individual dead into a world of ancestral stories. A number of archaeological and literary case studies are discussed, including ship burials, emphasising the central importance of tales in the Norse world-view. The question is posed as to whether the material narratives of funerary rites could form one of the creative strands behind what we know today as Norse mythology.
The Sutton Hoo ship burial, with its curious assemblage of artefacts, is not a truthful reference to real life at all; it is itself a heroic text . . . a poem, like Beowulf, in another medium, and has many of the same problems of interpretation.2
Any student of life in the Viking Age is sooner or later also confronted with those same peoples attitudes to death, as expressed in the thousands of burial monuments found across Scandinavia and the landscapes of the diaspora. One of the key problems facing archaeologists working with the funerary practices of the Vikings3 (or any ancient culture) is the need to bridge the gap that exists between the contents of graves, as excavated and interpreted, and the mortuary behaviour that lay behind their creation. For the Scandinavians of the late Iron
1 Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, St Marys, Elphinstone Road, Aberdeen AB24 3UF, Scotland, UK. neil.price@abdn.ac.uk 2 Carver 1992, 181. 3 As in any work on the Viking Age, this paper must grapple with the intractable problems of a nomenclature for the people with a cultural background in what is now Scandinavia during the mid-8th to late 11th centuries ad. Since part of this text concerns Norse mythology, itself an unsatisfactory term but one that encompasses the beliefs of those living well beyond Norway, I use Norse here throughout, alongside Vikings in the generalist sense and also Scandinavians the latter as a locator with a chronological qualier.
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Society for Medieval Archaeology 2010 DOI: 10.1179/174581710X12790370815779
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Age in particular, scholars must additionally contend with an unusually varied repertoire of burial form that differs geographically and also changes over time. There is no exact figure on the number of extant burials from the Viking Age in Scandinavia. On the imprecise basis of a professional lifetime working with the archaeological material, and following a personal canvas of Nordic colleagues who have done the same, a guess of perhaps half a million graves seems reasonable, though open to question. From the same informal survey, one can reach a figure for excavated examples in the low tens of thousands. They fall into some basic, broad patterns: essentially the Vikings either burned their dead or interred their bodies. To these can be added the unknown proportion of the population that did not receive any kind of burial that is visible to archaeology, whose existence is confirmed by the fact that the known graves are insufficient in quantity to fully account for the settlements in their vicinity. These missing individuals may have been disposed of in water, dissipated through exposure, or else cremated and their ashes scattered. Among the surviving graves there are also some geographical trends. In Sweden almost only cremation occurs, with occasional inhumations and chamber burials at exceptional sites such as Birka. In Norway and Denmark a mixture of cremation and inhumation was practised.4 Beyond the level of cremation or inhumation, a number of clear categories of grave form can be discerned. The most ubiquitous is that of burials under mounds. Burials are found within stone settings, and also in the form of chamber graves, the iconic ship and boat burials, and occasionally as mass graves. Within these basic structures, however, the variety in the detail of mortuary behaviour is almost such as to make every grave slightly (and sometimes dramatically) different. Clearly, a generalisation of this kind is problematic without reference to individual excavated examples, but here some type-sites can suffice for the features discussed below.5 The relative numbers of burials in the same place can vary greatly, partly in natural relation to the size of settlements an obvious difference between, for example, a town and a single farmstead but also sometimes grouped in clusters that must have served more than one community. Mounds occur singly or in small groups, all the way up to cemeteries of thousands. The exteriors of the graves, the part visible afterwards to the community that made them, are found either unmarked or covered by stone settings that can take numerous different forms. The latter include rough circles, elipses, rectangles, stars, triangles and other alignments, often with other stones within them forming still further variant patterns. Mounds can also be crowned by single standing stones,
4 See Price 2008a for a recent overview. 5 Providing merely a representative selection, at the larger end of the scale a number of excellent reports have appeared on urban cemeteries, such as those from Birka (Arbman 194043) and Kaupang (Blindheim and Heyerdahl-Larsen 1995; Blindheim et al 1999). The grave-elds of several Baltic islands have been published in detail, with especially good coverage of Gotland (Thunmark-Nyln 19982006) and land (Beskow Sjberg et al 19872001).There are reports from cemeteries serving trading sites (eg Carlsson 1999), villages or clusters of them (eg Ramskou 1976; Andersson 1997; Rundkvist 2003), specialised communities such as the 10thcentury enclosure at Fyrkat (Roesdahl 1977) and spectacular individual graves such as Mammen, Denmark (Iversen 1991). Chamber graves, ship burials and mass graves are discussed further below.
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so-called bautastenar, occasionally carved with runes. Uniquely on the island of Gotland (Sweden), memorial stones carved with pictures occur.6 Inhumation burials are found under mounds but also flat to the ground surface, apparently unmarked. The bodies are laid out on their backs or on their sides, with knees straight or legs flexed, and with many other variations of limb arrangements including corpses buried prone. They may be just placed directly in the earth, or in shrouds or coffins. The dead could also be interred in other vessels such as the detachable bodies of wagons (especially for women)7 and even small boxes, with bodies folded and crammed into them. There are regional variations in all this, as in Norway where people were sometimes buried in large coffin boxes, taking the form of over-sized graves lined and floored with wooden planking in a construction that had been built inside the cut rather than being lowered into it.8 Often lined with mats of birch bark covered with textiles, the same features can also be built of stone. In an increasing number of burials, especially in Iceland, evidence is now being found for post-built structures erected over inhumation graves. Resembling small buildings, some of them also appear one-sided and even with posts inserted at an angle, perhaps making some kind of shelter-like affair above the interment.9 Chamber graves effectively take the form of underground rooms built in wood, with walls, floors and raftered roofs, usually covered by a mound.10 There are no standard dimensions, but the Swedish examples average 2 m deep and may be up to 4 m in length. These are substantial structures requiring considerable investment to build, especially in a Scandinavian winter. Most often found in urban cemeteries, they were apparently reserved for occupants of high status, buried in fully furnished environments packed with objects, animals, food and drink. Here too the dead could be laid out on their backs or sides, or even sitting in chairs; many examples of the latter rite have been found in Sweden and Russia particularly.11 Alongside these there are the famous burials within boats and ships that have become iconic for the period.12 A funerary association with maritime craft could extend all the way from a simple one-person rowing boat up to a large ocean-going vessel. What appear to be dugout canoes have been found, as have graves that somehow reference boats (for example through inclusion of a few boat timbers alone) without actually containing them. Sometimes graves are just shaped like boats, even fitted out with stone benches inside, and still others are deposited as cremations in and around stone settings in the form of ships. These latter can again range dramatically in size and form, from a couple of metres to considerably bigger than any real longship could ever have been. In addition to all these there are also rarer forms of burial such as mass graves, perhaps more
6 Lindqvist 194142; Nyln and Lamm 1987. 7 Hgg 2009. 8 Shetelig 1912. 9 The graves at Litlu-Npar, Lyngbrekka, Kumlabrekka and Ingirarstair are unpublished at time of going to press, but the author thanks Howell Roberts and ra Ptursdttir of the Institute of Archaeology in Reykjavk for discussing them. Interim reports in electronic form can be obtained from the Institute <www. instarch.is> [accessed 9 August 2010], and a brief but well-illustrated popular article on the burials has appeared as Roberts 2009. 10 Eisenschmidt 1994; Ringstedt 1997; Stylegar 2005. 11 Grslund 1980; Robbins 2004. 12 This form of grave is referenced in detail below.
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situational in that they probably relate to specific events, such as plague affecting large numbers of people in a single locality.13 Although most graves contain a single individual, it is not uncommon for two, three, four or more bodies to have been buried on the same occasion. Beyond even this the variation continues, over literally thousands of graves, all different. The beginnings of a quantification of this data were made in the early 1990s, with the ground-breaking work of Johan Callmer. In two publications mapping ethnic diversity in the southern Baltic,14 he trawled the museum archives of the region to isolate differences in the burial traditions of each site, painstakingly charting variation in mortuary behaviour at the most detailed level. In real terms, this is the difference between burying the dead with a pot to the right of their heads in one village, and with a pot to the left in the next, but writ large through every aspect of ritual practice and across the full artefactual spectrum. The results were startling, especially for their time, in that they demonstrated the truly individual nature of funerary rites, not just within and between regions, or from one settlement to the next, but even within discrete communities. Similar mapping was undertaken more recently with a tighter focus in south-eastern Scandinavia by Fredrik Svanberg,15 confirming Callmers findings. Many research questions arise when all this bewildering variety is considered together, but one emerges as an imperative. What can explain the presence of so many individual, exact and deliberate expressions of mortuary behaviour, yet unfolding within a broadly consistent framework of funerary practice that takes a relatively small number of discrete forms? To put this in practical terms for just one of those forms, archaeologists can identify a clear category of ship burials, but in their precise details each grave is unique. What does this mean? This paper presents a model to explain this patterning. The ideas proposed, while speculative, are nevertheless solidly linked to the collective data-set represented by the excavated graves. The difficulty in citing representative material from such a massive corpus has been mentioned above, but it is important to understand the depth of individuality and deliberation in the graves. As an opening case study, a single example to stand for many, I therefore consider a complex sequence of burials from one of several cemeteries serving an early trading site in Norway. FIVE DEAD AT KAUPANG The scene is a small, beachfront trading community, located in the outer reaches of the Oslofjord. Known today as Kaupang, market, to its inhabitants it was Skringssalr something like the shining hall, perhaps named after its lords residence on the hill behind. It appears now as an inlet on the little
13 Two examples connected to probable Viking armies or raiding parties have been discovered in the UK at Repton see Biddle and Biddle 1992 and at Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth, as yet unpublished but summarised on the excavating units website <thehumanjourney.net> [accessed 9 August 2010]. 14 Callmer 1991; 1992. 15 Svanberg 2003.
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Viksfjord, with gently sloping soils leading up to scrub woodland on the higher ground. In the 9th century, the early Viking Age, the shoreline was several metres higher than today and the waters much more accessible to shipping, explaining the rise on this spot of the Kaupang settlement. A few elusive details of this young emporium are contained in the descriptions of the arctic trader Ohthere relating his voyage to the Baltic.16 Excavations at Kaupang first by Charlotte Blindheim from 195067 and later by Dagfinn Skre from 200003 have revealed rows of small houses and workshops strung out along the waters edge, with access to wharves where the ships came in from around the whole region.17 The scene at the quayside can be imagined, a bustling community of merchants and others looking to take advantage of a commercial centre.18 Here, attention can be focused on what was going on just outside the settlement, in the cemeteries that developed around it, on promontories and on the low heights along the edges of the fjord. More specifically, we can consider one grave, a multiple burial so complex that when it was originally excavated in the 1950s it was recorded as four separate features and later published in an extremely fragmented way.19 Only during the second Kaupang project was it recognised as a single entity, renumbered as Ka. 2947, and even then discussed only briefly.20 The interpretation presented here is my own. The sequence begins in the midlate 9th century when a man of indeterminate age was buried on his left side, his head to the north-east, probably dressed in a cloak because a penannular brooch was found at his shoulder. He had been interred with his chest pressed up against a large stone, and his body had been covered from the waist down with a cloth of very fine quality, drawn up like a blanket over his legs. With him were a handful of objects: two knives, a fire steel and two flints, a whetstone, some fragments of a soapstone vessel and what the excavators called an egg-shaped stone. Some unspecified iron objects, perhaps tools, were also found. Little in this is particularly exciting, though even this meagre burial has its own character and individualism, everything in it being there for a reason. A few nails and rivets may have come from a small box or may be intrusions resulting from what was to happen above the grave. Several decades later, probably in the early 10th century, a clinker-built boat 8.5 m long was placed on top of the dead man, its keel aligned SWNE along the axis of his grave (which indicates that its location was remembered). Inside the boat were the bodies of four people: a man, two women and an infant, together with a number of animals. Around and above the bodies, laid out together with them or deposited above them as the boat was filled with earth, were numerous objects (Fig 1). In the prow a man and a woman lay on the decking, perhaps on blankets. The woman was aged about 4550 when she died, arranged on her back with
16 Bately and Englert 2007. 17 The main reports on the early investigations can be found in Blindheim et al 1981; 1999; Blindheim and Heyerdahl-Larsen 1995; Hougen 1993; Tollnes 1998 and Blindheim 2008. Publication of the later investigations is ongoing but at present two volumes have appeared, Skre 2007 and 2008. A complete bibliography for the site can be found online at <www.kaupang.uio.no>. 18 Skre and Stylegar 2004. 19 Blindheim and Heyerdahl-Larsen 1995, 226, 925, 99, 103, 11520, 1289. 20 Stylegar 2007, 95100, 1223.
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fig 1 A reconstruction of grave complex Ka. 2947 from the Bikjholberget cemetery at Kaupang, Norway, dated to the early 10th century. Drawing by rhallur rinsson, Neil Price.
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her right hand on her breast, ankles crossed and her feet pointing into the prow. Her head was resting on a stone, like a pillow. She was expensively dressed, her clothes held together with two gilded oval brooches and a trefoil brooch, beads and a silver ring strung between them. At her waist, probably hanging from a belt, were a knife and a key. To her immediate right was a bucket; balanced across her knees, a weaving sword. A sickle lay somewhere nearby. A baby was bundled at her hip, with the womans left hand probably resting on its head. Lying head to head with the woman, arranged symmetrically with his feet pointing to the stern, was a man of unknown age. He had been placed slightly twisted, his upper body lying supine while his legs were flexed and bent to one side at the waist. Spatially, though not necessarily personally, associated with him were numerous weapons: two axes of different types, of which one was an antique when it was buried; a throwing spear; a sheathed sword, its point by his head, with two knives and a whetstone next to it; a shield (two more lay nearby); a quiver of arrows implying probably also a bow, now decayed. On his midriff lay an inverted frying pan. Two spindle whorls had been carefully placed on the sword scabbard. A pot of German manufacture had been smashed and its pieces scattered over the mans body along with three glass beads, near a soapstone vessel. Two more of the latter were deposited at the mans feet. An iron dog chain was draped next to him. Amidships, a bridled horse had been killed and laid on the deck. Its exact manner of death is unknown but in the absence of other injuries its throat was probably cut. Irregularities in the bone assemblage also suggest that the horse was decapitated and roughly dismembered, its limbs and body parts then placed back in approximately anatomical positions. A single spur was thrown into the fill above the mangled corpse. In the stern of the boat was a second woman, apparently buried sitting up, either in a chair or hunched up against the rising end of the vessel. Most organics are lacking from the grave, but from the womans location and her seated posture it is possible even likely that the steering oar of the boat was resting in her hands. A whetstone and a bridle-bit had been placed by her feet, which touched the carcass of the horse. She seems to have been well dressed, her clothes fastened with oval brooches and beads, fragments of textile suggesting high-quality fashion. In addition, she was apparently wearing some clothing item made of leather, very unusual apparel indeed. Somewhere close to her was a shield, perhaps behind, in the stern itself. To her right, resting on the deck, another enigmatic egg-shaped stone and a weaving sword of iron. To her left, an iron staff pinned down under a large rock. In the womans lap was an imported Insular bowl of bronze that had been scratched with runes, i muntlauku, in the hand basin. The bowl contained an unidentified object of gilt copper alloy fixed with iron nails, a copper-alloy ring that might have been used to suspend the bowl, a tweezer-like object, and the severed head of a dog. Its body lay crossways over the womans feet. One pair of its legs, perhaps detached, lay a little below the torso; the other legs were missing. Marks on the bones suggest crude carving of the flesh before the ragged skeleton was reassembled. Around the woman were also found fragments of wood and (curiously) bark, pieces of sheet iron and objects of copper alloy; the nature of these items is unknown.
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The iron staff might offer a small clue to the identity of the dead steerswoman, as it is of a kind identified by several scholars as a tool of the vlur and other female magic-workers who feature extensively in the Old Norse poetic and prose sources. I have discussed these possible sorceresses extensively elsewhere and will not pursue this aspect of the Kaupang grave further here, except to a note a suggestive parallel: another of these staff burials, grave 4 from Fyrkat in Denmark, contains a woman with the only other known example of a leather costume.21 The four people in the boat, the horse and the dog were probably not alone. The excavation records are incomplete here, but it looks as though there were other animals, too. Several loose animal teeth were recorded, scattered around the body of the woman in the prow. The whole burial was then covered with earth and several layers of stones, bounded by a stone kerb around a low mound. The excavators also found patches of cremated bone and wood mixed in the deposit, hinting at further rituals about which we know nothing. Other objects, too, had been thrown in between the stone layers as the grave was being filled: a silver arm-ring above the mans body; another axe and an iron ring above the woman in the stern; more broken fragments of soapstone vessels. Beyond the obvious but not especially informative notion of disposing of the dead, what was actually happening on the banks of a Norwegian fjord in the early 10th century? This is only one short sequence in a much larger cemetery, which is itself one of several surrounding the Kaupang settlement. The ship burial also represents only a few decades in the couple of centuries that the grave-fields were in use. The relationship between this grave and those around it will be examined further below, but for now I wish to pursue the larger picture through the lens of close examples such as this, a detailed window on the widespread diversity in the funerary practices of the Vikings, not only in Scandinavia but also in their burials across the vast region through which they moved during the late 8th to 11th centuries ad. At Kaupang, then, we find a burial of four people in a boat, itself placed on top of another grave, a few decades old. Were the man and woman a couple, with their child? Or were they unrelated? Who was the woman sitting in the stern, perhaps some kind of witch? Did they all die together, either violently or through illness? Was one or more of them killed to accompany the others in death? Whose were the boat and the animals, or did they belong to none of the dead? Given all that is known of contemporary shape-changing beliefs, and the permeable boundaries between human and animal in particular contexts,22 it is possible that the horse, dog and any other creatures originally in the grave may represent more than mere livestock. What do the objects mean, and would a contemporary understanding of them even approximate to our own? What connection did all this have with the man under the keel? It is very hard indeed to suggest precise answers to questions such as these, reasonable though they are. However, precision can be found in a different sense, namely by acknowledging the degree of it present in the burial by noting the detail, the deliberate choice and positioning of objects, the placement
21 Price 2002. Fyrkat: ibid 14957; Pentz et al 2009. 22 See Price 2002, 5960, 36474.
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of the humans and animals. The treatment of these Viking-Age dead is eloquent in its sheer specificity. It is also vital to be wary of obvious categorisation. The archaeology of death has attracted considerable theoretical debate over several decades,23 but with some polarisation we can observe that burials have traditionally been looked at as assemblages of things, or grave-goods, often taken problematically to represent typical forms of contemporary material culture. They are usually catalogued and described in great detail, but often left simply as a list. At the same time they can be perceived as the results of sequences of actions, the process of the funeral ceremonies or rituals that made the grave. Of course this has rarely been an either/or in archaeological practice, but in the study of Viking-Age burials there has undoubtedly been an emphasis on description over analysis. Many cemetery reports stop at the presentation of data without attempting to understand what it might mean across a sliding scale of social context. In countering this, the Viking archaeologist can not only look to inspiration in the Anglo-Saxon world,24 but also to the helpful trend of the last decade or so that has focused on materiality. This concerns the study not of objects or materials, but of the way in which these things actually constitute and structure behaviour,25 illuminating the process whereby we make things, but things also make us. Our whole world, and those of past peoples, is full of objects that guide and constrain our actions. This is a concept that of course is highly applicable to Viking burial ritual, in which those performing it not only react and conform to an established pattern of behaviour (what you do at a funeral) but also add to it and deepen its complexity at the same time. The objects selected for disposal with the dead in part condition what you do with them, and at the same time what needs to be done in part decides what objects are required to do it. In this spirit, the next stage of enquiry is to ask how variation on this scale might have been produced what actually went on at a Viking funeral? DEATH ON THE VOLGA We are fortunate here to have a written record that will be familiar perhaps overly so to those studying this period, namely the account of an arguably Scandinavian ship cremation on the banks of the Volga, witnessed in ad 922 by an Arab soldier on a northern mission from the Caliph in Baghdad. He later wrote about what he had seen in a document known as the Risa la (literally Report, though this should not be taken as an overly official text). Readers may be surprised to see Ibn Fadlan described as a soldier rather than a scribe or religious scholar, but this and many other new suggestions are some of the things coming out of the recent work by scholars of classical Arabic such as James Montgomery, whose publications have revolutionised our understanding of this critical text.26 The literature on Ibn Fadlan is vast, encompassing more than two dozen variant translations into different languages alongside a
23 Eg Chapman et al 1981; Parker Pearson 1999; Williams 2003. 24 Eg Carver 2005; Williams 2006. 25 Eg Olsen 2003; DeMarrais et al 2004; Miller 2005. 26 Montgomery 2000; 2004a and b; 2006; 2008.
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number of critical editions of the manuscripts, together with hundreds of secondary sources.27 His description of the funeral alone runs to many chapters and is too long to present here in full, but in its outline at least it is well known. Here I wish to draw out just a few key points in his word-picture of what happened at this funeral, but it is first necessary to address some source-critical problems. ibn fadlan and source critique A great many caveats have always been present in any attempt to generalise about Viking mortuary behaviour from Ibn Fadlans description. Are his al-Ru s yyah really Scandinavians at all? Even if they were, how typical were the actions of a group of mobile traders, in the early 10th century, far from home and in a distinctly multi-ethnic environment? Are other cultural traditions mixed up here with those of the North? And can we trust what Ibn Fadlan says anyway? What does he alter, omit or simply misunderstand? Comprehensive engagement with these problems could take a book in itself, but some outline responses can be presented here with reference to the specific conclusions drawn. We know that al-Ru s and al-Ru s yyah were terms applied by Arab authors in a far from consistent manner. Usage varies from one writer to another, though it almost always carries a connotation of northern foreigner. It is more than likely that individual travellers did not know the precise geographic origins of the Rus they encountered.28 Similarly, it has long been understood that Rus denoted a contextualised, hybrid identity developing over time, akin to the Anglo-Scandinavians or Hiberno-Norse of the British Isles and the Normans on the Continent. By the early 10th century, when Ibn Fadlan met them on the Volga, the label also probably carried greater implications of discrete ethnicity, and it is worth remembering that unlike the new identities of the West, this was a name that is known to have been used at the time and self-applied.29 However, it has never been in doubt that Rus identity included a very major Scandinavian component, and the frequent passage of individuals to and from the Nordic region into the eastern rivers should be remembered: the territory of European Russia was very far from being a foreign place to the Vikings. A significant distinction should also be made between merchant travellers on the river systems and the more settled urbanites of Kiev and Novgorod. Each textual reference should be considered in context, and in the case of Ibn Fadlan it is striking how often scholars ignore the telling details of his account in favour of broad-brushed reference to the supposedly insoluble complexities of Rus ethnogenesis. To begin, it is probably not irrelevant that Ibn Fadlan describes the men he encountered as tall, blond or red haired, with pale complexions perhaps the ultimate clich of Nordic appearance but nevertheless interesting. The
27 This material is too large to address here, but references can be found in Montgomerys work; see also Price 2008b, Lund Warmind 1995 and Schjdt 2007 for comments from the respective viewpoints of an archaeologist and two historians of religion. 28 Montgomery 2008. 29 Shepard 2008.
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details given of clothing for both men and women match the evidence of grave finds in Scandinavia. As for the Rus burial rituals in the Risa la, if his report does not record a Scandinavian funeral, then why is it that almost every single material aspect of its procedures can be matched in the archaeological record of the Nordic countries, but not in the cultures of the Volga? These include the ship cremation itself, the presence, location and appearance of the chamber, the specific grave-goods of weapons and food, the couch-bed and its furnishings, the clothing of the dead man, the corpses seated posture, the animal killings and the death of another person as part of the ritual.30 Even the more esoteric actions, such as a woman being elevated by men to look over a door-like structure and experiencing some kind of vision, have an exact parallel in Old Norse poetry.31 Taken together, this very strongly suggests not only that Ibn Fadlans al-Ru s yyah or at least the decision-making members of the group were Scandinavians, but also that their actions among the Bulgar closely resembled what they did at home. There are also more subtle hints contained in his choice of words that may help corroborate this Scandinavian interpretation. The Angel of Death has a suggestive title, considering that Ibn Fadlan must have been translating something he was told in a different language into a term he could understand. He decided to use the Arabic Malak al-Maut, which in Islam is the name of the angel that separates the soul from the body at death, and who is responsible for taking the dead at their fated time. It is quite a close approximation of chooser of the dead, or valkyrja. This is not to say that there are not foreign elements in Ibn Fadlans description. The slaves vision over the door, with its vista of a Paradise beautiful and green occupied by her dead family and master, is actually similar to descriptions of the Khazar afterlife, as Montgomery has observed.32 That said, it might be unlikely for Scandinavians to have Scandinavian slaves. There are also practical problems that cannot be solved without more data coming to light. How does Ibn Fadlan know what is going on inside the grave chamber or the tents? Is someone telling him, are the interiors somehow visible, or is he inventing? the ten-day funeral If we return to the detail with all this in mind, it can be noted that the whole process of arranging the burial rites is so time-consuming that it is necessary to begin by building a temporary grave for the dead man. In practical terms this is simply somewhere to keep the corpse while everything is prepared, but even this modest inhumation is roofed with timber. With the body are placed
30 To note only a few comparisons, these include the ship burials from Oseberg, Gokstad, Ladby (Denmark), Hedeby and the later graves at Valsgrde as well as Viking-Age funerary monuments outside Scandinavia on the Isle of Man and the le de Groix (France). See Nicolaysen 1882; Brgger et al 191728; Bersu and Wilson 1966; Mller-Wille 1976; Crumlin-Pedersen and Thye 1995; Srensen 2001. An early catalogue of ship burials was compiled in 1970 by Mller-Wille. 31 In the Vlsattr poem, contained in the late 14th-century manuscript of Flateyjarbk but probably much earlier in itself, a woman presiding over a sexual ritual asks men to lift her over door-hinges and over door-lintels, where she looks into an ambiguous other place from which she attempts to retrieve a sacrice; see Steinsland and Vogt 1981. 32 James Montgomery pers comm.
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food, drink and musical instruments. In the context of a temporary burial, it does not seem unreasonable to see these as representing entertainment, something to pass away the time. This in turn implies that the dead man is somehow still a presence, if rather passive. There then follow ten days of activities. If the events of this period are viewed as a whole, there is no reason why these should be seen as leading up to the real funeral on the last day when the ship is cremated. The ceremonies clearly begin the moment the man is dead and do not stop until the onlookers leave the freshly constructed mound for the last time. This is a ten-day funeral at the very least. One of the first tasks to be undertaken is the making of special, extremely rich clothes specifically for the deceased to be buried in (purpose-made funerary apparel has potentially worrying implications for the interpretation of excavated graves). These garments cost a whole third of the dead mans wealth, though presumably this means ready capital rather than his estate, remembering that these are people on the move. Another third finances the brewing of special funeral drinks. The spending of so much wealth on the making of alcohol, and more than a week of subsequent drinking, may be more important than previously acknowledged. Ibn Fadlan notes how extraordinarily intoxicated everyone is, and also that this was common practice at funerals of this stature. This may be due to religious culture shock on his part, but it does not necessarily render what he describes either inaccurate or atypical. And yet how often is the possibility entertained that some of the Viking-Age burials excavated in other parts of the Scandinavian world might have been created by people who were drunk? The elements of sacred frenzy and ecstasy associated with, for example, the cult of inn, are well known and may not be irrelevant here. It seems clear that the whole community was involved in the funeral, with general participation in days of feasting, drinking, music and sex. This feature of Ibn Fadlans description, and especially the alcoholic and carnal aspects, has led to a common view of the proceedings as a giant party, in keeping with the stereotype of boisterous Vikings up for a seriously good time. However, this attitude again avoids engaging with the detail of the text and in some respects rather distastefully distorts what is actually going on. In particular, the directions of the Angel of Death and her daughters, and the rites performed, all concern precise, deliberate actions just as observed above in the excavated graves. This is anything but freeform rowdiness. Similarly, a party time interpretation of the alcohol consumption ignores the fact (mentioned by Ibn Fadlan) that ten full days of intoxication is literally hazardous to life. As for the sex, it is hard to judge the degree of coercion involved in most of the acts with the female slave, but those occurring just prior to her death, as the beating of staves muffles the sound of her cries, can only be seen as rape. The latter primarily concerns power rather than desire, and it is very hard indeed to see any kind of celebration in raping a screaming girl on the same bed as a ten-day-old corpse.33 Not just a matter of modern moral sensibilities confronted with alien values of the
33 Variations on this theme include both lurid and apparently romantic readings, an example of the latter being the writer Bruce Chatwins version of events (1990, 178), in which the six men in the chamber did not rape the slave but made love to her, before she lay back exhausted.
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past, these events concern people who are all constrained by rules in ceremonies that are managed. The Angel of Death is a funeral director, and together with everyone else she is clearly following an agreed procedure. On the day the pyre is lit it seems that the rituals intensify and grow in complexity, and without repeating the usual tropes of Risa la interpretations it is still possible to draw some new conclusions. Ibn Fadlans description of the deck construction like a tent made of wood is striking, because we have Viking-Age camping gear from Gokstad (Norway) among other ship burial sites and the resemblance with the chamber on that vessel is exact.34 There is no structural reason why these grave chambers need be triangular in cross-section, so this suggests that it really may have been intended to resemble a tent, an interesting kind of temporary resting place. There may also be a link to the tents set up around the ship, where the slave copulates with each man in turn. Ibn Fadlan notes that they had been pitched there after the ship had been drawn up for burning, so perhaps the tents are part of the ritual and put there for the purpose, even related to the wooden version on the deck? The seated posture of the man bears close comparison with excavated burials, and not just the chamber graves such as those in Birka where such rites are relatively common. The woman sitting at the stern of the Kaupang boat has been mentioned above, and at least one of the Vendel ships (Sweden) also had a seated corpse, a man in a chair on the deck.35 In Ibn Fadlans example, the dead man may have been seen as sleeping, in the same position adopted for the night as in the cramped bed-closets of Norse halls. Interestingly, apart from his weapons there is no real suggestion that any of the objects placed in the ship or the chamber actually belonged to him another worrying factor for archaeologists. The deaths of the animals are interesting, and quickly blur any easy categories of sacrifices and offerings. First, the different creatures are chosen with care, and have a part to enact before they are killed witness the horses being run until blown and lathered. It appears significant how many animals there are, of different species, entering the scene at specific points in a clear sequence. They are participants, and they are killed in precise ways that have nothing to do with the efficient methods of the slaughterhouse. The horses in particular are hacked to pieces while alive, presumably rearing and screaming, while the dog is bisected and the birds decapitated both with knives and by tearing. The body parts are also treated precisely, being thrown either to one side of the ship or onto the deck. All of this echoes excavated ship burials, and it is important to emphasise just how many animals might be involved. On the foredeck of the Oseberg ship (Norway) was a heap of at least ten decapitated horses and three headless dogs, with a further three horses and an ox beheaded outside the vessel by the prow, while the severed head of a very large ox had been carefully tucked up in a bed on the deck.36 At Gokstad, at least 12 horses and six dogs were killed outside the ship and arranged along its sides, while a peacock had been laid aft of the
34 Nicolaysen 1882. 35 Vendel grave 9; Stolpe and Arne 1912, 37. 36 Brgger et al 1917.
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grave chamber.37 In this, as in Ibn Fadlans description, too little thought has been given to what these events would have looked, sounded and smelled like. The graceful lines of the Oseberg ship as it is currently displayed in Oslo belie the fact that at the time of burial it must have been dripping with blood. How did the animals react after the first of their number was killed? It is not difficult to imagine the noise, to visualise the gore covering ship, objects and onlookers, and to scent the blood and offal. This is not an exercise in gratuitous melodrama, but an attempt to recapture an integral part of the funerary experience for those who were there. Violent spectacle seems to be important, something confirmed by other, recent finds of Viking-Age animal killings in ritual contexts, such as the hall at Hofstair in Iceland.38 A similar pattern is drawn to an extreme in the person of the slave, who the Arabic nouns imply is about 14 or 15 years of age. As with the role played by the animals, this girl does not really seem to be given to anyone or anything through her death; she is a component of the action. It is hard to tell whether she really volunteered for her fate, but Ibn Fadlan seems to have thought so. The sexual themes appear central here and they take on a repetitive overtone with respect to the girl. Ibn Fadlan mentions that the female slaves were sexually abused by their owners. This role is amplified significantly after the slave-girl is marked for a funerary death, and the entire mortuary process is in fact punctuated by sexual acts. In some manuscripts, the girl is referred to as the dead mans bride. Finally, the preparation of the ship for burning is significant not only for its elaboration, but also because it confirms that in this case at least a funeral could involve both inhumation and then cremation, and in effect two graves for one person. How much of this has been missed in the archaeology? This whole ten-day process is continuously accompanied by chanting and music that the Arab unfortunately does not understand. It is important to emphasise the brief nature of the above summary. Ibn Fadlans account of one burial runs to 2,000 words, and he is a laconic writer. Every sentence, every Arabic word of his text has meaning and can be glossed or decoded with effort. However, in seeking to succinctly isolate key factors in the burial rites he describes, one could do worse than to focus upon social inclusion, expenditure, effort, violence, intoxication and not least sexual performance all of these in considerable quantities and expressed conspicuously. Animals also seem very significant, and certainly not merely as ambulatory possessions (we do not even know who they belong to). Above all we see deliberate, complex action performed over time. Ibn Fadlan provides us with a key text, the most elaborate eyewitness account of a (probable) Scandinavian funeral that we possess, but there are also additional, briefer sources that nevertheless contain fascinating points of detail, resonating well with what we have so far seen. Another Arab writer, Ibn Rustah, describes an elaborate chamber burial of a leading Rus man, also in what is now Russia, with deposits of food, drinking vessels and coins.39 Echoing the
37 Nicolaysen 1882. 38 Lucas and McGovern 2007; detailed evidence was found here for cattle decapitation in a manner that would have required two people and which was calculated to produce a dramatic spray of arterial blood. 39 Jakubovskij 1926.
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unfortunate slave of the ship cremation, here the woman he loved (not wife, as most translations erroneously have it the difference may be significant) is sealed up alive in the grave. The same practice is mentioned in connection with Rus travellers by Ibn Miskaweih.40 To turn to a Byzantine source and the writings of Leo the Deacon, in 970 he described Rus warriors cremating their battle dead after a skirmish with imperial forces.41 Raising great log pyres on which they laid the slain, the rituals were accompanied by the killing of male and female prisoners, apparently in some numbers, and the slaughter of young animals. Cockerels were especially singled out, killed and thrown into a nearby river. Abundant alcohol was a very clear part of the ceremonies, which unfolded to the sound of the Rus eerie, high-pitched howling that terrified the Byzantines and which they compared to noises made by animals. All of this took place under the light of the full moon, a useful reminder that burials do not necessarily happen in daylight. Ibn Fadlans report and those of the other Arab writers are describing the burials of elites, and it is often these high-status graves that are clearest in the signals they convey because they are more elaborate, more intricate and therefore leave more traces for the archaeologist to detect. Like their lives, the deaths and funerals of these people are about the communication of power, relating a message that was ultimately brought into everyones lives. The funerals of more ordinary people will be discussed below, but from Ibn Fadlans description it is possible to glimpse a little of what might have lain behind the bewildering complexity evident in excavated graves of high status. It is now necessary to ask how these burials might have worked, and to try to understand what it was that Ibn Fadlan was actually describing. DRAMAS OF THE DEAD Following a line of thought tentatively explored for sites like Sutton Hoo (Suffolk) by Martin Carver, as in the epigraph to this paper, I would like to suggest here that these funerals did not consist simply of rituals (whatever that means in its usual abstract and undefined usage) but that they in fact specifically represented the performance of stories. Does the excavated record of burial 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? setting the stage In an earlier paper I have briefly employed an example to explain my thinking, which may perhaps seem out of place at first: the stage at the end of a production of Hamlet.42 This is an image worth revisiting here. What does the scene look like when the Dane is dead? It is a Shakespeare tragedy so we have 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
40 Arne 1932, 216. 41 Ellis Davidson 1972, 25. 42 Price 2008b.
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complicated environment if one imagines it as an archaeological site, which is the key point. Do the Kaupang graves and Ibn Fadlans ship-cremation work as exactly that, as stage sets 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 who 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. In this light, one may think again of Ibn Fadlan and those ten days of actions: what were they doing? With reference to the archaeology, a useful focus is on the notion of the stage, considered first in terms of the symbolic overtones of the grave. I have suggested above that Ibn Fadlans wooden tent on the deck supports the idea of the grave as dwelling, an old notion in early medieval studies, reinforced by saga accounts of the dead living in their mounds.43 Frands Herschend and Martin Carver have gone further to argue that the ships in particular were intended to precisely reference the hall as the seat of power for their occupiers, for the living lord or the dead man buried.44 Objects representing particular situated activities such as cooking equipment and therefore a kitchen are spatially located in the boat graves in the same position relative to other such artefact symbols as the area for food preparation in a hall. Similar effects are achieved through references to the central and public hearth area (food consumption items, objects for display, gaming sets), sleeping chambers (bedding), ante-chambers (weapons) and so on. The idea works for most of the Valsgrde (Sweden) graves, a large part of Sutton Hoo mound 1 and seems to hold up well here, but it is far from universally applicable to ship graves. In an aristocratic culture of status and display, funerary objects may have been laid out to represent not only the different facets of power but the space within which they were employed. Were these particular ships halls for the dead, occupied by leading figures living on in their graves? If the storied funeral was a process of passage, presumably to Valhll, Hel or another afterlife (one of the bigger unknowns of Viking studies), this need not rule out some kind of continued social function for the elites, even after death.45 If the grave itself might be a symbol, what of its qualities as a place in its own right? An interesting perspective comes from new work by Terje Gansum on the Oseberg ship.46 Reviewing the excavation diaries from the time of the dig, linked to a fresh examination of the plans and photographs, Gansum revived an interpretation that was virtually unanimous among its original investigators
43 See Price 2002, 1345. 44 Herschend 1997; Carver 1998 and 2002. 45 The archaeological evidence provides plenty of contradictions, typical of the problems in funerary studies and also rather characteristic of the Vikings in particular. The Oseberg ship might be seen as a symbol of travel, but it was moored in the grave with a hawser tied to a large boulder. For many of the smaller boat burials, including the one described at Kaupang, the idea of the funerary ship-hall does not work. I return to the issue of representativeness below. 46 Gansum 2004.
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fig 2 A moonlit reconstruction of the funeral ceremonies for the Oseberg ship burial, Norway, incorporating the half-mound identified by Terje Gansum. Drawing by Anders Kvle Rue, to the artist and used by permission.
but which they had not published: the Oseberg ship had initially been covered by a mound to only half its length, the entire prow section and foredeck protruding from the vertical face of the earth piled over the stern (Fig 2). The halfmound bisected the ship across the opening of the burial chamber on its deck, leaving the interior accessible. It was certainly months, and perhaps even a couple of years, before the mound was completed and the ship fully buried.47 One strong signal of speed, at least at one point in the proceedings, is the evident rapidity with which the chamber was finally sealed. Its open gable was closed with a number of odd pieces of wood, nailed up with no attention to care or placement, in a manner very different to the neatness of the rest of the chamber. The timbers were hammered so fast that several nails were bent and broken, but left in place while others were put in around them. Indications of this same concern for haste can be found in the great mound of wooden items simply thrown onto the deck in front of the sealed chamber, heavy objects smashing others beneath them with no regard for their fine qualities. It appears that when access to the chamber was no longer wanted or thought advisable, it was felt necessary to seal it and close the grave as fast as possible.48
47 The excavation was conducted over a century ago and the detailed records are not sufcient to resolve this; lenses of soil and possible silting imply an extended period when the grave was open. 48 This concern for a speedy departure from the burial is interesting in the light of the kindler of the pyre in Ibn Fadlans description, who takes care to protect all the orices of his body when approaching the ship, perhaps fearing something in the grave.
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The possibility that other graves may have been left open and accessible for a time has been raised for other early medieval sites with ship burials at Valsgrde, perhaps at Hedeby (Germany) and maybe even at Sutton Hoo mounds 1 and 2.49 If we expand upon the idea of a stage, Oseberg was a place of ongoing activity. Either it was revisited, left open for continued access and activity, or it may even have been that the funeral itself was considered to last so long. The process may have begun with the first preparations of the grave, the moving of the ship into the trench and so on, maybe beginning even before its intended occupant(s) had died. Later still, after the mound was closed, the chamber was broken into in an episode clearly registered in the archaeology and usually described as robbing. We know from the excavations that objects and bodies were moved around, but we do not know why. Given that the mound was re-entered soon enough after the burial that the bodies were still semiarticulated, and considering the sheer effort required to dig into the barrow, this cannot have been a secret process and must have been enacted with at least some degree of social sanction. If not robbing, then perhaps this too was part of the funeral. Moving beyond the specificity of a single grave, is it possible to see cemeteries as literal theatres of death, arenas for these individual acts? stories on stones In support of the identification of these possible dramas as stories, we can turn to evidence from a different medium again, that can also suggest what in one precise place and time the stories might have been for. How would these funerary plays work, and what would they say? There are clues to be found in a special form of monument found in a special place, the picture stones of Gotland. Although they reached their zenith in the Viking Age, carved stone memorials to the dead had been raised by Gotlanders since at least the 5th century ad, increasing in size over time. Typically shaped like a keyhole and standing up to 4 m tall, the Viking-Age versions take the form of flat panels of the local limestone engraved or carved in relief with numerous small scenes. Some are organised in non-linear groups of images; others are more formally laid out in horizontal bands one above the other, each containing linear pictures. On almost all the Viking-Age stones, a large image of a ship under sail occupies most of the lower half of the monument.50 The early stones have been found raised either on top of burial mounds or beside them, often dotted throughout a cemetery in a small landscape of imagery. Many of the Viking-Age stones were set up, either singly or in pairs, along roadways or at the boundaries of estates. The later stones seem to function as memorials and occasionally also as grave markers. Sometimes cremations have been found actually packed around their bases enclosed by a box-like structure made up of miniature picture stones. The majority of the stones have no inscriptions, but towards the end of the Viking Age, as rune-stone carving increases exponentially on the mainland, we also find similar runic memorial texts on the Gotland stones.
49 Valsgrde: Herschend 1997, 504. Sutton Hoo: Angela Care Evans pers comm. 50 A complete catalogue was compiled by Lindqvist 19412, updated by Nyln and Lamm 1987. Subsequent nds of picture stones are reported in the annual volumes of the journal Fornvnnen.
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Found almost exclusively on Gotland,51 in one sense the stones limitation to the island matches the individualism of much of the rest of its material culture at this time. One particularly interesting idea that has been put forward addresses the fact that, curiously for an intensely maritime community at the centre of the Baltic seaways, Gotland has no ship- or boat-burials.52 Given the prominence of the ship imagery on the stones, could it be that they represent the Gotland equivalent of the mainland graves, but manifested in pictures rather than objects? In a corollary of Herschends ideas about the ship-grave as hall, on the stones perhaps the depicted scenes show what artefacts we usually find in graves signified. If correct, this would prove a powerful support for the ideas about funerary stories outlined above. Another observation can be made that further strengthens the idea. Scholars have debated for decades about what the images on the picture stones might mean. They tend to show numerous apparently male and female figures, apparently human, engaged in a variety of activities, accompanied by animals of various kinds. Buildings, objects and landscapes are shown, often enclosed or simply dotted with more abstract patterns that may be decorative or may mean something more. Occasionally elements can be discerned that might be connected with tales from Norse mythology or the sagas a male seemingly transforming into a bird of prey; a figure in a pit of snakes; a figure on an eight-legged horse, and so on.53 The same females with raised drinking horns occur here as in the metalwork. However, in the late 1980s a striking discovery was made of great relevance to my theme here. In studying the picture stones of Lrbro parish, of the form erected at property boundaries, Anders Andrn noticed that the lower panel of images on one stone was repeated at the top of the next stone as one moved around the limits of the estate.54 Furthermore, when taken together and read from bottom to top and from one stone to the next, he was able to identify the story of Sigurr, the famous hero of Norse legend who killed the dragon Fafnir, and a popular subject for early medieval iconography. The implications are literally dramatic. First, at this one location Andrn established an apparent link between stories and monuments to the dead. It may be that the Lrbro stones were all set up simultaneously, or alternatively that they commemorate successive generations of leading members of the same land-owning dynasty. Either way, this not only suggests some kind of family tale, but also implies that it could form a land claim document: the holding was literally bounded by statements about the dead, staking title through reference to ancestral presence. This assertion seems to have been made by means of a sequential story, perhaps with a new chapter added from one generation (ie one dead person) to the next. The use of this particular story for commemoration also has parallels elsewhere at the same time. Marjolein Stern has recently collected the small number of sculptural stone images from the Viking Age that have been argued to depict
51 The only exceptions are one stone from Uppland, two from land (Sweden) and one from Grobin in Latvia, all thought to commemorate Gotlanders who died there; Nyln and Lamm 1987, 1447; Petrenko 1991. 52 Andrn 1989. 53 Eg Ellmers 1995. 54 Andrn 1993.
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parts of the Sigurr story, consisting of a handful of Swedish rune-stones including the famous Ramsund carving, and also some of the Manx crosses.55 She notes that despite difficulties in making unequivocal interpretations, it is nonetheless clear that this is the tale in question, and that it was used in a commemorative context. Present in what may be regional variants, the selected elements of the story interestingly all focus on the same themes of heroism, the acquisition of wisdom and wealth, and the potentially tragic consequences that this could have. funerary motif This idea of referencing between monuments, of some motif in one linking with something similar in a second memorial, can also be found in the graves themselves. To take a high-status example, we can consider Norways richest female grave from the Viking Age after Oseberg, the so-called queen from Gausel near Stavanger, Norway (Fig 3).56 This celebrated find of 1883 uncovered a finely dressed and appointed woman in an elaborate cist-grave, with a varied selection of objects that has enabled researchers to recently narrow the burial date to 85060.57 Among the plethora of expensive items was a striking animal element: the severed head of a horse, laid in the coffin at the womans feet and still wearing its bridle of gilded bronze. The cemetery contains some 22 visible mounds and a further six unmarked graves found through excavation, with dates spread throughout the Viking Age. In addition to that of the queen, three other graves also contained horses heads. One was found in another womans grave, A-1006, a curious burial placed inside the ruins of a building and covered by a mound; it was not possible to date the find more precisely than to the Viking period. The other two horse heads, caparisoned as before, were both found in boat burials containing a single male surrounded by weapons. One could again be dated only to the Viking Age, but the other, grave 3751, was from the mid-9th century and thus contemporary with the queen (Fig 4). Moving to lower-status burials, we can consider a selection of graves found on the land islands, situated between Sweden and Finland. Unique to this small archipelago, with the exception of a scatter of sites along the central Russian rivers that are thought to represent the graves of travelling landers, is the funerary deposition of tiny model animal paws made of clay. Placed with cremated ashes, either in scatters or in ceramic vessels, the paws occur throughout the Viking Age but only in a small proportion of graves.58 In comparing the horse heads of Gausel with the land animal paws we find a consistency over time, within a specific locale. In the absence of DNA analyses we do not know if these rituals relate to kinship groups in the cemeteries, but whether or not this is the case it is clear that whoever was burying these people chose to make precise links between their graves. We do not know the significance of these rites, but in the referencing of funerary motifs (the heads and paws) we presumably also see a link between the meanings ascribed to them. This suggests that the same process was playing out at Gausel and on land as
55 Stern 2009; see also Liepe 1989 on the Gk stone. 56 Bakka 1993; the grave of the Gausel queen was later renumbered S-1883. 57 Brsheim and Soltvedt 2002, 177236. 58 Callmer 1994.
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fig 3 A reconstruction of grave S-1883 from Gausel in Rogaland, Norway, dated c 85060. Drawing by rhallur rinsson, after an original by R L Brsheim, Neil Price.
in Lrbro parish, Gotland, but articulated through material culture instead of images: three widely separated localities at different points in the Viking Age. Evidence of a similar practice can be found at many other sites, including Kaupang, returning to the complex ship burial described above. There I focused just on the sequence of events within that one grave, but looking to its immediate environs raises several further questions. The boat burial there is actually one of several, ranged more or less side by side along a low ridge at Bikjholberget outside the main settlement.59 Many of them also contain multiple individuals, though with variant body positions, accompanying objects and animals, and indeed different combinations of human age and sex. Here we see a broad consistency of form (several people in a boat) but with the specific variation we have encountered before. However, under some of these boats are also other burials, men interred in relatively simple graves some years prior to the deposition of the vessels on top of them, just as in Ka. 2946 reviewed above. Not only does this expand the repertoire of ritual and motif at Kaupang (several people in a boat, with someone else under it), but it also alters the very conception of what a grave and a funeral were at this place. The vital point here is the
59 Blindheim and Heyerdahl-Larsen 1995.
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fig 4 A reconstruction of grave 3751 from Gausel in Rogaland, Norway, dated to the mid-9th century. Drawing by rhallur rinsson, after an original by R L Brsheim, Neil Price.
sequence of events, and the staggered deposition over time of bodies and boats. Just as we find a motif in this rite of superimposed graves, there are also material links between the people under the boats and the graves on top of them: in Ka. 2946 an egg-shaped stone was buried with the man under the keel, and another was placed beside the woman in the stern of the boat above him.60 All this has interesting implications for communal memory and planning, the relationship of the living to the dead over tens of years, and also the notion of a prolonged funeral. There is a reasonable case to be made here that the entire decades-long cycle from the digging of a grave to its capping with a boat burial
60 This example also demonstrates a common problem of recording bias in the interpretation of Viking-Age burials, in that these egg-shaped stones were not retained by the excavators and neither photographed nor drawn, presumably being thought insignicant. Part of my point in this paper is that everything in graves must be considered in the total social context of the funeral as meaningful behaviour. Ptursdttir 2009 makes a similar observation in her examination of Icelandic Viking-Age graves.
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is part of the same ritual, replicated in adjacent plots in yet another localised example of the phenomenon we encounter all over the Viking world. Note too that this is not characteristic of Kaupang: it marks out only a single small group of graves within one of its cemeteries there are dozens of other groups there too, all different. THE FRAGILITY OF STORIES In examining all these motifs linking graves within cemeteries and memorials to the dead in the landscape, the only one that can actually be identified with any confidence is the continuing story of Sigurr on Andrns picture stones and at a few other sites. However, set alongside this there are the hundreds of largely uninterpreted scenes on the rest of the Gotland picture stones, and occasional figurative panels on mainland rune-stones. There has never been any doubt that they probably represent narratives of some kind, and their quantity merely serves to emphasise the sheer range of tales that were probably involved. This is relevant if the suggestion of funerary motifs is followed, as argued above, from iconography to material culture, from stone monuments to the contents of graves. In this case there is no reason why, at least in theory, some (or even most?) of the detailed patterns found in Viking-Age grave groups, each utterly individual, could not also have had narratives behind them. The fact that the content of these postulated stories is now unknown to us does not mean that they never existed, and indeed there is very good evidence that the Vikings lived in an intensely storied world. There is the obvious evidence here of the sagas, skaldic poetry and Eddic verse. Even when sources from such a wide diachronic and diatopic range are conflated, and even when subjected to the most rigorous critique, one is left with the unavoidable implication that the period they claim to describe was nevertheless filled with tales. At least these have left some trace, however faint. As a contemporary indication of all the narratives that are now lost, we need look no further than the 9th-century rune-stone from Rk (g 136) in the Swedish province of stergtland. This relates whole lists of them in a manner that partly assumes prior knowledge and partly looks beyond it to a deeper level of secret lore, locked securely in the minds of a select few. Translation is problematic but the text makes allusions to at least eight narratives by means of short phrases, perhaps riddles, in prose and verse. Some are mere hints, others may be mnemonics or counting rhymes of some kind, and all may be elements in rites of passage or other social practices involving teaching, learning or response.61 It is worth considering how fragile these tales are, even the greatest of them such as Beowulf, admittedly an Old English poem but one that is about Scandinavians, a Swedish and Danish story that probably originated there. It is hard to overstate the degree to which early medieval scholarship takes Beowulf for granted, with all that it implies about Northern epic, yet it survives in only a single manuscript and is not mentioned in any other text: it is literally an archaeological artefact. The folio was nearly consumed in the Cotton Library fire of 1731, and if it had not survived then the entire field of Northern literary studies including the scholarly perception of stories in social context would probably be labouring under some quite
61 For a recent perspective on this complex stone, see Harris 2006 and 2009 who suggests that it references local variants of the great myths.
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erroneous misconceptions. One might reasonably ask how many Scandinavian Beowulfs of the Viking Age, in oral form, did not survive at all. However, it could also be that they dot the landscapes of the Viking world in precisely placed assemblages of funerary objects and as images on stone. EVIDENCE AND INTERPRETATION Clearly one must be conscious that much of the scenario presented here is conjecture, about what is itself a relatively esoteric aspect of Viking studies, namely the shadowy realm of world-views, mentalities and perceptions. With this in mind it is vital to separate evidence and interpretation, and to consider the potential for empirical testing of these ideas. It is at least certain that a very wide range of burial practices were utilised by Viking-Age Scandinavians. There is abundant evidence in the graphic form of every excavated cemetery, and archaeological comparisons over a massive range of sites. As discussed above there are detailed analyses of large, discrete data-sets from a variety of contexts, from single cemeteries to local mortuary landscapes, from farms to villages and towns. These have been compared across a broad scale ranging from regions to small polities and ultimately entire nations (at the end of the Viking Age), with a further reach to the whole sphere of Scandinavian activity overseas. Decades of archaeological enquiry into mortuary behaviour, across many cultures, also enable us to be sure that these practices at least to some degree represent material manifestations of ideas about the dead, their relationship to the living and their possible destination(s) beyond the grave. In considering what lay behind this variation, again there can be little doubt that Viking funerals included long sequences of complex actions. Apart from Ibn Fadlan and comparable accounts, there are the excavations of countless elaborate graves, including ship burials. Quite simply, at least some of these graves can only have been created through complicated activities of this kind. To this can be added Gansums reinterpretation of the Oseberg mound and the other evidence discussed above for burials left accessible for a time, and the opportunities this afforded for continued ceremonies and visitations. Other prolonged sequences of ritual over considerable time can be seen in the material motifs, and the long periods between graves linked either by features of mortuary behaviour or more directly through physical superimposition. There is also a demonstrable association between visualised stories and monuments to the dead, but only on a small number of sites. However, the examples that can be securely identified occur on types of memorials that exist in much greater numbers, containing literally thousands of other images that cannot be matched with tales we recognise. That there could have once been many more stories in circulation during the Viking Age than have survived in intelligible form today is hardly in reasonable doubt. The symbolic transition from meaningful image to equally meaningful combination of objects is not a difficult one to make. From this platform one can move on to more tentative interpretation. I have suggested that many, perhaps even the majority, of Viking funerals involved the material manifestation of stories. It is important to note here the elisions between poetry, prose and drama. Crucially different categories in
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literary critique, they are not necessarily formally divided in this funerary context. All these media communicate narratives, and the manner of their expression might well have been fluid. From everything known of runic epitaphs and the spirit of skaldic composition at this time, it is surely justifiable to speak of a poetic attitude to commemoration. From this naturally flows the idea of a poetic passage for the dead, regardless of whether the words used at funerals were in verse or not. Dramas take many different forms and are rarely consistently the same, and it would be unwise to search pedantically for a precise term when we have no reason to believe that such definitions were used in this context at the time.62 Terminological quicksands aside, the crucial concept is that of stories. Performance is also a keyword here, precisely because the creation of the burials was a physical act involving the manipulation of material culture, and not merely words. Whether this interpretation is correct or not, and regardless of what exact kind of categorisations were present in the suggested narratives, it seems certain that there are linking motifs of various kinds among small groups of graves within or between cemeteries. Following the idea of materialised narratives, I have therefore suggested that these mortuary 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. But is it not the case that what I have termed materialised narrative could equally be another scholars graveside ritual of a more familiar kind? Surely the variations that I suggest might represent different funerary stories can also be interpreted merely as local preference, perhaps as family groups develop their own practices and, eventually, traditions for the disposal of the dead? These more conventional readings seem sensible enough at first, but on closer reflection it can be seen that such catch-all terms as custom actually conceal more than they explain. It is one thing to support a proactively vague approach in analysing the archaeology of the intangible, and I firmly believe that interpretive precision is an impossible illusion in contexts such as these. However, this is quite different from employing terminology that can essentially mean anything at all, privileging observation per se over any attempt to understand the data. Resorting to a vocabulary of burial tradition actually tells us nothing about what these graves might have meant, even conceptually, and the presence of such meanings is an inescapable conclusion in acknowledging the funerary variation that archaeology is giving us from all over the Viking world. The alternative is absurd, namely an assumption that people placed severed ox heads in beds (or clay paws on ashes, or boats on top of corpses, and so on and on across the thousands of permutations known from excavation) simply because these things seemed like good ideas at the time, presumably perpetuated thereafter on the basis that what was good enough for granddad is good enough for me. Of course, none of this means that my narrative interpretation is necessarily correct, but it does propose a model that addresses the imperative of explaining the variety that can be seen in the graves. The model also provides a context
62 A similar problem has arisen in the study of Viking-Age sorcery, the subject of an earlier book (Price 2002). To the study of mortuary drama I would apply essentially the same criteria as Daniel Ogden on magic (2008, 3), in his wise critique of authors who confuse the attempt to give nal denition to an abstract concept, ancient or modern, which is self-evidently impossible, with the delineation of a coherent core of source-material for study.
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for the sheer precision and deliberation in the repertoire of mortuary practices, few of which appear arbitrary or random. Each burial is a conscious act, its objects and animals selected with care, and deposited with concern. Furthermore, the model allows this variation to be meaningfully located within a broader, more standardised framework of funerary behaviour. The precise material treatment of the dead in boats is unique to each grave, for example, but there is still a recognisable category of boat burial in the archaeological record. These larger patterns perhaps relate to something not otherwise taken up here, concerning where people were thought to go after death. Lastly, the model incorporates an awareness of the source-critical limitations of the material. It might be possible to suggest the existence of these stories, perhaps in some instances even guess at their purpose, but we are unlikely ever to know their plots. THE FOUNDATIONS OF NORSE MYTHOLOGY? Leading on from this, it is lastly appropriate to consider the circumstances in which these postulated dramas in the widest sense of the word may have come into being. Were they composed for each separate funeral, either in advance or more spontaneously? Did they build on existing stories, or merely repeat a formula? Most realistic is perhaps a combination of all these things. As above, I would also stress the importance of the material element. The funerary objects were not merely placed, they were used in the ceremonies, indeed they form their very essence because their deposition was the ritual itself. But can we find any link between the graves and the big narratives of the Norse epics and myths? I have explored the physical nature of the stories in these funeral rituals, but bearing in mind the motifs used the story of Sigurr, for example, and suggestive fragments of interpretation that we can apply to other picture stones are we actually seeing here part of the creation of myths? To explore this approach requires some clarifications. Any mythology as it exists today is an organic entity and the product of evolution over a long period. The stories have been told and re-told on countless occasions, elements have been added or fallen away, details have been changed or embellished, probably thousands of times. Sometimes several versions are in circulation at once. Many mythologies contain internal contradictions, and that of the Scandinavians is certainly no exception. There is also the factor of transmission to consider, all the copyists errors and biases over the centuries, as well as the deliberate distortions and suppressions. Finally, there are the simple vagaries of preservation. Simultaneously, it must be acknowledged that any mythology, in its 21st-century form, is something artificial, a construct. In a sense the slow process of accretion and redaction has now ceased, and the tales have solidified into something that they never really were from the beginning dead, static texts, very different from the dynamics of true narrative and story-telling. Terminology is deceptive here, and in this light it is worth remembering that the Norse themselves did not know about the Norse myths. Some of the stories concern semi-legendary figures, others relate the activities of gods and supernatural beings, while others still purport to describe historical events involving people who actually lived. It is important to understand that Viking-Age people need
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not have seen any reason to separate these categories and instead may have viewed them as a seamless whole. Even in the 13th century when many of our primary sources were either compiled or at least first written down, there was no concept of mythology in this context. The anonymous collector of the poems in the Codex Regius did not categorise them. Similarly, Snorri Sturluson wrote about stories and poems, narratives related to what he claimed to be the spirituality and cultural aspirations of his ancestors. Although fully aware of genre and subject, he did not make the same distinctions between heroic and mythological works that are common in critical editions today.63 Over the last few centuries of scholarship, these tales (in whatever form, poetry or paraphrased prose) have been reorganised and collated into an illusory canon, and one that may bear little relation to how whatever lay behind them was actually seen in the Viking Age. If such easy categorisations can be dispensed with, there is nevertheless a basic truth so fundamental that it sometimes tends to get lost in the minutiae of scholarly analysis. At some point, or rather at a succession of such points, each individual element of these stories was invented. Whether one takes inn giving up his eye, or rr losing his hammer, or the binding of Fenrir, somebody made them up. Even allowing for the unfolding creation of tales within the framework of centuries-old traditions, or millennia of myth-making traced across the arguable Indo-European paradigm, the precise detail of each story within its own cultural context nonetheless must have had specific moments of germination. By this I do not mean primal origins, difficult though this is to conceive, as in a general sense most mythic cycles have at least some connection back into prehistory. Instead I would focus here on details, set in an immediate social context. I am not arguing that my postulated graveside narratives acted out the specific myths we have today, nor that all of them included necessarily any mythological element at all.64 However, in their specifics, some of them might have incorporated these instants of inspiration that left very long echoes indeed. The funerary stories could have partly concerned the dead person themselves, perhaps including events from their life, their actions and personality. On the evidence of rune-stone inscriptions it is surely likely that those doing the burying were prominently featured, especially if the family saga idea of the Gotland stones had a wider distribution and validity outside that island. I would see these actions as combining everything discussed above: the dead, their family and relatives, the community, the folkloric history of all these people, and also elements taken from a wider sphere of heroic legend and the doings of
63 For example, the standard Oxford edition of the Poetic Edda, Dronke 1969 and 1997, which is actually divided into volumes under these headings. Despite its modern title, Snorris Prose Edda is nevertheless primarily concerned with poetry and of course includes substantial poetic citation. 64 The work of Terry Gunnell on the Eddic poems in the Codex Regius and the AM 748 4to is relevant here (1995; 2004; 2006; 2008). While it has been known for centuries that many of the poems are divided up into a number of speaking parts and characters, Gunnell has pointed to the presence of what amount to stage directions and marginal notes for actors. Focusing on dialogic and monologic works, Gunnell has demonstrated a unique interaction between drama, place, actors and audience within precise physical situations. Poems such as Vafrnisml, Lokasenna, Grmnisml and probably Hvaml are deliberately set within the space of the pagan hall, while others such as Skrnisml, Ffnisml, Sigrdrfuml and Hrbarslj take place in liminal settings outdoors. In other words, at least in their recorded form in the 12th and 13th centuries, these were not just poems to be recited or sung, but dramas performed in numinous places of supernatural power. The link to the funerary dramas proposed above is suggestive.
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supernatural beings, all woven together through material culture and verbalised into something just for this grave, this corpse, this time and place. The blending of genre and tone is part of the point, as men or women passed from a narrative of life into the larger one of death. EPITAPHS AND AFFADAVITS It is naturally hard to credit that this suggested practice of mortuary drama could ever have applied to everyone. There were exceptions to everything else in the Viking world, and burial is unlikely to have been different in this respect. However, at the core of this idea is the importance of tales, the power of stories (in whatever media they were expressed) and the central place they occupied in the minds of the early medieval Scandinavians as a whole. Much of this paper has been concerned with the burials of elites of one kind or another, and their representativity can of course be called into question. Our culture, too, has the equivalents of such rituals, but one cannot easily extrapolate from the funerary cortege of Sir Winston Churchill to someone elses 20 minutes in a suburban crematorium.65 However, appearances can deceive even in an example such as this, and there are in fact many points of contact from details to principles. In funerary practice the statesman lies in state, by definition, but an ordinary citizens body can also often be viewed in an undertakers mortuary. Similarly, both funerals essentially conform to the same storyline of Christian burial and resurrection, placing different narrative emphases within the same basic parable. Politicians eulogies may take hours, but even private citizens may receive a few words of send-off from family and friends. This merely demonstrates that funerals of radically different material investment can have things in common. However, there is a simple reason why elite burials in the Viking Age should not be set completely apart from those of the bulk of the populace. We are not dealing with one or even a handful of prominent peoples graves set against the faceless uniformity of the mob: the variations stretch across thousands of burials. Differences in status, context and the prerequisites for conspicuous consumption certainly affect the complex elaboration of the graves, and one would expect an Uppland farmers burial to have been different from that of a Danish jarl. Even taking graves of similar status, the differences are plain. If Andrn is correct in his reading of stories on the Gotland stones, the same formula does not work for all or even the majority of them. Not all ship burials can be read as symbolic halls, and so on. However, this realisation not only leaves the model presented here unaffected, it actually strengthens the argument by emphasising precisely the variation at its core.66 This does not rule out the same basic principle of a poetic passage through the medium of story. In practice, only the scale need differ between the two. Pursuing this sheer diversity of ritual, in all this variety how then might ordinary people fit in? If the rich linked themselves to the great heroic lays, of
65 I thank an anonymous referee for this comparison, though I ultimately draw the opposite conclusion to him/her. 66 This also matches the current scholarly consensus on Norse pre-Christian religion, rejecting the latter term with its connotations of orthodoxy in favour of mutable belief systems varying geographically and over time within a discursive space of spiritual practice. For key works, see McKinnell 1994 and 2005; DuBois 1999; Price 2002; Gunnell 2000; Andrn et al 2006; Andrn 2007; Schjdt 2009.
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the kind they paid others to recite and sing in their halls, did the rest become part of the same stories, but in minor roles? No Sigurr is entirely alone: he lives in a populated landscape, he has relatives and followers, as do all those he meets. The mythological and heroic stories are actually richly inhabited, though by people who remain mostly invisible in the core narrative. It is not hard to see the proverbial man or woman in the Viking street as part of this greater drama, their (to us) anonymity offset by the prominence of the heroes higher up the social scale in death so as in life. Does every grave tell a story? However brief or perfunctory, it is entirely possible that it does. Because all this was monumentalised in a landscape of burial, in a sense the people of the late Iron Age could be seen to be actually moving through this story, literally living in it. When they died, perhaps they became a kind of eternal cast member. These patterns are also found within the tales themselves. If we take Beowulf as an example, even with caveats as to its dating and its arguably Scandinavian origins, the poem is actually structured around funerals. It begins with a ship burial at sea and ends on the burning pyre of Beowulf himself. All the burial ceremonies are described in detail, each taking up several pages in a modern edition, and provide a steady beat of combined actions and objects that gives the poem its rhythm. I would argue that these are stories of memory and a particular kind of constructed history. But they are also tales of individuals, of ancestry and family, and the intimate bond to the land. Above all they are stories that seem to speak not just of the desire never to be forgotten, but of the need to be remembered well. This is, of course, a well-worn clich of the Viking Age and in line with that it would be conventional to end this paper by giving the last word to the people of the time. One could remember the warrior Ful commemorated on the Aarhus stone, Denmark (DR66), who died when kings were fighting; or Hastin and Holmstn on the Fyrby rock, Sweden (S56), the most rune-skilled men in Migarr; or Banke on the Svinnegarn rune-stone, Sweden (U778), who had a ship of his own and steered eastward in Ingvars host.67 Whatever its ultimate origins, the person who created the Beowulf manuscript presumably found the sentiments of its closing lines appropriate as a poetic send-off for an early medieval king, a man keenest for fame. Wonderful though all these words are, we should not forget Ray Pages sensible admonition that an epitaph is not an affidavit.68 Eulogies of this kind about the heroic dead are at least partly the spin version, in that death rituals are also about power and the use of power they are spectacles with a message and a purpose. Instead, I find it appropriate to end with a very different quotation, relating the observations of an American journalist on the genocide in Rwanda. The context is not so distant as it might appear, and I trust that its relevance will be obvious in the light of what I have argued above: to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.69
67 All inscriptions can be found, with further discussion, on the Scandinavian Runic-Text Database, <www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm> [accessed 11 June 2010]. 68 Page 1985, 309. 69 Gourevitch 1999, 489; Price 2002, 389.
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acknowledgements An initial version of this paper was presented in late 2008 as my Inaugural Lecture for the Sixth Century Chair of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, and a month later was given as the invited Annual Lecture to the AGM of the Society for Medieval Archaeology held in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries in London. It develops ideas rst sketched in my earlier publication on bodylore and the archaeology of embedded religion.70 Subsequent versions have been presented at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, and also in academic seminars at the universities of Aarhus, Durham, Gotland (Visby), Harvard, Iceland (Reykjavk), Leicester, Nottingham, Reading, Simon Fraser (Vancouver), St Andrews, Uppsala, Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and York. I would like to thank all those who commented and shared their ideas on these occasions. One such meeting, in Copenhagen, also resulted in a specialised collection on Old Norse religion.71 I am very grateful to that volumes editor, Professor Catharina Raudvere, for permission to use parts of the text. I thank two anonymous referees for their comments. In particular I thank Anders Kvle Rue for the use of his Oseberg painting and rhallur rinsson whose reconstruction drawings, made for this paper, have once again brought Viking-Age graves to life.
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Rsum Passage dans la posie: la dramatisation mortuaire durant lre des Vikings et les origines de la mythologie norroise par Neil Price Les inhumations en Scandinavie durant lre des Vikings (avant la christianisation) entrent dans plusieurs catgories de base, chacune englobant une riche gamme de comportements funraires. Cet article propose un modle permettant dexpliquer de telles variations. Il analyse la prcision et le soin visiblement accords la slection et au placement des objets et au traitement des animaux (et parfois des humains) sacris dans le cadre du processus funraire. Il est suggr que les inhumations de lre des Vikings ont peut-tre compris des lments complexes de dramatisation mortuaire, avec linterprtation de rcits rituels autour de la tombe an de potiser le passage du dfunt dans un univers dhistoires ancestrales. Plusieurs tudes de cas archologiques et littraires sont analyses, dont les funrailles bord de navires, an de souligner limportance centrale des contes dans la manire dont les Norrois apprhendaient le monde. Il reste savoir si le matriel narratif des rites funraires formait lune des inuences cratives sous-jacentes la mythologie norroise telle que nous la concevons de nos jours.
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Zusammenfassung
neil price
bergang in die Dichtung: Begrbnisdramen der Wikingerzeit und die Ursprnge der nordischen Mythologie von Neil Price Die Begrbnisse im vorchristlichen Skandinavien der Wikingerzeit lassen sich grob in eine Reihe grundlegender Kategorien einordnen, wenngleich innerhalb dieser Kategorien die Bandbreite individuellen Ausdrucks im Begrbnisverhalten ungeheuer gro ist. Dieser Aufsatz schlgt ein Modell vor, mit dem sich diese Variationen erklren lassen, wobei er sich auf die offenkundige Absicht und Sorgfalt konzentriert, die sich in der przisen Auswahl und Platzierung von Gegenstnden und in der Behandlung von Tieren (und manchmal Menschen) zeigt, die im Laufe des Begrbnisvorgangs gettet wurden. Es wird vorgeschlagen, dass die Begrbnisse der Wikingerzeit unter Umstnden komplexe dramatische Begrbniselemente umfassten, wobei rituelle Erzhlungen, die buchstblich am Grab aufgefhrt wurden, dem jeweiligen Toten einen poetischen bergang in die Welt der Ahnengeschichten ermglichten. Eine Reihe von archologischen und literarischen Fallstudien werden besprochen, darunter Schiffsbestattungen, die die zentrale Bedeutung der Erzhlung im nordischen Weltbild betonen. Es wird die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die materiellen Erzhlungen der Begrbnisriten eine der kreativen Adern gewesen sein knnten, die zu dem beitrugen, was wir heute als nordische Mythologie kennen. Riassunto Un trapasso poetico: la drammatizzazione funeraria di et vichinga e le origini della mitologia norrena di Neil Price Le sepolture della Scandinavia precristiana di et vichinga si possono suddividere in linea di massima in diverse categorie fondamentali, ma allinterno di queste le variazioni dellespressione individuale nel comportamento funebre sono innumerevoli. Questo studio propone un modello per spiegare tali variazioni, concentrando lattenzione sullevidente ponderatezza dimostrata dalla precisa selezione e collocazione degli oggetti e dal trattamento del sacricio animale (e talvolta umano) che faceva parte del rito funebre. Si propone la tesi che le sepolture di et vichinga comportassero complessi elementi di teatro funebre, racconti rituali rappresentati letteralmente presso la tomba, che fornivano al singolo defunto un trapasso poetico in un mondo di storie ancestrali. Si discutono diversi esempi della casistica archeologica e letteraria, comprese le sepolture nelle navi, dando risalto allimportanza fondamentale dei racconti nella visione del mondo degli antichi Scandinavi. Ci si domanda se il materiale dei racconti dei riti funebri possa essere uno dei loni creativi che sono allorigine di quella che oggi chiamiamo mitologia norrena.

PEIRCE. Passing Into Poetry

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Medieval Archaeology, 54, 2010

ANNUAL LECTURE TO THE SOCIETY FOR MEDIEVAL ARCHAEOLOGY 2008

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

passing into poetry

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

Published by Maney Publishing (c) Society for Medieval Archaeology

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