The Viking World (Routledge Worlds)

Rus and Byzantine courts were the background to all this trafficking. Tenth-century chamber graves
denoted exceptional wealth, social and/or political status and aspirations to retain these in the next world.
Their precise significance varied across the huge area in which they occur, and in Denmark they are found
at rural settlements as well as emporia. But the goods and types of funeral ritual found in them attest to
people for whom travel and ample equipment for the afterlife were status symbols, a kind of self-
consciously international elite. To that extent, the chamber graves offer a tracer of ‘the way from the
Varangians to the Greeks’.