that at Baltic funerals the deceased was given two coins in his left hand to
pay the ferryman for crossing the river.^41 In Russian laments the soul is
represented as fording a stream.^42
Seafaring peoples naturally made it the sea that had to be crossed. Odysseus
has to sail across Oceanus to reach Hades. Procopius relates a Frankish or
Celtic myth about how the souls of the dead are ferried over the sea to Britain.
It is a regular duty that falls upon the boatmen according to a rota. They are
summoned to the task in the middle of the night. They find strange boats
waiting, fully equipped and weighed down with invisible passengers. They
row out, and reach Britain with miraculous speed, in an hour, the voyage
normally taking a day and a night. The ghosts disembark, and the boats
return much lighter.^43 The body of Beowulf ’s father, Scyld, was laid in a ship
that carried him away over the sea (Beowulf 32–52). The same was done with
Baldr’s corpse, only the ship carried the blazing pyre (Gylf. 49, from Úlf
Uggason’sHúsdrápa). Sinfiotli’s body was ferried away across a fjord by a
mysterious boatman (Edda p. 162 Neckel–Kuhn, Frá dauða Sinfio ̨tla). The
belief in a post-mortem voyage clearly underlies the practice of ship burial
attested by archaeology in Scandinavia, England, and other countries where
Northmen settled.^44
As late as the nineteenth century, at Morar in the west Highlands, a Gaelic
woman crofter’s song, sung at the New Moon, referred to the fatal journey as
‘going over the black water of the abyss’.^45
Other traditions tell of a bridge. In Zoroastrian doctrine the soul after
death has to cross the Arbiter’s Bridge, which is broad for the virtuous but
very narrow for the sinful. Similarly an old north English song sung at wakes
referred to ‘the bridge of dread, no brader than a thread’. Saxo (1. 8. 14 p. 30)
tells how king Hading was taken by a witch to see the underworld, and how
they crossed a bridge over a torrent of blue-black water, in which weapons of
various kinds were being carried along. After Baldr was killed, Odin sent his
son Hermóðr to Hel to offer a ransom for Baldr’s release; Hermóðr rode for
nine nights and then arrived at the bridge over the river called Gio ̨ ll. This
(^41) Vánˇa (1992), 133; Mannhardt (1936), 444 (= Clemen (1936), 114), cf. 446, 452. On the
ferryman motif cf. B. Lincoln (as n. 38), 41–59; A. R. George, The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh
(Oxford 2003), 130 f. (Gilgamesh as ferryman of the dead); West (1997), 155 f.
(^42) B. Lincoln (as n. 38), 51. He quotes one from Elsa Mahler, Die russische Totenklage (Leipzig
1935), 286, in which the Archangel Michael transports the souls of the righteous over a river of
fire.
(^43) Bell. Goth. 4. 20. 48–57. A Breton belief reported by Grimm (1883–8), 833, still has Britain
as the destination of souls, but they travel there in an invisible flying wagon.
(^44) Cf. Grimm (1883–8), 830–2, 1549 f.; de Vries (1956), i. 153 f.; Gelling–Davidson (1969),
156 f.; Davidson (1988), 169.
(^45) Carmichael (1928–59), iii. 288, thar abhainn duibh an aibheis.
390 10. Mortality and Fame