CHAPTER NINETEEN

DYING AND THE DEAD: VIKING

AGE MORTUARY BEHAVIOUR

Neil Price

In his country Óðinn instituted such laws as had been in force among the Æsir

before. Thus he ordered that all the dead were to be burned on a pyre together with

their possessions, saying that everyone would arrive in Valho ̨ll with such wealth as

he had with him on his pyre and that he would also enjoy the use of what he himself

had hidden in the ground. His ashes were to be carried out to sea or buried in the

ground. For notable men burial mounds were to be thrown up as memorials. But for

all men who had shown great manly qualities memorial stones were to be erected;

and this custom continued for a long time thereafter.

(Snorri Sturluson, Ynglingasaga 8 , trans. Hollander 1964 : 11 – 12 )

T

his brief passage from the first book of Snorri’s Heimskringla is the only specific, as
opposed to incidental, description of Viking Age burial ritual left to us by a Norse
author. Written two centuries after pre-Christian mortuary behaviour was the norm, in
isolation we have little way of evaluating the degree to which the ideological filters
of his own time shaped Snorri’s presentation of these rites. However, alongside the
occasional descriptions of funerary settings in the Icelandic sagas and poems, and
observations from outside the Scandinavian world (especially those of Arab travellers),
we now have a vast amount of archaeological evidence that enables us to review in some
detail Viking attitudes to dying and the dead. That the excavated material should not
only corroborate but also to an extent sharply contradict the textual sources should
not surprise us, but of key importance is the fact that the archaeology reveals mortuary
practices that have left no documentary trace at all.
This chapter will confine its review to non-Christian burials, with some occasional
exceptions, as these are otherwise discussed elsewhere in this volume.

DIVERSITY IN DEATH

Perhaps the central element of Viking Age Scandinavian funerary ritual was its indi-
vidual character. After more than a century of excavations there can remain no doubt
whatever that we cannot speak of a standard orthodoxy of burial practice common to
the whole Norse world: Snorri’s ‘law of Óðinn’ is an illusion, even for the rather vague