purpose but presumably relating to the extended rituals of the burial, discussed further
below.
In general burials seem to have been unmarked in the sense of personally recording
their occupants, but Ibn Fadlan’s account, mentioned above, describes how a mound
was topped by a wooden pole, on which was cut (presumably in runes) the dead
person’s name and that of his lord. Leaving little archaeological trace this form of
commemoration might have been more common than we suppose, and may also
explain some of the post-holes found in barrows. In other ways the marking of graves
was elaborate and widespread, and usually achieved with stones. These range from
individual Sw bautastenar, standing stones erected on a single grave, to complex settings
in an enormous variety of shapes (Bennett 1987 ). The latter include kerb rings, circles,
rectangles, star patterns, triangles and curious three-sided forms with concave sides
known in the absence of an English term as Sw treuddar, ‘three-pointers’. The meaning,
if any, of all these stone-settings is undetermined but several explanations have been
proposed – by way of example, a recent idea has seen the treuddar as representing the
roots of a tree, perhaps Yggdrasill, the World Tree (Andrén 2004 ).
A particularly striking form of stone setting is shaped like a ship, occurring in a range
of sizes up to an enormous 170 m long at Jelling in Denmark (Roesdahl, ch. 48 , below).
The ship settings are sometimes empty but found among graves, often with the remains
of fires and meals within – perhaps some form of commemorative place. Other ship
settings contain one or more cremations spaced around their interior. In general most
graves contain single cremations, but multiple burials in the same mound are known
and are not uncommon within the larger stone settings. There is also a wider but related
issue in the erection of memorials to the dead beyond the burial itself. These will not
be treated in detail here, but include runestones, standing stones, bridges, and monu-
mental acts of commemoration such as colossal mounds, fortresses and churches (see
Roesdahl 2005 and ch. 48 , below; also Gräslund, ch. 46. 1 , below).
Cremation burial in earthen mounds is frequently mentioned in the saga corpus, and
it is clear that afterwards the named landmarks that resulted played a part in the
cognitive landscape of the community. The degree to which the mounds’ incumbents
were still thought to ‘reside’ in their graves, and thus remain members of their com-
munities, is arguable though their metaphorical presence seems assured. The Old Norse
prose sources contain many stories of the living dead in the sense of the physically
reanimated corpse, but while the majority of these tales concern evil beings there are
also a significant number that merely relate how the dead live on in their graves. Two
examples among many are Gunnar of Hliðarendi from Njáls saga, who is seen happily
singing in his mound one night, and the dead warriors of the rather eerie poem known
as The Waking of Angantyr who seem to sleep uneasily in their burials, ‘down among the
tree-roots’ (Terry 1990 : 248 – 53 ).
INHUMATIONInhumation was rarer, but occurred across Scandinavia. In the later Viking Age it has
been argued that some of these burials represent transitional Christian graves, but this is
debated (see Gräslund, ch. 46. 1 , below). Bodies were generally laid in rectangular grave
cuts, either directly on the ground, on textiles or on mats of bark (the latter especially in
northern Norway), in shrouds or in coffins of various kinds including the detachable
–– chapter 19: Dying and the dead––