and has (or says she has) a series of visions. Ibn Fadlan states specifically that the girl
volunteers to accompany her owner in death, though how much coercion was involved is
another matter. He mentions that slaves of both sexes might do this, and also dead men’s
wives. The latter are also mentioned by other Arab writers such as Ibn Rustah and
Ibn Miskaweih, who describes how women might be buried alive in the chamber
graves of their male partners, something perhaps confirmed by the Russian burials at
Chernigov (Price 2002 : 46 ). It is clear that more than one person might be sacrificed at
Viking funerals, and there are Byzantine accounts of a Rus’ army burying its war dead
by full moonlight, accompanied by the mass killing of prisoners of both sexes (Price
2002 : 369 ).
FUNERARY DRAMA AND THE RITES OF PASSINGIn surveying the archaeological evidence for mortuary behaviour, we have considered the
end result of burial practices but not the process by which these graves were created. An
important strand of recent work on Viking death rituals has been a focus on a kind of
funerary drama, in which the burial is preceded, accompanied and followed by extended
periods of orchestrated action and activity. Pioneered by Terry Gunnell’s research on the
dramatic nature of Eddic poetry ( 1995 and ch. 22. 1 , below), and Martin Carver’s work
on similar ‘theatres of death’ at Anglo-Saxon sites ( 1992 : 181 ) this approach has also
been inspired by the vivid written records of Viking funerals left by several Arab
travellers including Ibn Fadlan.
The latter’s description of a ship cremation on the Volga in 922 is well known but
not without complexity; the best English translation and commentary on its problems
can be found in Montgomery ( 2006 ) and its archaeological implications are discussed in
Price ( 2008 ). In brief, Ibn Fadlan relates as part of a longer journey how he witnessed
the elaborate rituals surrounding the burial of a leading man among the Rus’. Involving
ten days of carefully supervised activity prior to the final cremation, including the
temporary burial of the dead man in a provisional grave that itself contains grave goods,
the ceremonies of feasting, drinking and sex culminate in a funeral that involves dozens
of people and the rape and murder of a slave girl noted above.
The central importance of this text for our understanding of Viking Age burials can
hardly be overstated, especially in its implication that what we see in the archaeological
remains is merely the ‘stage set’ at the close of a ‘play’, leaving only hints of the possible
days of activity that precede and contextualise the actual interment or cremation. We
should also consider the ‘afterlife’ of burials in terms of their continued active use within
the community. The most striking evidence comes from the Oseberg ship burial, which
has been shown to have been covered only part-way by the original mound, leaving the
entire prow and forepart of the ship exposed, including the entrance to the burial
chamber (Gansum 2004 ; Figure 19. 3 ). Although the mound was later completed to
cover the whole vessel, we do not know what kinds of activities took place around and
even inside the burial in the intervening period.
More evidence for these drawn-out rituals of death comes from other ship burials,
such as a boat grave from Kaupang, which exhibits a particularly prolonged sequence of
activity. The scene begins with an unremarkable ninth-century male inhumation burial.
Some years later in the early tenth century, and for unknown reasons, a boat was laid on
top of this grave, exactly aligned with the keel covering the buried man from head to toe
–– chapter 19: Dying and the dead––