The peoples of the North Sea coasts buried their dead in boats. The mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk covered a ship some twenty seven metres long, filled with weapons, silver and gold, and the Oseberg and Gokstad burials in Norway did the same two centuries later, with the Oseberg ship holding two women and a wagon. Whatever the theology behind it, the vessel as the vehicle of the dead was shared across the water.
The water itself received offerings. From the Bronze Age onward, weapons, cauldrons, ornaments and whole ships were deposited in bogs, inlets and river mouths around the sea, at Nydam and Hjortspring in Denmark among many others, often deliberately broken first. Richard Bradley's analysis of such finds argues that they are structured deposition, a religious act of giving away wealth to water, and not the accidents or emergency hoards that earlier antiquarians assumed.
Tacitus, writing about the coastal peoples, describes the goddess Nerthus carried in a covered wagon among the tribes and then washed in a hidden lake, after which those who had washed her were drowned. Njord in the later Norse sources, a god of the sea, wind and wealth from voyaging, carries a name derived from the same word. David Wilson's survey of Anglo-Saxon paganism finds the same watery emphasis on the English side, in place names and in offerings at springs and rivers that the church legislated against for centuries.