Norse Ship Burial

The image of a Viking sent out to sea in a burning ship is not what the evidence shows. It is a nineteenth century picture, and the excavated graves say something more interesting.

The great Norwegian ship burials were static. At Oseberg, buried in 834, a seagoing vessel was dragged up from the water, set in a trench, filled with a burial chamber, and covered by a mound of turf and clay that sealed it well enough to preserve the wood, the textiles and a carved cart. Gokstad was much the same. These ships went nowhere; they were furnished, occupied and buried in the ground, and the mound over them was a landmark visible from a distance.

Other forms existed alongside. Ships were burnt with their dead in some places. In others, particularly on Gotland and in parts of southern Scandinavia, the dead were laid in a setting of standing stones arranged in the outline of a hull, a ship shape with no ship, which shows that the meaning could be carried by the form alone.

What all of them have in common is expense. A ship was among the most costly objects a Norse community could make, and putting one in the ground took it permanently out of use. Ship burials are a fraction of a percent of excavated Viking Age graves. Most people were cremated and the ashes placed in a small mound or a flat grave, with modest goods or none, and any account of Norse funerary religion that starts from Oseberg has started at the far end of the scale.

The most detailed narrative of a Norse ship funeral was not written by a Norseman. In 922 the Arab envoy Ahmad ibn Fadlan travelled up the Volga and watched the funeral of a chieftain among the Rus, a people of Scandinavian origin trading on the river, and wrote down what he saw at length: the body held in a temporary grave while grave goods were prepared, the ship drawn up on land, the feasting, the killing of animals, the killing of an enslaved girl who had agreed to accompany her master, and the burning of the ship on shore followed by the raising of a mound.

It is a genuinely valuable text, and it is the only eyewitness description of its kind. It also has to be handled with care on three counts. Ibn Fadlan was an outsider describing a people he found alien, and he says so. He was watching one funeral, of one man, among a diaspora community a long way from Scandinavia. And what he describes matches only part of the archaeology: burning on land is attested, but the wealthy Norwegian burials were not burnt, and the human sacrifice he reports is rare and disputed in the excavated record even where a second body is present in a grave.

Modern scholarship treats the account as evidence for what could happen rather than for what usually did. The atlas records it the same way, and records the killing he describes without either dismissing it as travellers' invention or generalising it into a Norse custom.