Norse funeral

[1] It was important to bury the dead in the right way so that he could join the afterlife with the same social standing that he had had in life, and to avoid becoming a homeless soul that wandered eternally.

The Borre mound cemetery in Vestfold is for instance connected to the Yngling dynasty, and it had large tumuli that contained stone ships.

It was only one of the two large tumuli that contained a chamber tomb, but both barrows, the church and the two Jelling stones testify to how important it was to mark death ritually during the pagan era and the earliest Christian times.

[7] On three locations in Scandinavia, there are large grave fields that were used by an entire community: Birka in Mälaren, Hedeby at Schleswig and Lindholm Høje at Ålborg.

[8] The ritualistic practices of the North Germanic tribes were incredibly pliable as they adapted in response to temporal, cultural, and religious influences.

[8] The ceremonies are transitional rites that are intended to give the deceased peace in his or her new situation at the same time as they provide strength for the bereaved to carry on with their lives.

A supposed sighting of the deceased as one of these creatures was frightful and ominous, usually interpreted as a sign that additional family members would die.

The dead person had to die anew; a stake could be put through the corpse, or its head might be cut off in order to stop the deceased from finding its way back to the living.

Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda references a funeral rite involving the cutting of fingernails[11] lest uncut nails from the dead be available for the completion of the construction of Naglfar, the ship used to transport the army of jötnar at Ragnarök.

These practices could include prolonged episodes of feasting and drinking, music, songs and chants, visionary experiences, human and animal sacrifice.

[13] These performance styled funeral rituals tended to occur within similar places in order to create a spatial association of ritualistic practice to the land for the community.

[15] The tenth-century Arab Muslim writer Ahmad ibn Fadlan produced a description of a funeral near the Volga River of a chieftain whom he identified as belonging to people he called Rūsiyyah.

Scholars generally interpret these people as Scandinavian Rus' on the Volga trade route from the Baltic to the Black Seas, although other theories have been suggested.

Thus, Ibn Fadlān's account is reminiscent of a detail in the Old Norse Völsa þáttr, where two pagan Norwegian men lift the lady of the household over a door frame to help her try to recover a sacred horse penis that has been thrown to her dog,[18] but other parallels exist among Turkic peoples.

[19] Thus, some recent scholarship has sought to maximize the case that Ibn Fadlān informs us about practice in tenth-century Scandinavia,[20][21][22] while other work has tended to minimize it.

[26][21] The dead chieftain was put in a temporary grave with nābidh, fruit, and a drum, which was covered for ten days until they had sewn new clothes for him.

[27] A woman volunteered and was continually accompanied by two slave girls, daughters of the Angel of Death, being given a great amount of intoxicating drinks while she sang happily.

An informant explained to Ibn Fadlān that the fire expedites the dead man's arrival in Paradise, by contrast with Islamic practices of inhumation.

[33][21] Afterwards, a round barrow was built over the ashes, and in the centre of the mound they erected a post of birch wood, where they carved the names of the dead chieftain and his king.

[34][35] The sexual rites with the slave girl have been imagined to symbolize her role as a vessel for the transmission of life force to the dead chieftain.

[37] Others ascribe her more agency, speculating that demonstrating her "willingness to face immolation" secured her a higher social standing and better prospects for the afterlife than would otherwise be achievable by a slave.

[38] It has been suggested that, by using intoxicating drinks, the mourners thought to put the slave girl in an ecstatic trance that made her psychic, and that through the symbolic action with the door frame, she would then see into the realm of the dead.

[2] Sigurðarkviða hin skamma contains several stanzas in which the Valkyrie Brynhildr gives instructions for the number of slaves to be sacrificed for the funeral of the hero Sigurd, and how their bodies were to be arranged on the pyre, as in the following stanza: Því at hánum fylgja fimm ambáttir, átta þjónar, eðlum góðir, fóstrman mitt ok faðerni, þat er Buðli gaf barni sínu.

[42] The symbolism is described in the Ynglinga saga:[43] Thus he (Odin) established by law that all dead men should be burned, and their belongings laid with them upon the pile, and the ashes be cast into the sea or buried in the earth.

For men of consequence a mound should be raised to their memory, and for all other warriors who had been distinguished for manhood a standing stone; which custom remained long after Odin's time.On the seventh day after the person had died, people celebrated the sjaund (the word both for the funeral ale and the feast, since it involved a ritual drinking).

One interpretation of the Tune Runestone from Østfold suggests that the long runic inscription deals with the funeral ale in honor of the master of a household and that it declares three daughters to be the rightful heirs.