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Chapter 5. The Underworld 127
The battering wave that broke
My father’s line broke my life.
It smashed through as the wild sea
Breaches the widest sea-wall.
Ran, you have been hard on me.
My dearest friends are all dead.
And now you have slit that strand
Ásgard and I wove with love.” 22
It was customary, however, among all the northern peoples that the sea-dead be
given a proper “burial” even if no body were found, for if the body should return
to the earth it could and often did according to classical and folkloric Germanic
literature seek to return to its home as a draugr becoming the source of further
death and destruction.
The newly dead needed to be properly introduced into the Land of the Ancestors,
into the circle of the ancestral kinfolk, so that the family luck would not be lost.
Human beings are born of the earth and not of water. In the case of Egil’s son, the
body was found, and the funeral feast was made according to the ancient custom.
Had the body not been found it would have been necessary to set up a memorial of
some sort, a so-called “rune-stone,”most likely between the shore and the home, to
give the dead one a new resting place beneath the earth. (Not every rune-stone was
set up for this reason, however.) Funeral pyres during mercenary or trading exploits
to far off places were also customary since the family burial ground was not readily
available, and funeral feasts and memorial stones were done just as if the warrior
had drowned. In any case, if one had died outside the kin circle, precautions were
necessary.
In the 20 th Century, funerals and funeral preparations are done to placate the
living, but to the ancients this was not true. Minne-ales 23 were drunk 30 days after
a death and one year after a death. These “memory-ales” were drunk not simply
to honor the dead but also to help the deceased to remember those he/ she had
left behind and that the family is ever in need of assistance. Minne-ales were also
drunk to stay in good favor with the dead since the luck of the family flows from
the Land of the Dead out into Midgard (see above). Juha Pentikáinen in Nordic
Folklore discusses what he calls “the dead without status” quite extensively:
22 Egils Saga tr. by Christine Fell (Everyman’s Library; London, UK) 1975, pp. 146-49.
23 Literally ”memory-ales” or toasts to the honor of the dead usually done on the anniversary
of the death of a loved one (from the Old English minne = ”memory”).