Road To Hel - Rune Web Vitki

28
FUNERAL CUSTOMS
next world. And when we find a gravestone depicting the dead in a chariot leaving the
earth, then Ebert claims that we have a new idea coming in, that of the chariot as a means
of reaching another world. Wagons are first found in Northern graves in the transition
period between the Bronze and Iron Ages, that is at the same time as the ship-form graves
first appear in Gotland. It seems possible then that at this period the conception of a death
journey may have entered the North, and that the wagon and chariot used by an inland
people were naturally replaced by the boat and ship among a people to whom travel
meant primarily a journey by sea. This is Almgren’s opinion; 1 Ebert is inclined to think
that we find traces of the idea earlier still in the coffins of wood, formed from the
hollowed-out trunk of a tree, in which the dead were laid in the middle Bronze Age; these
were introduced independently of the practice of cremation and at about the same time as
the rock-engravings begin, so that there may be a connection between the two.
But even if we decide that the conception of a journey made by the dead came in some
time during the Bronze Age from the south of Europe, this does not necessarily mean that
the ship-funerals which began in the sixth and seventh centuries were inspired by the
same belief. The orientation of the graves rather suggests, it is true, that the second
introduction of the ship was not unconnected with the first, 2 for, just as in the Gotland
graves the dead lie with head to the north and feet to the south, so the same is true of the
earliest of the Norwegian boat-graves. But the gap in time is enormous, and the evidence
for the conception of a journey to another world behind the Northern boat graves of the
Migration period and the Viking Age is hard to establish. Lindqvist 3 believes that the
introduction of the ship in the grave arose out of the desire to provide the dead with as
complete an equipment as possible, influenced partly by the example of Merovingian
funeral rites on the continent. He instances the stones weighing down the Oseberg ship in
its mound, and the mooring of it to the great stone with a rope. The burial chamber is
another argument against any belief in a journey taken by the dead; we have a good many
examples of it in Scandinavia, and in one grave from Karmø in Norway the timbered
grave chamber was not even in the Ship, but had its roof resting on two parallel stone
walls built outside it. On the other hand, it is well to remember that
1 Almgren, op. cit. p. 395.
2 Ibid. p. 201.
3 Lindqvist, Fornvännen, 1921, p. 175