Old Scandinavian Burial Customs

In the Scandinavian culture from the Bronze Age to the Viking Age, people of the old heathen beliefs performed various forms of burial customs; these include passage graves, cremation burials with or without cremation remains of the pyre, inhumations in pits with or without coffins or in wooden chambers and boat burials. But after the conversion to Christianity (from the end of the 10th century onward), these varying burial customs disappeared and got unified into inhumations in consecrated grounds (Pulsiano and Wolf; Graves). Old Norse literature and archeology unveils these forgotten rituals. Written sources, however, could not give a thorough picture of ancient concepts since most were recorded by Christians at least 200 years after the Christianization and were discovered in fragments. The interpretation of excavated Viking graves was also problematic due to religious ambivalence from pagandom to Christianity even though many of the archeological findings were from the Viking Age (Pulsiano and Wolf; Burial Mounds and Burial Practices). Nonetheless, the burial customs present the modern world with the important aspects of the perception of reverence for ancestors, life after death, and social structure in the old Scandinavian culture. Scandinavians believed that
According to Gesta Danorum III, the King of Saxony, Gelder was ¡°laid on a pyre built of vessels¡± and then his ashes, treated reverentially as his remains, were put ¡°in a noble barrow¡± (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/saxo/saxo03.htm). In another instance, in the Arabian Ibn Fadlan¡¯s eye-witness account of a funeral from the year 922, a Varangian chieftain¡¯s corpse was burned on the pyre with numerous grave goods such as weapons, cushions, animals, and even a young girl, who went through various funeral preparation rituals; a burial mound was raised then over the ashes (Roesdahl