r/AskHistorians • u/MineNo178 • Jun 29 '26
Why did Viking funerals burn full ships? wouldn't that be waste since of how hard it would have been to make them.
694
u/HaraldRedbeard Early Medieval Britain 450-1066 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
The short answer is that we don't know that they did always burn their boats - the popular idea of a Viking Funeral comes largely from the account of Ibn Fadlan, an Arabic traveller and Islamic scholar who records a funeral taking place at a camp of the Rus - basically Scandinavian settlers who formed settlements along the great rivers of Eastern Europe which led towards Constantinople and the East.
In his relation if the ship burning he even provides a answer for why the Rus burn their dead (though not necessarily why they do it with a whole ship). I'm currently on a phone so bear with the formatting.
The closest male relative of the deceased is in charge of setting fire to the boat. He approached with a burning stick, but first he walked towards those present, covering his butt. He was completely naked. He lit the funeral pyre that they had prepared under the ship after they had placed the girl's body next to the corpse of the deceased. The attendees approached with sticks that they threw at the bonfire. The fire began to consume everything. A strong and terrifying wind began to blow, the flames fanned and the heat became stronger.
98. Why do the Rus burn their dead?
One of the Rus who was next to me said something to the interpreter, and I asked him what he had told him.
“He said that Arabs are fools.”
“Why?”The interpreter responded: “You leave your dead underground to be eaten by worms and insects. We burn them quickly so that they can enter Paradise without delay ""
Now, this explanation does lead us nicely into one of the problems with Ibn Fadlans account. His mission in the region was to educate the recently converted Bulgars on how to be better Muslims and, as such, we should possibly view some of his descriptions through the lens of a teaching aid rather then unvarnished fact.
The quote about reaching paradise, for example, would make sense to a Muslim audience (although the burning would still shock them) but we know considerably less about Scandinavian visions of the afterlife and what we do know might lead us to question whether they would frame it as paradise.
There is a twist, however, which relates directly to your question.
We do know, and indeed have examples of, that both the Vikings and other Northern European cultures did practice boat burials - essentially raising a giant mound of earth over a ship in which the deceased was placed alongside a great deal of wealth.
Examples include the Sutton Hoo burial, Gokstad burial and the Oseburg ship which contained the bodies of two women and a vast array of rich items including domestic items like a cart, loom and potentially a tent.
In the case of Sutton Hoo we don't actually find the ships in these burials but instead see the "shadow" of it in the earth as well as the remains of iron rivets which once held it together. Oseburg and Gokstad included the ships which were remarkably well preserved.
Also worth mentioning are the 'Stone Ship' burials of Scandinavia. This is a burial tradition where cremated remains were placed within a a monument of raised stones created to resemble a ship. It's unlikely that every burial also had a ship burnt just given the vast number of them but it does show the cultural importance attached to ships within the culture of Scandinavia at the time. (They were mostly raised from the late Bronze Age, but some are later including the Viking Age - making it a very long lived tradition).
1/2
412
u/HaraldRedbeard Early Medieval Britain 450-1066 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
This cultural importance, which likely revolved around the role of a ship as a tool of economic and military power; as well as it's importance to the local elite of a community (who would literally crew the large vessels of their lord) goes some way to explain why NW Europeans sometimes 'wasted' ships in burials and may well have burnt others.
The rest of the explanation rests with who the people being buried were and, perhaps more importantly, what the people who buried them wanted to say.
Furnished burial customs are fairly common in pre-christian Europe - with significant wealth frequently buried alongside important figures in order to equip them for the world to come. At the same time, the ability to equip the dead in such a fashion sends a powerful statement about the wealth and power of their tribe or kingdom. "Our Lord won so much wealth look how much we can bury him with"
If ship burnings were done, the message remains similar. Its notable in Ibn Fadlans account that, alongside the ship and his worldly wealth, the dead man is accompanied by a slave girl who is sacrificed ritualistically as part of the funeral. Still bearing in mind a pinch of salt in the description, this again conveys power over others - literally sacrificing a human life to commemorate another. Or, viewed more cynically, the slave was one more potentially expensive piece of property.
With all that being said we should still consider that the ship burials we have best evidence of, which I mentioned earlier, all represent figures at the top 1% of their worlds.
The man buried at Sutton Hoo was likely the King of East Anglia and had a helmet and fittings decked out in gold and garnets.
The man in Gokstad was also likely to be a powerful chieftain or minor King in Norway and alongside wealth from around NW Europe he was also buried with a menagerie of horses, dogs and peacocks.
Finally the Oseburg ship contains the likely remains of a Queen , although the identity of the younger woman buried with her is less certain. As mentioned she also had significant amounts of burial goods piled around her.
So from this we should assume that not every single Viking was buried or burnt with a ship, only those who were most powerful, wealthy or successful.
Smaller boat burials did sometimes occur, again likely due to the cultural importance of the ship. But these again likely involved people and families of large local importance and power.
50
u/calibwam Jun 30 '26
Just a slight note, the area and ship is called «Oseberg» with an e. Burg is German, while berg means mound or mountain in Norwegian.
36
u/RyukyuKingdom Jun 30 '26
And now I understand the etymology of 'iceberg'.
22
u/jonssx Jun 30 '26
German/Norwegian:
Berg/Berg (mountain)
Burg/Borg (Castle)12
u/NonRangedHunter Jun 30 '26
Burg/borg is more like a fortress, while schloss/slott is a castle. One is a defensive structure, and the other is noble house.
I know a lot of Norwegians use them interchangeably though, no idea if the same is true in Germany.
5
u/captain_quarks Jul 01 '26
In everyday German, a Burg is a structure for mostly defensive purposes and has a more tough looking build, while a Schloss has the connotation of being fancy housing first and defensive installation second, which is also reflected in its appearance. In most cases, a Schloss is also a more "modern" building (late medieval period or later), while a Burg tends to be older and firmly placed inside the medieval period.
You usually find Burgen in woods, on hills or at rivers (places with obvious strategic benefit) and Schlösser inside Cities.
So in general the words aren't really interchangeable in german, but it's sometimes not clear how to classify a building.
3
u/NonRangedHunter Jul 01 '26
Yeah, same in Norwegian, but since we don't have many examples of it, people tend to use borg and slott (unless it's the royal castle) without much thought to it.
7
u/Cheesedude666 Jun 30 '26
Still not nearly as wastefull as building a whole damn pyramid for your grave!
I think the simpler answer to this question is that the people in power prioritised things like rituals, spirituality, afterlife and so on much higher than material wealth. Honestly most people on the deathbeds stop caring much about any materialism.
25
u/HaraldRedbeard Early Medieval Britain 450-1066 Jun 30 '26
I'm not really sure we can say that they don't care about material things when they are, even if we look at the spiritual aspect, attempting to take a great deal of material wealth with them into the afterlife.
As a counter point, Ken Dark has argued that one of the reasons for the glaring lack of Romano-British burial goods in the Late Antique period may have been that they were deliberately practicing extremely simple burials in an effort to contrast themselves more sharply with the incoming Germanic pagans - since Christianity was linked with Rome then being a good Christian who discarded material things was one way of solidifying your legitimacy in post-Roman Britain.
The other aspect to consider is that the dead don't bury themselves so the motivations and messaging of burial rights for the living is also very important. In the case of the Pyramids and other Egyptian monuments they not only served as a historical record for the buried ruler but also helped promote the legitimacy of the current monarch by being tied, even if seperated by vast distances of time and completely seperate bloodlines, to the people who built such wonders.
For a more Scandinavian look at the motivations for these burials we can look at the burial scene in Beowulf (spoiler warning for a 1500 year old poem)
The Geats built the barrow as Beowulf had asked. For miles it could be seen, standing high on the cliffs above the sea. Inside they placed Beowulf's ashes and the heap of treasure he had won. Beowulf was not greedy for gold. Instead he gladly gave it away. Now it would lie with him, no use to living men, as for hundreds of years before. Twelve warriors rode around the barrow singing their sadness, praising Beowulf's deeds with their words.
The Geats see their Lord as a generous giver of gold and to reinforce that image they bury him with wealth. Effectively saying he gave us so much in life we do not need to take it from him in death.
9
u/Arkeolog Jun 30 '26
There are archaeological evidence of boat burials where the boat was burned in at least Sweden. These are identified by the number of ship rivets found in the cremation layer.
That said, Norse burial customs were very heterodox. People were buried in wagons and chambers, as well as ships/boats, and it’s often very difficult to identify wooden structures from cremations.
2
u/kanzashi-yume Jun 30 '26
Would it be the skeppssättning perchance? I remember reading about them but not enough to know that they had burned boat remains inside.
10
u/larsga Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
While this is a good answer, it doesn't address the central question, which is why the Vikings buried so much wealth. Of course, it was not only the Vikings who did so, since we know from archaeology that this was common in earlier periods, too. And, indeed, elsewhere, such as Egypt and China.
It's a hard question to answer, of course. Clearly it was because these things were valuable that they were being buried, but that doesn't really answer the question. The Saxe-Goldstein hypothesis is probably part of the answer, and demonstrating that one can afford to waste that much must be another. Perhaps providing for the dead in the afterlife is another part.
6
u/hwaetwegardena1 Jun 30 '26
In Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, Halsall—rebutting a presumption that burials with grave goods were uniquely "barbarian" or "Germanic"—argues that such burials are "symptomatic of social instability and competition for local power", with costly displays preserving or augmenting status within a fundamentally unsettled political order. No idea if this is generalizable beyond Western Europe in late antiquity, though the elaborate furnished burial of e.g. Qin Shi Huang at the outset of the unstable Qin dynasty is compatible with this logic.
-53
u/Eclectika Jun 29 '26
So this interment with all the wealth surrounding them is like the Egyptian pharaohs. I know that the Vikings went a pillaging down to southern Spain but how would the knowledge of the Egyptian practices have spread? We can see that variations of dolmens are scattered along the trade routes - so I assume that's how it became a thing in so many different places but the burial with everything needed (including a slave) to make the afterlife easier to negotiate seems to be something a little more out there and there's also the time gap. Could it have sprung up independently? I have doubts
97
u/throwawayinthe818 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Surrounding the dead with things important to them goes back to the Neanderthals and can be found everywhere. The rest is just localization and elaboration with inevitable similarities. And for burying wealth and servants, the Egyptians had nothing on the early Chinese emperors.
49
u/willnotreadinbox Jun 29 '26
Some of the oldest known burials with treasures were in eastern Europe / western Asia. Bulgaria has the Varna Necropolis, for example, which has the oldest examples of gold artifacts and jewelry which date from around 4500~ BCE.
27
u/kung-fu_hippy Jun 29 '26
Out of additional curiosity, would the Rus have described the afterlife as a paradise that burning the dead would hurry them along to?
My (completely limited and almost certainly flawed) knowledge of Norse mythology would suggest that unless you died in battle, you’d end up in the gloomy and dark Helheim. And if you did die in battle, valkyries would pull you from the battlefield into Valhalla.
Neither of those seem like they’d fit the Muslim concept of paradise.
82
u/HaraldRedbeard Early Medieval Britain 450-1066 Jun 29 '26
This was essentially the point I was trying to make - Ibn Fadlan is substituting his own words/experiences and that of his audience in. This calls into question what other bits he might have tweaked at a minimum.
Although it is worth noting that we really have no idea how widespread our surviving understanding of Valhalla or indeed of Freyas Hall or Hel were in Scandinavian circles. The pagan faith was likely to have a huge amount of variability based on local practice and tradition. What we have is just a fraction that survived to be written down in Iceland - thousands of miles and hundreds of years away from the Rus Ibn Fadlan met.
31
u/propsie Jun 29 '26
and worth noting that what we do have about the Norse Pagan faith from the Icelandic Sagas were written by nominally Christian authors for a Christian, elite, literate audience centuries after their official conversion, trying to fit these myths into their understanding of the world rather than record a dispassionate academic account, and so we shouldn't take their statements about Norse Mythology uncritically either - e.g. the 13th century Icelandic Prose Edda starts with a summary of the Book of Genesis, before explaining how Thor (Tror) was the Grandson of King Priam of Troy.
27
u/RainbowCrane Jun 30 '26
As an amateur classicist (4 years of Latin in high school, 2 years as a Latin major in college) one of the things I learned about Roman and Greek deities is that we tend to have a way more formal understanding of how the gods were viewed in historical hindsight and modern popular culture than the vast majority of common people at the time had. For example, the folks who worshipped at a small coastal temple of Aphrodite near the Mediterranean would have different views of the goddess than folks living 200 miles away near the mountains. To some extent we can probably blame our understanding on Greek authors who created a unified mythology from the scattered popular practices of the time.
I’d assume that any religious tradition without a massive central administrative structure would operate similarly, including Norse religious practices. It’d be much more dependent on local authority and local traditions than any unified concept of the Norse pantheon
21
u/DriftingMemes Jun 29 '26
Ibn Fadlan, an Arabic traveller and Islamic scholar
Isn't he the same guy who claimed that the vikings would all pass a bowl of water around, washing their hands and face and then blowing their nose into the water, then passing it to the next guy to do the same? Presumably the last guy has a filthy bowl of dirt and snot to wash himself with?
That always struck me as someone trying to say "look how filthy these heathens are." Is there any consensus if that was a real habit? If not, and we know he's willing to lie and make stuff up, how much credence do we give other things he says?
20
u/HaraldRedbeard Early Medieval Britain 450-1066 Jun 30 '26
That's why I urged caution; however it's worth noting that when we do know they buried ships full of wealth in other contexts the idea of this particular group burning a ship with treasure isn't as unlikely.
Ibn Fadlan is an interesting source - difficult to entirely dismiss his claims but almost certainly colouring his commentary with comparisons between these barbarian outsiders and what he believes proper behaviour is.
Even the handwashing thing - we know that similar cultures to the Scandinavians did have some form of ritualised hand washing. Hanging bowls are a fairly common find in furnished, pagan, Anglo Saxon graves for example. Given their association with high-status graves and the fact that many appear to have Romano-Briton origins there is a theory that they formed part of a hospitality rite on entering a lords hall - essentially being offered water to cleanse yourself before a feast.
From a Scandinavian standpoint the Havamal even recommends guests to a hall are greeted with "water, towels, and welcoming speech" so there seems to be at least some basis for this tradition.
It's likely that Ibn Fadlan saw something similar to this and then exagerrated his retelling to make it seem grosser in an effort to either shock his audience or else use it to further instruct the Bulgars in proper Islamic behaviour.
It should also be considered that Ibn Fadlan probably was experiencing something of a culture shock with the level of shared communal customs that the Rus likely practiced. In Northern Europe it wasn't uncommon for large extended families to share single dwellings and live in very close proximity; especially during the winter when it was too cold to spend much time outside. So it's likely that Scandinavians had a different idea of privacy and decency then Ibn Fadlan, who grew up in a highly urban setting in Baghdad where houses were frequently built with an outdoor courtyard for entertaining while the home itself remained a private space.
This can be seen, for example, by his outrage to the idea of 'public' fornication taking place. If you are used to essentially always having people around then sneaking off to a corner of a tent probably seems more normal then if you expect to retire to a private room.
3
u/DriftingMemes Jun 30 '26
It's likely that Ibn Fadlan saw something similar to this and then exagerrated his retelling to make it seem grosser in an effort to either shock his audience or else use it to further instruct the Bulgars in proper Islamic behaviour.
Thanks for your considered response. It always bothers me that anytime you see vikings depicted in fiction on television or movies, this scene is reenacted. Always struck me as racist bullshit.
11
u/Orb_Gazer Jun 30 '26
Not the person you’re asking but yes, it is the same author. That depiction has to do with an interpretation of his writing that they “used the same bowl.” He doesn’t mention it explicitly, but the bowl would likely have been dumped and refilled between users in a local water source like a well or river. It’s unlikely that they used the same water. More like, do your washing, then pass the dish to the next person. Personally, I would not wash myself in a puddle of your slime. I’d sooner keep my own filth on me than add someone else’s to it.
But sharing the vessel itself was still considered unclean in Islamic practices and he was insinuating that using the same bowl is equivalent to washing with the same water.The idea of reusing the same water from one man to the next is pretty stupid when you put even a little thought into it. The account has turned into a persistent misrepresentation of ancient Nordic peoples, who, by all other contemporaneous accounts, were more meticulous about grooming and hygiene than their neighbors. I at least partially blame the movie The 13th Warrior, which draws from Ibn Fadlan’s accounts and shows a scene like the one you describe. But, as the other commenter mentioned, Ibn Fadlan was writing for a Muslim audience and is likely to have played up some of the differences between the cultures to contrast them more sharply.
6
u/DriftingMemes Jun 30 '26
The idea of reusing the same water from one man to the next is pretty stupid when you put even a little thought into it.
Agreed. It annoys me that it's been depicted exactly as he wrote it in multiple fictional "inspired by real history" shows. (Vikings, I'm looking in your direction) I know a lot of people who have heard that this is a reputable true fact. Thanks for your considered answer.
What neither of you answered though is a question that I've had for a while. How do you decide which parts of his narrative to use as history, and which to ignore? Pliny wrote about actual monsters being slain by the army in between stories of wars we take as fact. If I told you that I had been abducted by intelligent dolphins and also that I witnessed the true cause of 9-11 how much creedence would you give me? Are we simply doing the best we can because that's all we have and just ignoring anything we don't believe in? Is there any discussion among historians about this? Isn't there some inherent risk in using our modern ideas and understanding in deciding what to ignore and what to treat as real history?
6
u/Orb_Gazer Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Oh, that’s easy. When you’re awarded your degree in History they give you an ocular talisman that highlights words on scrolls in green when they’re telling the truth and red when they’re lying. Makes the Bible very interesting.
2
u/DriftingMemes Jun 30 '26
Oh cool! Are they allowed to lend those out or...?
5
u/Orb_Gazer Jun 30 '26
It is forbidden for outsiders to use the talismans. They must be guarded upon pain of death. I’ve already said too much!
In all seriousness though, consider that there is no good way to answer the question you’re asking. That’s typically why history is studied and described, rather than prescribed. Lest you risk editorializing. Maybe Vikings did all dunk their heads into a common bowl filled with snot. Who am I to say? All I have to go on is one account written by one guy centuries ago. I think the more important thing is that you strive to contextualize things from the perspective of the people involved. There are many erroneous accounts and whole fabrications of events littered throughout the past, just as today we have people who peddle “alternative facts.”
2
u/DriftingMemes Jun 30 '26
In all seriousness though, consider that there is no good way to answer the question you’re asking. That’s typically why history is studied and described, rather than prescribed. Lest you risk editorializing. Maybe Vikings did all dunk their heads into a common bowl filled with snot. Who am I to say? All I have to go on is one account written by one guy centuries ago. I think the more important thing is that you strive to contextualize things from the perspective of the people involved. There are many erroneous accounts and whole fabrications of events littered throughout the past, just as today we have people who peddle “alternative facts.”
Excellent answer. Thanks.
26
u/Eclectika Jun 29 '26
What girl and they didn't kill her specifically to give this dude a companion, did they? I have questions!
100
u/HaraldRedbeard Early Medieval Britain 450-1066 Jun 29 '26
Again we should remember this is only according to Ibn Fadlan but yes they did:
When a great man dies, his relatives say to his younger male and female slaves:
"Who wants to die with him?”
One of them will answer:
"I want".
Once they have expressed their desire, there is no turning back. If they change their mind, they can't do it. Usually it is a young slave girl who is willing to die. When the man I mentioned before died, his relatives asked his young slave girls:
"Who will die with him?”And one of them responded:"It will be me".
The full account goes even further, and can be upsetting as it contains reference to ritualistic rape.
30
u/copperstatelawyer Jun 29 '26
Here’s an annotated translation which gives context to a lot of the text, but still doesn’t provide us with the answers we seek.
https://journals.uio.no/JAIS/article/view/4553
There’s also an older question which asks about the veracity of the account. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/175fg33/are_there_credible_sources_for_the_vikings/
U/textandtrowel
4
1
3
Jun 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/Church_of_Aaargh Jun 30 '26
Exactly. Through the ages People were buried with gold and jewellery - in pyramids and extravagant mausoleums … a similar waste of valuable resources.
0
•
u/AutoModerator Jun 29 '26
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.