In his detailed account of the customs of the Vikings he encountered in Russia, Muslim traveler Ibn Fadlan describes the funeral of a Viking chief. This excerpt tells what happened after the body of a slain slave girl was placed near that of the chief on the funeral pyre.
Then the deceased's next of kin approached and took hold of a piece of wood and set fire to it.... He ignited the wood that had been set up under the ship after they had placed the slave-girl whom they had killed beside her master. Then the people came forward with sticks and firewood. Each one carried a stick the end of which he had set fire to and which he threw on top of the wood. The wood caught fire, and then the ship, the pavilion, the man, the slave-girl and all it contained. A dreadful wind arose and the flames leapt higher and blazed fiercely... it took scarcely an hour for the ship, the firewood, the slave-girl and her master to be burnt to a fine ash.
Quoted in James E. Montgomery, "Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah," Cornell University Library. Www. library .cornell. edu/colldev/mideast/montgo1.pdf.
At the height of the funeral of a Viking chief, the ship containing his body is set afire by his kinsmen and followers.
Now here, now there, while the two men throttled her with the rope until she died.47
Finally, they burned the ship with the two bodies in it. Archaeologists have confirmed that such elaborate funerals for well-to-do Vikings did occur sometimes. The remnants of one such ceremony were uncovered in 1903 at Oseberg, Norway. They remain a testament to a medieval individual who desired to leave life as boldly and colorfully as he had lived it.
World History
