ABSTRACT
Since the Scandinavian and Baltic countries remained for so long independent of the Roman organisation and Christian beliefs of the rest of Europe, their ancient religious practices contained many features from an earlier age. In the year 921 an Arab traveller, Ibn Fadlan, reported a full-scale shipburial among the Rus of the Volga. His account gives the most remarkable insight into what might lie behind the great howe and barrow burials which litter the European landscape. First, the chieftains body was buried for ten days in the semi-frozen ground while the preparations were made. Then the body was exhumed, blackened with the cold but otherwise not decayed, and dressed in the sumptuous clothes which had been made for it. It was laid on Byzantine silken cushions on a bench in the ship, and surrounded with food, drink and herbs before animals, including horses, cows, a dog, a cock and a hen, were cut to pieces and thrown onto the ship. One of the dead mans retainers, a slave girl, had volunteered to die with him. She had been treated like royalty meanwhile, as well as becoming thoroughly intoxicated through drinking, singing and having sex with as many men as she liked, Tor love of her master. Before she went onto the ship she was lifted up three times to look over a structure that resembled a doorframe. She was looking into the Otherworld, where she said she saw first her parents, then her dead relatives, and finally her master, whom she wanted to join there. She then went onto the ship, singing two ceremonial farewell songs, and was led into the tent where the chieftain's body lay. A group of men banged their shields with sticks, to drown any screams, as she underwent a double death by simultaneous strangling and stabbing. Her executioner was the old woman in charge of the whole proceedings, a Hun known as the Angel of Death. Afterwards the chieftain's nearest kinsman approached the ship on its pyre of brushwood. He was naked, and walked backwards with one hand on his anus. He picked up a brand, set fire to it and set the pyre alight. Other people added sticks and timber, and the whole structure went up in flames. In the opinion of the Rus, the Arabs and other inhumers were mad to bury their dead. ‘We burn them up in an instant, so that they go to Paradise in that very hour.’ 1
