The Shape of the Soul: The Viking Mind and the Individual

so good afternoon everybody welcome back to uh unfortunately the last of these three messenger lectures all good things must come to an end um um it is a pleasure again to have Neil price professor of archaeology from Aberdine University with us it is a pleasure to see so many people in the audience um Neil will uh conclude his discussion with us of um the Viking mind today but as many of you know he is a man of many talents and many interests he goes well beyond just uh Vikings and their material culture and their um um mental culture he has worked and I'm just throwing out examples this is an exhaustive list he has worked for instance on the archaeology of the Holocaust on um Southern African um uh rock art in various places he has worked Excavating or whatever you want to call that um uh World War II battlefields in the Pacific um he um has worked on or is working on the history of piracy more broadly than just the Vikings and quite appropriately you'll be happy to learn that um International speak like pirate day last week I think it was was also his wedding anniversary so without too much further Ado NE Al turn over to you thank you aurin uh first can you hear me okay is that all right joh good well as you know yesterday we explored the complex world of the dead as articulated by the living in their funeral rituals and what I want to do today in this last of the three lectures is to bring that progressively back through into the world of the living and finally to the level of the individual the individual Viking and the individual Viking mind to try to get to the essence of this topic that's the theme for the three lectures and once again I'm going to be looking at stories in all kinds of settings and circumstances playing out in different ways that combine I think to give us a deeper understanding of that Viking mental world and I'm going to begin with where I left off yesterday with those intricate Tableau of Graves and burial rituals and you might remember my closing suggestion which was that the archaeological evidence for these things might represent what's left of stories that have been dramatized and acted out effectively a kind of Mory plays in order to explain what I mean by that I'm going to begin with an example that might at first hearing sound a little bit odd but do uh do bear with me I want you to imagine the stage at the end of a production of Hamlet what does it look like well it's a Shakespeare tragedy so you've got a heap of bodies together with their clothes and their dress accessories and their weapons and equipment and things like that and then beyond that you got all the other props the furniture and what have you the stage set itself it's quite a complicated scene if you imagine it in that way and especially if you imagine it as an archaeological site imagine Excavating the stage at the end of Hamlet providing of course nobody moves think of the graves we looked at as exactly that the stage at the end of a play where all the dead people and the animals and the objects all those things placed so very very carefully as we saw are where they've ended up at the end of the roles that they've played out do you see what I mean that these things are a kind of fossilized stage set and then of course going back to Hamlet or for that matter any other drama think of all the action all the dialogue all the very very complex aspects of the story that are not present right at the end at that final curtain but that nonetheless are very much a part of everything that's led up to that all the people who aren't even on the stage at that point who've come and gone in the case of Hamlet you've got a good three maybe even four hours of drama what about ibben fadlan the Arab traveler that we saw yesterday with his description of 10 days of people doing all those kinds of things that's what I mean by this kind of ferary drama what actually then were they doing at this point I'm just going to suggest a few of the things that those stories might have been about and then these are themes that I'm going to follow up in the rest of the talk I think we might be fairly safe in assuming that those kinds of dramatized stories might have had something to do with the dead person or the dead people probably also something to do with the mourners if that's what we want to call them the people who are actually doing all this making the grave conducting the funeral the dead person's family and the family of the mourners perhaps the same thing perhaps their stories of land and place the environment in which all of this is taking place and then add some time depth to that the history of those places and those people and then if you go back a bit further still into Legend a mythology a different kind of history and if you remember some of the points I made in the first lecture a different kind of reality stories of gods and other supernatural beings but all of them narrated within a wide social framework the community and the larger society but as we've seen in that infinite variety of burial ritual with specific elements for this person for this grave today to do those things and I can't resist explaining this or not explaining but just telling a bit about this rather peculiar grave you see on the left there um this is one that was excavated only a couple of years ago um it's a good example of how much information you can get out of these burials in terms of sequence for example um at the foot of the Grave inside the grave itself is a standing Stone you have a dog here which the artist has sanitized very slightly um remember I I apologized yesterday for getting a bit gross with Viking burials here we go again um you have a standing Stone and then they've sort of squashed a dog down over the standing Stone um and you've got a sequence in there then you've got the dead woman lying there as you can see and a horse in a grave that's so small the horse is actually on top of her very difficult to arrange a dead horse to look like this I think it was alive when it was driven down into the grave and then probably its throat was cut or something like that um so it's actually standing on the dead person and then you have all the other objects as well so think of of what's there and what isn't and the and the sequence of action this is the kind of detail that you can get out but it may be and i' completely understand if it's the case that you doubt that these could be stories it's just an idea after all so what I want to do now to support that a little bit is to turn to a rather different area and a different medium although also connected with the dead that can give us some hints about what these stories are and what they're for and we're going to look at a special kind of Monument on a special place the Baltic island of gotland in the Viking age gotland is essentially a separate country it's an island Community um at the center of the Baltic at the center of all the movement through the Baltic and everything on gotland is just a little bit different very similar to the rest of Scandinavia but the way they dress the kinds of things they use the houses they build build the graves they create they're just a little bit different from everywhere else um even beyond that idea of of variation and I want to look particularly at a special class of burial Monument they're known as picture Stones I showed you one of these briefly the other day but what they are is large flat slabs of limestone the smallest are about this big and the biggest come up to the top of the screen so they can vary quite widely the kind you see here are the um top of the screen variety so they're bigger than the you can see them on the screen itself very large monuments and as you can see they're carved with lots and lots of pictures and they generally appear in two forms either divided into doesn't sound good um divided into parallel bands a bit like a bit like a comic strip here or with more jumbled images just um heaped up but in all of them a ship is a very prominent part of the lower field of the stone it's tempting to read a sequence into the ones in the horizontal panels but even in the um the more jumbled ones there may be structure in that image nonetheless we also don't know for example if there's perspective in it um you might effectively see something in three dimensions flipped vertically it's hard to tell but lots and lots of information there are several hundred of these stones with thousands and thousands of images collectively um very difficult to understand but a fascinating visual record coming to us from the Viking age we know that these things are memorials to the dead effectively they're a kind of Tomb Stone sometimes they're set up on burial mounds in the cemeteries sometimes they're on the farms but they're connected with the dead you find burials at the foot of many of these Stones the first suggestion I want to make to you and I should say it's not my work this is the work of a man called Ander chandrian concerns the fact that rather strangely for an island dependent on an entirely Maritime economy gotland has no ship or boat burials of any kind it's one of the few places in the Viking world that has none of this there are no ships or boats in the graves and if you look at a ship burial from the mainland this is one from vendel in Sweden think about all those objects laid out on the deck and the the dead person in the middle there and the animals and all the rest think of them as ideas think of them as a potential part part of a story or part of a play as I've described and then imagine how you would draw that can it be that the picture stones are effectively pictorial ship burials hence the boat in the lower part of the field there's something else that adds to this this professor that I mentioned Andre grian Works in stock he looked at a number of these stones in great detail and he managed to identify some of the stories that we have from Norse mythology you have the overall Motif as I've said of the ship at the bottom but if you start in the lower field and read up you can actually make sense of these pictures in line with stories from Norse mythology especially in this case the story of sigur the Dragon Slayer if you like your Vagner this is one of the main stories behind his ring cycle and the really exciting thing is that when you look at the location of these stones out in the countryside they're spaced around the edges of property boundaries around the edges of Estates so you have one stone like this standing up in the countryside and then you go around the property boundary to the next stone and you find that the top top panel on one stone is repeated as the bottom panel of the next and then The Story Goes On so these monuments to the dead are very definitely stories this is what they look like when they're out in the countryside this one's been eroded by the wind and the weather so it's blank um largely blank to the eye now but if you go close to it you can see that there are pictures on it so what you have are memorials to the dead which we can also see as claims to land because they're marking out the boundary of territory and because they are memorials to the dead they're also making a link between the ancestors all the people that have died there and that Land This Is My Land because that's my father's burial and that's my grandfathers and that's his fathers marking out literally the the boundaries of the land and most importantly that statement is expressed through a kind of story and I think we can say a family story because it's linked to the land owned by a particular group and it's told in sequential I can call them chapters added from one generation to the next because there's a time interval between these burials so that's quite a a package of things really there's also one other tantalizing element here you may have noticed that all of these stones are shaped like keyholes that characteristic shape is also found as the doors on stave churches these are the earliest kinds of wooden churches that we have in the north and there's an idea that these things are doors doors into somewhere else another world I just remember just remind you of two things here when I was talking about iban Fan's description of the ship burial remember the slave who was lifted up to look over a door into somewhere else the same idea and then remember in the very first story yesterday that complicated boat with lots of people in it that was buried on top of someone who'd been buried 50 years before think of that time interval the fact that they know they're going to do that in advance they bury someone and they know that a few decades later they're going to add to that sequence just as they do when they start setting these stones out in the countryside so we have people living on their Farms marking their possession with memorials to the land owners of the family each one merging as they die as they're buried with a family story as the property is gradually ringed perhaps with points of entry into another world that's quite a a a sequence I think I've mentioned the same kind of idea in that boat burial from Norway you can find this notion of referencing between one grave and another referencing I would say between stories when you go back to the graves themselves I'll just give you one example from the mainland this is a rather magnificent woman's grave from a place called goel in Norway and you see she's buried in a coffin surrounded by big stones with various things in the grave a very high status grave indeed from the same Cemetery just a few meters away is a rather magnificent boat burial quite a large boat a man in the middle here surrounded by weapons lots and lots of weapons you can see four Shields a sword all kinds of things two swords in fact at first glance you might not think there was much similar between these they're clearly a very different type of Monument except if you look both of them contain the severed head of a horse with a bridle on it a very rich Bridle a bridle made of gold actually and you find these horses heads in several of the other Graves on that Cemetery Graves that are separated by several decades in some in some cases over a century again they're referencing between one grave and the next and I would argue you could probably see this same idea of a sequential chapter in a story being added in this case through the medium of a burial and all its its contents as opposed to pictorially on those stones from gotland can we decode those stories what are they about I think we can do so up to point on the picture stones of gotland the stories are Tales of Heroes they're stories from the mythology at least the ones that we can identify pretty clearly when you have a very clear Motif that you can recognize from the texts most of them we don't know what they're about if we can use um a sort of a narrative convention I think we can probably come quite close to the topic of conversation I think we must might one day be able to find the grammar and the syntax of what they're doing but a translation I think is probably going to be Beyond us for now I think we have to be satisfied with understanding more or less what is going on well I've been talking about the dead what I want to do now is to take this much more into the world of the living to see how these stories play out in more everyday life the life as lived rather than as lived in the grave I'm going to follow this idea of ship burials here's two more you've seen a lot of them now and give you another way of looking at them a comparison between the hall the the central place of the Viking world and the grave because one thing that's been identified in in a lot not all but a lot of these ship burials is that the disposition of objects in the grave objects that you might be able to relate to a particular set of activities and by that I mean uh cooking equipment representing cooking or weapons representing weapons um things like uh gaming sets or drinking vessels representing the place where you do those things the center of the hall the relative spatial distribution of those kinds of objects matches the spatial distribution of where you do those things in the hall so you have all the kitchen equipment at one end of the boats the same end as you have the kitchen in the hall you have the weapons in the part of the boat which matches the part of the hall where you leave your weapons because you don't go into a house fully armed the central part the the main uh sort of public area of the hall here is where you find the gaming sets and the things that you do publicly in the hall and then right at the other end of the ship you find the more private objects associated with the dead person just as the private quarters of the hall at that end is there a sense in which the grave the ship is the Hall of the dead person that you have this idea that I've mentioned before of living in the grave actually um played out in the disposition of the objects as well which of course um doesn't rule out that this is a play because you can be acting in the hall in the grave moving around in it putting the different objects down as you act out in the hall itself this can also be a stage if we think of it that way for a play that can on for a very long time this is where I show you that image that you've seen lots of times as the sort of title card for these lectures this is our best current shot at reconstructing the ship Burial at ulab bar in uh Norway this is the um the most spectacular ship grave we have from the Viking age and it's recently been discovered that instead of covering it with a mound as we might expect as is the case today it's it's now a very big m Mound they started by building half a mound that the ship stuck out of and this triangular cross-section thing here is the grave chamber remember those things like a tent made of wood in the middle of the ship and as you can see one end of it is open and if you look at the environmental record all the pollen and they preserved grasses and things like that the OAB ship was open in in the grave certainly for months and perhaps for years and we know from the very detailed archaological deposits inside that people are moving things around so it's not just a grave where for example for 10 days you do this and put things there you go back to it you add to it you interact with the dead and the living community in which they're set so really quite a longlasting funeral that's a contrast with ibben Fan's description where they finally build the mound and go away but remember these are merchants on the move this is where they live so let's now look at the real versions of those buildings the hall these are tremendously important structures they are the literal heart of the community Central places with Central functions these are the residences of the the leaders as you go progressively up the social hierarchy they get more and more impressive the residences of local leaders of petty Kings and higher Kings residences with public profiles these are public spaces you do things in these Halls remember how important I I said that Hospitality was this is where you receive your guests it's where you give out all these material bribes to keep you um in the the manner you'd like to become accustomed to um you bribe your retainers with rings and gold and swords and so on and most important for what I'm saying today they're the setting for storytelling I mentioned I think that at the beginning of the Viking age Scandinavia was divided up into lots of little tribes there were no nation states Sweden Norway and Denmark as we know them did not exist but the rulers of those little tribes those little kingdoms had big Ambitions and they were projecting those Ambitions um into their community and Beyond and what happens during the Viking age is that those small tribes gradually expand partly as a result of all that raiding actually because the money that's coming back into Scandinavia the loot is fueling that process of expansion and some people are getting very good at it and some people are less good at it and their kingdoms are being absorbed into the others and the medium through which that's happening the location where those ideas are being negotiated a Halls like these so a very visible agenda to what's going on in there and I do mean visible these are very shiny Kings indeed they like their their gold their flashy clothes this is a a reconstruction of um one of these Kings um lots of gold thread on his costume a very rare red used for the color and lots and lots of glinting metal work which um you have to kind of see this to to understand it but uh when you go inside these Halls which are very dark places very few Windows if any they're lit by the Light of the fire um the light of of torches and in that shifting flickering dark light all this gold glints you see it as as constant flashes and Sparks of light so these are very visible people you see them glittering there in the dark and if you if you like that image um and have the time and the the um the interest do do come to this lecture tomorrow because I'm going to be talking about exactly that process and what happens inside those Halls but for now I want to emphasize that one of the the ways in which they made those epic aspirations manifest was through epics stories you've probably heard of Bale wolf one of the greatest epics of the north there are others as well um the hall is the setting for reciting those stories it's the setting for that scalc poetry that boasting poetry that I mentioned these are very Lively oral narrative places and epic Tales demand an epic stage some of these Halls the ones um belonging to the winners in that process of State formation are very uh magnificent indeed um someone in the audience asked me yesterday about the use of Timber this is a reconstructed one of these buildings um at firat in Denmark uh you've got half a forest in this these these uh these are not um cut Timbers these are tree trunks that make up the walls um rounded off and trimmed and so on but they're basically Tree Trunks and inside this are further wooden plank walls the roof made you can just about see them here of wooden shingles each one carved and to produce this you have to have the forest management behind it to keep this process going some of these things are very very large this one which you you might I hope you can see in the field here marked out in the post holes is a hall from Lyra in Denmark this group of blobs here are people it's 150 ft long really very large indeed if you look at it in plan it's the one I showed you with the the grave earlier um lots of different areas you have entrances here here and here so you can divide it into different zones just like in those Graves at this site in particular I put this one on the screen because um Lyra is actually the setting for baywolf I don't I don't have time to go into the baywolf poem in any detail but just in case you're interested Lyra is the seat of the historical Danish king rothar and the Halls on this site have been excavated in a continuous sequence going back to the fifth and sixth centuries and the Great Hall that's the center of the baywolf poem hot um might well be one of them it's quite a a creepy feeling to think that we may possibly have identified the hall that features in baywolf some of them are even bigger this is the largest known one from Viking age Scandinavia at a place called Bor up in the lolon islands very far north in Norway you can see the terrain here it's 240 ft long this picture of the reconstructed version of it is taken as a distance but um in the picture I'll I'll show you now when I say epic space just let me emphasize how epic these things really are I'm sure some of you have traveled in Europe you've probably been to some of the the great medieval cathedrals of Europe and if you haven't been there I'm sure you've been to American Cathedrals you know how big these buildings are well the next image shows the hall from Lyra and this Hall from Borg with Trondheim Cathedral and the scale is the same so think of your yourself in a cathedral and then think of one of those Halls that big very very large indeed if we go back to the written sources it's also clear that there's a type of place called a Hof or a HOV depending which language you use that in addition to being the residence of the Lord with all these functions that I've been describing also has a ritual and religious function that these Halls are effectively temples as well all of those offerings to The Elves and the dwarfs and all of these little creatures that I mentioned take place in these special Hof Halls so this brings us back into that um that ritual world that alternative reality of the the the cosmology that I began with and how it filters back into the places where people are telling stories and remember that all of these are then encircled by those cemeteries full of Mounds where all those other stories are taking place we've got some superb archaeological sources for this um this is a a reconstruction a hypothetical one of the interior of these things you can see how dark they are one of these offering ceremonies taking place um perhaps to an idol set up in the place of the high seat where the the the lord of the hall would otherwise sit this again is detailed in some of the written sources and archaeology most recently from this place Hof it means the place of the Hoff in Iceland up in the north a big Hall like this up in the top there very carefully excavated and all around the walls are the skulls of cattle that have been sacrificed with a blow through the forehead and also a very specific kind of cut to the neck designed to cut the artery and make as much blood as possible remember all that spectacle that rather unpleasant spectacle that I mentioned yesterday surrounding the ship baral this gives us an indication of what they're actually doing in those offering rituals in their Halls what I want to do now is make another link not just to the stories of the Gods but to the homes of the Gods I've mentioned Valhalla a few times in these lectures or or valul as it's really called the Hall of the slain this is the home of Odin there are some marvelous descriptions in the sources of what it looked like a very Marshal place as you can see here its roof was made of shields it has Spears around the walls it's kind of a hall of weapons full of Warriors and I think I mentioned in one of the questions yesterday there's an idea that um the Coliseum might be a model for this even though it doesn't look very much the same but uh this sort of big building with lots of doors full of Warriors we should also remember that all of Asgard that that home of the Gods is full of other Halls everyone's heard of Valhalla hardly anybody has heard of the rest of them um one for each of the Gods sometimes the gods have more than one so the first names are the names of the halls and in Brackets are the names of the Gods who own them most of these we know absolutely nothing about other than their names but think about them as a landscape of halls and the things that go on in Halls just like in the real world and to emphasize that this is not just a metaphorical link I think it's a highly literal one I want to also present to you um another new excavation in fact it's ongoing now at one of the archetypes for these Central places gamla Upsala gamla means old this is old upsa Sala in Upland in Sweden this is um just down the road from where I live actually it's mentioned in many sources but particularly Adam of Breman a German cleric writing at the end of the 11th century as one of the most important ritual and secular power centers in early Sweden particularly he describes a whole series of sacred um places in this landscape as you can see it focuses on a central Ridge with massive burial mounds and according to the sources these are the burial mounds of some of the Kings named in baywolf um all around it are uh there's a sacred grove various kinds of evidence for cultic activity and offering things but at one end of the ridge up here are a series of terraces which excavation has shown to be the site of these Halls the halls of the kings of central Sweden one of these excavations um the results I'm going to show you are from last year but they're continuing now um last year they got half of this Hall you can see it here cut off at the end of the trench on this Terrace so it's not these not just these enormous buildings that I talked about but if you raise them um about 40 ft off the ground they get even more impressive um and the the fins from this building are really um remarkable its doorway is 15 ft wide with double doors um with a a massive ramp leading up to it up the side of the Terrace um I should say that the preservation here is extraordinary so they have the door posts they have the hinges the bolts all the fittings that were on the doors um imagine it as an extraordinarily visually Rich building covered in carvings as well I think less than half the structure has been excavated but um if it goes on the way it's going it's bigger than the hall at Lyra and this is where we start to get really interesting the hinges of the doors are made of Spears they they're literal Spears not things that look like Spears they are Spears that have been hammered out to make the hinges of the doors and there are Spears fitted onto the doors as well and then all over the hall there are iron spirals like this driven into the walls into the posts into the doors in vertical lines in horizontal lines the smallest ones are about this size about the size of your hand the biggest ones like this one on the screen are like this so it's a a Hall that's absolutely bristling with sharp points and Spears and bear in mind its location in gamala I think we might be justified in seeing this as a secular or a real varhur on on midgard itself appropriately as the seat of a king really quite an extraordinary Discovery and we find these things going together in the landscape so you have this is an example from Tissa in Denmark you have these big enclosures with walls around them in the center you have the hall that you've seen in some of them they have those offerings in little buildings next to them sometimes they're in the hall itself and very very often you find a body of water nearby into which offerings have been placed um and this idea of this the lake or the bog the marsh as a a point of communication to the other world is something that you find again and again throughout Scandinavia and excavations of these places many of which are now land or a swampy kind of land um have produced thousands and thousands of objects that have been deposited into these water courses several of them been reconstructed um I hope you won't find this a bit distressing there's some there's some bits of animals Here In Living Color um this is a Reconstruction from from Denmark where you have um animal body parts on posts in the marsh pottery and all kinds of object objects thrown out into the swamp some of them landing on the surface others of them sinking into it and around the edges of these you find scaffolds set up with the skins of animals um this is something you can identify archaeologically because what you have is the Skull and the hoofs the extremity of the animal which is what you find in the archaeology but actually they're attached to the skin so the bone and the flesh has been removed so it's just the skin but with the skull and the Hooves attached on these scaffolds and we'd find lots of these in the archaeology and as I as I'm sort of going through these these connections between the halls and the landscape and so on I'm trying to move to a progressively more personal level and when you get to places like this these are not the rituals of the Kings the rituals in those magnificent buildings these are personal rituals people are making offerings at night or in the daytime you pass by the swamp throw something in these are the kinds of places where you interact with the Elves and the dwarves and the spirits the spirits are places like this um in that that world of stories that I've been mentioning Excuse me while I take a drink we also find this in some really remarkable little snapshots so you can see what happens in these offerings one of which is in a very spectacular and very beautiful place called fer in Northern Sweden the place name is interesting um Swedish has lots of onlet words so this the o with the the two dots over it is the word for Island and this f r f is the name of the god fr the the god of um fertility amongst others so this is the island of FR so it's it's a a sacred place name as you can see it's set amid the lakes of of harod Island in in in Northern Sweden you've got the mountains in the background and at the very highest point of the island up on a hill here and you can see the kind of view you have is a place called Hof and this is one of those Hof temples Halls that I mentioned what's there today is a church and it's not uncommon to find medieval churches set up in the places where the place name tells us there was once one of these pre-christian non-Christian um Temple Halls so when the conversion to Christianity comes they take over those existing cult sites and convert the place as well as the people to Christianity what makes this one so interesting is that when they were installing some uh some lighting and electricity in this church they dug up the floor and underneath the altar the altar itself buried quite far down was the remarkably preserved stump of a birch tree um the the the stump itself was preserved you could even see the axe marks where it had been cut down and All Around The Roots were hundreds and hundreds of Bones and what it looked looks as if it's happened is there's been some kind of sacred tree at this H site the highest point of the island in the middle by the way of a cemetery um this is now a Christian churchyard but in it even now are a number of burial mounds I'll show you one in a second so you have this tree at the highest point of the island and there appear to be animal offerings either around the tree or perhaps hanging from it as we find in the texts to get an idea of what this might have looked like and I showed you some of those images of those bog sacrifices just now this is what it comes out to from the 10th century five whole bears and these are Big Bears six elk heads two heads of Stags and then these are the things where you find the skulls the legs and the feet in other words those skins that I showed you earlier a five um you might wonder what a sheep/ goat is uh you can't can't tell the difference OST osteologically looking at the bones so sheeps or goats 11 pigs and two cows there's also Bones from reindeer squirrel and teeth from horses and dogs and when you put those those animals together not all of them but most of them match the animals that run up and down the world tree igdrasil there's an idea perhaps this is the world tree as well and not on this slide I'll spare you that but are also human remains there are people in this tree as well so it's under the high altar of the church and here you can see one of the pre-christian burial mounds in the churchyard another one there so the highest point of the island a tree full of offerings perhaps the world tree itself in symbolic terms surrounded by Graves on the site of a horf temple Hall and on and on and when you start adding those stories of the graves and the stor is in the Halls you can see the kind of environment in which this is happening finally I want to go from Community rituals to highly personal ones how do you yourself get in touch with the powers with the beings that inhabit that different reality around you and you do it through magic this is something I've spent quite a long time studying essentially um lots of different kind kinds of uh techniques and practices that you can combine in different ways um using the services of lots of different people so there's lots of different kinds of magic and lots of different Specialists who perform it it's used by both gods and humans in the textual sources and interestingly this comes back to a question I was asked yesterday it's primarily the province of women the proper performance of magic should be done by women men certainly do perform it but in so doing they take upon themselves a whole range of very negative things um different connotations of unmanliness essentially something you don't want to be as a man in the Viking age you might reasonably ask why men do this anyway and it seems to be because there's a particularly terrible kind of power that comes with that transgression the idea of going across Bel borders of different kinds including between the worlds which is what Odin does is something that's intimately bound up with this so many forms of magic and forms of magical people there are special places where you do this um under the bodies of the hanged like in those trees on burial mounds at night where you're in contact with the dead and in a different kind of world a dark world we have lots of um really very very many sources describing the kinds of spells and charms that were were used it's problematic to date them the sources are from after the Viking age as I talked about but there's a very very high degree of consistency in these um magical uh functions so there spells to see the future to heal the sick to influence the emotions in various ways to make someone fall in love with you or the opposite or whatever to control the weather to um influence the movements of game to bring fish into your Lake things like that to communicate with the supernatural in lots and lots of different kinds of ways and to make war and if you think back to all those ferary rituals you find a very similar emphasis on sexuality and aggression in the sorcery as well so the this idea of violence being an end in itself think how violent some of those funerals are and the sexual elements think of IB fadlan also come through in the magic this isn't just a textual world it's an archaeological world as well because we've had um uh we've been able to excavate more than 50 women's Graves from the Viking age very securely dated most of them from the 10th Century containing things that we can recognize from the sources as having to do with magic especially a kind of metal staff that that's the main attribute of the Sorceress um charms of various kinds made of the body parts of animals the kinds of things you recognize from medieval witchcraft even drugs hallucinogens like cannabis and hen Bane to take you out of yourself to send you on these these spiritual Journeys and these women are buried in special costumes things like silver headbands nasal piercings dresses which I I showed you a couple of these yesterday actually um dresses woven with Gold and Silver Thread that meant they would have glittered as they moved especially inside those Halls this is the kind of Staff looks a bit Tatty now um a metal rod with various kinds of um decoration on it this example has a hall a little metal Hall at one end of it you see the roof and the walls even those supporting posts around the side and at the corners of it are animals biting into the roof so again you have these these different connections going through all the time and originally this object would have looked absolutely magnificent it's only made of iron but with bronze details on it and if you think how that sort of matte black you get of of polished iron and add bronze that would have Shone like gold against that really quite spectacular objects I can just show you um quickly how um how special some of these rituals are to do with the sorceresses this is a a most peculiar grave one of these chamber Graves where you have two people a woman and a man on top of each other on the same chair if you wonder how you do this the answer is you tie them on with a chain um and leaning up against the back wall of the Grave is one of those sorceress's staffs and again this woman has all kinds of special costumes and things so you can see how very particular the rituals associated with these um these graves are if you look at it in cross-section here they are um you might wonder what this is It's a lance that's been thrown with great force into the revetment at the front of this little panel where the dead horses are and there are several textual accounts that say the way you send something to Odin is to throw a spear over it and I think what's happened here the last thing before they close the grave is somebody has thrown a spear over those two people and we know where they're going there's one other example which has been um examined in some detail recently another one of these sorceress's Graves from FCAT in Denmark where a remarkable battery of scientific analyses have been thrown at this grave that have enabled us to to reconstruct the appearance of one of these people these intermediaries between the worlds with remarkable Clarity she had a translucent blue gown very finely made a long Veil that covered her face and almost down to her feet she wore silver rings on her toes she had an iron star like we've seen she was wearing a kind of makeup made from White lead this would have been a real sort of pancake makeup think of a Japanese gisha that kind of makeup on her face she had pouches full of animal body parts another bag full of henbane seeds this is a very powerful hallucinogen and at the end of the the list there this is particularly gross um in her stomach she had lots of little balls made of fat and hair and Ash someone had sort of rubbed them together to make little pellets and we think these are from the remains of cremation PES she is eating the dead so really quite a remarkable picture and the last thing of all I said I wanted to get to the personal level the individual Viking here's a question for you what was inside a viking apart from horrible things like this what did the Vikings believe about the shape of the Soul what was inside each person each of us if you like well to go from the written sources which continue very late into folklore and indeed into um modern belief on Iceland each person has four components I'll just go through them very quickly to get us down at the end to the most personal level of all the first aspect of a person was something something called the hmer it means it's hard to translate these words but it means something like um the the shape or the shell it's the thing that contains you it's essentially your physical body in the Iron Age North the Viking age North there are lots of beliefs about shape changing people that can change into wolves or Bears or SEALS or whales and things like that and the thing that changes the thing that shifts from one for form to another is this the hmer so it's your outer form it's not a body as we would say it it's something more fluid and flexible than that but it's the thing that contains all the other things and then this is something I I particularly enjoy about the Vikings the hinger the hinger is your luck personified your luck is a being inside you and it can be to some extent separate from you and independent of you it can wander about and do things while you're not there you've heard about the idea of your luck running out on you that phrase that phrase is from the Viking age because it did to be lucky is very very important there there are very many sources that talk about he or she is lucky a lucky man um you should go with him on that Viking exped Expedition because he always has lots of luck there's a wonderful account of a uh the moments before a fight when um in one party there's a a man who has the sight who can see things that others can't see and he says I can see these guys luck spirits and there's a lot of them and I'm off so you it's a very important part of what you are and then there's the hugur the hugur is your essence it's what you really are deep down inside if I can give you an example um a popular character in Viking age uh stories was the king of the Huns ATA you you might have heard of him um someone from many centuries before the Viking age but he was a character that pops up in their Tales quite a lot and I'm sure you know Atela thean not a terribly nice man um and one of the things that was said about him was that he had an ulf's huger a wolf's Huger he might have looked like like a man but really he was a wolf that was what he was like inside that's what the Huga means and the last component of the Vikings and of us perhaps is the fer it means the follower and this is a a being separate from you always female even for men that appears to you in dreams or entrances and helps you it's a kind of guardian angel effectively um who gives you advice tells you not to do things or to do things um that watches out for you and these things are inherited they they pass through families so you have a a sort of Guardian Spirit of the family and these may be the things that are represented by these silver pendants that we have here well we're almost at the end of today's lecture and these three lectures what I've tried to give you from different perspectives and in different contexts is the Viking age as a world of lost stories many of them unfortunately are lost lost stories and lost storytellers what I've been saying is just the the tip of the proverbial Iceberg um because this Lost World of the Viking mind goes on and on and on if you're interested in exploring it more I'd certainly advise reading the the the myths of of the Norse read the sagas um and explore the archaeology as well I I think that this is one of the richest seams of intellectual inquiry i' I've ever encountered I hope you've you've gathered I'm I'm very enthusiastic about this and I I think um really that we're only beginning to explore this this Viking mind but right at the end now there's one thing I haven't touched on which is how did those stories end and we know that they end in something called the Ragnarok the battle at the end of everything its name um according to the latest research apparently really does mean the Twilight of the Gods this was a an interpretation that had been um discredited for a very long time and is now coming back the destruction of all worlds forever and incidentally this picture doesn't show what you might think it shows this is a volcanic eruption um in Alaska actually but uh volcanoes and the volcanic world is very much a part of living on Iceland where these stories were written down very briefly what happens at the Ragnarok is that everything is destroyed in a huge battle the gods fight the Giants and the forces of evil all the different kinds of beings that I've talked about all the gods all the Giants all the spirits the elves the dwarves all the people absolutely everything dies in this enormous cataclysm there are some myths that imply a sort of new world coming afterwards but um some Scholars including myself think this is a an addition um filtered through Christianity effectively making a a myth of Resurrection but um we don't know that that for sure but it seems to be that the Vikings are one of the very few World cultures without a permanent afterlife we've seen this this afterlife that people can go go into can can die into and then live through but it's only a respite before the final battle of the Ragnarok so if your future is fixed someone asked me about morality yesterday one of the things that matters most is facing that future in the right way your conduct on the way to meet it even though it won't alter what happens the Dignity of your conduct is important and that also tells us something about the Viking mind so is this the last story of the children of Ash that I talked about before what I've been talking about of course relates to the world of the Vikings specifically but I think it's also Al inevitably through the medium of this particular culture a meditation on The Human Condition these people are wrestling with the same problems as everyone else the question of mortality what we're doing here where we're going and so on the right way to live the Vikings had an essentially fatalistic Outlook they focused on the brevity of life and the importance of living in a certain way without regard for what is coming after you might find that to be a very alien way of looking at things you might find it very familiar or comforting I think that it has a lot to say to us today from different perspectives I think the Vikings still matter and I think their unique view of the world can genuinely give us some deeper perspectives on the fundamentals of life and the fears of mortality that confronted them as they still confront us I think there stories are still going on and after all Ragnarok hasn't happened yet thank you um you asked whether in the Norse world the ancestors speak to you and give you advice um yes in two ways um you remember the fer the follower that I mentioned right at the end that seems to be some kind of ancestral Spirit maybe the embodiment of all your ancestors put together um the part of your family that follows you all the time so and they appear to you in dreams there are also um some Saga accounts and poetic accounts of people waking up the dead not just seeing them or thinking of them in their graves but really waking them up and interrogating them and asking them for things um one of the areas of Viking ritual behavior that we know least about actually is offerings to the ancestors and I can tell you there are two PhD students working on this at the moment and I'm I'm sure many more um so I think we need to report back on that in in a few years time but they are important certainly mad right in the back ass whatever you were asking about the uh the fat sorceress with the uh the ingested remains of cremations and whether this was a regular thing or a oneoff I I've often wondered whether it killed her actually um uh the only reason we know about this at all is because of a project funded by the Danish state which has taken one person one grave from each time period of Danish history and and thrown as much science expensive science at it as possible to try and reconstruct this person so that's that's the reason why we know this um we don't have that information from any other grave which doesn't mean to say that it's not there it's we're also fortunate that these things have survived at all because they are organic um the the bit about its ingestion it's in the its location is is in her stomach um that I don't think there's much doubt that she has been eating them what it really means um we don't know we there hasn't been um an identif hasn't been an identification of whether this is uh human um remains or not because to get that they'd actually have to destroy the the objects and at the moment they don't want to do that so we don't know whether it's human or animal um you asked whether her stomach had any other contents um none that would register but uh I think it's the very unusual composition of these things that's meant that they survive at all you don't normally find food remains so we don't know you asked why the excavations of gam lopala are so recent when the the monument has been known for so long um the area of the monument is absolutely huge as as you remember it's it's I don't know exactly but it the the ridge is more more than a kilometer long if you take its extensions and it stretches out into the fields um there have been a lot of excavations over the years in different places in that landscape uh one of the reasons why those Terraces have not been looked at too much is precisely because they are so prominent um the same kind of reason why there's not often excavations at Stonehenge for example because it's it's such a Dignity of Monument that um it's very difficult to get permission to do it apart from anything else um what's happening at the moment is uh shud to tell you this but they're building a railway very very close to the Mounds which is um uh entailed a massive program of archaeology and this is a research excavation that's been added on to that this this um sacred landscape this ritual landscape um stretches very far to the sides of the ridge you asking whether the the water offerings are a matter of appeasing the the nisser and the tomta these are little sort of Sprites that live in the landscape um who might drown you and and things like that uh if we go with folklore which is very late this is going into postm Medieval Times early modern times um there are many different reasons for offering things for luck to as you suggest to appease the spirits but there's nothing consistent about it in terms of Viking age offerings we don't really know um there is uh a suggestion in snor st's Eder that uh if you uh when you when you die and you go into the next world you can take with you things that you yourself have put in the ground while you're alive a sort of spiritual bank if you like and we wonder whether some of the stuff in in the water courses and the the the bogs and so on is that kind of thing you also sometimes find very large collections of things so lots and lots of weapons and they seem to be um sacrificing is of the equipment of a defeated enemy that's one of the interpretations that that's one of the explanations you also find regular rituals at these places um particularly involving the sacrifice of animals which implies that it's a place that you come to often to do these things either at specific times of the year or for specific reasons when they crop up but the actual detail of it we don't really know you talked about the uh elements of of um action in baywolf and and and other sources as well where the hero makes um first something is is retrieved and brought back and then used in these these actions of um of of dismemberment in different forms with the head and so on and that and you had examples from baywolf with um grindle's arm and grindle's mother's head and whether this can match up with the kind of thing I've been talking about um absolutely unequivocally yes uh I think that's exactly the kind of thing we're talking about it's very hard to prove it of course but um the idea of retrieving things and things that are old this time Dimension is very important uh often the things we find in graves are well over a hundred years old when they went into the ground um so these things are things that people have kept and you have to wonder and I can't give you an answer but you have to wonder at which point do they decide that now it goes in the ground has it lived out its purpose um there are also uh this time depth in the rituals themselves I mentioned the um the uh the the burial at cang the one with the guy under the ship uh this is the same Cemetery by the way that you might remember from yesterday with the fingers and toes um on on the boat uh most of the boats in that burial in that in that grave field have people under them there's about a 40 50 year gap between the people under the boats and the boat and in some cases um one of those sequences of person plus boat has been completed at the time of the burial over there of someone else who 50 years later will get a boat on top of him they know that they're going to do that they know that's what you do here and just as with the picture Stones adding a chapter each generation over time think of how they do that they they're not not using writing this is an oral culture the idea of doing this must be transmitted I'd like to say through stories but certainly through description and memory and and oral culture and I think if you follow this idea of stories in the graves you've seen all the kind of dreadful things that they do to animals and each other and and so on um these are very extreme acts and especially they concern dismemberment and moving body parts around um I'm giving a long answer but it was a long question so there you are um but uh the other aspect of this is when you find parts of animals in the graves say a head the horse's head for example what happens to the rest of it that isn't in the grave so you get not only an arena of action beyond the grave that you might excavate but um a whole Arena of behavior and and they're doing something with the rest of that horse they might be eating it or do they save it up and put bits of it in other grave we don't know but you can see how these things filter out into society but still linking between um these different events and different meanings you're asking um or contrasting the the home oriented elements of these burials in their location and the objects and so on with the fact that an awful lot of people in the Viking age died somewhere else um what's done about commemorating them and what can that tell us this is the part I thought was really interesting about what what are the really important things to do um the best uh you'll appreciate part of this is arguing from a lack of evidence because if they're not there then they're not there um we find certainly some things that have traditionally been described as Graves but they don't actually have bodies in them they look like Graves but there's no people there so maybe they're they're doing all these things in the absence of the dead person and it's the ACT and and the the thought that counts so to speak um one category of monuments which is spatially quite distinct you only find it in certain areas of Scandinavia are the runestones um I I showed you one on the screen there I haven't talked about them very much because they're overwhelmingly Christian though there are pre-christian ones as well and they quite often talk about people who died somewhere else specifically they say this is to commemorate so and so who died in the East or who died while fighting the somebody or others what's important with those and this is late Viking age but we may be able to read the sensibilities into it um first you find a lot of a lot more space is devoted to the people doing the um the memorializing than the person being remembered um the formula you often find on these runestones is this person this person this person and this person raise the stone to that person you often find it also put in a a social context of where this is happening or their um which piece of land the person owned some people think they're kind of inheritance documents there's also context of behavior my my favorite runic inscription actually um has a list of four names it's these it's four men's names you know one two three four um raised this Stone to the memory of a guy his name means ugly actually uh to the memory of ugly their their comrade in arms and this is the bit that really sets the scene who died when kings were fighting so that that's a good way to go and he's clearly not there he's presumably on a battlefield somewhere so you find this combination of um overwhelmingly emphasizing the people doing the the commemorating and the context just lastly I'd say there are a very few run Stones um put up by people to themselves um usually with a lot of um hyperbole about how wonderful they are so that gives an idea of preoccupations as well um you're asking about the content of the stories and how they would work um one thing to demonstrate a sequence but how does this work at a larger structure of logic or causality um I tend to see these things as very local I think it's the process that is generalized but the the form that it takes is is local um one idea I've been working with and I don't really know how I can possibly prove this but is that um if you look at the stories that have come down to us as Norse mythology as I was saying yesterday I think things that we've effectively made into Norse mythology because we've codified them and so on um at some point they must have had an origin not a discret origin because they're organic things that have been built up over time and there's contradictory versions and all the rest of it and even if you want to relate them to uh the larger trajectories of indoan tales and and things like that still at some point somebody bluntly made up the idea of Odin giving up his eye or Thor losing his hammer or whatever it is and I wonder if part of the origin process of those tails is ferary Tales um I've struggled a bit with when I've been publishing things like this in finding a term and I've settled on story in the end you notice I I've used narrative as well um a a meaningful sequence of narrated events that have a a Time Dimension Beyond an evening for example something that you remember something that you tell um that's the sense in which i' I'd use it I don't think there is any Viking age or Swedish or Norwegian or whatever um overarching structure to these things I think they're living in an oral culture that sustains itself through talking um and we have that idea of of the importance of talking especially sort of you talking when they're not talking that kind of get making your voice heard in the hall and so on um as a something that really sustains their their way of life and if you look at some of the the sort of epitaphs in in uh some of the poems like Halal um the idea of being remembered properly having done something that makes you memorable that makes you talked about and perhaps I think in the graves acted about um is important the one thing I think is quite difficult is I I mentioned yesterday that iban fadlan for example is describing the burial of an elite and that's what we find in the ship burials and all these kinds of spectacular Graves that are easier to interpret can there really be stories in the little Graves where you find just a a heap of crated Ash and a couple of knives or something like that um it's harder to get the the detail and sequence from things like that but I think the kinds of tales that we know are present in some of the monuments like the story of sigur on the picture stones are actually highly populated stories we focus on the hero and the people that they interact with but but every time sigur goes to a village or walk moves through a landscape it's implicit that the landscape is lived in and I think that most people are probably the bit part players in in those stories but they still have a role to play just as um someone in the uh in in the farming Community would not expect to and probably wouldn't try to give themselves a ship burial um because of how it would be thought thought of um they're still within that social world the last thing I say I'm sorry it's another long answer but um I think these are stories with a purpose they're sending out messages perhaps for different audiences at the same time if you think of all the I use the example of Hamlet but you think of the the tragedies punctuated by dirty jokes and and things that were in jokes at the time for particular political context and so on I'm sure things like that are going on we also have to ask whether these burials actually do what they're intended to do I think some of them may not work so when we have say OAB that massive ship burial where they're sacrificing 15 horses I do wonder whether there are this is a a sign of status and just simply getting rid of 15 horses is an enormous thing to do I wonder whether there are people standing there saying have you seen 15 horses oh good grief you know it it might not work um or it might work for different people in different context so yeah um you asked me about the the contrast between the the warrior image of the Viking and the evidence of the female burials for high status and and prominence and so on um I I think the idea of the Warrior Viking as a stereotype is a stereotype it's it's something that's come out of the 19th century very largely um it's come out of a time uh of you know the last centuries and and and back a bit decades which tended to um take an immediately androcentric view of History anyway I think that's where that emphasis comes from it's also something that derives from as I said right at the beginning the the um emphasis that's been placed on the accounts of the people the Vikings attacked and the people doing that attacking were overwhelmingly male although I think some of them were women actually I think there were women fighting but that's a different question but um the graves in themselves undoubtedly show that women have very high status or some women just as some men could have very high status we know that they can inherit land um I mentioned these runic inscriptions there's a remarkable one a very long one which um uh it commemorates the the relatives of a particular woman it's a woman who's who's commissioning the inscription and it appears that she has outlived all of her husbands she's been married several times all of her children all of her sons all of the husbands of her daughters and even some of her grandchild she's outlived them all and through the inheritance system everything has eventually come back to her and she's the richest landowner in the district so she s narrates this sequence of of of shifts of power um with regard to the the graves um I think I mentioned that one of the big enigmas of the Viking afterlife is that we don't know what happens to women and if you look at for example oag that massive ship burial it's the burial of two women um the the most spectacular burial we have at all from the Viking age is is a woman's burial uh which which tells us something uh I certainly think that it was I don't want to make too much of a point of this but I think it's a a comparatively more um equal Society than the societies that succeeded into the M ages um so I think that certainly comes through in the in the material here I I'd also say just just quickly that uh there's a very clearly prominent role played by women in all kinds of access to this other world whether it's sorceresses or the people presiding over cultic ceremonies and offerings and so on women are are very I'd say preeminent in in that I think we're going to call it a d thank you very much thank thank you very much thank you

Channel: Cornell University

Views: 1,374,756

Keywords: archaeology, medieval, vikings, rituals

Id: 7Db9sG1PSsQ

Length: 81min 9sec (4869 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2012