The Vikings: A Very Short Introduction Read Online Free PDF Page A

ideological meaning of the motifs. Animal ornament may represent part of a totemic belief system, for example. It is important not to forget, however, that our knowledge of Viking art is generally dependent upon durable objects of metal and stone; wood and textiles are rarely preserved; human skin, which may have been elaborately tattooed, has never survived.
    Pre-Christian belief systems
    To us ‘religion’ conjures up a set of beliefs and rules of behaviour s
    that embody concepts of worship, with holy men or women to g
    kin
    interpret them. In Scandinavia before Christianity, however, no one e Vi
    would have understood this. It is probably more appropriate to talk Th
    about a ‘belief system’, a way of looking at the world. Religion was just another aspect of life and the act of worship as required by the Norse pantheon was not adoration or even uncritical approval, and therefore it was utterly unlike the Christian relationship with the divine. According to Norse mythology, everything ended at Ragnarok, when all humans and gods were killed and burnt.
    According to this philosophy the outcome of our actions is predetermined, and we cannot change our fate; what is important is our conduct as we go to meet it.
    Vikings had a more fluid sense of the boundaries between this world and the next, as well as between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Under Norse mythology there were many classes of supernatural beings. There were two families of gods: the Æsir, including Oðinn and Thor; and the Vanir, including Njord, Freyr and Freyja. However, there were also servants of the gods, such as the valkyries, and Oðinn’s raven, as well as giants, dwarves, elves, 20
    trolls, spirits, ghosts, and so on. Sorcery, and the practice of seiðr , was fundamental to Viking beliefs. Neil Price has suggested that seiðr was the Norse counterpart of shamanism, and that comparable features can be seen amongst the Saami, from whom some of its features may have been borrowed. Specific grave-goods, such as metal and wooden staffs, silver amulets shaped like chairs and animal masks, may indicate the burials of practitioners.
    A grave in the cemetery at the Danish ring fort at Fyrkat has been interpreted as the burial of a witch or sorceress. A wagon was used as a coffin for the woman’s body. She was not buried with the customary pair of brooches but was wearing two silver toe rings, and was accompanied by a Gotlandic box brooch. It has been suggested that she came from the Baltic region. Her grave-goods P
    included a bronze bowl containing fruit, two drinking horns, an agans an
    iron spit, and traces of a wooden staff. There were also several amulets, including a silver chair, a sheepskin pouch (probably d Christians
    containing henbane seeds), and a drinking glass. By her feet was a locked oak box, containing clothes, a pair of shears, a slate whetstone, a pottery spindle whorl, the lower jaw of a young pig, and a clump of owl pellets.
    Two women were laid out in the burial chamber within the Oseberg ship (p. 48): one aged c .25, and the other aged c .50. The younger woman may have been a princess and the older one her slave, but other objects in the grave also indicate at least two roles: that of princess and that of high priestess, roles which may have been combined in one person. Two small tapestries depict processional scenes with imagery of Freyja and Oðinn and some of the grave-goods suggest that the tapestries depict real events rather than just myth. They included an oak chest which contained a sorcerer’s staff and two iron lamps which resemble those being carried in procession, as well as five wooden animal heads, and a cart carved with images of cats, the sacred animal of Freyja.
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    There seems to have been no single pre-Christian burial rite and there was tremendous regional variation throughout Scandinavia.
    Nevertheless, widespread practice was to bury the dead fully clothed with personal adornments, together