Fragments of a conversion: handling bodies and objects in pagan and Christian Scandinavia ad 800–1100

Abstract

The article discusses aspects of changing relationships between the living and the dead in Scandinavia in the Viking Age (800 – 1050AD) and the beginning of the Early Middle Ages (1050 – 1100AD). This period was characterized by the change of religion from Paganism to Christianity. The changes and variations in the treatment of the deceased' bodies and the grave goods are explored in a number of case studies. Fragmentation and wholeness in relation to changing world views are analysed, through a discussion on personhood: On what constituted a person in this period, and how persons were deconstituted through the acts of the burial during a period of religious change. Parallel ways of handling of bodies and objects in the graves are examined, demonstrating that treating the bodies and the grave goods were a means of negotiating or handling different notions of ideas of the body, death and the afterlife.

Keywords:

• Change of religion
• world-views
• pagan
• Christian
• burials
• Viking Age
• Early Middle Ages
• Scandinavia
• personhood
• fragmentation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Vegard Vike, Elise Naumann and Per Dissing Odgaard for fruitful discussions of earlier drafts of this paper, and the editor and three anonymous peer reviewers for valuable comments and criticisms.

Notes

1. This process is generally ignored in archaeological research, but the technical conservator at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Vegard Vike (pers.comm.) has observed that this process is visible on a number of Viking Age swords, as the traces of hammering on the iron in order to bend it are overlapped by oxide scales caused by the pyre. I have observed the same phenomenon on the sword from Lirhus in Bergen Museum.