Setting Sail for Valhalla

Vikings staged elaborate spectacles to usher their rulers into the afterlife

- ANDREW CURRY

A 1904 photograph shows the excavation of a Viking ship burial in Oseberg, Norway. The 71-foot-long vessel dating to A.D. 834 contained the remains of two women and an abundance of extraordinary grave goods. A 22-inch-long carved head made of maple wood depicting a dragon (left) is one of four such heads found in the ship's burial chamber. Their purpose is unknown.

And so it proved, for within that time the ship and the pyre, the girl, and the corpse had all become ashes and then dust. On the spot where the ship stood after having been hauled ashore, they built something like a round mound. In the middle of it they raised a large post of birch-wood on which they wrote the names of the dead man and of the king of the Rus, and then the crowd dispersed.

The Risala, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

FIRST-HAND ACCOUNTS OF ancient funerary rituals are exceedingly rare, leaving researchers to piece details together from archaeological evidence and ethnographic studies. One exception is found in The Risala, a report written by an emissary from the caliph of Baghdad named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan that includes an eyewitness account of the funeral of a Viking chieftain. In A.D. 921, Ibn Fadlan traveled deep into the Khaganate of the Bulgars on the banks of the Volga River in what is today Russia. His detailed account of the preparations and the ceremony he saw there is both vivid and chilling. Ibn Fadlan describes 10 days of rituals following the chieftain's death, including animal and human sacrifice, sexual violence, and drunken revelry. These rituals, he writes, culminated in the burning of a ship hauled up from the river along with its honored passenger—the dead chieftain—and an enslaved woman sacrificed during the ceremony.