The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

by Neil Price

TAKEN AT FACE VALUE, THE world of the Vikings appeared much the same as that of everyone around them: individuals, looking roughly like you and me but in different clothes, going about their business and moving through landscapes and settlements that—albeit rustic-looking—would still be intelligible all these centuries later. But that is all it was, surface, a screen masking something very different, very old, and very odd.

They were also familiar with those divinities’ servants (some of them utterly terrifying) and a whole host of other beings, spirits, and creatures that have survived under the comforting label of ‘folklore’ but at the time were very real. This question of reality is important because the Vikings did not believe in these things any more than someone today ‘believes in’ the sea. Instead they knew about them: all this was as much a natural part of the world as trees and rocks. That these beings could not be seen need not have been significant.

In the Scandinavian languages even today the word gård simply means ‘farm’, and this is its basic sense—a settled place, a bounded place, even a whole world; in the same meaning of enclosure, it is the root of the modern English ‘yard’. This idea of being inside the wall, as distinct from what is beyond and therefore outside one’s control, is at the core of Viking-Age concepts of settlement and order. It is an insight into their way of thinking.

(just in passing, as another insight into the Norse mind-set, it is worth noting the unusual sex of the heavenly bodies, the sun female and the moon male).

One other dimension of the gods’ lives is intriguing. Strangely, Asgard also contained temples, cult buildings where the gods themselves made offerings—but to what or whom? The mythology of the Vikings is one of only a tiny handful in all world cultures in which the divinities also practised religion. It suggests something behind and beyond them, older and opaque, and not necessarily ‘Indo-European’ at all. There is no indication that the people of the Viking Age knew what it was any more than we do.

One concept above all was central to the gods’ relationship with the human world and intersected with the lives of its other, supernatural inhabitants: the idea of fate. Governing beings of every kind—mortal and divine, living and dead—was the preordination of the future; it lay at the heart of the Norse mind-set. For the Viking-Age Scandinavians, fate did not represent the absence of choice but rather the manifestation of a pre-existing truth. Free will existed, but exercising it inevitably led to becoming the person you always, really, had been.

These ‘primal’ Valkyries did not visit the battlefield, swooping gracefully down to bear away their chosen heroes; instead, they were unleashed upon it and personified its harsh realities. Indeed, they appear to have literally represented aspects of the fighting, as revealed by their names. We know of some fifty-two individual Valkyries, and there are many, many more anonymously subsumed in collectives. It is extraordinary, and telling, how many different terms for ‘battle’ and ‘war’ can be found in the Valkyrie names. Clearly, many of them embodied the condition of combat itself, often through the metaphor of a violent storm. The sense of swirling chaos is increased by the significant portion of the Valkyries whose names refer to noise, the overwhelming din and screaming confusion of a Viking-Age battlefield. Thus, we meet Göndul, the ‘War-Fetter’, who brought the freezing hesitation that could be fatal; perhaps the same is meant by Hlökk, the ‘Chain’, or Mist, the ‘Cloud’. Around them move Hjalmthrimul, ‘Helmet-Clatter’; Hjörthrimul, ‘Sword-Noise’; and Hjlód, ‘Howling’. There is Randgnithr, the ‘Shield-Scraper’, and behind her Skalmjöld, the ‘Sword-Time’; Sváva, the ‘Killer’; and Tanngnithr, ‘Teeth-Grinder’. Other Valkyries’ names focus on weapons in combination with different elements—Geirahöd, ‘Spear-Battle’; Geirdríful, ‘Spear-Flinger’; Geirskögul, ‘Spear-Shaker’; and so on. Their many sisters’ names include Battle-Weaver, Shaker, Disorder, Scent-of-Battle, Victory- F...

As agents of fate, the Valkyries also have obvious links with the Norns, and Snorri even says that the “youngest” Norn, Skuld, rides with the Valkyries to choose the slain. In a strange battle poem called The Web of Spears, dating to either the tenth or eleventh centuries, a troupe of twelve horse-borne Valkyries are seen dismounting to enter a cottage. When the observer peeks inside, he sees them working an immense loom made of human body parts, weaving a cloth of entrails dyed with blood, using weapons for tools. The women sing verses that make it clear they are, in fact, weaving the outcome of a distant battle, the motions of their implements mimicking (and effecting) the dart and swoop of projectiles on the field. Here, the Valkyries and Norns are truly combined. When the cloth is finished, they tear it to shreds and ride off with the scraps. The Valkyries were the essence of violence, unsettling and terrible.

As perceived and communicated today, the Viking Age is an intensely visual experience: the intricate interlace art, the sleek and predatory lines of the ships, the landscapes of burial and commemoration— and, of course, the people themselves as seen through several centuries of mediation in Romantic paintings, woodcuts, and reconstructions on the page and screen. Ultimately deriving from the accounts of the literate cultures whom the Scandinavians encountered on their raids and travels, especially the English, Franks, and Arabs, this is the ‘othered’ picture that has overwhelmingly formed the popular perception of the Vikings in our own times. However, very different worlds were being built inside the Norse mind. Here is another distinction between appearance and reality, between the surface and what it conceals. From the problematic medieval written sources, and occasional mentions in Eddic and skaldic poetry, emerges one of the most remarkable aspects of the Vikings: the fourfold division of being and an extremely complex notion of what might loosely be called the soul.

Such individuals crossed the borders between people and animals. We do not know how they were really perceived by their contemporaries, but in our terms, they perhaps formed a very special kind of gender. Our own happily expanding spectrum includes many variations of the self, but they are all bounded by the human; the Vikings may have gone beyond even that, into what we now call posthumanism (but they got there first). However, it is possible, although strange to the modern mind, that such abilities were treated more as a sort of skill than anything else. Some people were good at carpentry, others had a fine singing voice, and your neighbour could become a bear when irritated.

The last part of the fourfold soul was something else entirely: a separate being that somehow dwelled inside every human, inseparable from them but also distinct. The fylgja was a female spirit—always female, even for a man—and accompanied a person everywhere throughout life. How marvellous, and how utterly subversive of the male-focussed stereotype, that every single Viking man literally had a spirit-woman inside him.

The fylgja was a guardian—a protector—but also the embodied link to one’s ancestors (in some texts, they are strongly reminiscent of the dísir, and at times the two beings appear to be the same). She moved on at death, continuing down the family line (although exactly how is unknown—did the fylgja wait for the next to be born, or could a person inherit one long after birth?). In any event, everyone carried with them—through them—the spirit of their family, watching over them and guiding their steps. The fylgjur could not be seen other than in dreams, where they appeared with warnings and advice. Of all the Viking-Age spirit- beings, these have proved the most tenacious. Modern Icelanders roll their eyes at being asked by visitors, again, if they believe in elves—but question them about their fylgjur and you may be met with a level stare and perhaps a change of subject.

Some scholars have suggested that progressive destabilisation was caused by warfare on the Continent, part of the factional fighting that erupted there as Roman authority declined. This pattern is familiar from more contemporary conflicts, as units long accustomed to lucrative employment and active combat find themselves adrift, sometimes turning against the same authorities who hired them, or returning home looking for trouble. Such situations risk creating a world of petty warlords and a kind of gangster culture— part bandits, part small but effective armies—undermining the work of social institutions and leaving chaos in the wake of their vicious civil engagements. In a culture that does not formally record its history, even the most profound trauma can disappear relatively quickly without leaving much material trace. However, such war bands were on the move in the North, and they must have been entering Scandinavia in some numbers.

Even veterans and civilian victims of modern wars would have difficulty contemplating the deaths of fully half the population, and the consequent collapse of social institutions. Today, even the worst disasters with the most appalling casualties nonetheless play out against a wider arena where these things are not happening. It is not hard to imagine how the Scandinavians of the sixth century felt that their whole world was falling into ruin, and slipping back into the primal emptiness from which it came. In a culture reliant on oral traditions for preserving and mediating history, it would not be surprising if, two hundred years later, the trauma was still clearly embedded in stories—a terrifying vision of endings and beginnings that were also part of a longer cycle. After all, the preordination of fate, the inevitability of the Ragnarök, and the gods’ knowledge of their coming doom form the constant pulse of Norse mythology.

As the glaciers melted, they released water into the surrounding ocean at the same time as the relief from their immense weight caused the land itself to rebound and rise. The rate of change fluctuated and also differed by region, but the net result was a steady drop in relative sea level: since the time of the Vikings, parts of central Sweden have risen some five metres above the then waterline. This means that the people of the time experienced rivers that could take more boat traffic farther inland than these same waterways can today, deeper harbours offering better access to larger vessels, and lakes that have since become dry land. The process continues even now, as central Sweden rises at a rate of a few millimetres per year. In the Viking Age and the preceding centuries, the landscape was in places substantially different to its appearance today and had a great many more open bodies of water.

There is a sense in which this story-world of the late Iron Age depended for its vitality on the stage set of the dwelling, the wavering circle of light around the hearth—whether in a farmer’s longhouse or in the epic space of the hall. Indoors was the closeness of tellers and listeners, and outside, the dark. In the greatest early medieval poem of all, Beowulf, a famous building of this kind is almost a central character. Here, the hall is civilisation, light, fame, honour, memory, history, and joy—beyond its doors, and in the poem literally smashing through them, are the monsters of chaos and the night.

The point should not be overstated, but it is striking that the key tenets of the new societies that rose from the Migration Period crisis seem to have included a marked rise in militaristic ideology, infused with uncompromising codes of honour, oath-bound loyalty, and the obligations of violent redress. These values were expressed in the growth of an expansionist hall-based elite culture whose elevated view of itself was fuelled by a constant appetite for war. Underpinning it all was an ever-greater reliance on family and kin—a dependence on the ultimate redoubts of social cohesion and their unbreakable bonds. It is not hard to see all this as a bulwark against the distant memory of the sixth-century collapse.

Divorce was not uncommon, and a wife could initiate proceedings as well as a husband. She could cite a variety of reasons, including simple dissatisfaction, all strongly in her favour. In the Saga of Burnt Njál, a woman leaves her husband due to his impotence, which was regarded as formal cause. In the Saga of Gísli, a woman threatens divorce when her husband objects to her adultery. Extreme poverty—the fault of the husband because he did not support his family—was also sufficient grounds. Violence within a marriage was a significant feature of divorce petitions, although the severity of the injuries cited in such cases is so great that it seems the threshold of tolerance for male aggression was high.

There are hardly any examples of this from the saga literature. One episode, in the Saga of the People of Laxardal, set in the ninth and tenth centuries, sees a man divorce his wife on the grounds that she wears trousers “like a masculine woman”, having previously complained about all the terrible things that can supposedly happen if “women go about dressed as men”. There are also female equivalents, when women end a marriage because of their husbands’ supposed effeminacy, as manifested in their wearing shirts cut so low as to expose the chest (it is not irrelevant that—as in this case—married men’s clothes were usually made by their wives, which offers intriguing glimpses of agency within a relationship).

There is no doubt that this was a time of extreme homophobia, and we can trace a clear, though chronologically interrupted, path to the Germanic peoples of Tacitus’s time. He relates how men found guilty of homosexual acts were pressed into bogs and held down to drown under wicker hurdles. Archaeologists have found many male corpses from the Iron Age in the marshes of Germany and Denmark, often naked, sometimes bound, usually exhibiting various traumatic injuries: slashed throats, blunt-force cranial depressions, garottes around their necks. Some of these victims have been found in pairs and actually covered by wickerwork, just as Tacitus describes.

At the heart of nid, and Viking-Age homophobia, was the assumption “that a man who subjects himself to another in sexual affairs will do the same in other respects”. The key to such insults was not so much the accusation of perceived sexual perversion as an attack on an opponent’s honour. The latter partly defined cultural gender for the Vikings, and also partly depended on it to have meaning. What we would call sexual orientation was, in the Viking Age, completely bound up with much wider and deeper codes of behaviour and dignity, extending way beyond physical and emotional preference. Nid linked sexual and ethical concepts, and interlaced them with prevalent notions of the masculine and feminine. None of this implies a contempt for women; to be feminine and effeminated are not the same thing.

To get an idea of how deep the social contradiction went, one only has to imagine the god of medieval Christianity, with its capital penalties for many kinds of supposed sexual transgression, being clearly described in biblical texts as engaging in same-sex intercourse. Thus we have Odin—lord of the gods, divinity of war and poetry, patron of the royal elites to whom a masculine heterosexual ideal was central—also portrayed as the supreme practitioner of magic that was homophobically shameful for men to perform.

In a sense it does not really matter whether the person in the Birka grave was a female-bodied warrior woman or not (though as one of the lead authors in the research team, I firmly believe she was all those things). This person may equally have been transgender, in our terms, or non-binary, or gender fluid. There are other possibilities, too, but the point is that they must all be recognised as possible Viking-Age identities while—crucially—not assuming this must be the case.

The theophoric names vary widely in distribution, with a tendency for specific gods to cluster in particular regions. There are no Ull names in Denmark, but they are thick in eastern central Sweden; Týr names are almost only found in Denmark; Thor places are common in Sweden and Norway; Odin names are rarely found west of the mountains; and so on. Some scholars have argued that this suggests different focal regions for the worship of these divinities, and this may be the case, but differences in customs do not necessarily reflect a shift in the beliefs that underpin them. For example, Jésus is a common man’s name in Latin America, whereas one rarely meets a European called Jesus—but this does not mean there are no Catholics in Europe. This may be true of the Norse theophoric names as well.

A beautiful and very elaborate stone from Gotland lists all the workmen in this way, but marvellously also includes some extra, shaky little runes that do not keep to the main design scheme but meander untidily off into what should be a blank space: “and Gairlaiv [did] some as well he can”. One wonders if the team was on lunch break and came back to find their hapless assistant enthusiastically bashing away. Never mind—one could always fill it in and paint over, and it is not certain the patron ever knew.

There is a curious sense in which the very notion of a Norse religion may actually be in part a Christian product. This seems contradictory at first, but has parallels in other cultures where incoming missionaries attempted to supplant traditional beliefs with a regulated church. Something codified, organised, and effectively systemic (everything Norse belief was not) is much easier to oppose, because it is a coherent target and might be suppressed as a single entity. And if this was not already there, then it could be formed in that image. This was the beginning of the process that eventually turned the living, organic story-world of the North into ‘the Norse myths’—a kind of pagan scripture that never actually existed. It does not help that the Christians also seem to have misunderstood much of what they encountered and, in turn, incorporated their misconceptions into the retrospective pagan orthodoxy they created.

Offerings on the platforms most commonly include cattle, but also pigs, dogs, and especially horses. Most of them were killed with blows to the head, in some cases even with stone axes that date from the Neolithic, made thousands of years before the Vikings. Tools like these were evidently picked up in the fields by Viking-Age people just as they are still found in the countryside today, and there is folklore connecting them with the god Thor. Seeing them as ‘thunderbolts’, the Vikings may have believed these ancient stone weapons contained special powers, making them an especially charged instrument of sacrifice.

The missionaries viewed such displays with particular opprobrium. The Christian cultures of Europe thought it normal to put people to death in a variety of foul and public ways, and yet recoiled in atavistic horror from a tree of hanging animal corpses.

The tree was certainly meant to be seen, as it was situated at the highest point of the island, with views over the lakes and mountains. The place-name of this spot is also telling: Hov, in other words hof, the word for the temple-halls. Similarly, it is no accident that the Christians built their church on this precise site (presumably they had the tree felled, as well), even down to constructing the altar over the stump. Specialists often speak of syncretic religion—the fusion of different traditions or faiths in an easing of transition—but it is rare to find such a thing in the archaeology, although here one might better read the evidence as indicative of violent appropriation. As in other similar situations, it is clear the Christians did not always directly destroy the spiritual customs of the North, but instead tried to convince their adherents that they were a poorly realised precursor of the new faith—that conversion required a movement, an adjustment, not a total rejection of who they were.

Thus, in an episode from the Saga of Hrólf kraki when sorcery was unleashed, we read how “the air and the paths were alive with magic”—it captures the weird power of the Old Norse, the crackling tension of the Other World at its intersection with our own. None of this is direct reportage or anything like it, of course, but it is striking how the literary world of Scandinavian magic is decidedly not a replica of medieval European witchcraft as it was perceived at the time of the saga-writers. In fact, the material culture depicted in the sagas is generally consistent with the Viking-Age world they describe, not the medieval one of their scribal production, arguing strongly for at least a basis in historical circumstances and oral memory.

It was not an ambivalent experience. Poems such as Beowulf describe how the fire “consumed the house of bone”, how the flesh drew back and skulls cracked open in the flames. Unless held down by the ‘funeral managers’, a corpse might even sit up in the midst of the pyre. The human bodies were often accompanied by animals, sometimes in very large numbers in the wealthier graves; their corpses also moved, shrivelled, and burst. From the archaeology it is clear that sometimes flint was added to a cremation, and experiments have revealed how this can suddenly explode to produce showers of colourful sparks; this must have been intentional.

Brenni þér eigi bál á nóttum, svát ek við elda yðra fælumk; skelfrat meyju muntún hugar, þótt hon draug séi í durum standa. You could not light fires in the night, so that I am frightened by your flames; the maiden’s thought-enclosure does not tremble, though she sees a ghost stand at the door.

The Waking of Angantyr is a much-neglected source for our understanding of the Vikings’ view of death and burial, as well as perhaps one of the best of the Eddic poems. A different translation captures the nature of the place, as Hervör stares unafraid into her doomed future, having already dared what few others have before her: Now I have walked between the worlds I have seen the fires circling.

If you stroll through the cemeteries of the Viking Age today, unthreateningly gentle landscapes of grass-covered mounds that can make a nice place for a picnic, you might do well to recall Angantyr’s island and its night-time terrors of funeral fire, open graves at the gates of Hel. Hervör did not flinch in crossing this boundary, but on the other hand, her story is not a happy one.

The conclusion of the rituals also has something to tell us. Ibn Faḍlān describes a ten-day funeral at the end of which it all seems to hinge on a naked man, who is the only one to approach the pyre, taking precautions as he does so. He seems to expect something to be active in there; in protecting all the openings of his body, it seems that he believes it can move. The moment he lights the funeral fire, it is apparently safe, and everyone comes forward to add a burning torch to the conflagration. Oseberg has something reminiscent of this wariness, although the burial is an inhumation rather than a cremation. Most of the objects were deposited with great care and attention, but at the very end most of the larger wooden items—the wagon, sleds, and so on—were literally thrown onto the foredeck, beautiful things just heaved over the side from ground level and being damaged in the process. The accessible end of the burial chamber was then sealed shut by hammering planks across the open gable, but using any old piece of wood that seems to have been at hand. The planks were just laid across at random—anything to fill the opening into the chamber where the dead lay. The nails were hammered in so fast one can see where the workers missed, denting the wood and bending or breaking off the nail heads. Why the need for such haste? Were they afraid, like the kindler of the pyre in ibn Faḍlān?

At their most immediate, on the spot, on the day, for many the raids were the most bitter of endings. Behind every notation on our maps lay an urgent present of panic and terror, of slashing blades and sharp points, of sudden pain and open wounds; of bodies by the wayside, and orphaned children; of women raped and all manner of people enslaved; of entire family lines ending in blood; of screams and then silence where there should be lively noise; of burning buildings and ruin; of economic loss; of religious convictions overturned in a moment and replaced with humiliation and rage; of roads choked with refugees as columns of smoke rose behind them. Of utter, ruthless brutality, expressed in all its forms.

There is no evidence whatsoever, in archaeology or text, for the berserkers’ use of hallucinogens, entheogens, or any other form of mind-altering drug or chemical, including the consumption of fly agaric (despite the fact that Wikipedia’s entry for berserkers recommends the reader also look up ‘Dutch Courage’ and, indeed, ‘Going Postal’).

Alongside the berserkers, another persistent symbol of Viking-Age warfare is the shield-maiden. They appear conflated with Valkyries and other female warriors several times in the heroic poems of the Eddic tradition, in skaldic poems, and with some frequency in the poetic citations of Snorri’s Edda. In the sagas of Icelanders, by contrast, armed women are not encountered at all other than in isolated contexts of self-defence, momentary rage, or planned revenge. However, shield-maidens do appear frequently in the legendary sagas: in the figure of Hervör retrieving her father Angantyr’s sword, and also in the Saga of Ragnar lothbrók, the Saga of Hrólf Gautreksson, and several others. Early parts of Saxo’s History of the Danes, begun in the late twelfth century, also includes many dramatic descriptions of shield-maidens. In several of these sources, the action is set not just in the Viking Age, but also in the centuries preceding it as far back as the Migration Period.

The exceptional nature of the Old Norse stories does not prove they were based on real-life individuals, at however great a remove, not least since such figures only appear in certain genres of saga-writing and not others. However, they certainly do not refute the existence of real female warriors. In truth, the medieval texts are interesting, but strictly speaking unnecessary, for the interpretation of the excavated data. These burials are decidedly not medieval saga, legend, or poetic licence but empirically observable Viking-Age reality.

Some scholars attempt to draw fine distinctions between types of combatant that are often skewed in odd ways as they intersect with identity. After a certain point, these debates become absurd in the context of Viking-Age reality (one pictures a couple of monks peering over the monastery wall at an advancing troupe—“What do you think, are they warriors, or more like militia?”—as the chapel goes up in flames). But we must ensure that the same standards of data, evidence, and logic should apply regardless of sex, with our minds resolutely open to complexity. If scholars are prepared to claim that even a single male-bodied individual buried with numerous weapons can be gendered as a man and interpreted as a warrior (and there are hundreds of such examples across the Viking diaspora that are accepted with little controversy), then they must be prepared to come to the same conclusion if the sex determination is different.

Taking a clear-eyed look at the archaeological data, it seems that there really were female warriors in the Viking Age, including at least one of command rank. They were never numerous, and few have been even tentatively identified, though this may change as we re-examine our sources and our consciences. They were rare exceptions—unusual people, to be sure—but they were there.

All this suggests that the large-scale, mobile Viking conglomerates of the ninth century were neither ‘armies’ nor ‘warbands’, but continuously evolving migratory communities. They were not on their way to anywhere, but were an end in themselves, justified through action. In essence, these forces were polities in their own right.

Mobile Viking bands fought the forces of the three imperial claimants, singly or sometimes in alliance. They also raided local municipalities and took on the militias, or just whatever ragtag defence the peasantry could muster in the face of indifferent central leadership. Vikings were also hired as mercenaries by any and all of these factions, to fight their civil enemies or even other Vikings; in many cases, the Scandinavians then pooled their forces to turn on their erstwhile employers. None of this took place in a vacuum of knowledge, nor was it a matter of haphazard reaction: the Vikings knew exactly what they were doing, where they were doing it, and who they might be likely to encounter in the process. This mastery of reconnaissance in depth—an awareness of the value to be placed on prior knowledge—showed throughout their campaigns in Frankia and later in England. The Viking commanders were active political agents, stirring the civil war to effect maximum destabilisation, which in turn fed the Scandinavians’ own twin objectives of moveable wealth in the form of plunder, and mobile labour through the taking of captives.

Again, it is worth pausing to reflect on this. Less than a century earlier, perhaps a few dozen men ran up a beach to burn the monastery at Lindisfarne in an attack that was probably over in less than a day. At Paris, a fleet of thousands of Vikings, in hundreds of ships, besieged one of the greatest cities of Europe for a year, and fought pitched battles with the best soldiers the Empire could field. The speed and scale of the escalation is breathtaking.

If the data from the Continental written sources is combined, the protection money paid to the Vikings during the ninth century totalled about thirty thousand pounds’ weight of silver, most of it in cash: a sum equivalent to seven million silver pennies over a period when the estimated total output of the Frankish mints was in the region of fifty million coins. This equates to approximately 14 percent of the entire monetary output of the Frankish Empire—for a century—evaporated in the payment of extortion demands that produced no tangible positive gain and, in many cases, failed to appease the Vikings anyway. In addition even to that, the Scandinavians were given grain, livestock, produce, wine, cider, horses, and other commodities as part of their terms for not attacking— literally for not doing anything—and, of course, the same things were often lost when they did. Between 830 and 890 in Frankia, some 120 named settlements were sacked and destroyed, besides the unspecified accounts of regional devastation. And of course, the human cost was incalculable. Ermentarius of Noirmoutier did not exaggerate in choosing imagery reminiscent of a Viking apocalypse.

The key word here is ‘hydrarchy’, which was expanded in the eighteenth century to become a general label for the revolutionary fulcrum of dangerously radical social ideas represented by the Atlantic maritime community. The situation the term tries to capture is one in which there are no overall leaders with whom to negotiate (there was never a pirate monarch, which was part of the point), no state structures to oppose, and indeed no formal organisation to fight. The mythical hydra, the multiheaded beast of Greek legend, was a challenge to defeat because every time one of its heads was severed, two more grew to take its place. Likewise, sinking individual pirate ships or killing notorious captains did little to dent the nature of the enemy—and yet, through it all, ‘the pirates’ as a collective source of grave political peril remained entirely valid and operative, just like the supposedly unkillable hydra.

In all the debate concerning afterlives and the varying destinations offered by the traditional customs and the new religion, one wonders whether Viking-Age people might actually have decided where they wished to go after death. If so, what did they make of a faith in which the fate of a person’s immortal soul was dependent on living a certain kind of life? It is hard to overstate how alien this concept may have seemed, although a cornerstone of many world faiths today.