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
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