SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Book Reviews r07
of the large mounds at Jelling as Mr Sawyer implies, following
many Viking scholars. 3
p. 64: It is an ancient bit of archaeological folk-lore that
churchyards were periodically cleared out. Mr Sawyer gives
a footnote acknowledging this 'suggestion' from an archaeologist,
but is there any evidence at all for the theory? The reason why
so many churches appear to be on mounds is that the ground level
rises as more bodies are buried there: 4 it was not the habit of
pagan Vikings, Christian men of the Middle Ages nor eighteenthcentury
rationalists to disturb unnecessarily the bones of their
ancestors: only in the last hundred-odd years have town churchyards
been desecrated to make way for railway-stations or public
parks.
p. 133: Why should the absence of swords from a cemetery be
'remarkable'? This is often commented upon, but swords, as
any reader of heroic literature knows, were costly things and were
apparently passed from father to son with great frequency: they
cannot have been normally buried in an ordinary man's grave.
p. 136: Mr Sawyer says "some men may have prayed 'From
the fury of the Northmen 0 Lord deliver us' " and quotes as
a source Delisle. 5 What Delisle actually says is: "Je n'ai point
remarque ces mots dans les litanies de l'epoque carolingienne que
j 'ai eu l'occasion dexaminer" Until the source is traced let us
refrain from using this hackneyed - if picturesque - phrase, and
rather use the somewhat longer prayer recorded by Delisle. 6
It is proper, however, to leave the book by stressing its good
points. Particularly important, as I have already said, is the
discussion of the numismatic evidence - for the first time, this
has been given a reasonable amount of space in relation to its
importance. Mr Sawyer's enthusiasm may cause him to go
further than his evidence warrants, but this is a brilliant chapter
and one that deserves our best attention. In the archaeological
part of the book some of the pure description is very good,
particularly that of the Trelleborg monuments and of the great
trading centres. Despite some dubious premises, his discussion
of archaeological method is often thought-provoking. He is
surely right, for example, to dismiss Arbman's interpretation of
the Chernigov grave as that of a man of Viking ancestry, and
equally justified in his criticism of the dating of Jarlshof.
• Even Brendsted wonders who was buried in the Southern Mound: The
Vikings (1960), 277.
• Some interesting calculations as to the number of bodies in a single
churchyard will be found in F. Brittain, South Mvmms (1931), 29 f.
• L. V. Delisle, Litterature latine et histoire du moyen age (1890), 17-18.
• loco cit.