Road To Hel - Rune Web Vitki

Chapter II
FUNERAL CUSTOMS: THE EVIDENCE
OF LITERATURE
Him will I
Bury. So doing, nobly shall I die,
Beloved shall I repose with him I love
Having wrought a holy crime; since I must please
The dead below far longer than the living,
For there shall I dwell alway.
Sophocles Antigone (Trevelyan’s translation).
CREMATION AND INHUMATION
Already in the thirteenth century Snorri Sturlason had considered the problem of the
relationship between funeral practice and the belief in the after—life. He gives us some
of his conclusions in the often quoted prologue of the Ynglinga Saga:
The first age is called the Age of Burning; all dead men then had to be burned, and
memorial stones were put up to them. But after Freyr had been laid in a howe at Uppsala,
many chiefs raised howes as often as memorial stones in memory of their kinsmen. And
after Dan the Proud, the Danish king, had a howe built for himself, and commanded that
he should be carried there after death in his king’s apparel with war—gear and horse and
saddle—trappings and much wealth besides, then afterwards many of his descendants did
likewise and the Age of Howes began there in Denmark; although among the Swedes and
Norsemen the Age of Burning continued for a long time after.
Snorri’s account makes an apt enough preface to the archaeological evidence, with the
transition from burning to howe-burial, and the acceptance of inhumation in Denmark
while cremation went on in Norway and Sweden. He can hardly be referring however to
the change in practice which came in in the Roman period, a thousand years earlier; while
the allusion to Freyr shows that he is here concerned with a change which first affected
Sweden. The context may afford us some help here, for this paragraph does not occur in
the midst of a dissertation on funeral customs, but in a brief account of the sources which
he used for the history of the kings of Norway.