The trip to beyond the Vikings

Life after death is one of the fundamental elements of any culture.The mythology of the Nordic peoples in the Viking age reflected a wide variety of concepts related to the beyond, which included various physical spaces where existence continued after death.Hel, Valhalla or Fólkvangg are some of these places, which received both humans and gods.

Chronology

Under the sign of Odin

793

First important Viking attack in England, against Lindisfarne, a fact considered as the beginning of the Viking age.

834

In Oseberg (Norway), two women, provided with a splendid trousseau, are buried in a ship that is covered with a tumulus.

844

First Viking incursion in the Iberian Peninsula.A fleet attacks Asturias, Galicia, Lisbon, Cádiz and Sevilla, among other sites.

956

Blue Harald tooth erects a great runic stone in Jelling.In it, he boasts of Cristianizar Denmark and unify her with Norway.

1066

An Anglo -Saxon army defeats another from Norwegian Vikings in Stamford Bridge (England).End of Viking Age.

13th century

Icelandic Snorri Sturluson collects poems, sagas and legends prior to the thirteenth century and puts them in writing.

«Confusing, the god Balder looked at his chest.There, where nobody had ever been able to cause a wound, where no metal edge could leave a mark, a wooden spear was skewed as if it were the mast of a ship.Around him, the faces of the other gods, as full of surprise as his own, began to blur.How was possible?He, Balder, the only God who believes he is immortal, wounded to death by a humble spear of Merdago.Balder, between resigned and incredulous, began the way beyond ».

Where is a Nordic God when he dies?The brief previous narration refers to the death of Balder, son of Odin and God considered as beautiful and wise as immortal.And yet, even the only God supposedly safe from death can die.The other gods in Asgard - one of the worlds of Nordic mythology, in which the gods live - maintain their longevity through the magical apples they eat, but are as mortal as any of the humans that populate Midgard, the name of theworld of humanity.And like that same mortal humanity, the gods do not share a single location for the beyond: there is a wide variety of possible paradises.The beliefs of the Viking people about life after death were very heterogeneous and each individual or family could imagine that this stage would pass in various spaces.

Hel, in the other world

In the case of the god Balder, his surprise death takes him to the doors of Hel, a underworld from which we barely collect information pieces here and there in the Nordic literary sources.In the big room that dominates this underworld, the goddess Hel sits, who shares a name with the place that was sent to govern.On his throne he sits, with half of his blue body night, to receive those who arrive in his world.In the imaginary Viking, Hel arrives who die from illness or old age, which makes it a fairly common destination, although it is clear with Balder that dying of a spear also takes you to its doors.

Balder receives a funeral worthy of his high status and the great love professed by the other gods.The body of the deceased is accommodated in his great ship and, next to him, in the funeral pyre that will burn his remains, his horse is also deposited with his beautiful arreos and various treasures.Balder does not burn only in his pyre: his wife also ends up in it, as well as a poor dwarf that the god tor throws into the flames.

This funeral ritual carried out by the gods is not at all different from certain funeral customs of the Vikinga age.After all, Viking mythology is an exacerbated and supernatural reflection of Vikingas customs.Archeology shows us tombs in which the deceased were deposited in a Viking ship, on which a mound was then built.An example of this type of grave is that of two high -alburnia women in Oseberg (Norway), whose bodies rested on a great ship.Together with them, objects of such value appeared that it can be said that in status and funeral luxury the deceased could compete with Balder.Among other things, the grave contained an ornate car, sleds, a large number of horses and other animals, wood carved beds, home and farm objects, gadgets from other parts of the globe and some animals in the form of beautifully carved animal, that in their day they could decorate a throne or a ship.

It is possible that, just as Balder ended up his wife and dwarf, one of Oseberg's deceased, who clearly enjoyed a very high social status, was accompanied by the other woman, related to her or a slave.This tradition of burying slaves or other people with the deceased is attested both in other tombs and in some written sources.

Vikingas tombs

El viaje al más allá de los vikingos

The variety of funeral typologies in the Viking age is so great that we find burials with cremation and without it, with funeral cameras, in rectangular tombs, with a great trousseau that reflects the outstanding social position of the deceased or unintentionally.Archeology indicates that there is a relationship between what is buried together with the deceased and the importance, occupation and wealth that person had in life.But perhaps there is also a relationship between the trousseau and its use in the beyond.Funeral trousseaus are full of animals, weapons, ships or cars, board games and possibly slaves.The dead, and more visibly the dead with economic and social power, are directed to their particular beyond everything they need to maintain their lifestyle in their final destination.

Sometimes, the way in which a person is buried can be related to the type of beyond the one who will access after death.In some cases, the dead founded under the mounds did not go beyond the gods, but passed eternity under the mound itself, surely among the ancestors who also resided there.

An example of such belief is collected in the Njál saga, a medieval Iceland.You can see that the lights shine under the mound and that the dead man is happy and smiling;so happy is he that he starts to sing a song alive voice.

Sometimes, that beyond the open mounds is reflected, although on a larger scale, in the existence of a life after the death that runs under certain mountains.An example of this belief is the Helgafell mountain ("Sacred Mountain", in ancient Nordic), which rises in the Icelandic Peninsula of Snæfellsnes.The dead celebrated a great eternal feast under this rock prominence, whose northern side opened sometimes, allowing any passenger to contemplate what life was like after the death of those destined to dwell in Helgafell.

Sacred mountains, funerary mounds ... respect for this type of elevations in connection with the beyond is evident in mythology, folklore and funeral customs.Sometimes, when the inhabitants of a region found pre -existing mounds, they reused these structures to carry out new burials or as focus around which whole cemeteries were developed.This use of the remains of the past, perhaps associated with ancient legends, must be attractive to individuals and strains.Because there is a better way to legitimize the social position of your family than placing your resting place in an already respected and inevitably linked to the history and memory of the region?

Valhalla, the Odin Room

The Nordic God most related to memory is undoubted.This is the name of the vast Odin room in Asgard, where God sits to preside over the great banquets with which the dead who have been chosen have been chosen every night.

It is a gigantic room, with the roof beams made of spears, walls full of shields and long banks that surround the main stay covered with mesh dimensions.Already due to the type of ornamentation it can be guess that it is a place reserved for people in combat.But not all warriors or warriors go to Valhalla.Only those who have died in battle can access this beyond and, among that number, only half will go to Valhalla.

The ones in charge of selecting the inhabitants of this room are the Valkyrias, beings that go down to the battlefields to choose and transport them to their new destination.In Valhalla, the Einherjar - because the members of this Odinic Army - are called the day training for a great battle that, as prophesied, will take place at the end of the world.At night, the Einherjar return from their fighting exercises to spend the evening eating roasted wild boars and drinking the hydromiel that the Valkyrias carry and that flows from the udders of the Heidrun mythological goat, which pasta on the roof of Valhalla.The wild boar in question is an eternal delicacy that relives every night and is cooked for the hungry einherjar.

The other paradises

Valhalla is a glorious destiny, but it is not the only glorious destination for a warrior person.The goddess Freya also goes to the battlefield and receives in her room the other half of those who die in combat.Freya's ultratumba domain, Fólkvangg, has not become as popular in modern times as Odin's, but in the Nordic world both gods distributed the same type of deceased.

It seems that also some women who were not warriors believed that they would go to Fólkvangg after dying, as we can see in the saga of Egil, an Icelandic medieval saga that tells the life of the Viking Egil.In the saga, Egil's daughter announces at some point that she plans to star.

Other gods and goddesses included, also had their great rooms in Asgard, and it is possible that there were also life options after death in their rooms, although almost nothing we know about it.In some tombs of women and men, large iron rings have been found from those who hang hanging with the shape of the famous hammer of Tor.These rings, which were located around the polls with the ashes, are chosen as a funeral trousseau to show a connection with tor even after death.

Many beyond

As we can see, the beliefs of the Vikings about the world of ours.We can assume that, in general, the population was familiar with multiple forms of the beyond governed by the ancestors themselves or by the gods, they would be located in the world of Asgard or under mounds and mountains.However, it is possible to think that the ideas about the ultraterrene existence of each individual would depend on their family context, their social position, their lifestyle and the place where their days happened, among other things.Viking society was as plural as the roads that its members followed after death.

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Niflhel, the fate of criminals

Two stanzas of the Völuspá poem, whose narrator is a völva, prophetess and wise, suggest that criminals end in Niflhel, a part of Hel, where they are tortured.«I saw a large room, far from the sun, / that on the shore of the dead stands, / its doors looking north./ Through the hollow of the smoke falls of poison / as snakes surround the walls of the room./ In wild rivers I saw wading / through traitors and murderers, / embauzers and women./ There the great Nidhogg snake drinks the blood of the fallen / and the wolf shattered human flesh ».

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Las Valkirias, Guerreras de Odín

The Valkirias have passed to our imaginary through audiovisual media such as cinema or comic - specially influenced by the Nibelungo ring, Wagner's famous operatic cycle - and have become one of the most popular mythological characters of our times of our times.Women riding for the skies in winged horses, dressed in armor and helmet ... but were they how we imagined them?The word Valkiria means "the one that chooses the dead in battle".The Valkirias do not decide who lives and who dies, because this is a thing of destiny woven by other mythological entities, the Nornas.But they do choose from among the fallen who will go to Valhalla, the beyond led by Odin.In several of their literary appearances they carry weapons and mesh level, with a clear warrior connection.They also ride horse, although winged horses do not speak any source.The winged horse is a modern invention, as well as helmets with wings or horns and blond braids with which we have imagined them for a long time.

"They carry Einherjar beer".With this phrase, the gramnismámál poem adds another function to Valkiria in Valhalla.There, in the banquets that the warriors who have spent the day fighting every night, the Valkyrias carry beer horns and take care of the dishes and the containers to drink.It is not strange that this work is mentioned, since import crystal containers were one of the greatest luxury in the room of a leader, and the mythological lives of gods and goddesses reflect the aristocratic life.The concept of Valkiria thus approaches two great Vikings ideals: day warriors, hosts at night.

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Gerdrup, Vikingos Zombies?

In some burials of the Viking age, heavy rocks were placed on the deceased, as in the grave of Gerdrup (Denmark) where a man and a woman were buried.This lies next to a spear and has two great stones on top.Has perhaps fear that some deceased could get up again?In the Viking culture it was believed in something similar to the zombies: the Aprgangr or Draugong, who came out of his grave to threaten and even kill those who cross their way.Is it possible that the fear that the deceased became Draugr to cover some deceased with slabs?

To know more

Trial

Nordic mythology.

Enrique Bernárdez.

Alliance, Madrid, 2017.

Trial

That was not in my History Book of the Vikings.

Irene García Losquiño.

Almuzara.Córdoba, 2020.

Trial

Edda Minor.

Snorri Sturluson (translation by Luis Llerate).

Alliance, Madrid, 2016.

This article belongs to number 205 of the magazine history National Geographic.

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