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The Oseberg Ship

The identification, about 180 years ago, of a ‘Viking Age’ in Scandinavia fired the creative imaginations of novelists and painters alike. The Swedish novelist Esaias Tegnér’s Fridtjofs Saga became a best-seller throughout Europe on its publication in 1820 and inspired a wave first of antiquarian and then of literary and historical interest in the large body of Old Norse saga literature. Artists such as Johannes Flintoe, P. N. Arbo and Anker Lund based their careers on illustrations of scenes and characters from the sagas. Their efforts gave a strong but still only tentative legitimacy to the idea of a ‘Viking Age’. For the less romantically inclined, however, something more was needed to confirm ‘the Viking Age’ as a culture or civilization so distinct as to warrant separate naming.

When confirmation came it did so dramatically in the form of a short series of archaeological discoveries made in Norway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first of three Viking Age longships which emerged from more than 1,000 years of obscure anchorage inside burial mounds in the rural south-east of Norway was the Tune ship, unearthed at Rolvsøy in Østfold in 1867 and dated to about 900. A rectangular grave-chamber behind the mast housed the remains of a man, along with a horse, sword, spears and the remnants of a saddle. The discovery caused much excitement and provided significant new information about the construction of the Viking longships, already familiar from saga literature and tapestries, and soon to become the defining symbol of the Viking Age. Thirteen years later another ship discovered inside a mound at Sandar in Vestfold, known as the Gokstad ship, overshadowed the Tune find. A medical examination, carried out in 2007 by Professor Per Holck of the University of Oslo’s Anatomy Department, of the remains from the ship’s grave-chamber revealed a very different picture from that presented by a study carried out shortly after the initial discovery, which had suggested a man of between fifty and seventy, so badly afflicted by rheumatism that he was probably bed-ridden and scarcely able to feed himself. Professor Holck’s results show that the occupant was an extremely powerful and muscular man in his forties. At about 181 cm in height, he would have towered some 15 cm above the average man of his time. His thigh bones alone weighed 30 per cent more than the average for men of a similar height in modern times, a development suggesting that he spent much of his time on horseback, with his thigh muscles in constant use as they pressed in against the flanks of his mount. Neurologists at the Oslo National Hospital also found that he had a pituitary adenoma, or tumour of the pituitary gland, that led to an increased production of growth hormone and probably gave him the physical characteristics associated with gigantism. Appropriately enough, this first real Viking had died a violent death. Professor Holck suggests a sequence of events in which the Gokstad chieftain was ambushed by two or perhaps three assailants. A blow with a sword to the left leg, just below the kneecap, would have left him unable to stand. The left knee was then attacked a second time with some kind of club-hammer, and the outer part of the right ankle was sliced off in the heat of the struggle. A stab wound in the right thigh struck perilously close to the main artery, and these four wounds from three different weapons were enough to kill him.¹ A dozen horses had been buried with him, along with six dogs and a peacock, five beds, three small boats, a bronze pot with suspension chain, a barrel, buckets, and sixty-four shields with traces of yellow and black paint on them that had been fastened to the outside of the ship’s rail. The tent-shaped grave-chamber containing the skeleton had been built using notched logs (lafteteknikken); it remains the only physical proof that this particular woodworking technique was known to the Vikings.

The Gokstad ship itself was overshadowed by the discovery of the even more richly furnished and exquisite Oseberg ship, at Slagen in Vestfold in 1904. Unlike other mounds in the area on the western bank of the Oslo fjord, like those at Borre and Farmannshaugen near Tønsberg, there was no tradition associating the mound on Oskar Rom’s farm with a burial site. It was known locally as ‘Revehaugen’, meaning a place where foxes were to be found. In the wake of the huge national and international interest aroused by the Gokstad find, there had been a certain amount of active looking for ship-burial sites in Norway. Rom had done some desultory digging in Revehaugen and found something he thought might be interesting, and on 8 August 1903 he travelled to Oslo (Kristiania, as it was then known) to show it to Professor Gabriel Gustafson, the curator of the University’s Museum of Antiquities.

Gustafson was initially sceptical of Rom’s claim, but the moment Rom showed him the small sample of carved wood he had brought along with him from the mound his scepticism vanished. Two days later he visited the site himself and dug a provisional shaft which persuaded him of the importance and size of the discovery. It was too late in the year to begin a full excavation so he closed the shaft to protect the find from frost and spent the winter making practical and financial preparations for carrying out the work of unearthing it. Less than a year later, on 13 June 1904, with all the necessary financial support in place, excavation of the mound began.

The mound was some 40 metres in diameter and rose to a height of 2.5 metres above the surrounding field, having collapsed from an estimated original height of about 6.5 metres.² The summer turned out to be a dry one, which was good news for the excavating team. It made the digging easier, and justified a decision to dam the nearby stream and run hosepipes from it to keep the ship watered. The first significant find came within a few days, when the ship’s intricately carved sternpost emerged. It was a harbinger of how crucial the discovery of this grave and its contents would be for the creation of the Viking Age, for here was artwork that complemented and instantly expanded existing conceptions of Viking art which, until then, had been based on small finds of jewellery, the carvings on Swedish rune stones, the Gotland picture-stones, and the designs and illustrations used by carvers on the doors of Norwegian stave churches which were from a later, post-Christian period.

It was soon clear that the vessel was broken and much distorted from the pressure of the piled earth. This had forced the lower part of it down into the soft clay beneath, breaking the keel in the middle and forcing up the grave-chamber - positioned, like that of the Gokstad chamber, behind the mast - until it was higher than the railing. Inside it were two beds in which the two female occupants of the grave had originally been placed. At an unknown date the grave had been entered and their remains removed from the beds by intruders who had left the bones scattered in the entry-shaft. The smaller finds, too, were fragile, often in pieces, and saturated with moisture. Each item that emerged was packed in wet moss and sent to Oslo by weekly shipment. A wooden chest that had lain undisturbed for 1,000 years opened smoothly on its hinges at the first attempt. There was rope all over the deck of the ship.

With these smaller items out of the way, it was time to raise the ship itself. Nikolay Nikolaysen, the archaeologist in charge of the Gokstad excavation, had been lucky: apart from a clean, central break, his ship had been in one piece and cutting through the break had made it an easy, if laborious, task to transport the ship to Oslo in two manageable halves. The Oseberg ship, by contrast, had retained its basic shape but in shattered form. It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. A marine engineer was given the task of identifying and marking each of the 2,000 or so pieces as they came up. By 5 November the digging was completed and the ship followed the smaller finds up the fjord to Oslo, where the task of reconstruction began.

The most urgent need was to preserve the individual parts of the find from decay. Much of the oak used to build the ship had survived in reasonable condition and could be treated with linseed oil and carbolic acid during a slow process of drying out. Other types of wood were preserved in water. Objects made of iron were dried and then cooked in paraffin to prevent rusting. Bronze articles were dried and then lacquered. Rope was treated with glycerine, leather was oiled. Textile finds presented particular difficulties: the wool and silk had kept fairly well in the clay, but the linen had coagulated into a layered cake which proved almost impossible to separate.

Gustafson, meanwhile, had embarked on a fact-finding tour of European museums, visiting his colleagues and consulting them on the latest techniques of preservation. He returned with the idea of saturating the wood in a solution of alum and water. Afterwards the alum was washed off the outside and the wood allowed to dry. The alum inside crystallized and bulked out the wood, giving it structure and preventing shrinkage. Once dry it was coated with linseed oil and a layer of matt lacquer applied. The technique was the best then available to Gustafson. With the passage of time, however, the alum has assumed a wafer-like consistency that leaves the wood delicate and difficult to handle and highly sensitive to variations in temperature and humidity. If change occurs too rapidly the crystallization process in the alum will reverse and the wood burst.

After treatment it proved possible to use over 90 per cent of the original oak in the reconstructed keel, as well as over half the iron nails used by the builders of the ship. Both fore and aft ship-posts and the tiller had been twisted out of shape and there were anxious moments for the restorers as these were steamed and subjected to pressure from the braces, but these techniques, too, proved successful. The sternpost, the upper part of which was found in a break-in shaft dug at an unknown time by grave-robbers, did not survive exposure to the air. The only wholly new part of the restored ship, it was designed as a dragon’s tail to match the dragon’s head of the forepost, using as a guide images such as the invasion ships depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.

From discovery in 1904 to completed reconstruction in 1926, the restoration project took twenty-two years. A new museum was purpose-built for the three ships on the Bygdøy peninsula a mile or so from the centre of Oslo, and on 27 September 1926 the Oseberg ship was packaged in a frame of iron and wood before being mounted on a specially adapted railway wagon to begin its slow journey from the university workshops at Fredriksgate 3 to the docks at Pipervika. The wagon was dragged through the streets of Oslo on railway tracks laid by a team of soldiers. After every 100 metres the cortège came to a halt as the tracks were retrieved from behind the wagon, carried forward and re-laid in front of it. Large crowds of sightseers turned out to watch. Security precautions were high owing to fears of vandalism from the disturbed or drunken. At Pipervika the ship was transferred on to a barge for the short distance over the water to Bygdøy. There the rail-laying process continued as the ship was dragged up the slope of Huk Aveny to the museum, where she joined the Tune and Gokstad ships. In 1948, as a gesture of respect and in the presence of the king of Norway, the bones of the two women whose deaths had started the whole train of events over 1,000 years previously were ceremonially reinterred in granite sarcophagi in the reconstructed mound at Slagen.

 

If the Oseberg ship-coffin and its contents were all the archaeological evidence we had of the Viking Age and its culture we would still be fortunate, for the range and quality of the items buried with the two women far outstrip the grave-goods found in the other burials for sheer artistic merit and in terms of the amount of practical information they provide about the lives, ways and beliefs of the Vikings. Gustafson and his team of archaeologists, diggers, engineers and restorers left a compendious record of every detail of the excavation. In combination with modern techniques of scientific analysis it provides enough information to permit a reconstruction of the possible sequence of events surrounding the burial.³

Dendrochronological analysis shows that the Oseberg ship was built from trees felled in 820. Her hull was 22 metres long and 5 metres broad, and made of twelve overlapping oak planks, secured to each other with iron nails, a technique known to boat-builders as ‘clinker building’. Nine timbers formed the hull, the larger tenth marked the waterline, and the two upper timbers the sides. Tiller, oars and mast were of pinewood. The narrow and elegant lines of her bow originally led to an assumption that she was probably some sort of royal yacht used for travelling locally in the sheltered waters of the Oslo fjord. A recent electronic scan has revealed, however, that the horizontal ribs on either side of the reconstructed keel should have been curved and not straight. At the cost of elegance the broader bow would have made her quite capable of sailing on the open seas.⁴ Dendrochronological analysis has established that her active life ended in the spring of 834, when her presumptive owner died.

Some historians believe that the Viking practice of burying their dead leaders in large mounds that were close to the family home reflected the significance of the mounds as a visible broadcast of the family’s power. In that case the Oseberg mound is an exception, for its location has been described as almost actively ‘anti-monumental’.⁵ Possibly in a deliberate attempt to exploit the preservative properties of the clay, low-lying ground to the east of the stream at Slagen was preferred to the higher ground just a couple of hundred metres north of it. And unlike the complex of mounds at nearby Borre, for example, which functioned as a burial ground from about 600-650 until well into the Viking Age, this was an isolated construction. At that time the fjord lay about 1 kilometre further south than it does today, and the ship had to be dragged from the boathouse up the stream until that became too narrow, then hauled up on land and dragged on wooden rollers (how little had changed by the time of the journey to Pipervika) the rest of the way across the field to the long furrow which had been dug to receive it. The clay-type soil from the furrow was heaped up nearby on the grass, incidentally preserving the meadow flowers beneath it, from which it has been deduced that the furrow was cut in the spring. Once the ship was in position, facing south and toward the fjord, a tent-shaped oak shelter was built behind the mast to house the dead women. The whole community must have been engaged in the process at this time, craftsmen working on the ornaments and household objects that were to accompany them into the grave (though many showed signs of use in daily life), others digging the peat with which the mound was to be covered, still others breaking and transporting boulders from the rocky outcrop that lay north-east of the mound. The after part of the ship, between the grave-chamber and the sternpost, was loaded with what the passengers would need on their voyage: small axes and knives (no weapons were found in this female grave), cooking equipment and a whole ox - ‘the kitchen’, this part has been called - and the whole then covered by a layer of boulders. Beds, white woollen blankets with red patterns, down quilts, clothing, pots and buckets of various sizes, a weaving tablet with a half-woven piece of cloth in it as well as other pieces of weaving that perhaps originally hung as strip decorations on the walls of the chamber, and many other items were carried into the burial chamber behind the mast. The ship was then partially buried, starting from the stern, continuing up to and framing the triangular entrance to the grave-chamber behind the mast, at which point soil analysis shows that work stopped. If one of the two women was a slave fated to serve her mistress in the next life as in this then now was perhaps the point at which she would have been sacrificed.⁶ The two were ceremoniously carried on board and placed on the beds inside the chamber, and the entrance boarded up with surprising carelessness and lack of attention to detail, perhaps a hint that the consumption of alcohol in quantity may have formed part of the ritual.

More valuable and ornate gifts were then loaded on board, again seemingly haphazardly, including a beautifully carved ceremonial wagon and three sledges with shafts indicating that they were to be drawn by two horses, a gangway, oars, rigging (but no sail), rope, bailer, five metal rattles, of which one was attached to one of the animal-head posts inside the burial chamber, a beechwood saddle (the only complete surviving example of a saddle from the Viking Age), combs and wooden buckets. The handle of one bucket, the ‘buddha bucket’, was decorated with two beautiful bronze figures seated in the lotus position with eyes closed and four yellow enamel swastikas decorating their chests. The tops of their skulls had been neatly sliced off. Originally thought to hint at trade relations with Asia, a recent theory suggests they may be representations of seventh-century Celts who had been ritually sacrificed, desiccated and then buried to function as tribal messengers to the gods.⁷ All in all, the wealth of material buried with this ship - to say nothing of the ship itself - was such as to make it hard to imagine the loss was not felt in the community sponsoring the burial.

Now, with the chamber boarded up, came what was probably the heart of the proceedings. Four or five dogs and two more oxen were slaughtered, as well as fifteen horses that had first been run to exhaustion. The furniture, tools and carriages scattered across the foredeck were bathed in their blood. Stones were then piled over the ship, breaking many of the grave-goods and rendering them unusable. The sights and sounds accompanying such an orgy of blood-letting we might perhaps be able to imagine, the atmosphere conjured by it probably not. As the mourners then set about completing the mound, the sight before them must have been eerie and awe-inspiring, the blood-spattered ship with its cargo of dead women seeming to lurch forward across the field in a last attempt to shake off the engulfing wave of dark earth rising behind it. The meadow flowers preserved from this stage of the proceedings were autumnal, showing that the whole process from the opening of the furrow to the closing of the mound must have taken about four months. Clearly at least one of the women had died long before the burial took place.

 

It is hardly possible to conceive of a society that is not curious about the possibility of a life after death. The Saga of the Jomsvikings, a story first written down about 1200, contains a scene in which a number of warriors sit on the beach awaiting their turn to be executed after defeat in a sea-battle at Hjórungavág, off the coast of Norway, in about 986. One recalls with his neighbour their conversations on the subject of life after death, and tells him he intends to use his execution as the occasion of an experiment to find out if such a thing exists. When his turn comes he grasps a knife in his hand and tells the executioner that, if he is able to, he will hold up the blade after his execution as a signal that he is still conscious. ‘Thorkel hewed,’ the sagaman relates remorselessly, ‘the head flew off, and the knife dropped.’⁸

On the other side of the Viking world from Oseberg and the Norwegian Vestfold and about a century later, the Arab diplomat and Islamic teacher Ibn Fadlan noted down his detailed description of the rites surrounding the cremation of a Viking chieftain on the banks of the Volga which he witnessed in 921. A slave girl had been chosen to join her master in his death:

They led the slave girl to a thing that they had made which resembled a doorframe. She placed her feet on the palms of the men and they raised her up to overlook this frame. She spoke some words and they lowered her again. A second time they raised her up and she did again what she had done; then they lowered her. They raised her a third time and she did as she had done the two times before. Then they brought her a hen; she cut off the head, which she threw away, and then they took the hen and put it in the ship. I asked the interpreter what she had done. He answered, ‘The first time they raised her she said, ‘Behold, I see my father and mother.’ The second time she said, ‘I see all my dead relatives seated.’ The third time she said, ‘I see my master seated in Paradise and Paradise is beautiful and green; with him are men and boy servants. He calls me. Take me to him.’⁹

Saxo Grammaticus in the Gesta Danorum described a similar use being made of a cockerel as a medium or spirit messenger during a journey through the kingdom of death undertaken by a hero named Hading with a female companion:

Moving on, they found barring their way a wall, difficult to approach and surmount. The woman tried to leap over it, but to no avail, for even her slender, wrinkled body was no advantage. She thereupon wrung off the head of a cock which she happened to be carrying and threw it over the enclosing barrier; immediately the bird, resurrected, gave proof by a loud crow that it had truly recovered its breathing.¹⁰

Was it the observed tendency of hens to run around in a wild parody of continued existence after decapitation that lay behind their role in such situations? Was something similar done in connection with the Oseberg burial? We can hardly know. Because Viking Age Scandinavians had only a rudimentary written culture, in the form of terse runic inscriptions on stones and sticks, and because knowledge of Heathen rites and beliefs was actively suppressed by the Church after the triumph of Christianity, our ignorance of what these people believed about first and last things, and of how these beliefs manifested themselves in practice, is considerable. Here at last, in the form of the Oseberg ship, was a time-capsule from the Viking Age, free from the taint of the ‘creative imagination’ of the novelists, dramatists, painters and composers who had previously tried to describe it. But how was its wealth of material to be interpreted? What did it all mean? Stones were piled on to the ship: was this to prevent the dead from walking again, or to sink the ship to a level at which the voyage to the next world might begin? And if the ship was to start out on such a voyage, why then anchor her by a doubled rope at the bow to a very large boulder? Who was to cast her off? Who was to sail her, and where to? Why were many of the oars on board bundled and unfinished? What logical or magical purpose was served by the decapitation of all fifteen horses that went into the grave? Why had a shaft been cut into the mound not long after it was closed? Was there in fact a ritual purpose behind the apparently haphazard disordering of the women’s bones that were found in the shaft? A disappointment for the first students of the Oseberg discovery was that only two samples of runic writing appeared among the artefacts. One was a faint label carved on the outside of a pinewood bucket that has been interpreted as meaning ‘Sigrid owns me.’ The other was on a cylindrical piece of wood, tentatively identified as part of an oar and inscribed litiluism, interpreted by some runologists as litilvíss (er) maðr or ‘man is little wise’.¹¹ If correct, the interpretation is apt, for while the find conveyed an extraordinary amount of new information about the Vikings, the very richness of it took away the certainties of ignorance, and raised as many questions as it answered about the nature of Heathen spiritual beliefs and the larger culture of which they formed a part. Our task in the next chapter must be to try to reconstruct a general outline of this culture of northern Heathendom, which was in so many essentials distinct from the Christianity that had become, by the end of the eighth century, the dominant culture across mainland Europe.