Tiny Travels

Sail to the Lands of the Dead

May 19, 2017

The Vikings were known as the master ship builders and sailors. With their excellence they were able to sail from their home of Scandinavia to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland, America, coasts of Europe, and Russia. Maybe because these ships were so important to them throughout their lives that they chose to be buried in them instead of the tomb that we are used to see now. After their death, the deceased were put inside these ships with their funerary belongings and then these were covered with heaps of soil to create a mound. The Viking Ship Museum (Vikingskipshuset på Bygdøy) in Oslo houses three of such ship burials today. The Oseberg ship (820 AD) was the burial of two -possibly- important women died in 834 AD.  The other two, Gokstad and Tune burials, housed -powerful- men died around 900 AD. The Oseberg and Gokstad ships can be seen in a well-preserved situation since they were covered with compact layers of turf and clay. However, since these ships were looted soon after their burials, precious relics were not found but the remaining ones show that they thought they would need their earthly tools wherever they would go after. Since it is not possible to depict a destination for this final journey among a numerous afterlife stories in the Viking mythology as to what happens to the deceased today, from the Valhalla of the warriors to the Hel as the underworld, it remains a mystery how they embellished these burials in a complete picture, unfortunately.