Talk:Norse funeral

message: :The Vikings often immolated their dead leaders in ship burials, known from archaeology and notably from the account of Ibn Fadlan.
It is not clear: Immolation says it is burning, ship burial seems to mean literal burial (on land).--Patrick 22:23, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Immolation

message: The cultural references look a bit spoiler-y to me. Isopropyl 03:42, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spoilers 

message: Is the term lady appropriate because the woman is of a high status, or is it a mislabelling of woman or female? I'm not familiar with Viking cultural terminology, so my 21st Century perception may be wrong. In either way, this may need clarifying - appropriate terminology, not my 21st C perceps! ;~) LessHeard vanU (talk) 21:18, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It is because she was of high status. Some say that she was a queen, while others say that she was a Völva, two positions that were not contradictory.--Berig (talk) 15:27, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I have replaced 'lady' with 'woman' and added that she was a queen or priestess (as per the Oseberg Ship Burial article). In my opinion the only current use of 'lady' is as an actual title: Lady Mary, Lady Smith. Awien (talk) 16:22, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I see. Thanks for the correction.--Berig (talk) 16:23, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm overstating it a little, but other uses are really limited. Cheers! Awien (talk) 16:30, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comment on "lady" in the article 

message: :GA review (see here for criteria)
#It is reasonably well written.
#:a (prose):  b (MoS): 
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#It is factually accurate and verifiable.
#:a (references):  b (citations to reliable sources):  c (OR): 
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#It is broad in its coverage.
#:a (major aspects):  b (focused): 
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#It follows the neutral point of view policy.
#:Fair representation without bias: 
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#It is stable.
#:No edit wars etc.: 
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#It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
#:a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales):  b (appropriate use with suitable captions): 
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#Overall: 
#:Pass/Fail: 
#:: </div> 
* :Image:Haugsetting.jpg and :Image:Haugsetting2.jpg should have Fair use tag, not copyrighted, also use fair use rationale template if possible. The name of author is also required.
* improve img cap. "Alternatively, the deceased were incinerated inside a stone ship." is confusing. Name the place too, if possible. Img captions should stand on their own too.
* Lead should be expanded.
* "Death has always been a critical moment for those bereaved, and consequently a case of death is surrounded by taboo-like rules. Family life has to be reorganized and in order to master such transitions, people use rites." seems to be OR. Seems like a comment rather than a fact.
* A single account is described in too much detail and many redundant words. in "Ibn Fadlan's account." The account retold in "Human sacrifice". A case of WP:UNDUE. Soln: Rewrite deleting unneccessary details e.g. "Thereafter, an old woman named the "angel of death" put cushions on the bed. She was responsible for the ritual and she was the one who would kill the thrall girl. (later told again) She was an old witch, who was stocky and dark" can be re-written as "An old witch named "angel of death", responsible for the ritual, put cushions on the bed." similarly " Everything was incinerated." after "the relatives of the dead chieftain arrived with a burning torch and set the ship aflame." and before "Afterwards, a round barrow was built on top of the ashes".
* "in which the temperature reached 1,400 degrees centigrade; much higher than modern crematorium furnaces attain." seems to be OR. needs ref.
* "The soul" talks about general notions of death in Norse culture, not the funeral itself. I suggest renaming the article somethimg like "Viking funeral and conception of death" (not the best one). Think about a better one. --Redtigerxyz (talk) 14:56, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for looking into the article. As for Ibn Fadlan's account I don't think it is a case of WP:UNDUE, because it is the only eyewitness account ever recorded, but I will see what I can do to shorten it further. As to your suspicions of OR, the sections are referenced, and I thought that it was only necessary to add references on the bottom of the referenced text. I will try to improve the article according to your evaluation in the next few hours.--Berig (talk) 16:23, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ibn Fadlan's account as a whole is not UNDUE. the repetition of its details is an UNDUE. Please shorten "Ibn Fadlan's account", removing UNDUE details like was the witch dark etc. and redundant words. Leave a note on my talk when done.--Redtigerxyz (talk) 16:39, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: As for the pics, the invaluable Betacommandbot was very concerned by the use of fair use tags for other images from the same source (see ). I then learnt that the present tag was the most appropriate one, and it is indeed the tag that best corresponds to how the copyright owner (a Norwegian government owned college) wants them to be used.--Berig (talk) 19:01, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

text: PS, I have added some even better tags, as the pics are definately PD in the US. I hope that this clears the pictures of any copyright problems.--Berig (talk) 09:15, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

text: PPS, since I see no reason why these two pictures should stop this article from reaching GA status and in order to avoid any possible further objections against the pics, I have removed them and added a new pic to the lead.--Berig (talk) 09:32, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

text: I have tried to address your concerns now. I hope the present version is more satisfactory.--Berig (talk) 08:05, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

text: PASS.--Redtigerxyz (talk) 11:57, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  GAN 

message: The funerary customs described in this article are not restricted to the Viking Age in Scandinavia. Many of the practices were also conducted in the Nordic Iron Age and in the Nordic Bronze Age even. Bronze Age stone ships are know from Sweden in particular. It is Original Research to limit "Norse funerals" to the Viking Age only. No such division is made in archaeology. There are some differences in preferred practices, and the Viking Age perhaps introduces a few new funerary customs in the Norse culture, but that is not to say the funerary practices of the Norse are to be restriced to the Viking Age specifically. RhinoMind (talk) 12:41, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not restricted to the Viking Age 

message: At the moment, this article has the following summary of events in Ibn Fadlān's funeral account, and makes the emboldened comparison to Vǫlsa þáttr:
Meanwhile, the thrall girl went from one tent to the other and had sexual intercourse with the men. Every man told her: "Tell your master that I have done this purely out of love for you." In the afternoon, they moved the thrall girl to something that looked like a door frame, where she was lifted on the palms of the men three times. Every time, the girl told them what she saw. The first time, she saw her father and mother, the second time, she saw all her relatives, and the third time she saw her master in the afterworld. There, it was green and beautiful and together with him, she saw men and young boys. She saw that her master beckoned for her. By using intoxicating drinks, they thought to put the thrall girl in an ecstatic trance that made her psychic and through the symbolic action with the door frame, she would then see into the realm of the dead. The same ritual also appears in the Icelandic short story "Völsa þáttr," where two pagan Norwegian men lift the lady of the household over a door frame to help her look into the otherworld..
Unfortunately, I don't have access to Harrison and Svensson 2007 to check what they say about this (though I can find and add more recent and specialist scholarship on the issue). But here is the relevant text (in translation) from Vǫlsa þáttr (quoted for convenience from https://notendur.hi.is/eybjorn/ugm/volsi.html):
He then threw the thing onto the floor, where the bitch instantly caught it. When the old woman saw this, she flew up in extreme agitation, and spoke:
Who is this man,
this stranger,
who gives to dogs
this holy object?
Lift me over the hinge
and the door-beam,
to see if I can save
the holy sacrifice.
Put it down, Lærir,
let me not see such a thing,
and do not swallow it,
you evil, murderous bitch!
Lots of scholarship has invoked Ibn Fadlān to try to explain the very mysterious verse here in Vǫlsa þáttr, and the two texts are intriguingly similar (and without other clear parallels), so it makes sense to note this. But I don't think scholars would claim that the two texts depict 'the same ritual'! One narrative involves an old woman asking to be lifted over a door-beam to save a horse penis that has been thrown away by a Christian king; the other involves a slave-girl being lifted over a wooden frame and being able to see into the afterlife.
I've suggested changing the wording here from "The same ritual also appears in the Icelandic short story "Völsa þáttr"" to "Ibn Fadlān's account is reminiscent of a detail in the Icelandic short story Völsa þáttr" and it's been reverted (possibly because I made the edit at the same time as something else). Could we reinstate my wording, or otherwise agree that the phrasing needs changing? Alarichall (talk) 09:53, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks to Bloodofox for reinstating the wording. I've now tidied this up further. Alarichall (talk) 22:14, 1 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Does ''Vǫlsa þáttr'' record 'the same ritual' as Ibn Fadlān?

message: reverted in this edit a summary and quotation from :Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings. I agree that the passage misrepresented the thrust of Winroth's argument, but the citation was not fake. We were saying:
:Anders Winroth has commented that 'the exact identity of the Rus is much debated, and we should be careful not simply to take ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus as in any way representative of Viking Age Scandinavian customs'.
Winroth may not be visible on Google Books to people everywhere, and there was a small typo that may have affected search, so I have copied the complete paragraph for purposes of discussion here (noting where p. 95 begins) and here it is (an admin may wish to subsequently excise as copyvio):
After trading for almost a year from Baghdad to the town of Bulghar on the Volga, the Arab civil servant Ahmad ibn Fadlan was fascinated by the Rus merchants he encountered there. When he heard of "the death of one of their [the Rus'] great men," he was eager to learn more about their funeral practices, so he traveled to where this chieftain was going to be buried. He wrote down in Arabic what he saw when a great Rus chieftain was cremated in a great conflagration. The exact identity of the Rus is much debated, and we [95] should be careful not simply to take Ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus as in any way representative of Viking Age Scandinavian customs. Whatever their ethnic origins, the Rus that Ibn Fadlan saw may have been settled in Russia for generations and impulses from many different traditions surely influenced the way they buried their dead leader, but it is clear that Scandinavian rituals stand behind at least some and perhaps most of what happened almost eleven hundred years ago on the banks of one of Russia's many rivers.</blockquote/>
Things are complicated by the fact our article talks of diaspora and Winroth only of Scandinavian vs. non-Scandinavian customs, but clearly his main point here is that the ceremony was at least in part, and possibly in the main, based on Scandinavian customs. I have rewritten the section citing this passage in support of that point as well as for the point that the Volga people performing the ceremony may have been influenced by other traditions. The passage was added to the article as part of an edit by  in 2018, in which scholarly views regarding Ibn Fadlan's report as substantially representative or not representative of Scandinavian funerary practice are juxtaposed, with several instances of each. That edit was an obvious improvement, but opening with the Winroth passage represented as it was tended to overbalance the presentation towards scepticism, and I think we may also be blurring together the position that this funeral cannot have been representative because it was an elaborate ship funeral of a powerful leader (many if not all summaries make this point, Ibn Fadlan reports that he went there to watch specifically after learning that a particularly important man had died, and rituals of power is a major focus of Steinsland's work) and the position that it was probably not representative of Norse practice because there are significant non-Norse parallels). This issue has been further exacerbated by the later creation of a bulleted list of points (which I have changed back to straightforward prose), which tended to bring the issue of possible Turkic influence into prominence. But it would be a good idea to find a scholar distinguishing these two arguments and distinguish them in our article using such a reference. Winroth is one possibility. (I recognise that there is extended discussion above of the article's coverage of the Ibn Fadlan account, and that work has already been done to improve it.)
I also did some work on reference formatting, which made clear that we are relying on Steinsland & Sørensen an awful lot. For reader accessibility, we should add one or more English-language references throughout the summary of Ibn Fadlan, possibly replacing that source in many places. There are several, including the relatively recent Winroth (first published in 2014), Turville-Petre (1964) pp. 272–73, and several by :Hilda Ellis Davidson under varying names, starting with The Road to Hel (1943) pp. 45–46 (the big problem with her survey works is that they were republished many times under varying but mutually similar titles so that author-year references are intrinsically misleading; we have 3 copies in this house of one identical work from 3 publishers and under 2 titles).
More broadly: we are not distinguishing between ship burial and ship immolation (nor talking about the literary instances where the ship is launched, including the Prose Edda report of Baldr's funeral). The variation should at least be pointed out. I don't even see the point clearly raised that cremation vs. uncremated burial is a huge issue in archaeology and in discussions of death rites (a major focus in The Road to Hel and a traditional way to attempt to draw religious distinctions). We have a separate article, :Death in Norse paganism, but pointing out that both were done, including death deposits with cremated remains, and how Ibn Fadlan's report is also relevant to that issue since both it and the Baldr funeral involve a pyre built on the ship (and obviously the archaeological evidence is biased toward inhumations with an intact ship, rather than burial of the remains from an onshore shipboard pyre, and cannot include evidence of a ship launched with a blazing pyre as reported for Baldr), is part of the brief of this article. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:55, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for looking into it. I always appreciate it when you do. What made me revert was Winroth's statement "but it is clear that Scandinavian rituals stand behind at least some and perhaps most of what happened almost eleven hundred years ago on the banks of one of Russia's many rivers."--Berig (talk) 05:26, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

text: PS, I do think the present state of the article violates WP:DUE by trying to make the Scandinavian identity of Fadlan's Rus' seem more controversial than it is (but that is common problem on WP).--Berig (talk) 16:13, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Anders Winroth and the Ibn Fadlan report