How did Germanic peoples and Vikings honour their dead? The answer is scattered across graves, Roman reports, poetry and sagas, and each of these sources says something different. We take them in turn: Tacitus and the turf mound, Odin's law in Snorri, the ship grave, Ibn Fadlan's eyewitness account from the Volga, the heir-ale with its vow, the hel-shoes and the memorial stones by the road. Added to that is what the Church made of it all. The result is not one uniform rite but a mosaic, and the aim is to show it honestly.
Ask how "the Germanic peoples" buried their dead and scholarship first answers with a counter-question: which ones, when and where? Between the tribes Tacitus describes around 98 AD and the Scandinavians of the Viking Age lie seven hundred years. Landscape matters too: someone living on the coast had different possibilities from someone in the uplands, and a chieftain different ones from a farmhand.
Over the millennia, cremation and inhumation alternated several times. In the Bronze Age mounds prevailed; from about 1300 BC cremation took hold in many places; in the Iron Age inhumation became more frequent again, and often the forms ran side by side. In the Viking Age cremation was widespread, but burial with grave goods was also very common. That explains why contradictory sentences turn up in the literature. Each of them may be right for its own time and place. An overview is offered in Burial among the Germanic peoples.
This article therefore proceeds by source and marks for each claim how old it is and who wrote it.
Many accounts begin with small gestures at the deathbed: closing the eyes, opening the windows so the soul can leave, cutting the nails. They sound familiar, which is exactly why a source check pays off. The nail custom has a background in the Edda: Snorri tells in the Gylfaginning (chapter 51) that the ship Naglfar is built from the nails of the dead and carries the giants at Ragnarök; therefore, he says, one should cut the nails of the dead, so that the ship is delayed. That is in Snorri in the thirteenth century, as a mnemonic of doomsday. It is no proof that people actually practised it as a funeral custom.
The hel-shoes are similar. In Gísla saga Súrssonar (chapter 14), at the burial of Véstein, the priest Thorgrim says it is the custom to bind "hel-shoes" on men so that they may walk on them to Valhalla. That is the only well-known attestation, and it comes from a thirteenth-century saga telling events of the tenth. The idea fits another source, the Visio Godeschalci, a Christian vision account of a Holstein peasant from the late twelfth century: there shoes hang on a huge linden tree, and whoever practised mercy in life receives them for the road across a thorny heath. Whether an older, pre-Christian belief stands behind this is conjecture. The nineteenth-century collections (Grimm, Müllenhoff, Weinhold) thought it likely; it cannot be proved.
The oldest detailed description comes from an outsider. In chapter 27 of the Germania Tacitus writes:
"Their funerals are without parade. The only circumstance to which they attend is to burn the bodies of eminent persons with some particular kinds of wood. [...] The arms of the deceased, and sometimes his horse, are given to the flames. The tomb is a mound of turf."Tacitus, Germania 27, Oxford Translation (public domain)
The passage is short but revealing. It mentions no funerary pomp and no abundance of grave goods, but a rule of restraint: tears and lamentation are soon over, sorrow and regret last longer. It is the women's part to bewail the dead, the men's to remember them. That is Roman observation and Roman judgement; Tacitus probably never visited the country. Archaeology supplies the counter-image: cemeteries with sometimes rich grave goods, even from the centuries Tacitus describes. Both can be reconciled if one assumes Tacitus describes the basic attitude (no monumental show, turf instead of stone) and not every single burial.
Roughly a thousand years later, Snorri puts into Odin's mouth in the Ynglinga saga (chapter 8) an order that joins burial law and myth: all the dead are to be burned, their belongings laid with them on the pyre; for men of consequence a mound is to be raised in memory, for other distinguished warriors a standing stone. At the beginning of winter there should be a sacrifice for a good year, and in the middle of winter one for a good crop.
Two things matter here. First, Snorri wrote as a Christian and a scholar; he arranges scattered tradition into a system. Second, archaeology contradicts the system in several places, for not all the dead were burned, and not every mound belongs to a man of rank. The passage is therefore more a witness to how the heathen past was imagined in the thirteenth century than a binding rule. Yet that fire, mound and stone appear as a belonging triad reflects something real: whoever was powerful got a monument that could be seen from afar.
The burning of the dead was, by the way, no harmless detail of legal history. In 1849 Jacob Grimm devoted a paper of the Berlin Academy to it, "Über das Verbrennen der Leichen," and drew conclusions that reached into the nineteenth-century debates about cremation. Today the work is read more as research history. Its subject remains factual: that many Germanic people cremated is archaeologically secured; that it was "the" Germanic form is not.
That visible marks are for the dead appears early and clearly in the sources. In the Hávamál, stanza 72 says that memorial stones "seldom" stand by the road unless a kinsman raises them for a kinsman:
"Memory-stones seldom stand by the road save when kinsman honors his kin."Hávamál, stanza 72 (Bellows numbering), after Bellows 1923 (public domain)
This is no description of a custom but a proverb about loyalty: whoever takes the trouble to set up a stone acts from bond, not from duty. How many stones this concerns, nobody knows. In the Viking Age runestones then appear that do just this. The small Jelling stone bears the inscription that King Gorm made the monument for his wife Thyra; the large stone records that Harald raised it for his parents Gorm and Thyra. The stones date to the tenth century and stand with the mounds and a church at Jelling, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994. More on the places: Jelling and Picture stones.
Stories also know the mound as a place of remembrance. In Beowulf, after the hero's cremation the Geats spend ten days building a barrow, lay the treasures in it, and have twelve nobles ride around the mound, lamenting him:
"They placed in the barrow that precious booty [...] Then about that barrow the battle-keen rode, atheling-born, a band of twelve"Beowulf, ending, tr. Francis Barton Gummere, 1910 (public domain, excerpts)
Beowulf is an Old English poem of the early Middle Ages set in Scandinavia; whether it reflects a real funeral ritual or is poetically shaped is open. The image of the ride-around and the lament has parallels in other sources but is usually read as literary.
The strongest image of honouring the dead is the ship. Beowulf opens with a ship funeral: the founding king Scyld Scefing is carried to the shore by his retainers, as he had ordered, and laid on the breast of the boat with a gold-woven banner above his head, "let billows take him." That is the poetry of an Old English author who knew the image, and it is a beginning that sounds from afar. Archaeology does know ship graves, though not as drifting funerals but as burial chambers.
The ship of Oseberg near Tønsberg was excavated in 1904 and 1905 by Gabriel Gustafson and Haakon Shetelig. Dendrochronology dates the burial to the autumn of 834. Two women lay in it; which of them was the more important, and whether one was sacrificed for the other, is open. The abundance of grave goods, among them four decorated sleighs, a four-wheeled cart, bedposts, chests and textiles, impresses to this day, as do the remains of 14 horses, an ox and three dogs. The grave had been broken into in ancient times; no precious metal was found. Related finds are the Gokstad ship and, on the English side, Sutton Hoo. More on the whole category: Boat burial.
The only detailed eyewitness account comes from an Arab. Ahmad ibn Fadlan travelled in 921 to 922 as envoy of the caliph to the Volga Bulgars and describes by the river the funeral of a leader of the Rūsiyyah, the Rus: a ship, a pyre, animal sacrifices, a woman who is to join the dead man of her own will. The report survives only in excerpts and in a thirteenth-century manuscript that Zeki Velidi Togan found in Mashhad in 1923; Christian Martin Frähn had published the excerpts as early as 1823. The role of the young woman is read differently in scholarship: victim, participant with a role of her own, or change of status are all proposed readings. Whether the report shows Scandinavian Vikings or eastern Rus is likewise debated; certain features, such as basil, are hardly to be expected in Scandinavia, and there are parallels among Turkic peoples. The same source also mentions that the poor were burned in small boats, slaves left to the animals and thieves hanged. More: Ibn Fadlan.
The social core of honouring the dead lay in the shared meal. The Church noticed it early: in the Indiculus superstitionum et paganiarum, a list of heathen customs from the eighth century that is associated with the synods around Boniface, the first entries include "desecration at the graves of the dead" and the desecration over the dead, called dadsisas, which is interpreted as a funeral feast. The Church thus forbade not only fire and mound but also the feast with the dead.
In the North the funeral ale is called erfi or sjaund, after the seventh day. It was at once a legal act: whoever drank the heir-ale took up the inheritance, and the rightful heir was allowed to take the high seat of the deceased. That a ritual hung on this is shown by Snorri in the Ynglinga saga (chapter 40 in Laing's numbering, "The Burning in Upsal"), though through the example of a catastrophe. At the heirship feast for his father, King Ingjald has to sit on a footstool until the Bragi-cup is brought; only then does he rise and make a vow: to enlarge his realm by half towards the four corners of the world, or die. Afterwards he has the hall set on fire, and the six kings burn in it with all their people. The story is legend; the framework of footstool, cup and vow, however, probably rests on something familiar.
The memory-drinking described in Hákonar saga góða fits here. In the numbering of Samuel Laing's translation (chapter 16), the goblets at the sacrificial feast are drunk in turn: first Odin's "for victory and power to the king," then Njord's and Freyr's for good seasons and peace, then the Bragi-goblet, and finally "the guests emptied a goblet to the memory of departed friends, called the remembrance goblet." More on this scene in Ancestor veneration at Yule. What matters here is the classification: it is a royal-saga text of the thirteenth century that attributes to Hákon the Good (around 960) a sacrificial custom of the North; whether things went exactly so remains open.
One of the most striking features of the Norse sources is that the dead are not simply gone. The sagas know mound-dwellers who advise or threaten the living, and revenants, the draugar. Especially full is the Eyrbyggja saga, composed probably in the middle or second half of the thirteenth century, with the Fróðá wonders: after Thorgunna's death the farm is haunted, a shepherd walks, Thorir Wooden-leg dies after meeting him, further people die, and at Yule Thorir and the drowned enter, warm themselves at the fire and shake wet clothes over the guests. The dead are banished only by a legal act and Christian rites: Snorri the Godi has them summoned before a door-court and ordered out of the house.
The attitude behind it matters more than the horror. Whoever does not honour the dead properly, so runs the logic of these tales, gets them back. Respect for the dead is a duty, and a proper farewell, a mound and a feast are the means. One can read these stories as literary shaping; but they are also the best evidence of how seriously the community took the matter. A sister form in Grettis saga is the shepherd Glam, who walks at Yule.
Anyone telling the history of honouring the dead in northern and central Europe often begins not with the Germanic peoples but in the Neolithic. The megalithic tombs, dolmens and passage graves, are several millennia older than any Germanic source and belong to other societies. The Irish Newgrange is built so that at the winter solstice a narrow beam of light falls through a roof-box into the chamber; this alignment is astronomically confirmed. It is not a Germanic practice, and it would be wrong to ascribe it to the Vikings. It is interesting all the same, because it shows how early people in Europe tied graves to the course of the sun. Comparable thoughts about winter and the turning point can be found at Solstice.
Christianisation changed the honouring of the dead in three places. First, the place: the Capitulary for Saxony, issued by Charlemagne in the years of his Saxon wars, demands in clause 22 that the bodies of Christian Saxons be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans. Second, the form: clause 7 puts to death anyone who has a dead body burned according to pagan rite. Third, the meal: the Indiculus lists the "desecration over the dead" as a custom to be stopped.
What remained? Remembering itself. Even in the time of the mission people kept anniversaries, drank to the dead, set up marks. In the North, runestones for the departed are given Christian crosses: the large Jelling stone carries Harald Bluetooth's claim to have made the Danes Christian, next to the commemoration of his parents. It is a document of transition in which the old form (a stone for the dead) is joined with the new faith. For the wider context see Christianisation of the Germanic peoples and Harald Bluetooth.
For the Rhineland there is good news and a caveat. The good news: the region has a long history of grave finds from Roman times into the early Middle Ages, and museums such as the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn and the Römisch-Germanisches Museum in Cologne show finds from it. The caveat: what lies there is mostly Roman and Frankish in character, not "Germanic" in the sense of the Nordic sources, and for Aachen itself no specific funeral custom of the Germanic period can be derived from the sources used here. Individual finds are therefore named only where we can document them. Anyone who wants to follow the regional history is well served by Germanic peoples in the Rhineland and Vikings in Aachen.
What can be taken from all this for the present without stretching the sources? Three things are well attested and can be taken up in a plain form. The shared meal with a drink in honour of a dead person, the minni. The thought that a mark by the road expresses bond, as the Hávamál records. And the knowledge that remembrance was not tied to one form: mound, stone, ship, cup, word. The Hávamál sums up the core in stanza 77: cattle die and kinsmen die, but a good name never, if one earns it. That is a stance toward remembering, not an instruction for ritual, and it can be taken up in just that way today: by telling, saying names, setting up photographs, handing on stories.
The mark can be a stone. Anyone who would like one engraved will find simple memorial plaques of natural slate with us. Like every present-day sign, it is a modern gesture that takes up an old thought without claiming a rite. For places of remembrance in the open air, the first step is to find out who owns the ground. The question of the tree as a burial place is treated in Tree burial and the heathen worldview.
Once more, briefly, what is missing. We know of no Germanic book of the dead and no liturgy. We have graves in which only what lasts has survived. We have Roman reports, brief and applying foreign yardsticks. We have poetry and sagas written down by Christians, often centuries after the events they describe. And we have prohibitions, which show what was fought but not how it ran.
From this follows what may honestly be said. Death was accompanied visibly and with effort; mounds, stones and ships are the proof. Remembering was a communal matter, with ale, vow and high seat. The dead remained present in the worldview. Which small gestures accompanied the deathbed can no longer be said with certainty. Saying so openly takes nothing away from the subject.
How did the Germanic peoples bury their dead? In very different ways: by cremation or inhumation, in flat graves, under mounds, in tree coffins or in ships. Around 98 AD Tacitus names the turf mound and the burning of famous men with particular kinds of wood.
What are hel-shoes? Hel-shoes are shoes bound on the dead for the journey into the beyond. The main attestation is Gísla saga (chapter 14), which says it is the custom so that the men may walk to Valhalla. The source is late; whether it was a widespread custom is not certain.
What is an heir-ale? The heir-ale (Old Norse erfi, sjaund) was the funeral feast, often after the seventh day. Whoever drank it took up the inheritance, and the rightful heir was allowed to take the high seat. Vows were made, as Snorri's Ynglinga saga shows with the example of Ingjald.
Were there ship burials with a burning ship? Yes, Ibn Fadlan describes a ship cremation of the Rus on the Volga in the early tenth century. From Scandinavia itself, grave ships under mounds are mainly attested, as at Oseberg (834), Gokstad and Sutton Hoo.
What role did memorial stones play? Mounds and stones made the dead visible. The Hávamál says that memorial stones seldom stand by the road unless a kinsman raises them for a kinsman. The Jelling stones of the tenth century are an example.
What did the Church forbid? The Capitulary for Saxony punished cremation according to pagan rite and demanded burial in churchyards. The list of heathen customs (Indiculus) also names the desecration at graves and the funeral feast.
Für Mut. Für Erinnerung. Für Legenden, die weiterleben.
The tree as last companion · Hel – goddess and realm of the dead · Hringhorni – Baldr's funeral ship · What comes after Ragnarök · Seiðr – the magic.
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