Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2009, Page 27

Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2009, Page 27
ICELANDIC VlKING AGE GRAVES: LaCK IN MATERIAL - LACK OF INTERPRETATION? the following declaration; “The material at hand is probably more or less known to my audience. I do not pretend to offer any striking novelties, nor do I think we should expect any” (Eldjárn 1984, 3). Furthermore, the emphasis on com- parative analysis, especially with the Norwegian material, has facilitated a tendency to focus on what the Icelandic material lacks instead of perceiving of it on its own terms. Emphasis has been on the scarcity and homogeneity of fmds, the uniformity in raw material, the absence of rich graves and the assumed low technological level of the society. As stated by Vésteinsson (2000, 169 [with ref. to Eldjám]) “[t]he grave goods sup- port the general impression of material poverty among the first generations of Icelanders...[and hence]...the Icelanders were very much the poor cousins, com- pared with Norway, when it came to personal objects taken to the other world”. Norway, in this sense, has been the estab- lished “norm” against which the Icelandic corpus has been measured and evaluated, and hence the actual characteristics of the material have not been acknowledged as significant aspects of a distinct trait but as deviations from something else. The lack of consideration given the act of burial as an important social and ritual practice is also interesting. It is generally regarded as common knowledge that people’s belief in an afterlife urged for the disposal of objects, or “necessities”, in the graves with the deceased and any further consideration of this practice and its probable social meaning, or of the objects buried, is rarely attempted. Rather, one can observe a certain degra- dation of burial practices, as if they were acts of trivial importance. “Most mun- dane objects, which on the other hand could fít in the grave, were suitable as grave goods,”1 Eldjám declares (2000, 301). However, there is in fact nothing in the corpus that allows us to suggest that the burial and deposition of things was an incidental practice. And, hinting that the paucity of grave goods in Icelandic graves merely reflect economic aspects and/or a conscious reluctance to forfeit valuable objects does not hold either. Actually, if this really was the case we may as well not have had any grave goods to puzzle over. The material at hand Considering the morphology of Icelandic Viking Age graves there is truly not the same variety among them as represented in many other areas of the Viking world. However, reorienting the focus away from parallelism to the material itself reveals that the material is not poor, sim- ple or homogenous, but on the contrary. There is a considerable variation within the corpus, as well as there are clear recurring traits which deserve a closer look. In general, grave goods are what most evidently distinguish a pagan grave from a Christian one, although this is not without exceptions. Thus, a number of the Icelandic graves identified as pre-Christian seem not to have contained grave goods. This is in many cases problematic, especially with single graves where dating is difficult and therefore hard to assert if they are actually pre-Christian. In other instances graves with no grave goods are found on burial grounds among others with clear pre-Christian characteristics. In most cases, however, the dead were accompa- nied by some items, often three to five pieces, and/or an animal, a horse or dog. 1 Author’s translation. 25

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Archaeologia Islandica

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