Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2009, Page 32

Þóra Pétursdóttir
wanted to behold it for Gunnar’s revenge,
while Högni thought his father should
have it by his side in Valhöll (Böðvarsson
1971). Those familiar with Njáls saga
know the significant role of this weapon,
and although disagreeing both Högni and
Rannveig underline the same thing: that
Gunnar and his halberd are one. Without
the other they are incomplete and there-
fore the weapon should accompany him
in the grave. At the same time, as part of
Gunnar, the halberd is also the ultimate
weapon for his revenge.
In the Sagas we also come across
objects, most often weapons, which in
many ways resemble persons, and play
significant roles in the course of events.
They are even granted names, as Kvernbit,
Tyrving and Grásíða (Gansum and
Hansen 2002, 16-17), which bestows
them with an identity. Furthermore these
objects are ofiten described as personiíy-
ing some of their owners’ characteristics
and qualities or even to contain a part of
the person who used them (Gurevich
1992, 180), and hence had a personality.
Speaking of objects as persons or parts
of persons is not unproblematic. In mod-
em thought there is a deeply embedded
fear of becoming too intimately involved
with things, a superstitious and fetishistic
inclination incompatible with rational
behaviour. It is considered shameful and
unacceptable to be emotionally attached
to material things because it ascribes to
them some of the attributes we want to
reserve for humans only. We tend to pre-
sume, as Daniel Miller (1987, 11) has
pointed out, that peoples relations to
things are “...in some way vicarious,
fetishistic or wrong; that primary concem
should lie with direct social relations and
“real people”.” This attitude has been
promoted by modem social theory and
philosophy, where technology, mass pro-
duction and massive consumption have
become the incamations of our alienated
and inauthentic modern lives (Olsen
2003, 94). In tandem with this, the mate-
rial culture of burial deposits has repeat-
edly been reduced to a social, symbolic
essence or a form of “accessory”, dis-
tinctly different and subordinated to the
human remains. And although many
recent studies have emphasized the sym-
bol’s ambiguous and contested meaning,
it is mainly as symbols that the material
culture of graves has been considered.
So, the material culture is important in
the grave (and ritual) to make present that
which is not physically there - as a
“stand in” for some other essence and
largely without any significance in itself,
beyond representation. In the case of
Icelandic graves and grave goods, this is
a far too constraining and narrow posi-
tion. What meets the eye in an open
grave is a collective of human and non-
human remains entangled in a complex
and even chaotic nature that often makes
little immediate sense to us. This is not to
say that the objects do not, or can not
have a symbolic meaning, but simply that
their material quality and physical prox-
imity to the buried individual may be of
at least as much significance.
While the modern westem regime
tends to produce a rather alienated narra-
tive of the relations between people and
things, other cultural contexts may gener-
ate other and more consciously intimate
relations between the two (Fowler 2004,
77-78). The life world of a person in
Viking Age Iceland was undoubtedly
very much unlike our modem one. The
closeness and interactions with nature
and animals bred, worked with or hunted,
would have been essential in the con-
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