Free Vikings by Neil Oliver

marked by stones, enigmatically suggestive of empty vessels.
    Surely mention of the word ‘Viking’ summons up one image that is stronger than all the others – that of the ship engulfed in flames as it bears the body of a great warrior on his final journey out to sea and beyond? Archaeologists have suggested that at least some of the ship settings – on Gotland and elsewhere – are representations in stone and on dry land of just that, of the journey into the world of the dead. The inclusion of burnt human bones – testament to a great fire designed to send the deceased on his or her way – completes the picture.
    Archaeologists Richard Bradley, Peter Skoglund and Joakim Wehlin allowed for the possibility that the people of Gotland had an especially acute sense of their connection to the sea: ‘Gotland is long and narrow and comes to a point at its northern and southern extremes,’ they write. ‘That is very similar to the outline of the largest stone vessels. Is it possible that the greatest ship settings of all were meant to represent the island as a whole? Was Gotland itself imagined as an enormous vessel in the middle of the ocean?’
    Just as fascinating is to wonder how early the great voyages, for which they became so famous, actually began – and how far some of the ancestors of the Vikings might have travelled. If theDanish Egtved Girl is a celebrity of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, then the Swedish burial cairn called Bredaror, ‘the broad cairn’, is equally famous. Located near Kivik, in the south-east of the country, the tomb’s history, since its discovery, is almost as fascinating as the marvels it contains. Radiocarbon dates suggest it was originally constructed around the middle of the second millennium BC , but by the time local farmers started using it as a source of building stone in the middle of the eighteenth century, it cropped up only in stories to frighten children. Spirits of the dead were said to haunt the place, in the form of flickering lights, and local folklore had it that horses and other animals would shy away from the mound at sunrise or sunset.
    In 1748 two local farmers – Anders Sahlberg and Lasse Pärsson – had the misfortune to break through into the large burial chamber that had been the point of the structure all along. They had come only in search of more building stone but when word spread about an empty burial chamber, rumours circulated that they had made off with some kind of treasure. They almost certainly had not, but when the gossip reached the authorities the pair were duly arrested and charged with denying the Swedish State its lawful property. The men were tried the following year but acquitted for want of evidence.
    It was only in 1756 that someone finally noticed the rock art on the walls of the empty burial chamber discovered by Sahlberg and Pärsson. Bredaror was not subjected to any kind of scientific archaeological excavation until work there by Gustaf Hallström in 1931, but nothing was found to compare with the wonders depicted on the ancient stones, and left exposed all the while. The cairn was subsequently reconstructed – and it is anyone’s guess whether the finished result bears much of a resemblance to what was there in the Bronze Age.
    But nothing can diminish the impact of the story told by those pecked and carved images. There are eight decorated slabsin total and upon those, in simple, elegant style, is a record of sights surely witnessed during an epic journey long ago. There are the long ships powered by oars . . . stately processions of robed and hooded figures, some blowing horns and lurs. Better yet is the man riding a chariot with two spoked wheels and pulled by a pair of horses controlled by long reins – a mode of transport unknown in Scandinavia before that time.
    The monument had long been known as the King’s Grave (despite the fact that Hallström’s excavation revealed the burnt and unburnt remains of several people), but