Doors to the dead. The power of doorways and thresholds in Viking Age Scandinavia

Abstract

Mortuary practices could vary almost indefinitely in the Viking Age. Within a theoretical framework of ritualization and architectural philosophy, this article explores how doors and thresholds were used in mortuary practice and ritual behaviour. The door is a deep metaphor for transition, transformation and liminality. It is argued that Viking Age people built 'doors to the dead' of various types, such as freestanding portals, causewayed ring-ditches or thresholds to grave mounds; or on occasion even buried their dead in the doorway. The paper proposes that the ritualized doors functioned in three ways: they created connections between the dead and the living; they constituted boundaries and thresholds that could possibly be controlled; and they formed between-spaces, expressing liminality and, conceivably, deviance. Ultimately, the paper underlines the profound impact of domestic architecture on mortuary practice and ritual behaviour in the Viking Age.

Don’t all mothers love their children? Deposited infants as animate objects in the Scandinavian Iron Age

“…Not only children are known to be deposited within the built environment in Iron Age Scandinavia; adults or parts of adults were deposited and/or buried in connection with entrances and doors (Artelius 1999;Eriksen 2013), on the central axis of the house (Grindkåsa 2012), in walls (Ambrosiani and Erikson 1993;Backe et al 1993) and associated with hearths (Gejvall 1955). Yet, depositing children in constructional remains seems to constitute a distinct and significant tradition throughout the first millennium CE.…”

Viking Mortuary Citations

“…Equally important, especially in the context of this collection, Viking-age mortuary archaeology has developed over the last decade as a profitable arena for debating new theoretical frameworks for enquiry (e.g. Goldhahn & Oestigaard, 2008;Pétursdóttir, 2009;Price, 2010;Eriksen, 2013;Gardeła, 2016). This work is important, since in many regards Viking-age mortuary archaeology has largely remained within a pre-1970s culture-historic framework of identifying shared cultural beliefs of migrants, approaches that persist in many fieldwork reports and popular syntheses of the mortuary data.…”

“…Much of this literature explicitly critiques the bracketing of mortuary archaeology from other social realms and some studies have actively sought to explore mortuary mnemonics in contexts not traditionally regarded as funerary, including settlements (e.g. Thäte, 2007b;Larsson, 2010;Eriksen, 2013), hoards (Myrberg, 2009), and the life-histories of artefact types in relation to the living and the dead (e.g. Ashby, 2014).…”

Citations in Stone: The Material World of Hogbacks

“…The identities of buildings may have been crucial too. Halls may have accrued famed life-histories connected with their own construction, use, abandonment, and citation through new acts of building and burial (Thäte, 2007;Eriksen, 2013;. As places where memories were produced through the biographies of their inhabitants, halls may have become famed structures with personalities of their own: 'living', 'dying', and 'dead' non-human agents (see Eriksen, 2016).…”