A new Viking research paper determines parts of dead Norse folk, especially children, were kept beneath homes after the deceased had been buried.
So often sensationalized, glamorized and mystified, 11th century Scandinavia was often a dark and blood-thirsty realm where the upper classes ruled by sword and flame. While the glorified elites of the Viking world were often burned in boats wooden longboats, day to day, the bodies of common Norse people were often discarded crudely, with no pomp and ceremony, and now it has become clear that parts of smashed-skulls and even dead infants bodies were buried beneath doorways and floors in homes.
Consulting the skulls of arcane universal knowledge
Archaeologist Marianne Hem Eriksen from the University of Oslo , who authored the new study which has been published in World Archaeology , said “Parts of corpses were sometimes placed around farms and inside long houses” and that this was probably not a random act. The Norwegian researcher has studied 40 archaeological fragments from skulls unearthed around greater Scandinavia dating from the Iron Age around 250 BC until about 1050 AD, which was at the end of Viking Age. And testimony to the aforementioned violence, one of the analyzed samples was the whole skull of a 25-40 year old man with its face slashed off, discovered unceremoniously dumped in a well outside a 9th century pit house in Aarhus, Denmark.
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