Why Men? by Nancy Lindisfarne;Jonathan Neale;

Author:Nancy Lindisfarne;Jonathan Neale;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781805260165
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

A Viking Funeral at the Edge of Empire

An account by Ibn Fadlan, an envoy from Baghdad, the capital of the vast Abbasid Empire, gives us an exceptional, unmediated, insight into the past and a European example of human sacrifice by the Russiya/Viking slavers in 922 CE on the Volga River.

The place to start is with the violence Ibn Fadlan describes, and why it can’t be separated from his own presence there. The Vikings he met were slave hunters who aimed to dominate the lucrative slave trade at a time when the alliances between the states and empires of the region were facing drastic economic changes and deadly political struggle. The rape and murder of a young girl in front of Ibn Fadlan and the rest of the embassy from Baghdad may well have been in part designed to shock the Abbasid authorities into agreeing to new terms of trade.

Ibn Fadlan wrote:

When a great man dies, the members of his family say to the slave girls and young slave boys:

‘Which one of you will die with him?’

One of them replies: ‘I will.’

Once they have spoken, it is irreversible and there is no turning back … usually it is the slave girls who offer to die.

When the man I mentioned above died, they said to his slave girls: ‘Who will die with him?’

One of them answered: ‘I will.’

Then they appointed two young slave girls to watch over her and follow her everywhere … Meanwhile, the slave girl spends each day drinking and singing, happily and joyfully.9

Ibn Fadlan was a civilised man. He often found the various tribes he travelled among dirty, ignorant and savage. But he did like to see what was going on. The dead man would be arranged on his boat, on a mattress, and cushions covered with Byzantine silk. An old woman they called the ‘Angel of Death’ came down to the boat. ‘She is in charge of sewing and arranging all these things’, Ibn Fadlan writes. ‘And it is she who kills the slave girls. I saw that she was a witch, thick-bodied and sinister.’10

The dead man had been buried under some earth and wood to preserve him. Now his people took him out and dressed him in his funeral clothes. ‘I saw that he had turned black because of the coldness of the country… The dead man did not smell and nothing about him had changed except his colour.’11

They laid him on the mattress in the boat, with a drum, fruit, basil and other food. ‘After that, they brought in a dog, which they cut in two and threw into the boat. Then they placed his weapons beside him. Next, they took two horses and made them run until they were in lather, before hacking them to pieces with swords and throwing their flesh on to the boat.’ Then they killed two cows, a cock and a hen.

‘Meanwhile, the slave girl who wanted to be killed came and went, entering in turn each of the pavilions that

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