Talk:Norse funeral

Immolation

The Vikings often immolated their dead leaders in ship burials, known from archaeology and notably from the account of Ibn Fadlan.

It is not clear: Immolation says it is burning, ship burial seems to mean literal burial (on land).--Patrick 22:23, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Spoilers

The cultural references look a bit spoiler-y to me. Isopropyl 03:42, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Comment on "lady" in the article

Is the term lady appropriate because the woman is of a high status, or is it a mislabelling of woman or female? I'm not familiar with Viking cultural terminology, so my 21st Century perception may be wrong. In either way, this may need clarifying - appropriate terminology, not my 21st C perceps! ;~) LessHeard vanU (talk) 21:18, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

It is because she was of high status. Some say that she was a queen, while others say that she was a Völva, two positions that were not contradictory.--Berig (talk) 15:27, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I have replaced 'lady' with 'woman' and added that she was a queen or priestess (as per the Oseberg Ship Burial article). In my opinion the only current use of 'lady' is as an actual title: Lady Mary, Lady Smith. Awien (talk) 16:22, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for the correction.--Berig (talk) 16:23, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm overstating it a little, but other uses are really limited. Cheers! Awien (talk) 16:30, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

GAN

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

   lead

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   minor changes needed

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

• Image:Haugsetting.jpg and Image:Haugsetting2.jpg should have Fair use tag, not copyrighted, also use fair use rationale template if possible. The name of author is also required.
• improve img cap. "Alternatively, the deceased were incinerated inside a stone ship." is confusing. Name the place too, if possible. Img captions should stand on their own too.
• Lead should be expanded.
• "Death has always been a critical moment for those bereaved, and consequently a case of death is surrounded by taboo-like rules. Family life has to be reorganized and in order to master such transitions, people use rites." seems to be OR. Seems like a comment rather than a fact.
• A single account is described in too much detail and many redundant words. in "Ibn Fadlan's account." The account retold in "Human sacrifice". A case of WP:UNDUE. Soln: Rewrite deleting unneccessary details e.g. "Thereafter, an old woman named the "angel of death" put cushions on the bed. She was responsible for the ritual and she was the one who would kill the thrall girl. (later told again) She was an old witch, who was stocky and dark" can be re-written as "An old witch named "angel of death", responsible for the ritual, put cushions on the bed." similarly " Everything was incinerated." after "the relatives of the dead chieftain arrived with a burning torch and set the ship aflame." and before "Afterwards, a round barrow was built on top of the ashes".

* "in which the temperature reached 1,400 degrees centigrade; much higher than modern crematorium furnaces attain." seems to be OR. needs ref.

• "The soul" talks about general notions of death in Norse culture, not the funeral itself. I suggest renaming the article somethimg like "Viking funeral and conception of death" (not the best one). Think about a better one. --Redtigerxyz (talk) 14:56, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into the article. As for Ibn Fadlan's account I don't think it is a case of WP:UNDUE, because it is the only eyewitness account ever recorded, but I will see what I can do to shorten it further. As to your suspicions of OR, the sections are referenced, and I thought that it was only necessary to add references on the bottom of the referenced text. I will try to improve the article according to your evaluation in the next few hours.--Berig (talk) 16:23, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Ibn Fadlan's account as a whole is not UNDUE. the repetition of its details is an UNDUE. Please shorten "Ibn Fadlan's account", removing UNDUE details like was the witch dark etc. and redundant words. Leave a note on my talk when done.--Redtigerxyz (talk) 16:39, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

As for the pics, the invaluable Betacommandbot was very concerned by the use of fair use tags for other images from the same source (see [1]). I then learnt that the present tag was the most appropriate one, and it is indeed the tag that best corresponds to how the copyright owner (a Norwegian government owned college) wants them to be used[2].--Berig (talk) 19:01, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

PS, I have added some even better tags, as the pics are definately PD in the US. I hope that this clears the pictures of any copyright problems.--Berig (talk) 09:15, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

PPS, since I see no reason why these two pictures should stop this article from reaching GA status and in order to avoid any possible further objections against the pics, I have removed them and added a new pic to the lead.--Berig (talk) 09:32, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

IMO, Image:Semiradski.jpg would be a better lead img. Just a suggestion.--Redtigerxyz (talk) 06:37, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

• • Lead expand to include "The soul" summary. also see Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#First_sentences
  • Still feel "The soul" can be treated as an UNDUE. "The soul" deals with the Norse idea of death, not with the funeral directly.--Redtigerxyz (talk) 06:37, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I have tried to address your concerns now. I hope the present version is more satisfactory.--Berig (talk) 08:05, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

PASS.--Redtigerxyz (talk) 11:57, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Not restricted to vikings

The article does not say that the vikings had other funeral customs than other norse during the viking age. Neither is it probable that they had. Note that the viking article says that the term viking refers to the traders and raiders, not the whole population of Scandinavia. Suggestion: Move to Funeral in viking age Scandinavia. --Etxrge (talk) 17:23, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

"Viking funeral" is the conventional term in English and should be used per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English): "Use the most commonly used English version of the name of the subject as the title of the article".--Berig (talk) 17:49, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

PS, if we google the name "Viking funeral" and compare it to your suggestion we get:

"Viking funeral": 45,900[3]

"Funeral in viking age Scandinavia": 0 (no results found)[4]

Consequently, it would be against Wikipedia conventions to change the name.--Berig (talk) 18:19, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Its even more funny when one of the more famous stones, which was to honor a dead man during the vikingage after his funeral, states he was a viking watcher: he was appointed as a guard against vikings. Its really funny you want to call him a viking, and that no reader is aloud to understand that that definition is falsely used and wrong. When did google start becoming a source for medevial history knowledge? Dan Koehl (talk) 00:54, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

EDIT: if you search on google for "napoleon short" you will get over 2 460 000 hits, although he was of normal height. It was a conventional term in English as well, that he was short, although its not true... Dan Koehl (talk) 00:58, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

I see that you refer to U 617, a Swedish runic inscription that may have been raised in memory of one of the Thingmen (who protected the English against fellow Scandinavians). I hope that you will eventually come to terms with the fact that the term Viking in modern English has little to do with the use of the word víkingr in Old Norse.--Berig (talk) 08:28, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Berig, so far, I have understood hat the wikipedia should describe vikings, and not the word viking. The description of the word vikings belongs in the http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Viking and there may of course the british langauge misunderstanding of the term be fully presented, together with all myths and desinformation about the word. But the description of true vikings in this article is a mixture of true facts and misyunderstandings and myths, but still presented for the uncritical reader as facts about vikings, not the word. This only leads to misunderstandings and a pseudo knowledge about vikings, according to my point of view. Secondly, this view is presented as the only thruth, making the article POV, although modern historians has questioned "facts" about vikings for over 10 years now. To make the article NPOV it must be divided into two parts, the "classical" misunderstandings" and the true facts about vikings, those two views can not be merged, mixed and presented together in the article, they can only clearly make people unerstand the problem if they are divided from each other. OR, even better, the article should be written about true vikings, and not british langauge misunderstandings of the word.

Dan Koehl (talk) 15:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Dan, Wikipedia is not the place for correcting what "viking" means in English.--Berig (talk) 15:49, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

For different reasons, I lean towards renaming the article to something along the lines of Norse funerary customs. Personally, it irks me when people use "viking" when they mean "Norseman", but it is also true, as Berig notes, that that is common usage in English (even among scholars- Gwyn Jones' pivotal History of the Vikings being just one example). By the same token, we refer to various cultures by shorthand names that refer to only one, non-universal portion or aspect of that culture - such as Mycenean Greece, Inca civilization, Urnfield culture, or Kievan Rus'. Calling it the Viking Age is just something everyone does, accurate or not.

But, in point of fact, Viking funeral means something specific in the popular mind- the burning of a warrior in his boat, on the water, with his weapons and belongings around him. This is probably the least common Norse funeral rite and I only recall it appearing in a single medieval source (but I forget which), but for whatever reason it's captured public imagination and that's what people think of when they hear "viking funeral".

This article covers a very wide and diverse array of inhumation and cremation customs which differed drastically according to period and region. So "Viking funeral", even putting aside the issue of whether it's accurate nomenclature, is probably not the best title for the article as it is generally understood to mean only a single, very unusual form of funeral rite. Briangotts (Talk) (Contrib) 20:42, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I think you are right. I suggest Norse funeral instead since it's a simpler name, and "Viking funeral" will redirect there.--Berig (talk) 10:21, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Not restricted to the Viking Age

The funerary customs described in this article are not restricted to the Viking Age in Scandinavia. Many of the practices were also conducted in the Nordic Iron Age and in the Nordic Bronze Age even. Bronze Age stone ships are know from Sweden in particular. It is Original Research to limit "Norse funerals" to the Viking Age only. No such division is made in archaeology. There are some differences in preferred practices, and the Viking Age perhaps introduces a few new funerary customs in the Norse culture, but that is not to say the funerary practices of the Norse are to be restriced to the Viking Age specifically. RhinoMind (talk) 12:41, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Overall, I really miss a proper definition of what the term "Norse" actually comprise. Here on Wikipedia, it is often falsely assumed that the use of the term "Norse" is somehow restriced to the Viking Age in Scandinavia, but that is Original Research and not backed up by anything. RhinoMind (talk) 12:41, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Does Ibn Fadlān actually record Norse customs?

At the moment, this entry includes this statement about Ibn Fadlān:

A 10th-century Arab Muslim writer named Ahmad ibn Fadlan produced a description of a funeral of a Scandinavian, probably Swedish, chieftain who was on an expedition on the eastern route. The account is a unique source on the ceremonies surrounding the Viking funeral of a chieftain. The source says "Rus" (Rūsiyyah), and their identification as Norsemen, Slavs or some other group is still disputed.

I suggest the following change. It solves the 'citation needed' problem and better reflects scholarly debate on this issue:

A 10th-century Arab Muslim writer named Ahmad ibn Fadlan produced a description of a funeral of a Rūsiyyah chieftain. These people have been widely interpreted as Scandinavian Rus people, if so possibly Swedish or Kievan people on an expedition on the eastern route, but their identification as Norsemen is disputed. A recent survey finds that they may have been Scandinavians; Slavs; a local people named after the river Ros’; Kievan chieftains; more than one people, whom Ibn Fadlān confused; or some other complex or transitional ethnic situation. The account is at any rate a unique source on the ceremonies surrounding a high-status ship burial in northern Eurasia.

Anyone want to object to this? Alarichall (talk) 18:57, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

References

The article really needs a rewrite from scratch, in my opinion, so feel free to simply rewrite it as you see fit. :bloodofox: (talk) 19:05, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, :bloodofox:. I agree: this article is on a really significant topic, but there's a lot of work to be done... Probably not by me! But I'll try and tidy up the Ibn Fadlān stuff anyway :-) Alarichall (talk) 12:20, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Looks like there are no objections here, so I'll proceed with the edit. Alarichall (talk) 13:51, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

• I'm opposed to it. There's a paralell discussion on Talk:Rus' people involving the same source and the same dubious assertions, so I suggest we keep the discussion there. - Tom | Thomas.W ^talk 14:29, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

I just don't get what's dubious here, Tom. I'm just noting that scholarship shows that we can't be sure whether the people Ibn Fadlān was describing were 'Norse' (to use the term in this article's title). I don't understand how this is a 'dubious assertion'. Anyway, if anyone's interested, the parallel discussion is at Talk:Rus'_people#Does_Ibn_Fadlān_actually_describe_the_Rus'?. Alarichall (talk) 14:46, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

I have commented on Talk:Rus' people. - Tom | Thomas.W ^talk 14:59, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

I've also added my 2¢ worth on the "Rus' people" talk page. In relation to this article, I've restored the long standing consensus version. One academic's paper does not make for global questioning by scholars as to who ibn Fadlan was describing, so the tag for a citation being needed for theories other than those promoted in Russian (and to some extent, Ukraine) are irrelevant. There is a plethora of academic outrage over a global conference held in Russia (about a decade ago) where non-Eastern European scholars were subjected to politicised rubbish about some sort of spontaneous combustion leaving a developed infrastructure of Slavs in existence prior the Norse expeditions. Find something serious, please. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 08:00, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

@Iryna Harpy: Thanks for your involvement. I take your point that the subject of Rūs identity is highly politicised (though for what it's worth I'm just a common-or-garden Old Norse scholar and I don't think I have politicised views on this—but who knows what unexamined agendas I'm unwittingly carrying around with me!). At the risk of forking the discussion that's happening on Talk:Rus'_people, I think it's worth outlining some of the current tangles re Ibn Fadlān here on Viking Funeral, which are a bit different from Rus' people (and I didn't pick up on all of them when I first edited here). Unfortunately, I don't have access to two of the sources cited (Harrison & Svensson 2007, and Steinsland & Meulengracht 1998), which is a shame because I'd really like to check what they actually say :-( Still:

• The doubt about the relevance of Ibn Fadlān to the topic of this article has been present (unreferenced) since the version of 18:04, 15 July 2015‎ (an anonymous edit), so it's not like this is a new issue or not part of existing concensus. An anonymous user added a 'citation needed' tag on 09:42, 29 April 2018, and they surely have a point: if the page is going to register doubt, it should do so with references. So I do think something needs changing here (not necessarily to my earlier edit though).
• As I've said on Talk:Rus' people, but should repeat here for completeness, recent, professional scholarship on the subject of Ibn Fadlān and Norse funerals does record doubt about Ibn Fadlān's relevance. So it seems sensible to me that Wikipedia should too. (Though at the same time referencing the concensus that he's an okay source would also be fine.) Here is my evidence for this, from the other talk page:

  A recent popular history by a leading scholar says: 'the exact identity of the Rus is much debated, and we should be careful not simply to take ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus as in any way representative of Viking Age Scandinavian customs' (Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 94-95). Neil Price, 'Passing into Poetry: Viking-Age Mortuary Drama and the Origins of Norse Mythology', Medieval Archaeology, 54:1 (2010), 123-156 doi:10.1179/174581710X12790370815779 argues that evidence 'very strongly suggests not only that Ibn Fadlan’s al-Rūsīyyah — or at least the decision-making members of the group — were Scandinavians, but also that their actions among the Bulgar closely resembled what they did at home' (p. 133). But he still feels the need to acknowledge the debate over who Idb Fadlān was describing (esp. p. 132). Thorir Jonsson Hraundal, 'New Perspectives on Eastern Vikings/Rus in Arabic Sources', Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 10 (2014), 65-97 doi:10.1484/J.VMS.5.105213 does the same (p. 79).

• Just to add to the mess (I didn't realise this when I originally did the edit), the sentence we're discussing currently includes a reference to http://www.germanicmythology.com/original/RUSILA.html; but this is actually cut-and-pasted (without a proper reference or working link) from James E. Montgomery, 'Ibn Faḍlān and the Rūsiyyah', Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 3 (2000), 1-25. I just mention this because my reference to this article has been removed here and on Rus' people, but regardless of what we decide about my earlier edit, we should replace the references to http://www.germanicmythology.com/original/RUSILA.html with proper references to Montgomery throughout the article.

A couple of my other edits have got caught in the cross-fire here and reverted, but I'll start separate discussions about them below! Alarichall (talk) 09:53, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

• Please provide evidence for your claim that "recent, professional scholarship on the subject of Ibn Fadlān and Norse funerals does record doubt about Ibn Fadlān's relevance". If you're referring to Montgomery's article it does not in any way support that claim, since it's just a rehash of old sources, not a survey of recent research. - Tom | Thomas.W ^talk 11:05, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
  • I feel like I'm going in circles here a bit, Tom... But here, again, are the three references from 2010 and 2014 I cited above. If you'd like me to email you copies, let me know at a.t.p.hall@leeds.ac.uk :-) If you don't think these are relevant or appropriate, that's fine if you can explain why:

    A recent popular history by a leading scholar says: 'the exact identity of the Rus is much debated, and we should be careful not simply to take ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus as in any way representative of Viking Age Scandinavian customs' (Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 94-95). Neil Price, 'Passing into Poetry: Viking-Age Mortuary Drama and the Origins of Norse Mythology', Medieval Archaeology, 54:1 (2010), 123-156 doi:10.1179/174581710X12790370815779 argues that evidence 'very strongly suggests not only that Ibn Fadlan’s al-Rūsīyyah — or at least the decision-making members of the group — were Scandinavians, but also that their actions among the Bulgar closely resembled what they did at home' (p. 133). But he still feels the need to acknowledge the debate over who Idb Fadlān was describing (esp. p. 132). Thorir Jonsson Hraundal, 'New Perspectives on Eastern Vikings/Rus in Arabic Sources', Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 10 (2014), 65-97 doi:10.1484/J.VMS.5.105213 does the same (p. 79).

    Alarichall (talk) 13:02, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Just to note that I came back to this and added in more references, with fuller discussion of the debate. (None of which has much to do with the debate about who the Rus' people were, FYI!) Alarichall (talk) 21:43, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Some months ago, I was asked to rewrite Rus' (people). The "controversy" of the identity of the Rus is greatly exaggerated. It was hotly debated for nationalistic reasons during the Soviet era, and after the fall of the Soviet Union it was reactualized. However, it would be not be in agreement with WP:DUE to try to make the debate look like a debate between two equally strong sides. It is not. The majority view is that the Rus' were originally Scandinavians, or at least mainly, Scandinavians.--Berig (talk) 13:27, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

BTW, I am reading "The Children of Ash and Elm" by Neil Price, ATM, and by coincidence/serendipity, I just stumbled on the following statement:

"The parallels continued to appear over decades of new boat burial finds, excavations linking to his report with almost unsettling exactitude - from the expensive dress of the dead to the weapons and other costly possessions laid on board, the animal offerings, and the presence of a human sacrifice - in this case, a young female thrall. The result was that the essentially Scandinavian identity of ibn Faḍlān's Rus' came to be unchallenged, and so it remains today for all but the terminally sceptical". (Neil Price 2020:247)

So yes, there are sceptics (as usual) but per WP:DUE we should not give them too much space here.--Berig (talk) 15:55, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Does Vǫlsa þáttr record 'the same ritual' as Ibn Fadlān?

At the moment, this article has the following summary of events in Ibn Fadlān's funeral account, and makes the emboldened comparison to Vǫlsa þáttr:

Meanwhile, the thrall girl went from one tent to the other and had sexual intercourse with the men. Every man told her: "Tell your master that I have done this purely out of love for you." In the afternoon, they moved the thrall girl to something that looked like a door frame, where she was lifted on the palms of the men three times. Every time, the girl told them what she saw. The first time, she saw her father and mother, the second time, she saw all her relatives, and the third time she saw her master in the afterworld. There, it was green and beautiful and together with him, she saw men and young boys. She saw that her master beckoned for her. By using intoxicating drinks, they thought to put the thrall girl in an ecstatic trance that made her psychic and through the symbolic action with the door frame, she would then see into the realm of the dead. The same ritual also appears in the Icelandic short story "Völsa þáttr," where two pagan Norwegian men lift the lady of the household over a door frame to help her look into the otherworld.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to Harrison and Svensson 2007 to check what they say about this (though I can find and add more recent and specialist scholarship on the issue). But here is the relevant text (in translation) from Vǫlsa þáttr (quoted for convenience from https://notendur.hi.is/eybjorn/ugm/volsi.html):

He then threw the thing onto the floor, where the bitch instantly caught it. When the old woman saw this, she flew up in extreme agitation, and spoke:

Who is this man,
this stranger,
who gives to dogs
this holy object?
Lift me over the hinge
and the door-beam,
to see if I can save
the holy sacrifice.

Put it down, Lærir,
let me not see such a thing,
and do not swallow it,
you evil, murderous bitch!

Lots of scholarship has invoked Ibn Fadlān to try to explain the very mysterious verse here in Vǫlsa þáttr, and the two texts are intriguingly similar (and without other clear parallels), so it makes sense to note this. But I don't think scholars would claim that the two texts depict 'the same ritual'! One narrative involves an old woman asking to be lifted over a door-beam to save a horse penis that has been thrown away by a Christian king; the other involves a slave-girl being lifted over a wooden frame and being able to see into the afterlife.

I've suggested changing the wording here from "The same ritual also appears in the Icelandic short story "Völsa þáttr"" to "Ibn Fadlān's account is reminiscent of a detail in the Icelandic short story Völsa þáttr" and it's been reverted (possibly because I made the edit at the same time as something else). Could we reinstate my wording, or otherwise agree that the phrasing needs changing? Alarichall (talk) 09:53, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks to Bloodofox for reinstating the wording. I've now tidied this up further. Alarichall (talk) 22:14, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

References

What does all the sex with the slave-girl in Ibn Fadlān signify?

At the moment, the article has the following statement (made in a rather disjointed way) about the sex with the slave girl in Ibn Fadlān's account of the funeral: 'The sexual rites with the slave girl symbolize her role as a vessel for the transmission of life force to the deceased chieftain.' Again, annoyingly, I don't have access to the source being cited. But although this may be a good summary of Steinsland and Meulengracht's interpretation of Ibn Fadlān's account, these ideas are not expressed in the primary text and I don't think we can simply report them as fact in the Wikipedia entry. My suggested rephrasing, which has been undone (possibly as collateral damage to reverting something else in the same edit), is: 'The sexual rites with the slave girl have been imagined to symbolize her role as a vessel for the transmission of life force to the deceased chieftain.' I don't mind some other rephrasing, or contributing a proper short survey of scholarly interpretations here, but I do think something here needs to change! But I wanted to get views here because the edit's been undone previously. Alarichall (talk) 09:53, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

A major problem that occurs over and over again on Wikipedia is opinion presented as fact. From my experience, the only solution to this is to be extremely transparent with sourcing and attribution, which seems to be exactly what you're advocating here. This is the right approach. :bloodofox: (talk) 16:04, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. I've improved the handling of this. Alarichall (talk) 22:02, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

@Alarichall and Bloodofox: My belated response on this valid concern: Ibn Fadlan's account does say that the concubine had sexual intercourse with all the men whose tents she entered, but one wonders how he knew? He may well have leapt to an assumption. More appositely for Wikipedia, we are relying an awful lot on Steinsland and Meulengracht Sørensen, which is difficult both to obtain and to understand for our readers; see my new section below. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:55, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: Thanks for commenting :-) Just a generic point (I'll try to find the time to pick up on your points below later): I don't know how good this particular piece by Steinsland and Meulengracht Sørensen is, but I think Wikipedia provides important ways to make the findings of hard-to-access and/or non-Anglophone research available to a wider audience. So if a piece of research is good but inaccessible, I think we should be making an extra effort to include it, rather than avoiding it. Alarichall (talk) 12:17, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

References

I have the book.--Berig (talk) 12:52, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Det Ibn Fadlan beskriver är en hövdings båtbegravning. Varje detalj i ritualen har säkert sin betydelse. De sexuella riterna med trälkvinnan visar att hon tjänade som medium för överföring av livskraft till den döde herren. Med hjälp av berusningsmedel försattes hon i ett extatiskt sinnestillstånd som gjorde henne synsk. Genom den symboliska handlingen med dörrkarmen kunde hon se in i de dödas rike. Elden spelar en viktig roll i begravningsceremonin. Det sägs att den underlättar för den dödes resa till dödsriket. Till sist restes en gravhög över resterna av bålet. (Steinsland & Meulengracht Sørensen 1998:89-90)

As close a translation as I am able to make: "What Ibn Fadlan describes is the boat funeral of a chieftain. Every detail in the ritual probably has its significance. The sexual rites with the slave woman show that she served as a medium for the transmission of life force to the deceased lord. By using intoxicants she was put in an extatic state of mind that made her psychic. Through the symbolic act with the door frame, she could see into the realm of the dead. The fire also plays an important roll in the funeral ceremony. It is said to facilitate the voyage of the deceased into the realm of the dead. Eventually a mound was raised over the remains of the pyre."--Berig (talk) 12:52, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@Alarichall and Berig: I still hope some scholar, somewhere, has pointed out that Ibn Fadlan is not necessarily a reliable narrator on the sex. Unfortunately I have the point from an uncitable source.

Good point, Alaric. But given the massively international nature of Wikipedia and its topics, we'd wind up expecting our readers to be able to read a hefty majority of the world's languages; and it's also a major part of our mission to inform readers who are only beginning to learn about the subject matter, including school children. (If my experience was at all typical, the middle years of schooling are when someone has the most time and openness to read about and ask about a huge range of subjects, but maybe it wasn't; much of my schooling featured more and more doors closing, and things may not work like that elsewhere or nowadays.) So I understand completely the more or less official guideline that if there's an English-language source available, that should be cited, even if it's the least detailed among several sources cited. And that's what I think we need to do with the purely factual stuff here, primarily the summary of what Ibn Fadlan wrote in his account of the funeral.

On the separate point of the merits of Steinsland/Sørensen, that bit about transmission of life force is way out there (IMO) and I don't think we should state it in Wikipedia's voice. (I haven't looked to see whether we do; I'm arguing with myself on whether to muck in myself on this article along some of the broader lines I sketched in my later paragraphs below, or to leave it to the experts.) Berig, can I ask a translation question? I can manage Swedish but not well. Does Det sägs att here refer back to the preceding sentence—the point that fire plays an important role in the ceremony, i.e., we can conclude that fire facilitated the transition to the realm of the dead, which is a point made by Ellis Davidsom amongst others, and that's how I read it before I saw your translation; or, as you have it, is it an independent statement, i.e., it has been said by other analysts that that was the role of the fire? (Possibly this is ambiguous in Swedish, as with my loose use of "this" here.) Yngvadottir (talk) 00:51, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

The expression det sägs can be translated in different ways depending on context. The meaning can range from "rumour has it" and "reportedly" to "traditionally", but here it refers to what is told to ibn Fadlan during the funeral:

"[...] a Rus' bystander at the ship funeral witnessed by ibn Faḍlān says clearly to him that the dead are burnt (rather than buried) so as to enter "paradise" immediately, and that the "lord" of the deceased played a role in sending a strong wind to ensure this happened" (Price 2020:26)

As for the sex thing, sex appears to have played a major part in the practitioning of magic in those days. Neil Price writes a lot about it in Children of Ash and Elm (2020). It makes sense since men who practiced magic were put in the same category as men who played the female role in male homosexual intercourse (ergi).--Berig (talk) 04:57, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

PS, this funeral appears to be controversial in many and unexpected ways.--Berig (talk) 05:40, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Anders Winroth and the Ibn Fadlan report

Berig reverted in this edit a summary and quotation from Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings. I agree that the passage misrepresented the thrust of Winroth's argument, but the citation was not fake. We were saying:

Anders Winroth has commented that 'the exact identity of the Rus is much debated, and we should be careful not simply to take ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus as in any way representative of Viking Age Scandinavian customs'.

Winroth may not be visible on Google Books to people everywhere, and there was a small typo that may have affected search, so I have copied the complete paragraph for purposes of discussion here (noting where p. 95 begins) and here it is (an admin may wish to subsequently excise as copyvio):

After trading for almost a year from Baghdad to the town of Bulghar on the Volga, the Arab civil servant Ahmad ibn Fadlan was fascinated by the Rus merchants he encountered there. When he heard of "the death of one of their [the Rus'] great men," he was eager to learn more about their funeral practices, so he traveled to where this chieftain was going to be buried. He wrote down in Arabic what he saw when a great Rus chieftain was cremated in a great conflagration. The exact identity of the Rus is much debated, and we [95] should be careful not simply to take Ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus as in any way representative of Viking Age Scandinavian customs. Whatever their ethnic origins, the Rus that Ibn Fadlan saw may have been settled in Russia for generations and impulses from many different traditions surely influenced the way they buried their dead leader, but it is clear that Scandinavian rituals stand behind at least some and perhaps most of what happened almost eleven hundred years ago on the banks of one of Russia's many rivers.

Things are complicated by the fact our article talks of diaspora and Winroth only of Scandinavian vs. non-Scandinavian customs, but clearly his main point here is that the ceremony was at least in part, and possibly in the main, based on Scandinavian customs. I have rewritten the section citing this passage in support of that point as well as for the point that the Volga people performing the ceremony may have been influenced by other traditions. The passage was added to the article as part of an edit by Alarichall in 2018, in which scholarly views regarding Ibn Fadlan's report as substantially representative or not representative of Scandinavian funerary practice are juxtaposed, with several instances of each. That edit was an obvious improvement, but opening with the Winroth passage represented as it was tended to overbalance the presentation towards scepticism, and I think we may also be blurring together the position that this funeral cannot have been representative because it was an elaborate ship funeral of a powerful leader (many if not all summaries make this point, Ibn Fadlan reports that he went there to watch specifically after learning that a particularly important man had died, and rituals of power is a major focus of Steinsland's work) and the position that it was probably not representative of Norse practice because there are significant non-Norse parallels). This issue has been further exacerbated by the later creation of a bulleted list of points (which I have changed back to straightforward prose), which tended to bring the issue of possible Turkic influence into prominence. But it would be a good idea to find a scholar distinguishing these two arguments and distinguish them in our article using such a reference. Winroth is one possibility. (I recognise that there is extended discussion above of the article's coverage of the Ibn Fadlan account, and that work has already been done to improve it.)

I also did some work on reference formatting, which made clear that we are relying on Steinsland & Sørensen an awful lot. For reader accessibility, we should add one or more English-language references throughout the summary of Ibn Fadlan, possibly replacing that source in many places. There are several, including the relatively recent Winroth (first published in 2014), Turville-Petre (1964) pp. 272–73, and several by Hilda Ellis Davidson under varying names, starting with The Road to Hel (1943) pp. 45–46 (the big problem with her survey works is that they were republished many times under varying but mutually similar titles so that author-year references are intrinsically misleading; we have 3 copies in this house of one identical work from 3 publishers and under 2 titles).

More broadly: we are not distinguishing between ship burial and ship immolation (nor talking about the literary instances where the ship is launched, including the Prose Edda report of Baldr's funeral). The variation should at least be pointed out. I don't even see the point clearly raised that cremation vs. uncremated burial is a huge issue in archaeology and in discussions of death rites (a major focus in The Road to Hel and a traditional way to attempt to draw religious distinctions). We have a separate article, Death in Norse paganism, but pointing out that both were done, including death deposits with cremated remains, and how Ibn Fadlan's report is also relevant to that issue since both it and the Baldr funeral involve a pyre built on the ship (and obviously the archaeological evidence is biased toward inhumations with an intact ship, rather than burial of the remains from an onshore shipboard pyre, and cannot include evidence of a ship launched with a blazing pyre as reported for Baldr), is part of the brief of this article. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:55, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it. I always appreciate it when you do. What made me revert was Winroth's statement "but it is clear that Scandinavian rituals stand behind at least some and perhaps most of what happened almost eleven hundred years ago on the banks of one of Russia's many rivers."--Berig (talk) 05:26, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

PS, I do think the present state of the article violates WP:DUE by trying to make the Scandinavian identity of Fadlan's Rus' seem more controversial than it is (but that is common problem on WP).--Berig (talk) 16:13, 30 June 2021 (UTC)