From: Alexander Stolbov
Message: 11551
Date: 2001-11-27
----- Original Message -----
From: <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 5:01 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Burial customs in the countries around Denmark
...
> In the meanwhile I perhaps should point out again that on the
> assumption that there was an invasion of Yaz/Vani we would see three
> types of burials 1) Yaz, 2) Vani and 3) a continuation of Pre-Roman
> (Celtic!) burial customs. Therefore I might claim that that the wood
> coffins were Vani, which I believe Alexander Stolbov intimated were
> found among the Vani. A very interesting detail is the orientation of
> the graves. On Fyn inhumation graves are east-west (and with Roman
> grave goods) but on Langeland (an longish island to the east of Fyn,
> especially of Lundeborg, the "port" of Late Roman Iron Age center
> Gudme), almost uniformly north-south, with the head northwards, as
> Alexander Stolbov describes for the Vani (and without Roman garave
> goods).
>
> I read that Rasmus Rask had the crazy idea that the Aesir had invaded
> Scandinavia and that he was looking for a Celtic substrate in
> Germanic. Hm! Anyway he was from Fyn himself, as was my father's
> family, so what can you expect?
>
> Torsten
[A]
Not everything seems so self-evident to me.
I'm not sure that after the trip from Tanais through Gardarike and Saxland
to Scandinavia which had to last long years a tiny group of Vanir (actually
assimilated by Aesir) would keep their original ethnic burial traditions.
This could theoretically happen, but the probability was very low. And
"concentration" of Vanir graves in Scandinavia would be extremely small
anyway. So we may expect to find actually 2 main types of graves: which
existed "before Odins advent" and after this.
Are wooden coffins and wooden sarcophagi the same? I guess - not. I think
coffins are to be made of wooden boards, but sarcophagi - of a whole trunk
of a tree (or at least every wall of a sarcophagus is made of thick wooden
blocks). Unfortunately, Lordkipanidze gives no details of sarcophagi from
Vani. However one can see such a real sarcophagus made of a huge larch trunk
in the Hermitage. It was found at Pazyryk (Altai) and belongs to the
Siberian Scythian culture.
(So I think that wooden sarcophagi from Vani could also be a result of the
steppe nomads influence like horse burials). But the most interesting fact
is that Pazyryk sarcophagus contained a mummy (I must say that the quality
of mummification is actually as high as in Egyptian mummies). When looking
at it I recollect a fragment from The Ynglinga Saga:
" They [Vanir]
took Mime, therefore, and beheaded him, and sent his head to the
Asaland people. Odin took the head, smeared it with herbs so
that it should not rot, and sang incantations over it. Thereby
he gave it the power that it spoke to him, and discovered to him
many secrets."
So I'd like to ask :
What kind of "wooden coffins" are found in Scandinavian Iron Age burials?
Are there any hints of mummification in the richest graves?
In which else ancient cultures (besides Egypt and East-Iranian nomads) can
be found mummification traditions?
Alexander