Passing into Poetry: Viking Funerals and the Origins of Norse Mythology
Monday 27 October, 6.00pm
Kings College Conference Centre, University of Aberdeen
Professor Price will talk about the viking diaspora of the eighth to eleventh centuries AD which created the modern nation states of Scandinavia and transformed the northern world. But what animated this extraordinary cultural expansion? How did the early medieval Norse see themselves?
Some of the answers may be found in the Viking way of observing death, which produced some of the most spectacular burial monuments known to archaeology. Using new research, Professor Price will take us deep into the Viking mind to explore their attitudes to mortality, with implications for their unique outlook on life. From excavations, it seems that pagan funerals may have involved complex elements of mortuary theatre – ritual plays literally enacted at the graveside. The evidence suggests an almost infinite variety of funerary dramas, each providing a poetic passage for the deceased into a world of ancestral stories. Could these tales be the beginnings of what we know today as Norse mythology?
Professor Neil Price took up the Chair of Archaeology in 2007, having spent the previous 15 years in Scandinavian academia. Educated at the universities of London, York and Uppsala, he is a leading specialist in Viking archaeology and the study of ancient religion. The recipient of many awards, his books include The Vikings in Brittany, The Archaeology of Shamanism and The Viking Way. Neil is also a Consultant Professor at Harvard and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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