Death and Afterlife
http://norse-mythology.org/concepts/death-and-the-afterlife/ DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE The Vikings’ religion never contained any formal doctrines concerning what happens to someone when he or she dies. In the words of historian H.R. Ellis Davidson, “ There is no consistent picture in Norse literary tradition of the fate of the dead,” [1] and “to oversimplify the position would be to falsify it.” [2] The rational order that people today often naively insist on finding in Viking portrayals of the dead simply isn’t there in the sources. Nevertheless, the picture presented to us by archaeology and the Old Norse literary sources isn’t complete chaos. There are discernible patterns in the way the Norse conceived of death and the afterlife, even though those patterns don’t hold absolutely, and the details of what one source tells us are almost invariably contradicted by another source. The Land(s) of the Dead Spiritual parts of the ...