What runestones and graveyards reveal about the Vikings' conversion process
Birgit and Peter Sawyer | posted 7/01/1999 12:00AM
By the turn of the first millennium, pagan forms of burial had been abandoned in Denmark. Christian teaching about life after death must have been persuasive.
Missionaries objected to elaborate pagan burial rituals in which some graves were furnished with valuable goods, even ships, and covered by huge mounds. They urged instead that gifts should be made to them as "payment" for future prayers on behalf of the dead. This was an enormous breach with custom; the rituals of pagan burials were not only for the sake of the dead but also a means of demonstrating the wealth and status of the survivors.
With burial mounds gone (and before church yards became the natural places for memorials), rune stones provided a way of displaying wealth and status while honoring the dead. Such monuments flourished in western Scandinavia in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, while in eastern Sweden, they became popular later and continued into the twelfth century.
Inscriptions on these stones show the ...
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