Valhalla, I Am Coming

Valhalla, I Am Coming A millennium ago, some Vikings were lucky enough to be buried in boats – the idea being that the ship would then be taken to Valhalla, the heaven for warriors, by the mysterious female figures known as Valkyries. Still, few of these burial boats have ever been found. So archaeologists in Sweden were stunned to find two of them during a routine excavation of a vicarage in the historical settlement of Old Uppsala, an important religious, economic and political settlement since the third century. It was the first such finding in Sweden in over 50 years, Forbes reported. One of the boats contained the remains of a man, a horse and a dog, along with personal items and weapons. Judging by the remains and artifacts, the team believes the buried man was a person of high social standing, since boat burials were reserved for privileged individuals. “It is a small group of people who were buried in this way,” saidarchaeologist Anton Seiler. “You can suspect that they were distinguished people in the society of the time, since burial ships in general are very rare.” The rare find is exciting, Seiler said, for the insights it may provide about burial practices during the Viking period, from around AD 800 to 1050. “We can now use modern science and methods that will generate new results, hypotheses and answers,” he added.