Vikings have become known for all sorts of things, from the faintly ridiculous (no, they didn’t have horned helmets) to messed up things that happened during the Viking era, including human sacrifice. Those sacrifices were seemingly meant to please the gods. Evidence includes a Swedish picture stone that appears to show a human mid-sacrifice and the occasional appearance of human remains in ritual contexts.
Textual accounts also indicate that Viking communities engaged in human sacrifice, though early Christian chroniclers were invested in making the pagan Vikings look pretty darn bad. We do have a detailed account from a non-Christian source, the 10th-century Muslim chronicler and diplomat Ibn Fadlan. While traveling in what’s today Russia, he encountered a Viking group known as the Rus and witnessed an elaborate funeral of one of their nobles.
In Fadlan’s account, the high-ranking man’s death meant he was to be accompanied into the afterlife by one of his slaves. From that group, one woman volunteered and was feted with food, drink, and two servants of her own. But the price she paid for the short period of good treatment was to be harsh. Fadlan wrote that, in the lead-up to the man’s funeral, she was sexually assaulted, asked to gaze into the afterlife, drugged, and finally ritually killed while lying next to the body of the high-ranking man in his beached boat. Once done, the craft was set on fire and, afterward, the ashes were covered with a large burial mound.
