Queen Asa and the Blue Dress Woman
Listen to this. No, first a photo.
This is a Viking ship, the Oseberg ship, which was found in a burial mound in Norway. Inside the ship were two women, two skeletons, almost certainly of exalted status because of the nature of the burial. The year was 834. One woman was 80 years old, arthritic, dressed in a red wool dress, with a twill pattern, wearing a veil of white linen. One woman was in her 50s, wearing a blue wool dress, with a wool veil. Blue dress woman had Morgagni's syndrome, which would have given her a masculine appearance and the ability to grow a beard.
No one can say with certainty, but some scholars believe the older woman, whose dress may belie higher social status than the woman in the blue dress, is Queen Asa of the Yngling clan, mother of Halfdan the Black. Others think she was a shaman. The younger woman used a metal toothpick, which was rare and a luxury in the 9th century. Both had diets composed of meat, another luxury when most Vikings made do with fish. The women were found together in one bed. Is this a mother and daughter? Is this a couple? Is this a shaman and her slave? They were buried in this ship, in their bed, with 14 horses, an ox, and three dogs.
Thieves stole some of the artifacts from the ship, but still, we know the women were also buried with four elaborately carved wooden sleighs, wooden chests, silks, tapestries, household and farming tools, and most famously, the so-called Buddha bucket.
The very best way to die as a Viking was in battle--fallen warriors were welcomed to Valhalla or to the goddess Freyja's field Folkvangr. Past a golden tree, grazing stags and goats, you would enter the hall of the chosen dead at Valhalla; Freyja's vast and beautiful house is called Sessrumnir ("filled with many seats") and every day Freya, wearing a cloak of falcon feathers, rides from it in a chariot pulled by two huge cats, to watch the battles in her enormous, beautiful fields.
Most of the everyday dead, however, go to Hel, which is definitively not Hell. Hel is a world beneath the ground presided over by a goddess, named Hel, naturally. Families are reunited and the dead eat, fight, make merry, sleep and practice magic, just as they did on earth. There is no heaven. There is no hell. As the Talking Heads song goes, "Heaven, Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens."
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What strikes me most about the Oseberg ship (aside from my modern cleaving to the idea of those female lovers) is how stark and simple our burial rituals are. (We could talk of the ancient Egyptians, and other cultures, but stay with me with the Norse.) The idea of burying the dead with the objects they will need in the afterlife--the clothing, the bed, the farming tools, the jeweled bracelet is easy to kind of mock. Who are these people who believe they will bring their toothbrush along with them to the afterlife? Easy also to recoil from. Who are these people who must bring along other perfectly healthy humans to act as their slaves in the afterlife? Burial mounds, for us, are locations of knowing, places to learn how people lived then: what do the contents of their stomachs tell us? the condition of their teeth? the size of the ship in their burial mound? the absence of a ship?
Imagine such a burial for your loved one. What would the gathering of goods to ensure safe passage and a prosperous afterlife look like? What dress might you choose for your mother? What books? What tools? I find it impossible to imagine any afterlife--from Hel to Hell--that includes technology, but that's just because my mind balks at the very concept of bringing earthly possessions along. What if I could believe in that necessity? Would I pack an iPhone and a charger with my great-uncle's body? It's funny, yes. But thinking about it offers us a chance to consider what are the actual things we would choose to bring along with us to an afterlife filled with carousing with our family, sleeping in our Restoration Hardware beds at night, with the linens we ordered from Matouk. And such contemplation might lead to some insight about how we live now, with what we choose to surround ourselves.
Imagine such a burial for yourself. In an imaginary afterlife in Hel, I would want to read. So I would need a ship full of books I could read and reread: all of Shakespeare, and Paradise Lost, and everything by Nicole Krauss and Miriam Toey and David Grossman and Wallace Stegner, and poetry by Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joy Harjo and Mary Oliver. Reading is the through-line of my life. My mother tells stories of me as a two-year old, sitting on the couch, smacking the book on my lap with anticipation: "Read-a-read-a-read!" It hurts my heart to think of the books I might have to leave behind.
I suppose my best afterlife would include an endlessly charged Kindle that still synced with earth (or whatever planet humans inhabit next), so I could keep up with the New York Times Best Books list, and the winners of the Booker Prize, and so forth. That seems like wishful and complicated thinking. If it's just actual books, maybe I could add in books which would teach me Latin, and books written in Latin. That seems like a good long-term project for dead me.
I think if I had to choose just a few items of clothing (which I would, because I would want room for more books), I would wear a black turtleneck sweater and a great, worn-in pair of jeans, boyfriend fit. I would choose a scarf from my collection--probably the faded violet scarf with red poppies outlined in black. I would obviously be wearing Dansko clogs in the daytime, and the UGG slippers Alison got me at night. I would bring my comforter with the Icelandic duvet cover, and my coffee cup with the black crow that Peg gave me. I would want to write--it seems like a forgone conclusion that I will be a best-selling author in the afterlife. Again, the technology issue stumps me. I feel like a typewriter would be acceptable, but maybe one of those fancy ones I coveted in college, that allowed you to autocorrect the last few words. (Don't worry about this part, kids.)
Since I'm meeting up with all of you eventually, I wouldn't ask any of you to join me on my burning or buried ship, although it would be hard to wait for Sebby. I am not sure how dog years feel in the afterlife, but I bet it wouldn't feel too too long until he jumped up on my bed (I would bring the bed I have now, that allows you to put your head up for reading and your feet up to help with the swelling from my medicine, in case I still have lung cancer in the afterlife) and tucked into me, as he does most nights, eventually snoring in the quietest of ways. The ship is a quandary too, since I have spent so little time on or near ships, and definitely don't know how to sail. Perhaps my ship would be a car--perhaps someone could purchase the VW Beetle I've always craved, and I could be buried in that. But that doesn't leave room for many books.
This kind of burial forces you to kind of Marie Kondo yourself. What do you really need in the afterlife? (which may lead to what do I need now?) The idea that I would be reunited with the people I love is so beyond expectations that I hesitate to take much else at all. I actually can imagine just talking forever with the people I love. We would likely return to so many of the same topics--why did I marry so young? what kind of mother was I? why did we fight? how did we love? who was I? If the question of who am I now, and how am I living my afterlife was valid, I would need to ensure my therapist joined my afterlife circle too.
If your loved person died, and your job was to fill a magnificent boat with the objects this person loved, to dress them in their favorite clothes, to surround them with the things they loved to see and read, with the words they need, and the tools to grow the food they love, what would saying good-bye be like? We would be so busy, and thoughtful, especially because when we joined them in the afterlife, we could likely borrow Hamlet, thus making room for Cloud Cuckoo Land on our ship. We might not stumble as much with grief. Or perhaps that's just a modern fiction.
Somewhere I read that it was not a good Viking death to die in your bed, of old age. Better to die striving, fighting, a warrior. To die in bed at eighty, not having fought in any way recently, not even a troublesome quarrel, is, of course, my and your ideal way to die, although you might dream of more than eighty years. I dream of sixty years at this point, and as you know, I am not a warrior of any kind, not even a cancer warrior. I'm okay with dying a so-so Viking death.
The women who were in that bed together on the Osberg ship were clearly elevated because of their social status (or one's social status was linked to the other's), or because of their vocations, but let's assume the woman in the blue dress was Queen Asa. Asa was the daughter of King Haralde Granraude of Agder, and when another King proposed marriage to her, her father refused. So the unhappy suitor killed her father and her brother, presumptively leaving her without protection, and abducted her, and married her. A love story for the ages. A year later, Queen Asa became the mother of the aforementioned Haldar the Black. One more year later, she had her servant kill her husband. That's tidy.
Her son, Halfdar the Black, drowned when he, his horse, and his sleigh fell through the ice. He was a king by then, and the four districts of his kingdom each buried a piece of him. I don't know what was in his burial mound, and apparently bodily integrity was not important to the Norse, but I personally cherish the idea of Queen Asa in bed with her hirsute companion, on a journey to an afterlife of farming, admiring the Buddha figure, and wearing her favorite red dress. And I cleave to the woman in the blue dress, a woman of my age, a woman who made her way with unclear differences, although I despair that she happened to die at the same time as her 80-year-old compatriot. I wish for her an unbridled afterlife, where she dances freely in her blue dress, and is only ever seen as beautiful.
Of course, all of this is preposterous, and my plan is to donate my body to medical researchers, and then to be cremated. I hope my ashes are scattered at the cranberry bog. I suppose the desire to be thrown into the wind and water of the bog demonstrates that I haven't quite given up on the idea that what I love on earth matters even in death. For of course it does. I know that the gift I can hope for is that who I am and have been has something to do with love, and commitment, and witnessing, and holding, and that my family, my children, my dear friends, will take that with them in their own lives. But the dream of reuniting with Shadow, my first dog, and my grandmother Evelyn, and my grandfather Norman, and my childhood friend, Jimmy, who died of cystic fibrosis in Ohio when we were 7 or 8, or my old friend Jeff, who died in a fiery blaze in his twenties in New York, or my dear friend Robin, who died last month of breast cancer in a calm hospice center in Lincoln, well, that dream is impossible for me to discard, no matter how hard the science we know presses up against my unwilling heart. I will bake pies and cakes and bread for my family in the afterlife, if you all can remember to add in the rolling pin and the blue ceramic mixing bowl, and I will drive you all mad quoting Shakespeare's plays, all of which I will eventually memorize, and I will swear in Latin, and I will type into the dark night of the afterlife, before turning into bed, with my beloved dog. I can hear all of you nearby, quietly snoring.
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