Viking Funeral
written by:
Naughty Miranda

I will be rejoining my master tonight.

The wise women tell me it was what I was born for, and I know they speak the truth.

They tell me I should not feel fear, and in that, too, they are correct.

I survey the long wooden hut where the men, my master's warriors and friends, are already deep into their cups, drinking and feasting as they prepare their personal farewells to the man who has ruled over them for the past forty winters, but who has now gone to rule among the Gods themselves.

Over there, Harald, the champion. They say he can split a skull with one blow, and a woman with one thrust. I will visit his tent first.

Over there, Buthli, the beast. Once, he tore an entire Saxon village to shreds with no weapons greater than his fist and teeth. I will visit his tent second.

And over there, Sigurd, the madman, the seer, the prophet. I will visit his tent third. And then will come the others... and there are three more of them, some whose names I have never even heard... and then they too will have their fill of me.

And I of them.

This is what I was born for, and this is how I am destined to die. Of my own free will, visiting six of my master's most devoted friends, and asking each what final gift he would have me take to his Lord. I will accept the gift, whatever it might be, and when he bows to me at the end of the offering, he will speak these words: "Tell your master that I did this because of my love for him." And I will.

I have been drinking and singing, it feels, for days. No sooner had my master closed his eyes for the last time than I stepped forward. "If it pleases my Lord, I would journey with him."

Nobody told me to, nobody asked. Nobody, I doubt, even suspected that behind the soft features and ... yes, I would say I am pleasing... the pleasing body of the thrall girl Sága, there burned a devotion and determination such as this. But nobody stood to prevent me, either, and I fancy there was more than a few flickers of relief among the gasps of surprise, as the wise women led me forward to the hut where I would rest in luxury until my final hours.

Those hours were upon me now. My master was dressed and laid in his bed, already placed aboard the ship that will carry him to immortality. His jewels and weapons surrounded him, the horse meat has been scattered across his finery. A sudden panicked din, sliced into eerie silence, tells me that the cock and the hen have been sacrificed too.

The Angel of Death, the oldest of our crones, the wisest of our wise women, beckons to me, leads me to the platform that overlooks the ship. As if begging my approval, she indicates all that has been done to give our master all he could need. She has even fluffed his cushions, so that he might lie comfortably.

"I will lie beside him?" I ask, seeing the clear space alongside his body. She nods and I try to hide my surprise. In life, my time with my master was spent on my knees before him, never to rise to my full height nor to lay in invitation. I assumed, and perhaps a part of me hoped, that in death I would service him in the same manner, "sucking his cock" as his men might say; "speaking with the Gods," as the wise women retorted. Once, as I returned to the kitchens from one of our almost daily encounters, a Priestess of Hella asked me how much of my master's seed I had swallowed.

"Enough to people an entire island," I answered with a laugh, and she laughed with me, telling me that when we reached the other side, every one of those children would be reborn alongside us, a family to see to our every need, an army to fight our every battle. "You spoke with the Gods and they will answer you," she said, and my dreams that night were filled with our offspring, all as handsome as their father; all as beautiful as the night.

The Angel touched my arm. "The great hall is emptying, Sága. Your supplicants await."

I took a breath, then paused as other girls bustled about me, fixing my hair, adorning me with jewels, freshening my breath, adjusting my clothes. My master's ring was placed around my neck, hanging from a golden chain. Another woman stepped forward bearing a blazing torch. My guide to the huts that I was to visit.

Six men had been chosen to receive my visits. Six men more will visit me, as I await my final moments. I have no say in who they might be, but I trust the wise women who have arranged the funeral. Only the strongest, the bravest, the wisest and, of course, the most handsome of the warriors will be permitted to touch me.

Permitted to fuck me.

Permitted to have me in whichever way they choose, in whichever hole they desire.

Permitted to receive my blessing.

We walked a short distance, until we arrived at the first hut. Harald's hut. While my escort slipped into the shadows outside, I entered the room, my eyes blinded for a moment by the unaccustomed brightness. A great fire was roaring in the hearth and Harald sat beside it, staring into the flames. I spoke my words and struggled to catch his reply, lost beneath the crackle of the flames. But I crossed the earthen floor and obediently knelt before him, my hands unfastening his belt and tugging down his coarse woven breeches in one movement.

The smell of cock rose to greet me, thick and musky, animal. My cunt watered as fast my mouth, but if this was his gift, then I was proud to bear it.

His cock twitched in my hand. It was not, I noted with some relief, quite as vast as I'd heard it would be, but still it was formidable, fat and deeply veined with a helmet, broad as Thor's hammer, that glowed deep red in the firelight. My tongue snaked to greet it and felt his warmth, too; the blaze of his desire was like fire itself, and as my lips parted to softly fold over the tip, he hissed as my saliva cooled the ferocious heat.

He was gentle. It surprises me sometimes, after a night spent listening to the bards sing of our warriors' bravery and ferocity, to discover that in the arms of a woman they can be so tender and loving. I had heard the tales of the uses to which Harald had put his cock in the past - cruel, barbarous, violent uses. But tonight, though fiercesome and strong, it was gentle, too; as concerned, it seemed, with my pleasure as its own, reacting to my ministrations but never demanding more.

Cock sucking is an art I learned young, in the arms of a step brother with whom I had played since childhood, and who came to me first on the night before his initiation, a scared teen who would tomorrow become a man - or die in the process. We lay together on my straw palette, my head on a chest that was just beginning to sprout hair, listening to his heartbeat and softly singing to him.

I was not thinking of lust, merely consolation and love, but as I sang, I kissed his flesh and as I kissed, I allowed my head to drift down his body so that every part of his chest and abdomen might be calmed before the storm.

I stopped when I saw his cock, hard and long, reaching to his stomach; caught the glint of its one eye in the candlelight. I gazed upon it and it gazed unblinkingly back. My song still hung on my lips, and my stepbrother lay silent, as though sleeping.

I inched forward. His cock inched upwards, raising itself from his flesh as though to greet me. I sang another line and I was closer still. It raised itself again, and my mind flashed on the serpents I sometimes saw, arousing themselves from sleep in the mornings.

But no serpent was so straight as this one, and no serpent smelled like this one. I wanted to feel it, I wanted to taste it. I wanted to... oh. No sooner had my mouth closed around it than the serpent was struggling, spitting, filling my mouth with sweet-tasting venom, and its owner's hands were clamped around the back of my head, hips thrusting it deeper into my mouth as my mind whirled and my body rejoiced. Tomorrow, my stepbrother would become a man. But tonight... tonight he had shown me that he was there already.

That was then, this is now. He was a youth, I was a maiden. I had no more idea how to suck a cock properly than I had of how to sail across the ocean - beyond knowing that both would leave me with a mouth full of salt.

Now I know. How to coil my tongue and use my lips, where to suck and where to bite. And when to dip my head and fuck him with a mouth as deep as the ocean and as hungry as a wolf.

My stepbrother remained my lover until the night before his marriage and, even as my tongue curled beneath Harald's helmet and provoked fresh sighs and moans from beneath his great beard, I thanked him for that; wished that he was not at sea; wished that he could be among the six men selected to give their gifts to our Lord.

But he would hear of what I had done this night, in the drunken words of men and the impassioned verse of the bards, and he would glory in my triumph... as I now gloried in Harald's, swallowing down the cum that he pumped into my mouth, my hand a blur as I milked him into my throat and then, as the flood abated, smearing the tip of his cock against my face and neck so the last few drops glistened on my skin.

I remained on my knees, my head resting on his lap. Harald's hands moved in my long auburn hair, caressing me. Then he stood and, as I got to my feet, he bowed low before me. "Tell your master that I did this because of my love for him."

"I will."

He straightened and I stood on tiptoe before him, kissed his lips and turned away.

Outside, my escort waited patiently. I saw her eyes flicker over my body as I approached, as if to ascertain the nature of the first gift. Her gaze settled on my throat and she smiled. "Your talents are well known," she said softly and I laughed at her words. "En stor pik slikker" - a great cock sucker.

Buthli awaited. Buthli the beast, as broad as he is tall - the children of the village are convinced that he is descended from the giants, and that would not surprise me. I remembered the night he came to the village, one of a handful of survivors of a shipwreck that took several tons of treasure to the bottom of the sea.

For months after, coins and stones and jewels washed up on the shore where our village stands, and Buthli stayed, initially, to collect what would have been his share of the drowned crew's treasure. But then he fell in love, sired a family, and the months turned to years and he was still here. His wife worked alongside me in the kitchens and I counted her among my closest friends. It was she who told me what to expect from Buthli, once he was confirmed as one of the six, and before I entered the room, I prepared myself, slipping what I needed from the bag that my escort carried.

He lay on the bed, awaiting me. Naked, his broad, hairy body resembled that of a bear, and his eyes glittered as hungrily as a real bear's might. But his penis was soft and as he detailed his gift to my master, I shrugged off my smock and mounted the bed.

I sang of the Goddess Frigg; how, no matter how well satisfied a lover might leave her, she always wanted more, and how the elves made for her a dildo that in every way resembled the cock that she needed the most at any moment. Sometimes vast enough to tear her apart, sometimes so slender it could fuck her as she walked, sometimes so long it felt like it was poking her throat, sometimes so short it merely teased her cunt lips.

I have a clear voice, strong and melodious. A gift perhaps from the Goddess for whom I was named. And though it is a bawdy song, best suited to the menfolk as they serenade drunkenly, I carried it like a babe in a cradle, while my hands gripped the glass dildo, and I first teased and then thrust it into myself.

Buthli's eyes did not leave my cunt - why should they? Up to its hilt I sank that glass cock, and then deeper still until my hand, too, felt as though it had disappeared inside me. Then slowly withdrawing, the glass shining slick and wet. My free hand flicked at my clitoris, and several times my song faltered as the sensations gripped my entire frame. But my own sighs and moans merged with the melody, became a part of the spell that I was weaving for Buthli, and when my eyes left his face and strayed down to his cock, I saw for myself why his wife always laughed when the men called him "beast," and whispered "they don't know the half of it."

Buthli's cock was not long. If there is such a thing as "average length," he was a little below it. But it was fat. His wife, laughing at my own reputation, told me that the greatest cock sucker in the world would never be able to accommodate Buthli's cock, and that even she, who had spent three years working to accustom her jaw to his girth, could do no more than suckle the tip.

But one night, she said, he had fucked her ass, and though the pain felt as though it might never end, behind the pain and pushing around it, there was a pleasure such as she had never felt before. I looked to the left; on a table beside the bed, Buthli had already opened a pot of grease. Tonight, I knew, I would discover that pleasure for myself.

The grease was thick, warm. It tingled as it touched my pink flesh, and I felt my body tense as a thick slick finger slipped into my ass, spreading it wide. A second finger joined it, a third... my eyes closed, my entire body fighting against its natural need to tense itself against the intrusion. I was crouching on the bed, my hind quarters raised in the air, my song forgotten, and behind me Buthli worked on.

I could feel his fingers inside, so far inside, and I thanked the Gods that his cock was as short as it was - once before, with a stranger whom my master asked me to entertain, I had been ass fucked so deeply that I felt as though my guts must be scrambled. But his cock had been thin... so thin that when I sucked him I was tempted to play it like a reed. Buthli's, I had seen now, was the size of a fist.

And now that fist was upon me. I had sworn to myself that I would not cry out, but my scream came unbidden regardless. It felt... yes, it felt as though my entire body was being torn in two parts, and as he pushed his full length up inside me, those two parts became four and then eight and then more.

One hand was on my shoulder, holding me steady. The other was in my cunt, and that too felt as though it was tearing apart. But Buthli had a rhythm now, his cock thrusting in as his fingers pulled out, his fingers pushing in as his cock withdrew. A rhythm that rocked me, a rhythm that found an echo in my own body, and suddenly I saw what his wife had been talking about... literally saw, as my world exploded into bright light and sound, and my soul was torn up in an orgasm the likes of which I had never felt before.

It was as though every nerve-end in my body had come together at once, tensed tightly as they bound themselves into a single ball of fire, and then every muscle, every tendon, every fiber of my being, all of them let go at once. Again I screamed, but this scream was of sheer ecstasy, so vast and so lasting that I did not even hear Buthli reach his own climax, did not feel his cock and fingers withdraw from my body; did not sense anything outside of my own mad pleasure until he lay beside me and took me in his arms, to sing the verses of the song that I had omitted. The verses in which Frigg is finally sated by a giant who fucked her like she had never been fucked before.

It was time for me to leave. He bowed and bade me farewell. "Tell your master that I did this because of my love for him."

The evening passed. Sigurd the prophet wanted nothing more than my hand, stroking his cock until he climaxed with a suddenness that genuinely seemed to surprise him. I resisted making the obvious joke that sprung immediately to my lips, only for him to tell it for me. "A piss poor prophet I am, I should have seen that coming."

The prince, the eldest son and heir of my master, merely required comfort and tenderness, and so I rode his cock from above while we talked of all that he would accomplish now that he was Lord.

And Jordd, the Axeman, who once cut through an entire Saxon army in order to reach the convent that they were defending, wanted only to suck on my swollen, cum-filled cunt, as if the prince's seed were the nectar of the Gods. Which, I discovered when I kissed him afterwards, it was. For the first time, a pang of regret crossed my mind. If the Prince's cum tasted that good, what would the rest of his cock been like?

It was time for my final assignation. Final for now, anyway. I rejoined my escort and we walked clear across the village, past the lightning-struck tree that marked the traditional boundary of our settlement, and into the forest that surrounds it.

The wizard awaited me. The one man, out of all I had been told I would be seeing tonight, whom I genuinely feared.

We had never met. Of course I had seen him, passing the village at dusk, his cloak billowing around him, his head cowled, his boots scarcely seeming to touch the soil beneath him, as though he hovered just an inch or so above the mud and filth that habitually spattered the rest of us as we walked.

Once, too, I encountered him as I visited my master, and though his head was bare on that occasion, I saw only his eyes, dark and turbulent as a storm-tossed ocean, and a mouth set in grim... amusement? Pity? Scorn? His expression was impossible to read, but when he looked at me, kneeling before my master with my lips still clamped around that magnifient cock, it felt as though he were looking into me, deep inside to everything that I thought I kept secret, and filing it away in his own storehouse of knowledge.

He was standing in his doorway. We, my escort and I, entered the clearing where his hut stood, and I gasped as I saw it. Built of stones, it had a sense of age and permanence that mocked the simple wooden buildings that even my master inhabited. Its roof, thatched with a material that I could not even recognize, was rounded rather than angular, and from every surface hung what I assumed were the tool of his trade: stones and bones, tree limbs, carvings... and his dinner, a freshly killed rabbit. I smiled at the incongruity, and my escort squeezed my arm warningly.

I felt the wizard's eyes upon me and stepped forward, feigning a boldness that I did not feel and which I knew would never fool him. I was doing this for myself.

"What final gift would you have me take to your Lord?"

In answer, he turned and disappeared into the darkness of the hut. I followed him, and felt my escort melt back into the trees, as far from this place as she could get without deserting me.

The inside of the hut was scarcely different to its exterior. Every surface was hung, or laden, with items I could not recognize. Or that I did recognize, but had never seen before. He had books, a shelf of rolled manuscripts. One lay on a table beside the fire, its creamy face disfigured by the black spider-like markings that marched regimentally across.

He saw me looking. "Do you read?"

I shook my head.

"Then perhaps that should be my gift."

I looked at him, confused. Reading, I know, is a skill developed over years of study. I had scant hours, but if he read my thoughts (as I was sure he had), he showed no sign of it, turning instead to a shelf of earthen pots, themselves marked with the same strange symbols.

"Do you know what these contain?"

I was on firmer ground. "Herbs?" I asked. I had seen similar containers in the hut of one of the wise women.

"Yes. But herbs such as you have never experienced." He opened one pot and stepping towards me, affecting to ignore the step backwards that I instinctively took, he wafted the pot beneath my nostrils and flooded my mind with its odor.

"It is called..." then he waved his hand, as dismissing both the scent and the thought. "It doesn't matter what it is called. But it represents joy. Perhaps that is what your master requires?"

Joy. Yes, that's it. If I folded back my fear, shook away my nerves, dug deep beneath the lingering intoxication of the mead I had drunk so freely earlier, that is exactly what I felt. Joy.

He opened another. "This is desire." And another. "This is love." And a fourth. "This is life. Are those gifts that I should give to your master?"

I looked at him uncomprehendingly, while feeling each of those qualities pounding in my head, in my blood, through my frame, in my cunt. My body was blazing with them, but he only smiled.

"We will decide, Sága. But first, answer me this. How can anyone die if they have life? How can they die if they have joy, desire and love?"

I shook my head as if to clear it. I wanted to say something wise, something that would transform the scared girl before him into a knowing woman. "You speak in riddles," I blundered out finally. "All of those things await us in the next life."

"Then what is death?" he asked.

"It is the gift that my master gives to me," I replied. "So that I might have life alongside him thereafter."

He nodded and, stepping behind me, his hands loosened the strings that held my smock, tugged and it fell to the floor around my feet.

I stood unmoving, awaiting his touch. It never came. Instead, I heard his footsteps recede as he crossed the wooden floor. "Turn to me, Sága."

I turned. He stood at the window, a dark silhouette against the woods and sky beyond. A shaft of moonlight from another window... so many windows!... fell across my body and, almost without thinking, I shifted a little, to feel its caress across my bare breasts.

"Tell me of the gifts that others have given," he commanded, and so I did, recounting all that had passed already that evening.

"Now tell me those that are still to come?"

I took a breath. The ritual had been explained to me, but days before, and I had pushed much of it out of my mind. I hoped I would be able to recall it now.

"In the afternoon, I will be taken to the Door of All Vision, and the men will raise me high, three times. The first time, I will see my past. The second, I will see my present. The third I will see my future."

This much I had witnessed in the past, when another great chieftain was slain in battle and my master took his retinue to pay their respects. I was so young at the time, barely fourteen summers, and the maiden who was to accompany her master... why, she must have been the age I am now. So beautiful, so happy.

The first time she was raised high, she saw her parents. Both long buried. The second time, she saw her relatives gathered around her. And the third time, she saw her master in the afterworld, a world of green beauty and bright sunshine. Around him, men and boys drank and laughed. She saw him beckon to her and she called out to him in a voice that rang through the hall where we were gathered. I hoped my voice would ring as truly when my turn came.

"And then?" asked the wizard.

"Then I will be taken to my master. I will remove my bracelets and hand them to the Angel. I will remove my rings, and had them to her daughters. I will remove my clothing and hand it to my escort. Then I will board the ship."

My master's body lay in a grand tent aboard the vessel. I will say farewell to my friends and family, and wait for the drumming to begin, all the men of the village, and the women and children too, banging shields with sticks, banging rocks with logs, a pounding, deafening rhythm to accompany me as I enter the tent.

"I will kneel facing the entrance. Six men will enter and they will take me however they choose, all six at once, until they are spent. And then..."

The wizard noticed my pause, allowed it to hang, and then spoke again. "And then?"

And then I will be placed on the bed and bound with ropes, at my hands, at my feet, at my throat. And as all are pulled and my life chokes away, the Angel will drive a dagger into my heart. Then, as my lifeblood soaks into the bed, my Lord's eldest son, the boy of the so-sweet seed, will place a lighted torch to the oil that has pooled and soaked the ship's timbered frame, and my Lord and I will be borne on flame to the afterlife.

I halted and regarded the wizard.

"Can you take six men?" he asked slowly.

"I already have, tonight," I replied.

"Six men together," he clarified, and I laughed. "Two hands, three holes and the sixth will find a way, I am sure."

The wizard laughed, too, then stepped to the shelf, selected a new pot, then placed it beneath my nose. I breathed in deeply, once, twice... and then felt the world fall away around me. My last thought was of oblivion. My last thought asked, what if all we believe is wrong? What if death really is death?

I awoke. I was kneeling in a room I did not recognize, but which I instinctively understood. Behind me, on a great bed, my sleeping Lord awaited me. Around me, loud as thunder, the rhythm of the death drums. And before me, the entrance through which six men, my last six lovers, would emerge.

Six men entered, six men entered me.

Six men took my arms and legs. Six men took me.

Even if I wanted to, I could not detail everything that they did to me. Just flashes of consciousness that brought my mind gasping, like a drowning man, to the surface just for long enough to take one more breath of reality, before sinking back into the stygian depths of dreams.

The dark man, "ðr, drawing his lips back in an animal smile as he pulled back his foreskin and pushed into my mouth. The swordsman, Seaxnet, thrusting his weapon into my womb as the warrior, Teiwaz, pushed into my bowels, sliding effortless in and out of the hole that Buthli had already stretched so wide. And I hung suspended between three enormous cocks, each fucking its chosen hole as I choked and squirmed and other hands bore me high into the air, pinching my flesh, twisting my nipples, scratching my skin with nails sharper than those on the most manicured whore.

I tasted blood in the corner of my mouth, saw Váli with his wounds still fresh, fight for entrance to my distended jaw; I turned my head and suckled him as "ðr jerked himself harder just inches from my eye. I felt the sting of Viðarr's crop, sharp across my breasts and I would have cried out but my throat was full.

A shudder, a cry, a scalding warmth. My guts felt like they might overflow as Teiwaz pumped his passion into my ass, but as one man withdrew, another took his place. My arms flailed, my hands grasped at the bodies that shifted and shimmered around me. I heard laughter, and realized that it was my own; that I had orgasmed without even sensing it and now felt only the ever-rising hunger that would see me cum again so many times before this night was through. And with my every fresh thrill and my cries for more, the crop cracked mercilessly onto innocent, pale flesh, drops of blood rising from the vicious stings to melt into the seed with which I was suddenly drenched.

How many times had these men had fucked me now, in one place or another? How many had ejaculated, then returned for more? It felt as though I had been in this place for hours, but hours more would pass before the last man dropped and my body clung exhausted to whatever last shreds of awareness I possessed. Then my eyes flashed open and I raised my head, gazed upon the shadowy figures that melted back into the darkness that now surrounded me.

"Is that all you've got?" I asked their retreating forms.

"Is that as hard as you can fuck me?" I demanded, with scorn rising in my voice,

"Is that how you say goodbye?"

Silence answered me, the silence of midnight, the silence of the grave. So I reached out and my hand grasped the glass cock with which I had transfixed Buthli. Miraculously it had not broken... I did not think to question how it came to be here in the first place.

I raised it to my lips, sucked on it, warming it, greasing it too. Then I lay its tip against my cunt lips and pushed it violently inside myself.

Behind me, two hands clapped together. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster. A torch flared and a figure stood beside me, looking thoughtfully down at my ravaged, ravished body.

"My lady. I apologize, but I had to be certain."

"I know," I replied. "I would not have it any other way." Although I almost joked that I could not imagine any other way in which I could have been had. This did not feel the right moment for levity.

The wizard knelt. "You were gone so long, and when you returned..."
 "When I returned, I did so as a child, so that I might experience again the thrill of growing, of gaining knowledge, of accumulating wisdom. Until I again achieved womanhood." I paused and watched him, this man, this mortal, this fragile sack of bone and blood whom I had selected from so many others, so many years before, to serve as my voice in the affairs of men.

"And now?" he asked quietly.

"And now I will return to Sökkvabekkr, to drink from golden cups with Odin, and for once, it will be I who has tales to tell of travel and adventure." In my mind's eye, I could already hear Odin's laughter as I spoke of the quaint little customs of man, of their hopes and dreams and the ease with which our kind can upset them without even being aware of the fact ourselves. To live lives of such random madness, I thought, must itself be akin to insanity.

"There is a rite to be completed. A funeral," he said softly, as though he had only just remembered what had brought me to him today, but I shrugged. "The old Lord recovered. He just needed to lie down for a while." And as I drew back the veil of silent night with which I had cloaked us, so the sounds from the village became audible, the excited chatter, the laughter, the joy.

The hammering on the door as a man demanded the wizard join him at the waterfront, where his Lord was calling for him. His old Lord, his late Lord, his suddenly, miraculously, restored Lord. The man barely even glanced in my direction and if he had, he would merely seen the thrall girl Sága, who shared her name with a Goddess and who had shared her body with most of the men in the village. To him, I was meaningless, to him I was barely there.

"You should go," I said softly, so that the man at the door should not hear my words, and wonder why the girl was commanding the wizard.

"I will follow you," the wizard said to the visitor, and the man closed the door. Then turning to me, "will I see you again?"

I tilted my head to one side. Odin always laughed when I did that, told me it made me appear coquettish. Loki, on the other hand, said it made me look simple-minded. "You will see me again. And next time, I might let you fuck me first, instead of half dozen half-cut Aesnir."

He shrugged into his cloak, pulled on his cowl. But he could not resist one final smile. "Promises, promises," he said. "You Goddesses are all the same."

And before I could ask him how many other of us he had entertained in his home, that he could make such a sweeping pronouncement, he had left the room and closed the door behind him.

I was alone. And then I was gone.

In case you are wondering, the rites here are based on the eye-witness report of a Viking funeral written by an Arab merchant, Ibn Fadlan, in the 10th century. It all sounds a lot more enjoyable than a modern funeral!