Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries: Their Age and Uses

by James Fergusson

Tumuli.

The number of sepulchral mounds in Scandinavia is very great, and some of them are very important; but, so far as I can ascertain, very few have been explored, and, until interrogated by the spade, nothing can well be less communicative than a simple mound of earth. A map of their distribution might, no doubt, throw considerable light on the ethnography of the country, and tell us whether the Finns or Lapps were their original authors, or whether the Slaves or Wends were their introducers; and, lastly, whether the true Scandinavians brought them with them from other lands, or merely adopted them from the original inhabitants, in which case they can only be treated as survivals. Funereal pomp, or tomb-building of any sort, is so antagonistic to the habits of any people so essentially Teutonic as the Scandinavians were and are, that we cannot understand their adopting these forms, or indeed stone circles or monuments of any class, in a country where they had not previously existed. If we assume that the modern Scandinavians were German tribes who conquered the country from the Cimbri or the earlier Lapps and Finns, and did so as warriors, bringing no women with them, the case is intelligible enough. Under these circumstances, they must have intermarried with the natives of the country, and would eventually, after a few generations, lose much of their individual nationality, and adopt many of the customs of the people among whom they settled, using them only in a more vigorous manner and on a larger scale than their more puny predecessors had been able to adopt.[342] It is most improbable that the "Northmen," if Germans—as indeed their language proves them to be—should ever have invented such things as tumuli, dolmens, circles, or any other such un-Aryan forms, in any country where they had not existed previously to their occupying it; but that as immigrants they should adopt the customs of the previous occupants of the land is only what we find happening everywhere. The settlement of these points will be extremely interesting for the ethnography of Northern Europe, and ought not to be difficult whenever the problem is fairly grappled with. In the meanwhile, all that the information at present available will enable us to do here is to refer to some tumuli whose contents bear more or less directly on the argument which is the principal object of this work.

The first of these is the triple group at Upsala, now popularly known as the graves of Thor, Wodin, and Freya. It may illustrate the difficulty of obtaining correct information regarding these monuments to state that, even so late as 1869, Sir John Lubbock, who is generally so well informed, and had such means of obtaining information, did not know that they had been opened.[343] I was aware of a passage in Marryatt's travels in Sweden in which, writing on the spot, he asserts that one of them had been opened, and that "in its 'giant's chamber' were found the bones of a woman, and, among other things, a piece of a gold filagree bracelet, richly ornamented in spiral decoration, some dice, and a chessman, either the king or a knight."[344] Wishing, however, for further information, I obtained an introduction to Mr. Hans Hildebrand, who gave me the following information. Subsequently I received a letter from Professor Carl Säve, of Upsala, who kindly abstracted for me the only published accounts of the excavations as they appeared in a local paper at the time. These were forwarded to me by Professor Geo. Stephens, of Copenhagen, who also was so obliging as to translate them. They are so interesting that I have printed them, as they stand, as Appendix B. From these two documents the following account is compiled, and may be thoroughly depended upon.

One of the mounds, known as that of Wodin, was opened, in 1846, under the superintendence of Herr Hildebrand, the royal antiquary of Sweden. It was soon found that the mounds were situated on a ridge of gravel, so that the tunnel had to take an upward, direction. At the junction of the natural with the artificial soil, a cairn was found of closely compacted stones, each about as large as a man could lift. In the centre of the cairn the burial urn was found in the grave-chamber, containing calcined bones, ashes, fragments of bronze ornaments destroyed by fire, and a fragment of a gold ornament delicately wrought. Within the cairn, but a little away from the urn, were found a heap of dogs' bones, equally calcined by fire, and fragments of two golden bracteates. "The workmanship of the gold ornaments," Herr Hildebrand adds, "closely resembles that of the gold bracteates of the fifth or sixth centuries, and, with the fragments of these peculiar ornaments themselves, settles a date before which these mounds could not have been raised." How much later they may be, it is not easy to conjecture, without at least seeing the bracteates, which do not seem to have been published. With a little local industry, I have very little doubt, not only that the date of these tombs could be ascertained, but the names of the royal personages who were therein buried, probably in the sixth or seventh century of our era.

"The tombs of Central Sweden," Herr Hildebrand adds, "are generally constructed in the same way, the urn containing the bones being placed on the surface of the soil, at the place of cremation or elsewhere, as the case may be. Generally, nothing is found with them but an iron nail, or some such trifling object"—a curious and economical reminiscence of the extravagant customs of their predecessors. According to him, "almost every village in Sweden, with the exception of those in some mountain-districts and the most northern provinces, has a tomb-field quite close to the side of the houses. The antiquities found in the mounds of these tomb-fields all belong to the Iron age. The tombs of the earlier ages have no connection with the homesteads of the present people."

How far these tombs extend downwards in date cannot be ascertained without a much more careful examination than they have yet been subjected to. It may safely, however, be assumed that they continued to be used till the conversion of the inhabitants to Christianity, and probably even for some considerable time afterwards, for such a custom is not easily eradicated.

It would be as tedious as unprofitable to attempt to enumerate the various mounds which have been opened, for their contents throw little or no light on our enquiry; and being distributed in cases in the museum, not according to their localities or traditions, but according to their systematic classes, it is almost impossible to restore them now to their places in history.

105. Dragon on King Gorm's Stone, Jellinge. From 'An. Nord. Oldkund.' xii. 1852.

At Jellinge, however, on the east coast of Jutland, there are two mounds, always known traditionally as those of Gorm the Old and his queen Thyra Danebod—the Beloved. The date of Gorm's death seems now to be accepted as 950 A.D.;[345] but it is not clear whether he erected the tomb himself, or whether it is due to the filial piety of his son Harald Blaatand, or Blue-Tooth, and in which case its date would be 968.[346] Saxo Grammaticus at least tells us that he buried his mother in the tumulus, and then set a whole army of men and oxen at work to remove from the Jutland shore an immense stone—a little rock—and bring it to the place where his mother lay inhumed.[347] That stone still exists, and has sculptured on one side a dragon, which calls forcibly to our mind that found on Maes-Howe ([woodcut No. 85]), and on the other side a figure, which is, no doubt, intended to represent Christ on the cross. On the two sides are Runic inscriptions, in which he records his affection for his father and mother and his conversion to the Christian faith.

So far as I can ascertain, the tomb of King Gorm has not yet been opened. That of Thyra was explored many years ago—in 1820 apparently; but no sections or details have been published, so that it is extremely difficult to ascertain even the dimensions. Engelhardt reports the height as 43 feet, and the diameter as 240 feet;[348] Worsaae gives the height as 75 feet, and the diameter as 180 feet, and he is probably correct.[349] But in Denmark anything that cannot be put into a glass case in a museum is so completely rejected as valueless that no one cares to record it. When entered, it was found that it had been plundered probably in the middle ages, and all that remained were the following articles:—A small silver goblet, lined with gold on the inside, and ornamented with interlaced dragons on the exterior; some fibulæ, tortoise-shaped, and ornamented with fantastic heads of animals; some buckle-heads, and other objects of no great value. The chamber in which these objects were found measured 23 feet in length by 8 feet 3 inches in width, and was 5 feet high;[350] the walls and roof, formed of massive slabs of oak, were originally, it appears, hung with tapestries, but these had nearly all perished.

Not only are these monuments of Gorm and Thyra interesting in themselves, and deserving of much more attention than the Danes have hitherto bestowed upon them, but they are most important in their bearing on the general history of monuments of this class. In the first place, their date and destination are fixed beyond dispute, and this being so, the only ground is taken away on which any à priori argument could be based with regard to the age of any mound anterior to the tenth century. As soon as it is realised that sepulchral mounds have been erected in the tenth century, it is impossible to argue that it is unlikely or improbable that Silbury Hill or any other mound in England may not belong to the sixth or any subsequent century down to that time. The argument is, however, even more pertinent with reference to Maes-Howe and other tumuli in the Orkneys. If the Scandinavian kings were buried in "howes" down to the year 1000—I believe they extend much beyond that date—it is almost certain that the Orcadian Jarls were interred in similar mounds down at least to their conversion to Christianity (A.D. 986). Whether Maes-Howe was erected as a sepulchre for the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, as John Stuart seems to infer from the inscriptions,[351] or of Havard Earl, as I have above attempted to show, is of little consequence to the general argument. That it was the grave of a Scandinavian Jarl, erected between 800 and 1000 A.D., seems quite certain, and my own impression is that it is almost as certainly the tomb of the individual Jarl to whom I have ventured to ascribe it.

As before mentioned, no argument against these views can be drawn from the fact that Thyra's tomb is lined with slabs of oak, while the chamber at Maes-Howe is formed with stone. The difference of the two localities is sufficient to account for this. Denmark has always been famous for its forests, and especially on the shores of the Baltic, at Jellinge, wood of the noblest dimensions was always available, whereas the stone of the country was hard and intractable. In the Orkneys, on the other hand, there is absolutely no timber of natural growth big enough to afford a good-sized walking-stick, and stone is not only everywhere abundant, but splits easily into slabs, self-faced, and most easily worked, so that stone, and stone only, would be the material employed in the Orkneys for that purpose, as wood would also be the best and most available material in Denmark.

If, before leaving this branch of the subject, we turn back for a few minutes to the Irish monuments, we are now in a position to judge more correctly of the probabilities of the case than we were. Assuming the three-chambered tumulus at New Grange to have been erected between the years 200 and 400, and Maes-Howe and Jellinge between 800 and 1000 A.D., we have a period of from five to six, it may possibly be seven, centuries between these monuments. Is this more than is sufficient to account for the difference between them, or is it too little? It is not easy to give a categorical answer to such a question, but judging from the experience gained from other styles, in different parts of the world, the conclusion generally would be that the time is in excess of what is required. That there was progress, considerable progress indeed, made in the interval between the Irish and Scandinavian monuments, cannot be denied, but that it should have required five centuries to achieve this advance is hardly what would be expected, and it would be difficult to quote another example of a progress so slow. Yet it is hardly possible to bring down New Grange to the age of St. Patrick (A.D. 436), and as difficult to carry back Maes-Howe beyond Ragnar Lothbrok (794 at the extreme), and between these dates there are only 358 years; but we must certainly add something at either one end or the other; and if we do this, we obtain an amount of progress so slow that it would be almost unaccountable, but upon the assumption that they are the works of two different peoples. At the time the sepulchre on the Boyne was erected, Ireland was energetically and rapidly progressive, and her arts were more flourishing than might have been expected from her then state of civilization. When Maes-Howe was erected, the native population was poor and perishing, and as the lordly Vikings would hardly condescend to act as masons themselves, they did the best they could with the means at their disposal. Explain it, however, as we may, it seems impossible to allow a longer time between the mounds at Jellinge and Stennis and those on the Boyne than has been accorded above; and as it seems equally difficult to bring them nearer to one another, the probability seems to be in favour of the dates already assigned to them.

To return, however, from this digression; besides those just mentioned, Denmark possesses a nearly complete series of royal tombs such as are not to be found in any other country of Europe. Even Worsaae acknowledges the existence of that of Frode Frodegode, who lived about the Christian era, of Amlech, near Wexio—Shakespeare's Hamlet, of Humble, and Hjarne,[352] besides those of Hildetand, and Gorm and Thyra, already mentioned. If the Danes would only undertake a systematic examination of these royal sepulchres, it might settle many of the disputed points of mediæval archæology. To explore tombs to which no tradition attaches may add to the treasures of their museums, but can only by accident elucidate either the history of the country or the progress of its arts. If ten or twelve tombs with known names attached to them were opened, one of two things must happen: either they will show a succession and a progress relative to the age of their reputed occupants, or no such sequence will be traceable. In the first case the gain to history and archæology would be enormous, and it is an opportunity of settling disputed questions such as no other country affords. If, on the other hand, no such connection can be traced, there is an end of much of the foundations on which the reasoning of the previous pages is based, but in either case such an enquiry could not fail to throw a flood of light on the subject which we were trying to elucidate. The fear is that all have been rifled. The Northmen certainly spared none of the tombs in the countries they conquered, and our experience of Maes-Howe and Thyra's tomb would lead us to fear that after their conversion to Christianity they were as little inclined to spare those of their own ancestors. All they however cared for were the objects composed of precious metals; so enough may still be left for the less avaricious wants of the antiquary.