Slagen, Norway: Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife. As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.
“We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don’t know of any Viking skeletons that have been analyzed as we plan to do,” Egil Mikkelsen, director of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History, said at the graveside.
As rain pelted down, four men lifted an aluminum coffin containing bones of two women after digging a 1.5-metre deep hole in the mound where the women were originally buried in a spectacular Viking longboat. The women and the 22-metre longboat, with its curling oak prow still intact, were unearthed in 1904 in the 5-metre high mound, surrounded by cornfields, in one of the archaeological sensations of the 20th century.
The longboat, known as the Oseberg ship, is in a museum in Oslo but the bones were reburied in 1948 and have since lain undisturbed. About 200 people, including schoolchildren, watched the exhumation.
“We don’t know who the women were,” Mikkelsen said, adding that DNA tests could tell if they were related. “DNA analysis could prove if they were mother and daughter,” he said. “But I have always thought of them as the queen and her maid,” he added. If the two women had widely differing DNA it could be a sign that the second woman was a servant.
A servant might have been the victim of a ritual killing, perhaps her throat slit to accompany her queen to an afterlife in Valhalla. In one Danish Viking grave, for instance, an old man lying by a younger man had been decapitated. REUTERS
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