Beyond the Longship: Viking Women, Death, and the Afterlife Burial Rites, Revenants, and the Secret Fate of Norse Women, from Hel's Halls to the Osebe

What happened to a Viking woman when she died?We know the legends of Valhalla, the warrior's hall of feasting and endless battle. But the sagas and the graves hint at a stranger, richer world for the women of the North: a road that winds down through darkness to Hel's gate, a goddess who gathers the dead in her own hall, a mountain where ancestors feast, and a mound where a woman might rise and speak.Drawing on sagas, poems, runestones, and the stunning Oseberg ship burial, this book follows the faint trail Viking women left behind. You'll meet the queen buried with a wagon, sleds, and fifteen horses; the slave girl who walked willingly into a chieftain's funeral fire; the witch whose coffin could not hold her; and the grieving wife who rose from her deathbed to feel for her shoes.Part history, part detective story, Beyond the Longship asks what the dead meant to a people who never quite let go of them, and why the fate of Norse women was written in whispers while their men were sung in verse.Fierce, haunting, and richly told, it is the afterlife of the Viking Age as you've never seen it.