Have you ever seen something that sparks your imagination so much you can’t get it out of your mind? That happened to me recently. I was on social media and mindlessly scrolling when I came across something a writer friend shared that stopped my scrolling like I’d hit a wall.
It was an article about a woman and child buried thousands of years ago–in the grave the mother and child were buried beside each other and the baby was lying on a swan’s wing. How beautiful and touching is that? I’d never heard anything like it before.
She was about twenty years old and the baby a newborn. She’d probably died in childbirth, which was a very common thing and one of the main reasons women did not live long. Even in the Viking age, which was several thousand years later, many women died in childbirth. I always say that in those time periods, a woman going into childbirth was every bit as brave as a man going into battle. The prospect of death hung closely over them both. That’s also one reason why I decided to include the perils of childbearing and childbirth in my stories.
According to a National Geographic article about the burial, “The position of the woman’s head suggested it had rested upon a pillow, perhaps a folded piece of clothing long since gone. Perforated shells and animal teeth near her feet suggested she’d been clad in a garment trimmed with trinkets. By her head were 200 red deer teeth — each from a different animal — that had likely formed a necklace made by a hunter and laid down with her as a keepsake. Across the baby’s hips was a little blade of blue flint, perhaps a mark of status. He or she — the bones were too slight for there to be any way of judging sex — had been placed upon the wing of a swan.”
Everything about this burial speaks of a woman who was valued by her family, or perhaps, by the entire community. What it says to me is that someone loved her so dearly they buried her with great care and with so many valuables, like the deer teeth necklace and the “garment trimmed with trinkets.” If her head was resting on a pillow of some sort, the person burying her wanted only the best and most comfortable afterlife for her.
This also speaks to something else I’ve always believed about ancient and early medieval people, people like my Vikings–they were humans and as such felt human emotions like love and grief. There used to be this attitude that because life was so fraught with danger and hardship back 1000+ years ago, and the people so used to death, that they wouldn’t form as strong of attachments with their loved ones, and especially their children, as we do. I don’t think that’s true. I think, like now, mothers and fathers would have loved their children just as much, maybe even more fiercely, knowing they might have very little time with them.
The burial with the swan wing suggests just such a connection between the dead and whoever buried them with such care.
Another interesting aspect of it is the swan’s wing. Why a swan? This burial was done thousands of years before the Viking age but it got me thinking about the Norse Valkyries. They were said to have worn cloaks made of swan feathers. Could the swan cloaks be some holdover from an earlier age? Did those ancient people worship a deity who was associated with a swan and by the time it reached the Viking age it had morphed into something the Valkyries wore? No one knows but it intrigues me!
Archaeological finds like this often spark my imagination. I’m not the only person struck by this find. Along with a picture of the actual burial and bones, the article I first saw included an artist’s imagining of the burial. It’s from a graphic novel called Mezolith by Ben Haggarty and the illustration done by Adam Brockbank. I can’t share it here for copyright issues, sorry, but a quick search and you’ll find it! It’s a beautiful image.