Daily Life of the Vikings by Kirsten Wolf

Like ibn Faḍlān, who had never been to this region of the world but would have learned something about it prior to undertaking his travels, Hernán Cortés had lived in Cuba for nearly a decade before leading a small fleet of ships westward toward the Yucatan Peninsula in 1519. It is in this episode that another technology of culture catches the author’s eye: ibn Faḍlān claims that the ritual he witnessed made use of Byzantine brocade in the composition of pillows and quilts for the deceased Norse, linking thusly material networks from one end of Europe to another, and Asian silks have appeared in Norse burial remains elsewhere.

Death transformed by ritualistic fire allowed the vehicle of the boat to carry the deceased into the next realm. Ibn Faḍlān witnesses the funeral of a deceased Swede, which takes place on a boat piled with blankets and pillows, which were joined by the deceased, and in this case his slave girl ( thrall), all of which were set afire in a cleansing act of cremation that released the physical body to the celestial world. It is also an important textual source about Norse funereal rituals. This account comprises the earliest known, first-person travel narrative prepared in Arabic, and evidences contact between northern Europe and the Middle East within the context of the narrator’s encounter with the other-worldly. No doubt he had met with a Norse, and ibn Faḍlān went on to describe a Norse boat funeral that he witnessed.

Ibn Faḍlān consulted inhabitants of the Great Perm (today Perm Krai, in northern Russia), who characterized this giant as originating from across the sea – the polar sea. Once there, he met with a giant from the lands of Gog and Magog, where Muslim apocalyptic legends as well as the Qur’an related that these giants feasted on fabulous fish. He travelled thousands of miles away from Bagdad to the edges of Muslim eschatology in present-day Russia. In AD 921, the interpreter Ahmad ibn Faḍlān joined an embassy due north to convince the Volga (Bulgarian) king to accept the rule of the Abbasid caliphate, to establish Islam in the region, and to fortify trade networks for luxury goods.

Daily Life of the Vikings by Kirsten Wolf