This is a pretty good artistic rendering of a tapestry so damaged that I didn’t bother posting a photo of it here. And although it’s hard to see, if you look just right you’ll make out a bunch of human dead (probably) bodies hanging from the branches. You can see their limbs dangling and their necks turned askew.
What in the Yggdrasil is this, you may be asking yourself? For one thing, it is part of a tiny fragment of the numerous textiles placed in an elite Viking ship burial from Oseberg around 834 CE. But more to the point about the dead bodies on the tree, it’s suggestive of the practice of human sacrifice that occurred in this part of the world.
The eleventh-century Christian chronicler Adam of Bremen described a pagan temple at Uppsala, Sweden, and it echos this grizzly scene. He writes that “every nine years there is a communal festival” held there, at which nine males “of every living creature” needed to be sacrificed because their blood was supposed to appease the Gods. The bodies of nine men were to be hanged up on trees “considered to be divine” in the temple’s grove.
Many historians have written off Adam of Bremen’s account as being part of a fictitious invective against paganism, but then whence the tapestry here? Maybe, like the Blood-Eagle torture (discussed in another post here), the tree with its human ornaments was only part of Viking legends.
The tree makes an appearance in the 2022 film “The Northman”.
Sources: Image from Stig Saxegaard, Storm studios, 2018. Univ of Oslo Museum of Cultural Heritage, “The textiles among the Oseberg finds”, Marianne Vedeler July 8, 2016, modified Feb 23, 2021. www.germanmytjology.com, “The earliest representations of Old Norse Gods Mythological and Religious Art, “The Oseberg Tapestry Selected Images,”
