Grave Goods

Far from home and hearth
My family to provide
When wyrd was met
Dead so far from home

Never again to hold my dearest love
Nor hear my daughters laugh
My only home the barrow
My only embrace the dark

Back to home and kin
My empty body come
By fires not my hearths burned
To the waters of my home scattered

Never again to hear my wife’s laugh
Never again hold my daughters
No hearth fires in the barrow
No love to share the dark

Voices call like distant dreams
By name and need am summoned
By love of living still commanded
The grave no bar to their call

My weeping wife I hold again
Wrapped in arms of memory
Nights of love and passion bright
Days of shared hard struggle

My daughters fear calls to me,
A father’s rage to answer
My spark to light their inner fires
Theirs the strength to conquer

Sleeping with the land wights
Drifting in the waters
Among the sacred ancestors
Guardians of our line

I dream of my darling wife
With winter in her hair
My daughters now mother’s all
My grave no bar to their call

Far from mother’s hearth and home
Wherever they may go
Wyrd brought me to my grave
But love binds me still

Around 3500 years ago when our ancestors moved from their origins around the Black Sea to conquor northern India and help spawn Veddic culture, the burial customs were quite simple: burn the body and scatter the ashes.

It is assumed by anthropologists who study the burial practices of nomadic peoples that the reason for this was to keep from tying the dead to any place, so that they either will not leave ghosts haunting the plains, or will allow the dead to remain with the moving living (depending on the individual anthropologists view of the dead as either feared or loved). In any case, when the people became settled in India, and again during settlement periods in Germany, Scandenavia, and the migratory waves south and west in later centuries, the customs of barrow cremation (ashes into urns in barrows) were adopted, sometimes progressing into ship-graves with grave goods, but in peoples like the Angles, remaining with simple ash/urn barrow mounds.

There was little pre-syncretic (co-existence with Christianity) speculation about an afterlife. It was assumed the dead were still with us, that the spirits of the sacred ancestors watched over us. In particular, the Disir, the spirits of your dead mothers and maternal ancestors were often asked for aid and intercession in life.

Death awaits all of us. Love awaits some of us. The latter is by far the more powerful.