It's been seen in the 1958 movie "The Vikings," the History Channel show "Vikings" and fantasy series such as "Game of Thrones." But did the Vikings actually do this?
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Erin McGuire, an anthropology professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, also noted this limitation. From "an archaeological standpoint, we have no evidence for this very common motif," McGuire told Live Science in an email, adding that it would be hard to differentiate a fire set by a fire arrow from a regular fire. Additionally, shipwrecks "with human remains are very, very rare globally," McGuire added. "It takes particular kinds of environmental conditions for them to be preserved and I know of none from the Viking Age."
The Gokstad Viking ship from Norway, which dates back more than 1,100 years ago. (Image credit: Francesco Bonino via Alamy)Historical evidence and legends
Perhaps the closest historical evidence for the fire-arrow ritual comes from Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab traveler who went to the Volga River in what is now Russia and spent time with Viking groups there. In ibn Fadlan's written account, a Viking chieftain is placed on a boat, which is set ablaze.
Although not strictly historical, there are some legendary and mythical accounts of burials at sea that were possibly inspired by real events. "From medieval literature we have rare references to boats/ships involved in funerals over water," Williams said.
A 1,000 year-old Viking ship from Denmark. (Image credit: Oli Scarff via Getty Images)The funeral of Baldr has been particularly notable, McGuire said, noting that it inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to include a similar scene in his "Lord of the Rings" books.
Practical problems
"Personally, I consider cremation at sea using a ship set alight from the shore with flaming arrows to be rather unrealistic," Matthias Toplak, head of the archaeology department at the Viking Museum Haithabu in Germany, told Live Science in an email. "My own experiments show that it is not at all easy to set something alight with flaming arrows."
McGuire also noted that there are practical problems with the idea. "if you send a burning boat out onto the water, how do you stop it from drifting ashore with rather grisly contents?"
Related mysteriesOverall, the scholars we spoke with doubted that the Vikings used fire arrows to burn funeral boats set adrift at sea. "However romantic the idea of such a funeral scene may be, I unfortunately consider it highly unlikely," Toplak said.
It "says little about how 'Vikings' treated their dead," Williams added, "but tells us a lot about our valorised ideals of fate, honour and death linked to both fantasy and historical 'Vikings.'"
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