THE SALME SHIP BURIALS — EARLY VIKINGS ABROAD (c. 700–750 CE)
- Hrolfr
- 7 days ago
- 9 min read
Visit to Vrak Museum and "Vikings Before Vikings": Stockholm, August 2025
In August 2025, the Chieftain walked into Vrak – Museum of Wrecks in Stockholm and into an exhibition that quietly rearranged the internal map of the Viking Age. Vikings Before Vikings does not argue that Lindisfarne (793) didn’t happen, or that the raid shouldn’t remain the clean “start line” for the Viking Age in popular history. It simply does something more dangerous to our assumptions: it puts physical evidence in front of you—bones, rivets, blades, and the hard arithmetic of a mass grave—and it forces the question.
If Scandinavian war-bands were already crossing the Baltic, already fighting, and dying overseas, and already receiving ship-burial rites on foreign shores in the mid-8th century, then “the beginning” stops being a single date. It becomes a process: preparation, expansion, contact, conflict—before the West started writing it down. The Salme ship burials are the hinge on that realization. They are the proof that the sea-lanes of the east were active with armed expeditions decades before the famous shock of Lindisfarne echoed through Latin chronicles. [1]
What follows inspired by the museum visit, is research on the story of Salme—two ships, forty-one men, and a battle that predates the usual Viking Age timeline while displaying the unmistakable DNA of Viking-era violence, mobility, and elite identity.
A saga revealed beneath the soil
On the Estonian island of Saaremaa, near what is now the village of Salme, a routine roadwork project in 2008 exposed human bones and artifacts from the 7th–8th centuries. The location is telling: the area around the local schoolhouse had already been suspected as a potential prehistoric harbor zone, but modern disturbance, including the scars left by the Second World War and later landscaping—made systematic identification difficult. Then chance did what planning could not. A trench opened, and the ground answered. [2]
At first glance, bones in that region were not automatically “world changing.” Saaremaa had known more than one century of hard history, and the 20th century left its own debris. But this was different. Archaeological work soon traced an outline in the soil: a dark organic stain bordered by iron rivets—the signature of a clinker-built hull whose wood had almost entirely decayed. By the end of October 2008, the first phase of fieldwork on what would become known as Salme I was complete. Two years later, continuing work revealed something larger and far more complex: Salme II. [3][5]
Two ships on a foreign shore
Salme I: the smaller boat
Salme, I measured roughly 11.5 meters long and about 2 meters wide, with a shallow draft. Construction details recovered from rivet patterns and the surviving traces of structure indicate a light, fast, clinker-built vessel military shape, built for speed and control. One major interpretive point matters here: this was almost certainly a rowing vessel, and reconstructions commonly describe it as a 12-oar ship (six pairs of oars). [2][4][5]
Inside were the remains of seven men. Their bones were heavily disturbed and intermingled—likely affected by later construction activity and the way the burial decayed over time. Some researchers have also argued that at least part of the crew may have been placed in a seated position—an eerie possibility that would align the dead with their rowing stations, turning the ship into a frozen crew even in death. [2][4]
The grave goods were not the inventory of a peasant ferry. Weapons, knives, whetstones, and gaming pieces appeared, along with animal bones bearing butchery marks. These animals were not present as intact carcasses; the anatomical pattern strongly suggests butchered meat—provisions for the living, offerings for the dead, or the remains of a funerary meal conducted at the shoreline. [4][6]
Birds of prey also appear in the Salme complex—raptors that fit the social world of high-status men, hunting, and display. Their presence matters because it complicates the lazy assumption that these were merely “raiders with swords.” Falconry is not a poor man’s habit. [4][6]
Salme II: the larger ship
In 2010, excavation expanded and a second vessel emerged: Salme II, about 17–17.5 meters long and around 3 meters wide. Like Salme I, it was clinker-built, but several features—especially the preserved humus outline indicating a vertical keel—strongly suggest that Salme II carried a sail. Osiliana describes it as the oldest archaeologically excavated sailing ship in the Baltic Sea region. That single point alone should make any timeline feel less stable. [2]
Within Salme II were at least 34 men. The burial was not a simple “place them and leave.” The bodies were stacked in multiple layers—three, and in places four—sometimes separated by sand layers several dozen centimeters thick. This is a mass burial, but not a careless one: it shows method and intention, even in grim circumstances. [2]
The equipment count is staggering. Salme II yielded 40 swords or sword fragments, 91 arrowheads, and 251 gaming pieces (whale bone and walrus bone), along with the remains of at least six dogs and hawks/raptors, plus other animals, and birds. The shields themselves rotted away, but iron bosses survived—ghosts of protective circles that once lay over the dead. [2]
This is not the grave of a lone chieftain with a retinue. It is a war-band burial—collective identity preserved in timber outlines and iron rivets.
Death in battle: what the bones tell us.
The Salme dead were not lost at sea. They were killed.
Skeletal trauma at Salme II includes deep blade injuries and violent cranial wounds. In one early-excavated case, the humerus had been chopped through multiple times; another skull showed clear cuts consistent with a sword or axe. Even a dog skeleton was found cut in half—an image that reads like the residue of close-quarter chaos rather than a clean execution after surrender. [4]
The high number of arrowheads supports the same story: this was not only sword-work; it was missile fire, possibly concentrated and sustained. Whether the fighting occurred on the beach, in the shallows, or in and around the ships as they grounded, the conclusion remains: these men died overseas, in combat, and were placed into ships afterward with their gear by their comrades who took great care in doing so. [2][4]
And then comes the detail that changes the tone of everything: despite the violence, the dead were not simply discarded. They were buried with dignity—organized layers, weapons included, provisions present. Whoever controlled the ground after the battle allowed (or oversaw) a rite that preserved the enemy’s honor in death.
Provisions, animals, and the logic of a journey
One of the clearest signals that this was a traveling force is the food.
Animal bone analysis from Salme I identifies cattle, sheep/goat, and pig, with minimum counts consistent with at least six cattle, at least ten sheep/goat, and at least two pigs. Crucially, the distribution of elements suggests butchered trunk portions—meat rather than whole animals—exactly what you would expect from provisions carried for men on campaign. Whether those cuts were ultimately meant for the living crew, for offerings, or for a feast after the battle, the material reads like logistics: a journey with supplies, not a spontaneous brawl. [6][4]
The combs and grooming items belong in the same category. The Salme combs have been studied closely; ZooMS and aDNA analyses show elk and reindeer antler, with reindeer antler pointing toward northern sourcing. These are not throwaway objects. They are personal identity, carried across water. Men who expected to be seen—and remembered—brought them. [7]
Weapons of oath and honor
Swords dominate the Salme story because they dominate the social world that produced these men.
Across the burials, archaeologists found dozens upon dozens of blades and fragments—single-edged weapons common in the period alongside fewer, longer double-edged swords. Several pieces show elaborate Nordic animal-style ornamentation and parallels to elite material culture in Sweden. The signal here is status: not every man is buried with that kind of steel. [2][4]
One of the most symbolically loaded weapons discussed from Salme II is a ring-hilted sword—an elite form with a small ring fixed to the hilt/pommel area. In early medieval northern Europe, ring-swords are widely interpreted as prestige weapons, often linked to bonds of allegiance and the symbolic weight of oath. That does not mean every ring-sword is a literal “swear-here” device—but it does mean that when such a weapon appears in a grave, it tends to speak the language of high rank and tight loyalty. [8][3]
At Salme, that matters because it changes the question. If at least some of these men carried weapons tied to elite identity and allegiance, then the expedition was not a random pirate sortie. It begins to look like something that could include politics: a delegation, a dynastic venture, a high-status mission that traveled armed because the Baltic was never gentle.
Kinship in death: where they came from, and who they were.
Modern science has sharpened the picture.
Stable isotope analysis indicates that the Salme men were not local to Saaremaa and points strongly toward the Stockholm–Mälaren region in central Sweden as the most likely homeland for the crew. That is the hard mobility fact: these were Scandinavians abroad, and they died there. [4]
Ancient DNA analysis adds a colder intimacy: among the dead were close relatives. Osiliana summarizes the now-famous result—four brothers laid beside each other, along with kin ties that suggest at least one additional close relation. This is not just a war-band. It is family—men whose voyage carried bloodline risk as well as political ambition. [2]
In that light, the burial becomes even more haunting. Forty-one men were not only lost; a set of households, futures, and inheritances were cut down far from home.
So, what happened at Salme?
There is no single answer that satisfies every detail—and that is part of Salme’s power. It refuses the simplicity of our preferred narratives.
A raid gone wrong.
One reading is direct: Scandinavians attempted an armed action on Saaremaa, met coordinated resistance, and suffered catastrophic losses. Salme then becomes “Viking behavior” before the textbook start date. [2][4]
A diplomatic mission that bled out.
Another reading takes the elite indicators seriously: richly furnished weaponry, birds of prey, the social grammar of status goods. The Antiquity study explicitly raises the possibility that this was a diplomatic delegation protected by elite warriors, meaning the violence may have erupted from negotiation, rivalry, or ambush rather than simple raiding. [4]
Dynastic politics, prelude to the sagas.
And then there is the temptation—never fully provable, never fully ignorable—to look at later saga memory. Snorri Sturluson’s Ynglinga saga tells of a Swedish king, Ingvar (Yngvar), campaigning in Estonia and falling in battle there, his body buried on foreign shores. Snorri wrote centuries later, and saga material cannot be treated as straightforward reportage. But Salme is exactly the kind of event that could leave a long echo: a prominent leader, a violent defeat, a burial across the sea, a story retold until it becomes mythic history. [9]
The responsible position is restraint: Salme is not “proof that Snorri was right.” But Salme does prove that the kind of world Snorri describes—armed Scandinavian ventures into Estonia, violent clashes, deaths overseas—was real before 793.
Why Salme matters: the Viking Age as a process, not a starting pistol
The traditional beginning of the Viking Age—Lindisfarne, 793—remains a useful marker because it is a loud one. It enters written record with fire and shock, and it changes how the English and Frankish worlds describe the sea. But Salme demands that we also tell the quieter story: the eastern sea, the earlier voyages, the gradual sharpening of tactics, ship design, and elite ambition.
Salme dates to roughly a generation or more before Lindisfarne and displays a recognizable Viking toolkit: clinker-built warships, mass overseas violence, elite weapon culture, long-distance mobility, and group identity expressed through ship burial. In other words, what begins in 793 in the Western chronicles was already alive—and already lethal—in the Baltic. [1][2][4]
Salme is more than an archaeological site. It is a frozen moment of a saga: two ships on a beach, forty-one men laid into timber outlines, weapons and provisions beside them, the dignity of burial granted far from home. If you want to understand how the Viking Age truly begins—not as a date, but as a tide—Salme is where you start.
And if you can, walk through Vikings Before Vikings at Vrak. The exhibition does what the best archaeology always does: it makes certainty feel childish, and it makes the past feel physically close. [1]
As for the 40 warriors buried - Till Valhǫll!
Photos by the Chieftain
Footnotes
[1] Vrak – Museum of Wrecks, Stockholm: Vikings Before Vikings exhibition page and background on Salme; plus, current listing noting exhibition run.
[2] Osiliana (Tallinn University-linked research platform): overview of Salme I & II, ship dimensions, sail inference, layered burial, and key counts (swords, arrowheads, gaming pieces, dogs, kinship).
[3] World Archaeology feature (Jüri Peets): discovery narrative, ship context, combat trauma, and high-status items including ringed hilt discussion.
[4] Price et al., Antiquity (2016): isotopic provenancing; Salme I as rowing ship (six pairs of oars); Salme II trauma details; interpretation possibilities (incl. diplomatic delegation) and Mälaren-region origin.
[5] Archaeological Fieldwork in Estonia 2008 (Konsa et al.): Salme I hull/structure reconstruction via rivets; clinker construction; eight frames; plank thickness; 12-oar rowing interpretation; early finds and context.
[6] Allmäe, Maldre & Tomek (IANSA 2011): osteological and archaeozoological analysis for Salme I; minimum counts consistent with cattle/sheep-goat/pig; butchered-meat interpretation; raptors (goshawk/sparrowhawk) and ritual context.
[7] Luik et al. (2020) on Salme combs; plus University of York summary: antler sourcing (elk/reindeer) and implications of northern raw material networks.
[8] Background on ring-swords / ring-hilted swords as elite weapons often interpreted as symbolic “oath rings,” with scholarly references compiled and discussed in accessible form.
[9] Later saga tradition around King Ingvar/Yngvar and campaigns in Estonia (useful as cultural memory, not as direct reportage).
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