3. Dying to a Viking was not the end of the misery for an individual, as your corpse would be posthumously mutilated as a display of victory in an attempt to gain the attention of the Norse pagan deities
Believing that the time of their deaths was predetermined, it was beholden upon a Norseman to seek to acquire as much fame and glory in the time that they had to best impress their deities in Valhalla; consequently, each Viking sought to surpass another in their displays of violence to garner greater attention from the gods and earn their place in the legendary afterlife. This ever-intensifying competition in brutality in the name of glory culminating in the cultural practice of humiliating best opponents; it was insufficient to merely defeat an enemy, one had to shame them and actively promote your triumph to the world. An archaeological investigation of Viking Age graves by Niel Price from Uppsala University has produced substantial evidence, corroborated by subsequent studies, that, although each inherently unique, these remains and the composition of the graves bear consistent characteristics, in particular bodily mutilations.
As detailed by Elise Naumann, “there are lots of macabre treatments of the bodies. Some have chopped off limbs, such as in the Viking graves at Kaupang“, and a routine feature of those buried in traditional Viking manner was that the deceased “seem to have suffered a brutal death”; as mentioned, important individuals were often accompanied by their slaves into the afterlife, with the remains of these presumed thralls equally mutilated and brutalized. Naumann has hypothesized that “the fact that the graves are so disparate might mean that they are part of a burial ritual that recreates important incidences in the deceased person’s life. This would explain why each grave is unique,”.