11. Viking slaves, although capable of earning or buying their freedom, most commonly ended up being sacrificed in honor of their deceased masters
Viking society was divided into three primary classes of status: the nobleman (“jarl” or “eorl“), the freeman (“karl“, “ceorl“) and the thrall (“þræll”). The thrall was a slave or serf within the Viking hierarchy, existing as property belonging to their master. A hereditary condition, meaning that those born to enslaved parents were themselves automatically thralls from birth, others entered bondage through capture in war or the inability to repay debts; the trade of captured slaves formed a central component of the Viking economy, with an estimated 10 percent of the population of Viking Scandinavia believed to have been slaves and most households retained at least a couple of slaves, some as many as thirty.
The treatment of slaves naturally varied between masters, but general conditions were uniformly poor. In addition to being assigned the hardest of labors and facing daily sexual exploitation, research by Anna Kjellström of the graves of slaves in Scandinavia strongly indicates that most thralls did not die peacefully. In fact, many thralls were, willingly or otherwise, buried along with their deceased masters as a human sacrifice; one contemporary account of this ritual has survived from Arab explorer Ibn Fadlān, who detailed that “six men entered the pavilion and all had intercourse with the slavegirl. They laid her down beside her master and two of them took hold of her feet, two her hands. The crone called the ‘Angel of Death’ placed arope around her neck (…) She advanced with a broad-bladed dagger and began to thrust it in and out between her ribs (…) while the two men throttled her with the rope until she died.”