Crampons – Late Iron-age everyday items and/or artefacts with sacred meaning?

Abstract

The question is whether crampons, ordinary artefacts in everyday use on icy roads, also may have had a sacred meaning. The notion that they did is supported by Old Norse literature: in G.sle Sursson's saga, it is mentioned twice that it was customary to bind helskór to a dead man’s feet. After a description of crampons for horses and people, I have selected Valsgärde and Birka, two well-known burial grounds from the second half of the first millennium in the Mälar valley in eastern Sweden, to study the frequency of crampons and their distribution according to grave type and the sex of the interred. Crampons are rather common and occur in both men’s and women’s graves and in both inhumations and cremations. An exception seems to be children’s graves: in Birka, there probably are at least 80–100 children’s inhumations, and only in one of them a crampon has been found. Strangely enough, there are several examples where a dead person was provided with a horse crampon.

Philologist Dag Strömbäck has commented upon the mentioning of helskór in Gisli’s saga. He points out that translators have misunderstood the significance of the custom and strongly rejects their suggestion that the shoes were supposed to fasten the dead person into the grave and prevent him from returning to the world of the living as a ghost. To Strömbäck, it is obvious that the purpose of helskór was to help the deceased persons on their long and arduous journey to the Other World. I find Strömbäck’s argumentation strong and sound, and I join his opinion.