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A very royal crisis. Countdown

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1:30

place after this. With

2:00

me, Aurora, listen on BBC Sounds.

2:30

Hello, everyone. I'm John Harding of

2:32

University College London and Marianne Hem Erickson at

2:34

Leicester University. Also to

2:36

historians, Harriet Soper at Bristol

2:38

University and Katrina Byers of

2:40

King's College London. Pauline,

2:43

one of the tales of approaching death

2:45

that I've come across in Japan, a

2:47

country I write about, is of mummified

2:49

monks. These are Buddhist monks

2:52

said to have consented to being buried

2:54

alive in an underground cell, slowly

2:57

starving themselves to death and along

2:59

the way gaining psychic powers and

3:01

eventually Buddhahood. What

3:03

most struck you about attitudes towards death

3:06

in Uganda on your first research visit?

3:09

Well, actually, when I went to Uganda,

3:11

I wasn't researching death and I wasn't

3:13

really expecting to encounter any tales of

3:15

death whatsoever. So when I went to

3:18

a site of mineshafts in

3:20

central Uganda, I was expecting to

3:22

see some triarchaeological features. But actually

3:24

what happened was these mineshafts had

3:27

been turned into spirit shrines and

3:29

they become associated with the spirit of the

3:32

dead. And people were praying

3:34

there to ward off any sort of bonuses

3:36

that might lead to death. So it

3:38

was a bit of a shock for me. It

3:40

was a space where spirits

3:42

continued the lives of

3:44

people after death, so to speak. So there kind of

3:46

wasn't a death. All

3:49

right. Well, come back to that. Marianne

3:51

Hem Erickson, as part of your research

3:53

project. It's called Body Politics. You've been

3:55

looking at Viking death rituals and burial

3:57

sites. Have you got a particular example

3:59

for us? So the bodies I

4:01

look at in my project are the ones that

4:03

don't actually end up in normative burials. They are

4:05

bodies that don't end up in the fancy mounds

4:07

and the furnished rich burials that we kind of

4:10

associate with Vikings. It's those bodies

4:12

that are broken apart and

4:14

body parts are strewn across wetlands

4:16

and in people's dwellings. However,

4:19

were I to think about one spectacular

4:21

Viking burial, it would have to be

4:23

the very famous ship burial of the

4:25

Usobadig mound, the Usobadg ship, which some

4:27

people may know. We expect

4:30

to be a king's burial. It's the

4:32

richest Viking burial from any country, any

4:34

place. And it's actually the burial of

4:36

two women. Buried how? They

4:39

were buried in a

4:41

ship which had 12 horses

4:43

and 10 cattle and

4:46

dogs and lots of animals thrown

4:48

about. It had wagons and beds

4:50

and domestic utensils. It had great

4:53

preservation. So there were just this

4:55

immense array of domestic objects. And

4:57

yet it was lamented when it

5:00

was excavated in the decades after,

5:02

in the 20th century, how we

5:04

didn't have any male equipment or

5:07

weapons and how ashamed that was

5:09

when you have this amazingly rich

5:11

burial. Harriet Soper,

5:13

do you have an image from medieval poetry for

5:15

us? Oh, do I? Yes. There

5:17

are plenty to choose from in medieval poetry.

5:20

I think I would like to pick a

5:22

couple of old English poems, which are anonymous,

5:24

like most old English poems. And

5:26

they tend to be referred to as

5:29

the soul and body poems, which suggest

5:31

the kind of dialogue format, which isn't

5:33

ultimately possible because the body cannot speak

5:35

back. So although the soul berates the

5:37

body at length, this

5:39

body has already been broken apart in the grave.

5:41

So just kind of has to take this abuse

5:44

from a soul. The soul says you're dumb and

5:46

deaf, you deserve this, you deserve your state,

5:48

you were so materialistic

5:50

in life and now look at you. So

5:52

it's a spooky kind of poem, but I

5:54

like it for showing how many kind of

5:56

views of death can be at work at

5:58

once. splitting apart of

6:00

body and soul maybe, but also it's kind

6:02

of like a horrible kind of dormancy for

6:05

the body, kind of like a sleep. There's

6:07

a lot of different dimensions going on in

6:09

the same text, so I would pick that.

6:11

Katrina Vyres, in your research you've been

6:13

rummaging through morgues in 19th century Paris

6:16

and New York. Tell us

6:18

a bit about the island that New York

6:20

City still uses now as a burial place.

6:23

Yes, so this is Hart Island, it's an

6:25

east river, it's not far from Rikers Island

6:27

where the famous prison is, and

6:29

City Island, and this is

6:32

where over a million

6:34

New Yorkers have been buried over the

6:36

last 150 years, and

6:38

it used to also have a few

6:40

asylums and workhouses and other

6:42

kind of penitentiary institutions on it, and

6:45

today it's still used as the city

6:47

cemetery at the time they called it

6:49

a pauper cemetery or a potter's field,

6:52

and until 2020, imprisoned people from

6:54

Rikers Island were being used to bury the bodies,

6:57

and the island was run by the

6:59

Department of Corrections, so the island was

7:01

run by the carceral system, and only

7:04

very recently transferred to parks. Well let's

7:06

hear a bit more about your research. What

7:08

were the origins of these morgues in Paris

7:10

and New York, and what was their purpose?

7:13

So the first ever modern morgue, as we think of

7:15

morgues today, was built in Paris in 1804, and essentially

7:19

it was a site where all

7:22

the bodies that were found in the

7:24

streets or in the river of the city that couldn't

7:26

be immediately identified were brought to be processed

7:29

and managed and put in

7:31

display so that people could come and try

7:33

and identify them. And

7:35

then this morgue inspired morgues around the world,

7:37

the model was used and taken to countries

7:40

far away as Australia, and

7:42

in New York they also used Paris as the

7:44

model, and they built the first

7:46

ever American morgue in 1864. So

7:49

were these morgues mostly about keeping cities

7:52

clean and hygienic, Katrina? Or was there

7:54

a sense of respect for the dead

7:56

involved here? There's a sanitary element, so there

7:58

was definitely a movement in the 18- century where

8:00

they started to kind of realize that the

8:02

disease could be spread by the dead body

8:04

and that was also there's a movement towards

8:06

closing cemeteries and moving them outside the city

8:08

but in this case as well it was

8:11

partly a reaction to a massive immigration

8:13

to the city so there's a

8:15

huge population growth and because of that you had a lot

8:17

more people dying unknown in

8:20

the city and you had to have a place to

8:22

put them where people could come come and identify them

8:25

and it's also coincides a bit with the

8:27

rise in policing so there's much more interest

8:29

in knowing who's in the city who's there

8:31

what they're doing why they're there so these

8:33

things are kind of conflating and you have

8:35

a site which was designed you know they

8:37

say in the records to establish civil status

8:39

of people so they really wanted to know who who

8:42

was who so dead or alive they want

8:44

to know who you are what

8:46

sorts of sources have you found to help you tell

8:48

these stories a really broad range of

8:50

things so the morgan Paris has not been studied

8:52

very much at all and the one in New

8:55

York has never been studied and it's also very

8:57

hard to access the archive of the hospital where

8:59

that morgue was it's closed the archive so

9:01

I've been finding absolutely everything I can

9:03

which ranges from morgue registers to photographs

9:05

taken at the morgue to

9:08

fabric vultures that have been kept in the clothing

9:10

of some of the dead that was used to

9:12

help identify them financial records absolutely

9:14

everything architectural plans it's really an attempt

9:17

to kind of rebuild these buildings and

9:19

institutions and try and understand them in every every

9:22

different way and what's in the photograph so

9:24

these are photographs that were taken people who

9:26

weren't too far decomposed to still be identifiable

9:29

and they were pasted outside the

9:31

morgue in Paris they're based outside in

9:33

New York they had a wall inside

9:35

the wall of the unknown dead the

9:38

idea being that after the body had decomposed

9:40

and had been buried you could still go

9:42

and try and identify somebody because these photographs

9:44

essentially immortalize the body hmm

9:47

now in my home city of Edinburgh

9:49

we have Burke and Hare this pair

9:51

of notorious 19th century murderers who traded

9:53

in dead bodies so clearly

9:55

like it or not corpses had currency

9:58

in this era and you found newspaper

10:00

stories that reveal morgues to have been

10:02

involved in some dodgy dealing. Yeah,

10:05

especially in New York. So in New

10:07

York, the morgue was the source of

10:09

bodies for basically all the medical schools

10:11

in the city. And then

10:14

the morgue keeper was caught selling additional

10:16

bodies and also reselling them and

10:18

taking a cut. And there was a huge

10:20

scandal in the 1890s. He was, they've had

10:22

this traffic in morgue bodies and this was

10:24

a huge tabloid news and he

10:27

was indicted. But he was

10:29

never brought to trial and it all

10:31

disappeared because far too many high ranking

10:33

medical professionals and medical schools were

10:35

involved. So he was dismissed. And

10:38

a few years later, his obituary died in

10:41

1901. And his obituary reported that he died with an estate

10:43

of $100,000. And for a man that was making $700 a year as a morgue keeper,

10:50

he did pretty well. Gosh, and how

10:52

are the newspapers covering these things? What's the tone

10:54

of the writing? I mean, it's just scandal.

10:56

It's scandal. And they used to write about

10:59

the morgue quite a lot, mostly

11:01

about dark and terrible things.

11:03

There's another headline that came across

11:05

recently, 1894, which was used

11:08

corpses for targets, ghastly experiments made

11:10

by Dr. Phelps at the morgue,

11:12

unclaimed bodies won't be fired at

11:14

again to quote, benefit science. So

11:17

they had taken the

11:19

bodies and they were made in effect like a

11:21

shooting range in the storage room and they were

11:23

shooting at the bodies to

11:25

try and determine, you know, how gunshot

11:28

wounds worked. Gosh, that's

11:30

extraordinary. How much would a body fetch? Did

11:32

it depend on what kind of body condition

11:34

it said? It really depended. I mean, it

11:36

was a whole market. So it depends on the

11:38

condition. It depends on the age. It depended on

11:41

how good your relationship was with the morgue keeper

11:43

who was selling them. So there's a lot of

11:45

information, these tabloid stories about opportunities, who was giving

11:48

the better tips. So a body

11:50

might be destined for one medical college, but

11:52

he would get a better payment from say,

11:54

Columbia than Bellevue were giving. Yeah. And

11:56

there's also, you know, reports going on for so long that.

12:00

students or staff could come into the morgue and he

12:02

would prop open the coffins and basically be like which

12:04

one do you want? So yeah

12:07

and it was referred to as the material so it's like

12:09

what material would you like what are you looking for today?

12:11

Oh lovely euphemism there, fantastic. Now you

12:13

mentioned earlier on that part of the

12:16

purpose of these morgues is to identify

12:18

bodies. What have you found in your

12:20

sources, these newspaper reports about

12:22

how they went about trying to do that? They

12:24

had a couple of different methods so

12:27

display especially in Paris that was one of the most

12:29

significant methods so the bodies were put in a display

12:31

room there's two rows of

12:33

six slabs behind glass it was open gone till

12:35

dusk every day and the public could come in

12:38

and see the bodies and try and identify them.

12:41

They also used photography as I mentioned so

12:43

in New York from the sort of late

12:45

1860s and in Paris in the 1880s they

12:47

started to use photographs. They also did special

12:49

investigations so the police would also look into

12:51

them especially if there was suspicion of

12:53

a crime or murder and they

12:55

used clothing. The clothing in Paris

12:58

would be hung in hooks behind the body and

13:00

same in New York so the real wide range

13:02

of ways that they were attempting to identify people.

13:05

Was there a sense when they're displaying these bodies

13:07

in Paris that people are coming along who don't

13:09

really have you know an intimate interest but just

13:12

want to see a dead body? Absolutely

13:14

it was known at the time as

13:16

the best free theatre in Paris both

13:18

with Parisians and with tourists so especially

13:20

British tourists actually were very fond of

13:22

the morgue and they used to enjoy

13:24

remarking on how sort of morbid and

13:26

macabre the French were but they would

13:28

go to Paris to go to the

13:30

morgue while insulting the French for being so so

13:33

macabre and American tourists as well and

13:35

you know writers Charles Dickens and

13:37

and yeah I mean I think it was Thomas Hardy

13:39

who took his wife there on honeymoon once

13:42

so there was also people that just you know just

13:44

wanted a day out. What a charmer.

13:47

Harriet let's wind the clock back a

13:49

few centuries you've a poem for us

13:51

from the medieval era that describes different

13:53

ways in which a person might die.

13:55

Yes absolutely it's known as the

13:57

fortunes of men and

13:59

it survives in the 10th century Excessor book, which is

14:01

a collection of a lot of these kinds of poems

14:04

about death and transience and ways to

14:06

cope mentally with that. Full

14:08

oft, that's Yagonga, midgora's mierkdom,

14:11

that's aware und wiff in

14:13

warrled kenath, bey'an midyebodem, und

14:16

midblaem gora. So

14:18

this is the opening of the poem and we

14:20

can translate it as, it happens very often with

14:22

the powers of God that a man and woman

14:24

bring a child into the world with birth and

14:27

with colours dress it. And it goes on and

14:29

says they encourage and they cheer it, they carry

14:31

and they lead it, they give gifts

14:33

and prepare. But then there's

14:36

a shift and the poet says, God, honor,

14:38

what, what's him we extend and winter bring

14:40

us. God only knows what the

14:42

years will bring him as he grows up. And

14:45

then we get a taste of all the possible things

14:47

that could happen. The child

14:49

could be eaten by a wolf, fairly young,

14:51

it could fall out of a tree, a

14:54

person could die in battle, a person

14:56

could just get so drunk that they

14:59

annoy their friends so much that they

15:01

are killed by the people around them

15:03

because of their chattering. There

15:05

are some positive things that are

15:07

listed, but a very striking number of

15:10

terrible things for a person to meet. My

15:12

image of a medieval poet is a troubadour

15:15

strumming a lute and singing something whimsical and

15:17

romantic at a banquet. I think being given

15:19

a list of the ways I might die

15:21

would put me off my food. So

15:24

what do we know about how poems like

15:26

this were being performed and how they were

15:28

being received? I mean, I suppose the honest

15:30

answer is very little in this period.

15:33

It's hotly contested, whether it fits

15:36

with that kind of image you

15:38

described or whether this is a

15:40

very, very monastic kind of poetry,

15:42

strongly, strongly Christian, possibly composed by

15:45

monks or nuns in

15:47

a monastic kind of setting. And that's

15:49

increasingly where the tide is kind of

15:51

turning with scholars. We would think of

15:53

the Exeter book now as a product

15:55

of a deeply spiritually involved

15:58

environment and deeply concerned

16:00

with the problem of death and the idea

16:02

of death as a challenge to be embraced.

16:05

That's something that cuts across more heroic contexts

16:07

as well, that kind of picture you've described,

16:10

kind of the idea of dying well. It's

16:12

specifically Christian in some ways, but it's also

16:14

something that really busies the poet of Beowulf,

16:17

for instance, the idea of dying so that

16:19

you have a wonderful reputation, that kind of

16:21

dying well. But in a Christian context it's

16:23

to do with preparing for death, not

16:26

trying to avoid it in some sense, not trying to

16:28

flee from it, but being very

16:30

much focused on the afterlife and what happens to

16:32

your soul in that sense. So the idea of

16:34

death that comes out of nowhere, the ones that

16:36

are described in The Fortunes of Men, are a

16:38

bit frightening. Well, they're in themselves, they're frightening these

16:40

fates, but they're kind of extra frightening because they

16:42

might surprise you. And if

16:44

they're being written some of these in

16:46

monastic contexts, then the idea of having

16:49

parents effectively being warned that your baby might be

16:51

torn apart by a wolf, it's nice to see

16:53

that parenting advice is not just guilt tripping in

16:56

the modern era, that's been a thing for centuries,

16:58

but what was a parent supposed to do about

17:00

a child potentially being attacked by a wolf? Or

17:02

is that not what these monks or nuns had

17:05

in mind? They weren't finger wagging at parents. No,

17:07

I don't think so. I think it's more

17:09

as a sort of humane quality to it

17:11

where people can't control what happens to their

17:13

children or what happens to you. And there's

17:15

a real deep acceptance of that, I think.

17:17

I don't think there's any sense that the

17:20

parents are supposed to do anything differently. It's

17:22

interesting that monks are thinking about this because I suppose

17:25

maybe we forget that in the life course

17:27

of a monk, it's quite possible they spent

17:30

a lot of time outside of a monastery,

17:32

depending on when they joined. So it's not

17:34

necessarily people inside the walls of monasteries and

17:36

outside these communities kind of were wider

17:38

than that, and they encompassed lots of different kinds

17:41

of experience. People moved between these spheres. You could

17:43

be a warrior for a while and then join

17:45

a monastery, that kind of thing. So

17:47

yes, I think they were very much

17:49

aware of all the various different things that could happen,

17:51

and that's just part of life. And you

17:53

said it's quite hard to understand why

17:55

these things might have been created as they were, how they

17:58

were performed and received, what sorts of things they were. sources

18:00

do you use to try and get a feel

18:02

for the context? Oh I think

18:04

a lot of it is just very close

18:06

attention to details of the language itself. It's

18:09

kind of all we've got but people spend

18:11

a lot of time pointing out that a

18:13

lot of poems that we might think kind

18:15

of sprung from somebody's harp in a forest

18:18

kind of thing actually are very deeply connected

18:20

with a very learned Latin tradition. So a

18:22

lot of scholars now just kind of point

18:24

out how educated and how careful these poets

18:26

were in terms of channeling texts

18:29

like the Psalms or different

18:31

biblical texts or different kind of

18:33

exegetical texts and increasingly also I wonder if

18:35

there's a little bit of Scandinavian influence on

18:37

some of the later poetry from the settlers but

18:39

that's a little more controversial. Time to go

18:41

to Marianne I think in that case I

18:43

think Marianne I'm obsessed with these wolves but

18:46

I would file getting eaten by a wolf

18:48

under a bad death rather than surely a

18:50

good one. How did the Vikings think about

18:52

the end of life? Were there such things

18:54

as good and bad deaths? I

18:57

think there were definitely good and bad

18:59

deaths. I think it actually connects to

19:01

what Harriet was talking about there. She

19:03

mentioned Beowulf which is obviously an Anglo-Saxon

19:05

poem. Without appropriating that for Scandinavia it

19:07

does take place in

19:09

a Danish court and there is this

19:12

shared early medieval idea of

19:14

warriorhood and dying in battles. For some

19:16

segments of the population I think the

19:18

best possible death you could have would

19:20

be to die in honor on

19:23

the battlefield and that may have fueled some

19:25

of that kind of fatalist worldview that we

19:27

may associate with the Vikings as they

19:29

some of them came in with sword

19:31

and frenzied warriors. In my research I tried

19:34

to challenge that stereotype so it's hilarious that

19:36

I'm now repurposing it here but the

19:38

flip side of that is the impression we get

19:40

from the textual sources at least is that to

19:42

die of old age was

19:44

very bad. That was

19:47

at least for adult

19:49

men that was shameful. So

19:52

dying you know old

19:54

age with your family around you was not necessarily

19:56

at all seen as a positive. Because that means you

19:58

being kind of... hiding away

20:00

at the back of the battlefield and not getting stuck in.

20:04

Would it affect where you went after death,

20:06

these different sorts of death? Because you have

20:08

these different death realms in Old North religion,

20:10

is that right? Yes. From

20:13

the written sources, and we should just mention,

20:15

as always, that the sagas in the text

20:17

are written centuries after the fact here. So

20:20

what we're getting is a translation

20:22

of the generations after about how they thought

20:24

their ancestors thought about death. So there's a

20:26

little bit of a pinch of

20:28

salt, as it were. But from the

20:31

written sources, the impression we get is that there

20:33

were numerous different kind of death realms. So

20:35

you have the famous one is

20:37

Valhalla, where the warriors go. But

20:40

you have others like there's a mountain

20:42

where some of the dead go. You

20:45

have Hel's realm, Hel is a goddess

20:47

of death, which was then loaned into

20:49

English as the name of

20:51

the place you go for bad debts in

20:53

the Christian sense. But it's actually a female

20:55

deity from Old North religion that's given name

20:57

to Hel. So that's the written

21:00

sources. Then the archaeological material, which is what

21:02

I work on primarily, also at

21:04

least shows this really broad repertoire

21:07

of how you want to bury or

21:09

dead. And that may then

21:11

dovetail quite well with these ideas. There are many

21:14

ways of dying. So dead bodies

21:16

could be cremated and they could be in

21:18

hume, and they could be put in mounds

21:20

and in ships, as we talked about, and in

21:23

wagons. There's lots

21:25

of evidence also from that Osobag

21:27

ship burial, that spectacular burial I

21:29

mentioned earlier for people

21:31

going back in to the graves,

21:33

reopening them, moving things

21:36

around, taking artifacts out, taking

21:38

skeletal material out. And

21:41

so I think you get a very

21:43

strong sense in the Viking age that there's

21:46

a difference between being biologically dead and socially

21:48

dead. And I wonder if that dovetails with

21:50

what some of the other stories we're hearing

21:52

in this programme as well, that the dead

21:55

can continue to have a very strong social

21:57

presence after the heart stopped

21:59

beating. And is it

22:01

a sense of that social presence that leads someone

22:03

to go into a burial site and shift things

22:05

around? Do we know why they would do that?

22:08

It's this very strong sense of engagement with

22:11

the dead in different ways. So this physical

22:13

engagement, yes, it seems like they went in

22:16

and they removed swords or

22:18

heirlooms, perhaps to give them

22:20

to the descendants or create

22:22

a real oral idealized link

22:24

with ancestors. But

22:27

I wonder if they also didn't target

22:29

skeletal remains. And that becomes

22:31

really interesting from my research project where we're

22:33

looking at these broken skeletal

22:35

elements that are found, you know, out

22:38

of place. Were they

22:40

harvested from burials or not? And that's one

22:42

of the questions that we're trying to find out. What

22:45

happens also when Christianity comes along

22:47

and begins to mix with Old

22:50

Norse religion? Because infanticide remained legal

22:52

and socially acceptable even after conversion

22:54

to Christianity. So why was that?

22:57

There are some shifts that happen with introduction to

22:59

Christianity, just to answer that first. One of them

23:02

is that we get a strong sense in the

23:04

Viking Age and the pre-Christian period that not everyone

23:06

is afforded a burial, at least not in a

23:08

way we can recognize today. So

23:10

one of the things that happened when Christianity comes

23:13

in is that the cemetery

23:15

starts to look more like a

23:17

demographic real picture. You have more

23:20

sex balance in terms of biological sex, men

23:22

and women. You have more children. So

23:25

in the pre-Christian period, they clearly didn't afford

23:28

everyone burial in the same way. That's

23:31

one of the shifts. When we

23:33

have this question of infanticide, that

23:35

was clearly socially acceptable before the

23:37

conversion to Christianity, not only in

23:39

Scandinavia but in many of the

23:41

Germanic societies. And when you

23:43

think about it in societies where you don't

23:45

really have any contraceptives nor do you have

23:47

any way

23:50

of ending or terminating

23:52

a pregnancy without endangering the life of the

23:54

mother, then it's perhaps not

23:56

such a leap to think that you

23:58

might have other is of reproductive

24:01

control. And this is, you know, macabre

24:03

and sad to think about. But in

24:06

these societies, as in many others, it

24:08

seems that to stop

24:11

nursing early, to neglect the

24:13

child, to expose them, that

24:15

could be socially acceptable ways of

24:17

controlling the population. One

24:19

of the interesting kind

24:21

of psychological mechanisms to legitimize that, I think,

24:24

is this idea of the changeling, which you

24:26

have in English as well. So

24:28

the changeling is the

24:30

child of supernatural

24:33

creatures or beings that live in

24:35

the forest, these otherworldly presences.

24:37

And if you have a child

24:40

that does not perhaps have a

24:42

normal appearance, you would say, this

24:44

isn't actually my child. This

24:47

is a changeling. Someone from that other people,

24:49

from these other people, have come in and

24:51

they've swapped the child. And what must they

24:53

do now? Well, I must take this child

24:55

and bring it back to the forest or to the

24:57

mountain and leave it there so they can

25:00

pick it up again. Harriet,

25:02

in the poetry that you look at, how do

25:04

we find the life course as a whole being

25:06

imagined? I think it's just so profoundly variable.

25:08

I think that's the thing I've mostly come

25:10

away with after looking at it. We

25:13

might have heard of the ages of man. I

25:15

don't know how widespread that concept is nowadays, but

25:17

the idea that there are a certain number of

25:19

ages of man's life. I guess it's very famous

25:21

from Shakespeare and as you like it. Of

25:23

course, if you make it past those early

25:25

years, then your chances of living a decently

25:28

long life are quite high. So do we

25:30

find some of these medieval poems perhaps offering

25:32

people a certain degree of

25:34

guidance, comfort, perhaps acceptance when it comes to

25:36

death, a kind of wisdom for life? Is

25:38

that how they might have been used by

25:41

people? I think so, absolutely. It

25:43

depends what we think literature is to some

25:45

degree. I suppose is it a way of

25:47

testing out ideas, of experimenting with imagining what

25:50

a life could look like? And I think that's fair.

25:52

I think a lot of these preoccupations

25:54

run right through the medieval period. And by

25:56

the time you get to the 15th century,

25:59

you're getting text. books on dying. One

26:02

way to refer to them. The arts mariendi,

26:04

the art of dying way kind of says

26:06

to try these things. Which is

26:08

really getting to a point where it's quite directive about

26:10

what you should do on your deathbed. It also has

26:12

a little script for people around you to ask

26:14

you questions about are you sorry enough for

26:17

the terrible things you've done. That kind of

26:20

line of questioning which I personally can't imagine

26:22

saying to somebody in that situation to

26:24

try to make them feel actively worse. But it

26:27

was a way of protecting their soul I suppose.

26:29

But a lot of these things reach a real

26:31

kind of a point of intensity in the 15th

26:33

century. Yeah and why is that? I

26:35

think a lot of people think it's

26:38

the effect of the black death in

26:40

the 14th century wiping out at least

26:42

a third of the population of Europe

26:44

and just enormous cataclysmic social change bringing

26:47

death into everybody's lives and everybody living

26:49

in such intimacy with death. And

26:51

then you get a lot more kind of visual

26:54

traditions of death personified,

26:57

the dance macabre, the idea of everybody kind of

26:59

following death dancing in a line.

27:01

Definitely just a deep deep cultural fascination with

27:03

dying in the 15th century. You're

27:06

listening to Free Thinking on BBC Radio

27:08

3 and the Arts and Ideas podcast

27:10

with me Chris Harding. On the Free

27:13

Thinking programme website we have a collection

27:15

of episodes called The Way We Live

27:17

Now exploring everything from sleep to poignix.

27:20

All available to download as the Arts and

27:22

Ideas podcast where you can also find essays

27:25

written by the 2023 new generation

27:28

thinkers including one by Marianne.

27:31

Pauline Harding one of the focal

27:33

points for your research is Uganda's

27:35

one and only UNESCO World Heritage

27:38

Site, the Kasubi tombs. What

27:40

do visitors encounter when they get there? This

27:42

is an amazing site which is

27:45

it's built from almost entirely natural

27:48

materials. So you have a main

27:50

tomb structure which is about

27:52

15 metres tall at the

27:54

centre. It's a conical in shape, stitched.

27:57

Inside are buried four o'clock

28:00

of the last kings of Buganda,

28:02

Buganda being a kingdom with its origins in the

28:05

14th century that reached the pinnacle of its power

28:07

during the British protectorate in the 1890s to 1962

28:11

when the Buganda became independent. So

28:14

it's part of a larger landscape

28:16

of about 26 hectares and

28:19

it has an inner

28:21

courtyard around which there are several

28:23

structures that are smaller versions of

28:25

this large, fetched building. And

28:28

in these live various heirs

28:31

of the wives and half-sisters of

28:33

the kings who are buried within

28:36

the site itself. And they all

28:38

have a spiritual tie to

28:40

those kings. So their lives are

28:43

geared around honouring the kings, engaging

28:45

with them, finding out their everyday

28:47

wishes, performing

28:49

rituals to them. And

28:51

it's a site really that celebrates those

28:54

kings even in death. How does this

28:56

site differ to the one that you told us about earlier on?

29:00

So this is a much more official

29:02

site. I suppose you could say it's celebrated

29:04

by the whole country as a

29:06

piece of World Heritage that is remarkable

29:09

as a feat of engineering

29:12

really. The way it's been built is absolutely

29:15

magnificent. The other site

29:17

is much more based on everyday dreams.

29:19

So people have communications with spirits in

29:21

their dreams and they go and they

29:24

change the environment

29:26

based on what they have been told

29:28

by those spirits. Those are spirits of

29:30

the dead. They might be ancestral spirits.

29:33

They could also be the spirits of

29:35

what are called balubale, which are almost

29:37

deified. They're not actually gods. They are

29:39

still spirits, but they are the spirits

29:42

of deceased heroes or notable people from

29:44

the past. So how big

29:46

an area are we talking about with these

29:48

mineshafts or pits? It's a

29:50

pre-colonial mineshaft site, but the origins have

29:52

been forgotten. So in the 1920s, some

29:55

British geologists went and

29:57

they counted 176 mineshafts. the

30:00

landscape over about 40 acres I

30:02

think the whole site is and these are

30:04

about a one meter wide and up to

30:06

10 meters deep. Nowadays they there

30:08

have been more recent counts that say there might be

30:11

even up to 400 of them actually over the wider

30:13

landscape. But because the

30:15

origins have been forgotten they

30:17

became associated with a myth that

30:20

says that Willumby basically dug

30:22

these holes. So we've been hearing Pauline

30:25

and Harriet's medieval poems all these stories

30:27

about death. What sorts of stories are

30:29

told about death in Uganda and also

30:31

about the origins of these pits that

30:34

you've been telling us about? So

30:36

Kintu, I'll start with Kintu. Kintu is the first

30:38

king of the under and he

30:41

was said to be roaming the earth when

30:43

he met the daughter of the sky spirit

30:45

called Gulu. So this woman

30:48

Nambi decided she wanted to marry

30:50

him. Gulu wouldn't

30:52

allow them to marry until he had,

30:54

Kintu had performed a number of tests in the

30:56

sky. Kintu managed to do this. I won't tell

30:58

you what all the tests were or we'll be

31:00

here for hours. Gulu

31:03

gave him permission to go back down to earth and

31:06

he said please hurry otherwise Willumby will

31:08

follow. Now Willumby means in the local

31:10

language of Luganda, Willumby means sickness.

31:13

They hurried back down to earth but then on the

31:15

way they realized they'd forgotten to take millet to feed

31:17

their chickens because at this time there was said to

31:19

be no life on earth at all there was no

31:21

food or anything so they had to go back up

31:23

to get the millet to feed their chickens. And this

31:26

time Willumby saw them and he followed. At first

31:28

everything was fine. They had several children and

31:31

Nambi planted a garden and all was well

31:33

until the children grew up a bit and

31:35

Willumby requested one of them as a servant

31:37

and Kintu refused and so

31:40

the angry Willumby started to kill off all of their

31:42

children and Gulu at this point

31:44

sent another brother of Willumby's called

31:46

Caicuzzi. Now this means the digger. He sent

31:48

him down to earth to chase Willumby back

31:50

up from where he was hiding in the

31:52

underworld at this place called Tanda. So

31:55

Caicuzzi came down and kept trying to dig

31:57

him out and these holes emerged

31:59

as a result of... Caracuzzi trying to dig

32:01

out Willumby, but he never managed to

32:03

catch him. So basically Willumby is said

32:05

still to remain in those holes at

32:08

Tanda. So there'd be approach with a

32:10

certain amount of trepidation by people visiting, no?

32:13

Definitely. And when I first

32:15

went there in 2009, as

32:17

part of a UCL field trip, I was very

32:20

uneasy actually. It had a very dark

32:22

and strange atmosphere that I couldn't quite

32:24

explain. And as the

32:26

years have gone on, it's got more and

32:28

more popular. It's gained a real reputation as

32:30

a site to ward off death. So people

32:32

really go and pray there because they believe

32:34

that that is somewhere where they can address

32:36

all of the horrible ills. And this has

32:38

become particularly so, I mean, there's been a

32:40

horrible AIDS epidemic in the 1980s that caused

32:42

so much death. So

32:44

this site actually only became popular from about

32:47

2000. Probably because the

32:50

landowner decided to clear some of the land

32:52

and then invited people in thinking that in

32:54

the political context of the nation at the

32:56

time, so the kingdoms had actually been abolished

32:59

by Milton Abbose in 1967. And

33:01

in 1993, current president Yuri Massevany decided to

33:08

reinstate them in his cultural

33:10

institutions. So people were quite keen to

33:12

connect with the cultural identity and roots of their

33:15

kingdom. And so this site opened up that was

33:17

representative of one of the

33:19

foundation myths of Uganda. And they came and

33:21

they wanted to celebrate that. But at the

33:24

same time, there was so much suffering in

33:26

this country and passed all these decades of

33:28

political conflict and AIDS that people

33:30

came for a slightly different reason from

33:32

what the landowner had been anticipating. So

33:34

he had a spirit medium to feel

33:37

the people coming and the spirit medium

33:39

was very influential and she actually attracted

33:41

more and more people. And then more

33:43

people started dreaming. I suppose you could

33:45

say that dreams are influenced by your

33:47

social context. And if there are many

33:49

fears in your country or many fears

33:51

in your society, you will start maybe

33:54

dreaming dark dreams. And

33:56

so those people started coming because they

33:58

believed that the spirits send messages through

34:00

dreams. So there's a real cultural heritage

34:02

in Uganda of dream and finding

34:05

real significance in that. So

34:07

if you've got that cultural heritage, you've

34:09

got the Christian influence that's also come

34:11

into Uganda. How is that fed into

34:13

a debate now about burial sites, how

34:15

they ought to be treated, respected, protected?

34:18

This is a very difficult question

34:20

because this is such a different

34:24

case. I mean there are no actual people buried

34:27

in Tanda. This is not a graveyard. This

34:29

is a site where spirits are said to

34:31

go and then leave. There

34:33

have been two people who have actually died

34:36

at the site. One person fell into one

34:38

of the holes. This actually has contributed to

34:40

more power, I think,

34:42

perception of the power of the site because

34:45

Willimbi has basically swallowed someone. And

34:47

I think Kasubi is a more

34:49

interesting case when it comes to

34:51

actual burial practice. And before the

34:53

missionaries came to Uganda, a

34:56

king would be buried in a palace and

34:58

his jawbone would be removed, be kept in

35:00

a shrine separate from the body. And the

35:02

palace around the body would be allowed to

35:04

decay. But the shrine itself

35:06

would be kept with the jawbone and the umbilical

35:08

cord inside. And

35:10

then the descendants of the kings would

35:13

look after it on an ongoing basis.

35:15

Whereas at Kasubi, perhaps because of

35:18

Islamic and Christian influence from the

35:20

mid-1800s to late-1800s, Islam came

35:23

from about 1844 with traders from

35:25

the east coast. And you've

35:27

got Christian missionaries coming from Europe in the 1870s.

35:31

And they had a big

35:33

impact on beliefs. And

35:35

just in case the kings had to face a

35:37

judgment day, they wanted their bodies to be kept

35:39

whole so that they were able to engage

35:42

in that process. So now you have the

35:44

bodies buried whole. And instead of having a

35:46

jawbone shrine on the side, they kept the

35:48

body in the palace and the palace was

35:50

no longer allowed to crumble. So over the

35:52

years, this one's been

35:54

reinforced with concrete, with steel. So what once would

35:57

have been something that was just about to collapse

35:59

is now. is now kept and it's actually got

36:01

four bodies in it which would never ever have

36:03

been allowed in the past so there have been

36:06

enormous changes mostly as a result of Christianity

36:08

and you've actually got even a Christian graveyard

36:10

out back in this one that's all made

36:13

from Quonky so it's a very interesting kind

36:15

of religiously syncretic scenario.

36:17

Yeah and Marianna Thorne who studied

36:19

that kind of religious mixing linked

36:22

of course with death and with burial anything

36:24

that jumps out for you here hearing about

36:27

this extraordinary Ugandan context? Yeah it's amazing

36:29

it's really interesting again we have this very strong

36:31

idea here of the present dead and they are

36:33

super active in politics as well it sounds like

36:35

to me it's

36:37

very interesting. I got caught up about

36:39

the dreams because I find dreams fascinating

36:42

and some years ago I wrote a

36:44

paper about dreams in the Viking Age

36:46

as well based on written sources and

36:48

there too there's this interesting idea of

36:50

the dead coming to

36:53

you in dreams, the kin group

36:55

having some sort of spirit guardian,

36:57

a female ancestor that would come

36:59

and tell foreboding things in dreams but

37:02

also that people could send senses of

37:04

themselves or parts of themselves to others

37:06

and give messages in dreams in the

37:08

form of animals so this idea that

37:10

when you're asleep it's a

37:12

transitional state where you're in touch with the

37:15

other side and perhaps the dead and the

37:17

ancestors and the other world and I think

37:19

you know that's probably quite widespread I thought

37:21

that was fascinating and then you have the

37:23

idea about bodies and holes and parts which

37:26

you can find in so many many

37:29

societies the thing about the mandible and

37:31

the umbilical cord is really interesting because

37:33

it connects to the life course as

37:35

well doesn't it the umbilical cord obviously

37:37

from childhood and thinking about what you

37:39

were talking about the life course of

37:41

people and the ways they

37:44

could die but also the the mandible I wonder

37:46

what that's about do you have any idea why

37:48

they were interested in the in the jaw? It

37:53

says in an early text

37:55

from the 1900s that it's just thought in

37:57

that region to be associated with the spirit

38:00

There is no actual more information. There have been

38:02

more recent suggestions that it's because it's where

38:04

you how you speak I haven't actually

38:06

found any written back up for that

38:09

Katrina was there any kind of religious

38:12

or spiritual elements to how the morgues

38:14

in Paris and New York operated or

38:16

we were thinking about Modern municipal pragmatism

38:18

really in that case. Well, thank you

38:20

very much about municipal pragmatism here I

38:22

think especially also France at this point

38:24

is technically secular countries from the post-revolution

38:26

period So these are very

38:28

much bare bones is perhaps the wrong

38:31

term to use but they are yeah,

38:33

they're really municipal sites and they're very

38:35

much Institutions are they're

38:37

very much for the management and processing and

38:39

I think that one thing that comes across

38:41

sometimes Discussions of these morgues

38:43

when it comes to displaying the dead So

38:46

in Paris is obviously a bit of a different

38:49

religious context in New York Sometimes

38:51

they didn't just displayed the dead but it didn't become an

38:53

attraction in the same way And there's

38:56

some argument that perhaps that's because of

38:58

the different religious sensibilities But

39:00

it's hard to know for sure if that was the

39:02

reason that it didn't become an attraction there and obviously

39:04

that you know Critics of France and prisons at the

39:07

time again went back to this idea of being like

39:09

all French They're so disconnected. They don't have any feelings.

39:11

They're too macabre. That's why they could display the dead

39:14

I think it was perhaps a bit more complicated

39:16

than that I just

39:18

think it's so fascinating in terms of what's

39:20

comforting when a person dies, you know And

39:22

whether that kind of standardization on some level

39:24

is very comforting there's a process and there's

39:27

you know a sequence of steps and it's

39:29

the same for everybody and You

39:31

know the state is involved or institutions are

39:33

involved and I can definitely see what that

39:35

would be extremely comforting but then there are

39:37

so many other kind of traditions that Medievalists

39:39

look at more where it's the variety is

39:41

the striking thing, you know when people are

39:44

buried and they're buried in different ways at

39:46

different times of life like there's a Amazing

39:49

practice where young children

39:51

babies are often buried under the eaves

39:53

of churches So that water drips off the

39:55

roof and people think maybe that's a kind

39:57

of posthumous kind of baptism like a kind

39:59

of ongoing baptism or

40:02

else children are buried with pots

40:04

more to signify feeding and nurture.

40:06

And that kind of, yeah, I guess

40:09

personalisation of what happens after

40:11

death, I can imagine is comforting in a different way.

40:13

But it's fascinating to think of both sides of it.

40:15

And is there a role, Harriet, for dreams

40:17

in the medieval era when people are

40:19

thinking about death and the afterlife? Absolutely.

40:22

I think I'm more familiar

40:24

with dreams that are revelatory

40:26

in a slightly more traditional

40:28

Christian sense kind of

40:30

messages about the afterlife. But a very

40:33

famous poem along these lines would be

40:35

Pearl in the 14th century, where

40:38

the dreamer is visited by their daughter

40:41

who died, I think, before she was

40:43

two is what's implied. But

40:45

she appears kind of older in this

40:47

vision, more like

40:50

possibly this is some kind of perfect age.

40:52

She's kind of a maiden figure, which may be

40:54

kind of ideal kind of age

40:56

for women at that time. But

40:59

the messages she's bringing are quite

41:01

by the book, in

41:03

terms of encouraging him to think on

41:05

his place in heaven and

41:07

try to work to be there with her. And it's

41:10

part of the difficulty of the text is we in some

41:12

ways might want it to be a bit more personal than

41:14

it is and want her voice to be a bit more

41:16

personal than it is. But she can she can feel a

41:18

little cold. And at the end of the

41:20

dream, he runs across the river to try to meet

41:22

her, he kind of tries to jump the gun and

41:24

he tries to react instinctively in an emotional way. And

41:26

the shock of that kind of wakes him up. But

41:29

it's a kind of indication of

41:31

how he hasn't quite got it. He's still incredibly

41:33

bogged down in his love of her and his

41:35

memory of her. And it's difficult for him to

41:37

try to think in a more abstract way about his soul

41:40

in the way that the Pearl maiden seems to want

41:42

him to do. I want to

41:44

finish by asking what all this

41:46

research that you've done on death has

41:48

done for your own approach to

41:51

death. I'll start with you, Marianne. Being

41:54

an archaeologist, it means getting in

41:56

touch with literally remains of other

42:00

human beings. So it's made me think

42:02

about ethics surrounding display

42:04

of dead human bodies, etc.

42:06

On a more personal level,

42:09

I think being non-religious myself,

42:11

I don't care that much what happens with

42:13

my body after I'm dead. I'm not going

42:16

to know the difference. It's fun to see

42:18

the variation and think about all the possibilities

42:20

my mourners could have. What

42:23

I really take with me is the idea

42:25

of a living funeral. So if people haven't

42:27

come across that, it's the idea that you

42:29

don't wait until you're done to have your funeral.

42:31

You have it beforehand and you have a big

42:34

party. I've planned it all out in detail. It's

42:36

going to be great. Katrina.

42:39

Yeah, I think from a broad perspective, it's

42:41

made me think a lot about what

42:43

happens to the people who are most marginalized

42:46

in society and how they continue to be

42:48

marginalized in the past and how

42:50

they continue to be pushed

42:52

out of the social

42:54

body and out of traditional

42:57

funerals and traditional burials. They end up in

42:59

mass graves and that kind of thing and

43:01

how there's not enough acknowledgement of that. There's

43:04

still so much stigma around that that shouldn't

43:06

be there because funerals

43:08

are expensive. The death process in that sense,

43:10

the death industry is expensive. I

43:12

think that there's so much work to be done in

43:14

terms of de-segmentizing that for people. Just

43:17

because you can't afford an individual

43:20

traditional burial doesn't mean

43:22

that you're worth any less. I think

43:25

on a personal level, having seen

43:27

so many examples

43:29

of what we would consider to be bad

43:31

deaths, not in the Viking context, but very

43:33

much in the context

43:35

of painful or violent or untimely

43:38

death, I think it's

43:40

made me think very much that a good death

43:42

is mostly just not a bad death. If you

43:44

get a decent amount of time and

43:46

you're able to put your affairs in order and

43:48

you can die without pain and in

43:52

comfort, that's great. I think

43:54

that it's perhaps given me quite reasonable

43:57

expectations of death. Come

44:00

away with that. Harriet. Yes,

44:02

I think, speaking of reasonable expectation, I

44:05

think the thing I've really held on to is this

44:07

idea of living as always

44:09

a kind of outliving and always kind

44:12

of living in the absence of people

44:14

is something that everybody goes through kind

44:16

of from the off. Life

44:18

is always a kind of survival and getting

44:21

used to that and getting used to the ways

44:23

in which life courses are so variable. I

44:26

think it's prepared me in a funny way, studying these

44:28

texts, for kind of realising

44:31

that in real life whenever

44:33

I'm prompted to, that we're always

44:36

kind of living in the absence of others,

44:38

I guess. Pulling. I

44:41

think I've felt I

44:43

wanted to maintain a kind of

44:45

objectivity throughout my research. I don't

44:48

necessarily share the beliefs of the

44:50

people that I've been researching, but

44:53

I have found them very interesting as a

44:55

kind of metaphor, I think. Maybe even if

44:57

you don't believe in spirits, you don't believe

44:59

that the dead continue to exist on Earth

45:01

alongside the living, what's

45:03

memory? I think when

45:06

it comes to the dead, they do kind of

45:08

live on. They live on in your thoughts.

45:10

They live on in your mind. They

45:13

might even have a kind of will

45:16

of their own if you know someone so well and they've

45:18

died. They might even start doing things

45:20

in your mind and your imagination that they actually would

45:23

have done in life. And that is

45:25

a kind of possession of thoughts

45:28

if you start thinking in a kind of parallel

45:30

way. So I suppose it's

45:33

been quite a philosophical journey if I reflect on

45:35

it. So I think I'd send a dead a

45:37

kind of voice still with us. My

45:39

thanks to my guests, to my producer

45:41

Robin Reed and to our studio manager,

45:43

Steve Greenwood. Coming

45:46

up on Freethinking, Shahid Abari and

45:48

guests delve into the idea of

45:50

home and homeland while Matthew Sweet

45:52

explores the joys of a good

45:54

old-fashioned prank.