20 TH. PETERSEN, [1907 



793, and consequently that year cannot be used as a general 

 starting point for fixing the date of graves containing such objects. 

 As to the reliquary, however, there is no reason to suppose that 

 it vvas carried off and brought to Norway in this early time. The 

 raids undertaken as early as the first part of the 7th century be- 

 long to a period too remote from the date of the biirial, for the 

 shrine with any degree of probability to be derived from these 

 expeditions. Nor is it probable that the shrine was carried away in 

 the interval before A. D. 793 ; for it is quite unlikely that a foray, 

 in which a reliquary with its contents (an object at that time 

 certainly of high ecclesiastical and national value) formed part of 

 the booty, should not have been recorded in any annal or chro- 

 nicle! Not till the year A. D. 793 have we reliable historical re- 

 cords of incursions on the coasts of the British Isles by Nor- 

 wegian Vikings. But in this and the following years we read 

 of the plundering of a great number of British monasteries and 

 churches, the relics and ecclesiastical ornaments being a special 

 object for the rapacity of the pagans.^) 1 think it, therefore, not 

 unlikely — perhaps I dåre say probable — that the Melhus-reliquary 

 was carried off and brought to Norway just on one of these 

 first Viking expeditions. That this at all events has not taken 

 place la ter than the beginning of the 9th century appears clearly 

 from the early date of the grave. 



The find at Melhus has an historical significance as a direct 

 evidence that also Vikings from Namdalen Valley took part in the 

 first Viking expeditions to the Celtic lands in the West. There 

 is now much which points to the faet that at the beginning of 

 the Viking age the district of Namdalen occupied a prominent 

 position among the northern districts of Norway. By systematic 

 excavations there has been discovered during the last years a 

 number of graves dating frorn this period, several of them being 

 of great interest (Bjornes, Fuglem, Skomo, Vold, Melhus). Burial 

 of unburnt bodies has been the prevailing custom and in most 

 cases the body has been placed in a boat — in a few cases in a 



1) G. s t o r m, Kritiske Bidrag til N'ikingetidens Historie. I. K'ra. 1878, pp. 10 ff. 



