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Fire runs the whole length of the deck. A round shield still lies flat in the middle of it, and the painted rings show through the flame. The men who pushed the ship out are in the water below.

The ship goes out at night, because that is how the story wants it. On the wet sand, bare-backed men lean into the hull and push. On the deck above them, laid out among his weapons with the rigging already alight, the chieftain makes his last crossing. A war leader in gold scale armor raises one open hand on the beach, the salute of a man who has just set fire to his friend. The tide takes the light out. That is the funeral as the north sang it, and it is the version Frank Dicksee painted in 1893: one fire, one grey sea, and a crowd holding still. What the ground gives up is both humbler and stranger. The Norse did bury leaders in ships, and archaeologists keep finding them. Oseberg gave up a carved vessel holding two women, with sledges, woven hangings and a cart. Gokstad held a man laid out among 12 horses, 6 dogs and a peacock. But those ships were dragged ashore and buried under mounds, not launched burning. The flaming ship on the water belongs mostly to legend. The god Baldr was burned on his own vessel, which a giantess had to launch because the gods could not shift it. Old king Haki had himself laid on a burning ship and pushed out with the wind behind him. Songs are cheaper than ships. A real longship was years of work. Burning one was a boast few families could afford. The buried ships, when archaeology finally opened them, turned out to be arguments as much as graves. The Oseberg ship came out of a Norwegian mound in 1904, 70 feet of carved oak. Tree rings date the burial to 834. It held no warlord: two women lay inside, one old and one younger, with sledges, a cart, looms and imported silk. Which of the two the ship was for, queen or priestess or both, is still argued. Whoever she was, her people gave up a whole ship for her, then pinned it under stones and a hill of turf. They built a voyage and then made sure it could never start. One eyewitness did see the fire. In 922 an Arab diplomat named Ibn Fadlan watched Rus traders on the Volga burn a dead chief aboard his beached ship. The funeral ran 10 days and ended with a slave girl killed to go with him. Ibn Fadlan wrote it all down like a clerk, and he was appalled. A Rus man beside him laughed at the Arabs for putting their dead in the earth to be eaten by worms. We burn him in an eye-blink, the man said through the interpreter, and he enters paradise at once. Then the man added the detail that makes it history rather than sermon: the wind was strong that day, so his lord would arrive quickly. Dicksee painted none of the logistics and all of the belief. His Britain was in the grip of a Viking revival. Manchester Art Gallery has the canvas now, given in 1928 by a man named Arthur Burton in memory of his mother. The painting still does what the funeral was for. The man is not lowered out of sight. He leaves in the open, on his own hull, and the fire takes what the family spent years building. The sea kept the ashes. The story kept everything else.