Bodies of intoxication. Psychoactives in Viking ritual practice

The drunk and frenzied Viking is a trope in line with associated stereotypes of blood-thirsty warriors and senseless violence. However, enough evidence remains to suggest that intoxication due to alcohol, and perhaps other psychoactive substances, was integral to many aspects of life in the Late Iron/Viking Ages. After all, apparently there is no other word for ‘sober’ in Old Norse than ódrukkin — ‘un-drunk’. Viking bodies were, in many ways, bodies of intoxication. One of the aspects of life that alcohol permeates is ritual practice.To the extent that this has been studied, the use of alcohol conventionally links to ideas of frenzied warriors and berserkers, or with feasting. Some research over the last few decades has related intoxicants to ritual practices, specifically that of the völva — the female ritual specialist (e.g. Price 2019). More broadly Germanic work has centered élite drinking culture and the role of the ‘lady with the mead-cup’ (Enright 1996) and the female leader of the household as a powerbroker, mediating power relationships within the warrior-band through pouring of alcohol. What Iron and Viking age studies have not contemplated in much detail so far, is the fundamentally material and embodied process of making and ingesting alcohol or other psychoactives by taking them into and incorporating them with the body, generating specific embodied reactions in specific settings. Drawing on seminal work in anthropology and philosophy, this paper centers alcohol as a form of material culture, providing tangible sets of sensory experiences, but ultimately destined to be destroyed through the process of ingestion.