The Eddic funerals of Balder, Sigfred, and Brunhild, in the Long "Brunhild's Lay", Tregrof Gudrumar and the lost poem of Balder's death paraphrased in the prose Edda); the last message given to the corpse on the pyre (Woden's last words to Balder are famous); the riding round the pyre; the eulogium; the piling of the barrow, which sometimes took whole days, as the size of many existing grass mounds assure us; the funeral feast, where an immense vat of ale or mead is drunk in honor of the dead; the epitaph, like an ogham, set up on a stone over the barrow.
The inclusion of a live man with the dead in a barrow, with the live or fresh-slain beasts (horse and bound) of the dead man, seems to point to a time or district when burning was not used.

Apparently, at one time, judging from Frode's law, only chiefs and warriors were burnt.
Not to bury was, as in Hellas, an insult to the dead, reserved for the bodies of hated foes.

Conquerors sometimes show their magnanimity (like Harald Godwineson) by offering to bury their dead foes.
The buried "barrow-ghost" was formidable; he could rise and slay and eat, vampire-like, as in the tale of Asmund and Aswit.

He must in such case be mastered and prevented doing further harm by decapitation and thigh-forking, or by staking and burning.

So criminals' bodies were often burnt to stop possible haunting.
Witches and wizards could raise corpses by spells to make them prophesy.
The dead also appeared in visions, usually foretelling death to the person they visited.
OTHER WORLDS .-- The "Land of Undeath" is spoken of as a place reached by an exiled hero in his wanderings.