 I hope that you are still waiting for this very last paper. I'll be doing my best to make it as interesting as possible, though I find it a little hard coming after you, Marie, with these really amazing textiles. So, but I'll try to show some wonderful ones as well. Yes, I'm Charlotte Rimmstatt from the National Museum of Denmark and together with the Ulle Mannering and on behalf of Ulle and myself, I'll be presenting this paper on pillows and mattresses in Scandinavian Viking-age graves, and that is primarily focusing on the Danish ones. So, as we all know, when a person dies, the body can be dealt with in several ways. And we know this from many archaeological contexts where people have been cremated, embalmed, buried in upright or prone positions, or put to rest underneath a burial mound. And all of these ways of burying must reflect an understanding of death and of the dead that we can unfortunately only get a glimpse of. In some Scandinavian Viking-age burials, the dead is lying on layers of feathers and downs, as we have just heard in the Belciarum, as if to ensure a comfortable eternal rest. But what do these feathers and downs actually represent, and why are they present in the grave? In the following, I shall present some of the Danish Viking-age graves with preserved feathers and downs, and we shall explore the connection between death and sleep. So, at the National Museum of Denmark, we are currently working on a project called Fashioning the Viking Age. And it's focusing on the variation of textiles and textile productions and garments of the Viking Age. And in the project, we seek to reconstruct two garments, a male and a female garment, based on the rich textile materials from two burials, the Maman and the Vilehoj Burials, both in Jutland and dated to the late 10th century. However, finds of feathers and downs in both burials indicate that some of these textiles may not derive from clothing, but from the bedding of the grave. The rich Maman burial was discovered in 1868. The excavation was done unprofessionally by local farmers who literally dug into the grave mound, ripped out the finds, and just spread them all over town. So, but fortunately later on, most of the things were gathered again and sent to the National Museum of Denmark where the finds are exhibited today. The grave dates back to around 970 AD, and it consisted of a wooden chamber with a coffin inside and many grave finds. Among other things, the famous Maman axe, as you can see here with silver decorations. There was also a wooden bucket and a large candle of beeswax and several well-preserved textiles. So these are only some of the textiles from the grave, but you have here two cape bands of silk and needle binding in the middle, and then tablet woven bands. We also have two woven bracelets, also with tablet woven bands and a tabby woven silk, and then here's another loose tablet woven bands. There are quite a lot of them. We also have a lot of fragments of two-one twill embroidery, two-one twill with embroidery on. And the motifs are, I know it's very difficult to see, and a canvas leaves here, and here we have two animals facing each other. We also have birds and other four-legged animals, leopards and human face masks. Only a few human bones were preserved in the grave, but the dead had clearly been supported by an underlay of feathers and downs. And though the excavation was done in great haste, even the smallest fragments of these feather lumps were collected, and today they are still preserved, and therefore we can see that the grave bedding must have consisted of at least three different types of feather and down-filled objects. The first one is what I chose to call a mattress, just for you to understand what I mean. And it's around 18 lumps of feathers and downs, the biggest one around 36 centimeters in diameter and two to three centimeters thick, and it lay underneath the dead person. Some of these lumps still have imprints of the human bones, and vague imprints in the feathers indicate that the bolster could have been of plant fibers, perhaps flutes, flags. Secondly, smaller feather fragments were also present, only a few millimeters thick and covered in leather on both sides. And on several of them, traces of tabloid woven bands were found, indicating that this might have been a small leather cushion, perhaps edged with these tabloid woven bands. And hay or straw is present underneath the leather, and it may have covered the gray floor of the grave bed. Straw is well known to have been used as the bottom cover of beds from the Middle Ages and even well into modern times, so it's actually not surprising to find it as the lowest insulating layer of the grave. And last but not least, we have an almost complete pillowcase made of tabloid woven wool and dyed blue. The pillow has a complex construction pattern consisting of a very long piece of textile that has been folded into a pillow with a seam at the back, and then two drop-shaped gussets has been inserted on each long side, creating, as you can imagine, a shallow middle and then a long, oh, high ends. The seams are covered with raised fishbone stitches done with red wool thread, but the filling of the pillow is somewhat of a mystery because not a single feather or down has been found inside today. Perhaps the feathers were removed right after the excavation, but that would still leave some tiny, tiny traces, I imagine, but perhaps it's more likely that the pillowcase was filled with something else, possibly a plant material, which is not preserved, but we still have some microscopic traces of plant fibers that seem to confirm this, and it could be from linaigrette, but we haven't done any further analysis on these so far. So, not too far from the Marmel burial, another rich burial was excavated in 1880, the Wilhoit burial, and it contained a woman of high status buried in a wagon bed. Amongst the grave finds were a spindle roll, a pair of scissors, and a beet necklace. And this is actually a little bit of a wrong picture because the necklace didn't look exactly like this. Here the beads have been collected into this little tiny bracelet today, but they were originally mowing out in the grave as a necklace, which also included a coin that had been pierced in middle. Both textile and leather fragments were preserved, such as tabular woven textile with an interwoven cross-decoration, like this. Tabular woven bands on top of fur, and even a leather shoe. Actually it's a pair of shoes, you can see here, still with the toe bones preserved inside. The rest of the body and the garment, the fur and the feathers had all decomposed into flat cakes, thus creating a complicated micro stratigraphy for us archaeologists to decode. But also here the feathers and gowns seem to have been used as a soft and comfortable underlay for the dead. The bolster itself is most likely a green or blue 2-2 twill, which has been fold and is found in connection with the feathers. And the layer sequence clearly shows that this green or blue textile must have been connected somehow with the feathers, and such a weave was actually used for sheets in the Middle Ages, known as velmy. In order to keep the small feathers and gowns from flying out, it was necessary for the textile to be tightly woven, and often also full, except if the feathers came from the bird Greep, whose feathers easily stick together, I have been told. There was also a lot of fur and skin fragments in the grave, as you can see here, which may come from parts of the bedding as well, could be a leather sheet, but we don't know that. So over the years, the feathers and gowns from the two graves have been put through tests for species identification with very differentiated results, going right from chicken to duck, and to, yes, greep. And we have now once again taken out samples for species identification from the mammon and velary burials, and the results will arrive in a short amount of time. So unfortunately, I can't tell you what it is today. But greep feathers supposedly also occurred in King Gorm's grave in Yelling in Denmark, where they have been interpreted as the filling of a pillow. And in two of the burials from Birke, near Stockholm in Sweden, feathers were also recorded, though recent looks at these graves makes it a little bit unsure if it's actually feather or maybe fur. It's very hard to see, but we'll look into that. Also from the Ulseberg ship burial from Norway, which you've heard a lot about today, in that grave, more than 30 kilos of feathers were found, possibly deriving from a huge mattress. The bolster has not been identified, as the feathers today stick to many different textiles. But also in the Rolfsøy burial from the 10th century, feathers and downs were recorded, and possibly also in many more graves. And if you know of any, welcome to let me know. I'll be fast. Right. So feathers seem to be connected to special graves, which makes sense, as it took many hours first to collect enough feathers and downs, then to clean and dry them before they were sewn into the pillowcase or bolster. And the rest of the people were, of course, bound to fill the beds with other materials, such as straw, harps, mass and wool scrap or whatever came in handy. What seems to be clear from most of the grave context is that feathers were used for items, whether it be duvets or pillows, that people lay on and not something that covered themselves with. And this must somehow reflect the sleeping habits for the living people of their Viking age. A dead person does not need a soft underlay, but the living must have seen death as a sort of eternal sleep and therefore provided the necessary bedding equipment in the grave. The link between sleep and death was by no means new in the Viking age, as in the Greek mythology, the knight goddess, Nyx, was the mother of both sleep and death. And in the Scandinavian Bronze Age, people also buried on cow's hides and with blankets on, supposedly the way one could also have slept. So burying people in a manner that represented the idea of sleep or sleeping thus appears to be a tradition with long roots. The connection between death and sleep is further underlined by the finds of whole beds in burials, as in the aforementioned also bed burial, where at least four beds were preserved and these are freestanding beds, perhaps made for traveling. They're made of beech and one of them is elaborately carved with animals' heads. So the bed is only one meter and 65 meters in length, centimeters in length. And the average Viking age man was about 173 centimeters long and the woman about 158 centimeters long. So in order to fit the bed properly, one might have slept in a half sitting position and pillows would have come in handy as a back support. So the large pillow from the mom and grave may have been used this way. And such a broad pillow was later called a hoedyne in Danish, meaning a duvet for the head. A different kind of pillow was found in the grave of St. Canute in Ulse from around 1100 AD and this square pillow is made of exquisite silk from Central Asia and was used deliberately as a head support. So at least two kinds of pillows were probably found in a well-equipped bed. And it may have been as in much later times that the amount of bedding equipment was a synonym for the wealth of a family. The more duvets and pillows, the more wealth and power. And we also have another bed here from Krakstal which is much longer. It's over two meters long and there must have been used a lot of duvets and pillows in order to fill that up. The Icelandic sagas also mentioned benches alongside the houses and bed closets for people to sleep in but how common the freestanding bed versus these other bed types was is hard to say. The written sources offer limited information about the use of feathers, bedding equipment and the use of straws. But there are some. In the saga of Erik the Red, we hear about a woman sitting on a cushion filled with feathers and it's the same as Ida has already mentioned. A high seat was made ready for her with cushions to sit on. They should be filled with chicken feathers. That pillows were actually used as a head support. We hear in the saga of Laksdyllarna where Thorsten comes home in a sad mood. Thorsten then went home and was very sad. He went into the living room and sat down and asked to have a pillow underneath his head. It happened. The waitress saw that his tears ran onto the pillow. References to straw bedding is found in Gisla saga where a guy named Reu is hiding Gisla in a bed. He took out all the bedding textiles from the bed and said to Gisla that he should lay down in the straws and then he put all the bedding textile on top of him again. And in the Ida by Gisla, I'll do this quick, sorry. We hear about the bedding for a wealthy woman named Thorgan. She opened up her chest and took out valuable bedding textiles. She covered the bed with English sheets and a silk blanket, just as a curtain and other things, so valuable things that people had never seen the like which makes me, of course, think of the sheet that you mentioned. So several sagas mentioned the dead as living inside that grave mound. And in the dead, if the dead were somehow seen as still alive, obviously they would still need their precious sleeping gear and their life after death. And even though the Aslandis sagas must be used with great care, one thing is sure, both sleep and death came in many variations. But altogether, the fellow filled duets and pillows should be seen as special objects, perhaps even high status objects, on the same level as the silver decorated acts and the wonderful other textiles. So not only was it important to lie comfortably when sleeping, the luxurious underlay would also follow you in death and literally underline your importance in the afterlife. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.