It is to be observed also that the saga evidence is defective as to the customs connected with cremation.[39] The only literary evidence we possess in regard to them is to be found in the strange narrative by Ahmed Ibn-Fozlan, an eye-witness of the ceremonies attending the incremation of the dead body of a Northern chief.[40] The scene is on the banks of the Volga, and the date is towards the close of the Viking time. The narrator tells us that there was a temporary interment till all the preparations were made; that a female slave who had elected to die with her master was given in charge to an old hag, who as mistress of the ceremonies was significantly styled “the angel of the dead;” that the dead man’s ship was hauled up on the strand and prepared to be his funeral pile; that, when all was ready, the corpse was taken out of its temporary grave, arrayed in fur-mounted and gold-embroidered garments, and laid in state on the deck, where a banquet was spread for him; that his weapons were placed ready to his hand, and two horses, two oxen, his dog, and two fowls were hewn in pieces with swords and cast into the ship; that the woman who was to die, after taking leave of her friends, was first drugged with strong drink and then brutally slaughtered with a big knife by the “angel of the dead,” while two men pulled the ends of a cord wound round her neck and the crowd beat upon their shields to drown her shrieks; that she was then laid beside her dead lord and the pile fired by his nearest relative, and after it had burnt out a great mound was raised over the ashes. ----- Footnote 39: Suorri says that the custom of burning the body was over before the time when the historical sagas begin their chronicle of events. The fact that it is represented in the mythological sagas as the burial rite of the Æsir, in the Twilight of the Gods, shows that it was out of memory as a human custom in Iceland. Footnote 40: A translation of this narrative is given in the _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_, vol. ix. p. 518. -----