School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science

""Mircea Eliade discusses different smiths and their «Human sacrifices to the furnace» in his classical work The Forge and the Crucible (1962). Among others, Eliade refers to a group of traditional blacksmiths in central India and the myth where the god Sing-bonga sacrificed himself in the furnace. In another telling of this myth the divinities sacrificed the smiths since they had been intimidating and annoying the gods (Eliade 1962: 65-66). Eliade emphasises the necessity of performing sacrifice to the furnace, and that the myths relating to human sacrifice may underline the demoniac character of metallurgy. In Africa, for instance, miscarriages and abortions have been offered as a part of initiating the smithy, and this represents an intermediary form between the actual or the symbolic human sacrifice (Eliade 1962: 68). There is currently no evidence in Africa for proper use of human bodies in the smithy, but among the Achewa and Agoni tribes of the Dowa District in today’s Malawi, a miscarriage had to take place before a furnace could be made. A medicine man instructed a small boy to throw a maize cob inserted with medicines at a pregnant woman, which caused her to have a miscarriage. The abortion was buried in a refuse heap, but during the night the medicine man dug it up, mixed it with medicine, and burnt it in the whole in the ground. The furnace was then built above the whole and thus keeping the abortion within it (Hodgson 1933: 163).

We think that Mircea Eliade was right when he emphasised the furnace as a sacrificial place of human beings, but we also think he missed three crucial aspects when he stressed the mythological origins of these sacrifices rather than why dead humans might be necessary in the smelting process. Following Lotte Hedeager’s influential and thought-provoking research on the relation between technology and cosmology, and her interpretations of the meaning of the Scandinavian animal style (e.g. Hedeager 1999, 2003, 2004a, 2004b), we will emphasise the intricate relation between smith and death.""

"‘Change equals death’ (Woody Allen)

Apart from eschatological aspects, death is more important for the living than the dead. It is argued that funerals are one of the most important settings for recreating society through the re-establishment of alliances. When an important person dies, his or her former social relations and alliances come to an end and have to be re-established from a societal point of view. At funerals not only are gifts given to the deceased, but it is equally important that the ritual participants make new alliances and re-negotiate old ones by the exchange of gifts. Thus, the distributions of artefacts, or the construction of different funeral monuments, are here seen as the outcome of such transactions. By emphasising transactions and re-negotiations of alliances in different funerals we argue that the distribution of prestige goods in Europe is not only part of trade or warfare. Exchange of gifts and prestige items as part of reciprocal relations was crucial in the structuring of inter-regional areas. Funerals were such occasions where the descendants and the living could legitimate future hierarchies by transferring the deceased’s social status and power to themselves by re-negotiating former alliances and creating new ones."