dictionarywrites:

angrymadsygin:

dictionarywrites:

it is very, very unlikely that jötunn funeral custom involves

a) burying their dead 
or
b) burning their dead

re: burying their dead, there is very visibly a lot of layers of ice that people walk on, which is very thick, glacially thick, but ultimately isn’t actually on ground – think of it much like the arctic, which is basically a lot of tiny bits of land connected by a big frozen ocean in the middle. 

you just wouldn’t be able to bury anybody on that. even assuming you sought out a point where there actually is frozen earth beneath you… it’d be nearly impossible to shovel down into that, and it’s very unlikely that once you did so the body would actually rot and break down.

re: burning their dead

dude, it’s too cold lol. fires would be doused by one breeze or one burst of icy sea spray, and the thing is like… if you just think of it from the perspective of the jötnar, who are comfortable in the cold and therefore do not need to make fires to keep warm, and honestly probably don’t use fire at all…

it’d feel like a very unnatural way to dispose of one’s dead. you have to remember that this is a completely different culture, and that their valueset wouldn’t necessarily look on fire as an impressive or very powerful force in the way most cultures do.

for me personally, I believe that the Jötunn funeral process probably involves stripping the meat from the bones (I actually love the idea of there being a specific plateau where bodies are strapped down/settled down with magic, and so animals, particularly carrion birds and the like, would eat the meat themselves, but another way of doing this would be via some sort of acid) and then disposing of the bones in a ceremonial fashion via the ocean.

disposing of the bodies just outright in the ocean would probably lead to them just being devoured or ripped from the sacking/funeral clothes they’re packed in, etc, and you wouldn’t want to think of burials at sea where sea animals are waiting for you to drop a body and snatch it from you before it’s ready to go down, etc. 

@dictionarywrites But! What if Jötunheim is like, say, Iceland and there is volcanic activity present? That would expand the possibilities. Also, I read in an older fic
that Jötnar built ice cemeteries with the deceased encased in ice and planted upright, not unlike Midgardians’ headstones. I guess I like this more in ways of paying respect to the dead.

Mmm, we obviously don’t see too much of it, but geothermic vents seem pretty unlikely to me based on what little we see – just because like, those glaciers seem to go down for a few hundred feet, and that kind of glacier would be really difficult with heat like that. Thus why I tend to think of it as more like the Antarctic than like an actual ground. 

I love that idea though, of ice cemetaries – I actually have something similar, where the preparation of the dead involves laying a light muslin cloth over the body, on the back and on the front, in order to memorialise their markings? And so then those cloths are pinned back to back to one another, and laid in the Heall of the Dead, as part of like, a big library of every individual’s unique markings, which can be used to track familial history.