What are the spaces and materials of the cremated dead in the Swedish churchyard? I’ve addressed the commemoration of the cremated dead in historic churchyards in England and Wales, as well as in Finland and Sweden, in past publications (Williams 2011; 2012; Williams and Wessman 2017; Williams & Williams 2019). Here, I want to introduce a prominent additional example of how the cremated dead are commemorative collectively via landscape architecture and material culture which augments my earlier discussions based. This was inspired by a visit to the well-preserved medieval townscape of Sigtuna, Uppland, Sweden in 2018.

The Lutheran church of St Mary’s, part of the archdiocese of Uppsala, was originally built by Dominican friars in 1247 and received the body of Archbishop Jarler in 1255, it is a striking rare brick medieval construction: the first in the region of central Sweden. Today, it is situated in a well-managed modern churchyard containing traces of medieval buildings associated with the former convent.

Close by on the west side are the ruins of another early church: St Olof’s.

A further element of this historic context is one of a concentration of Viking-period runestones scattered throughout the townscape: U379 upon which the runes tell us it was erected by the Frisian merchant’s guild commemorate Thorkel and Thorbjorn carved the runes. ‘God help his soul’ secures the Christian identify of the commemorators and commemorated.

In addition to the church and earlier runestone, there are the foundations of aforementioned buildings connected to the Dominican convent on the south side of the church.

The churchyard bell is a further feature in the southern part of the churchyard.

This area obviously contains traditional burial plots for the inhumed dead, but also south of the church and close to the runestone and bell on the south side of St Mary’s is the minneslund (‘memory grove’): a garden of remembrance.

This is a prime example where the spatial setting and the materialities of the grove churchyard of Mariankyrkan integrate into the historical environment and thus both evoke nature and a primeval evocation of Sweden’s past as a sacred space for the late 20th and early 21st century cremated dead and mourners.

I have previously addressed the creation of absence-presence of the dead mediated by memory groves, specifically drawing on the past, their location and spatial setting, and the materiality of their contents.

For this memory grove, the spatial location fits a pattern: close to the historic church. Yet the concentration of deep-time historical associations are particularly pronounced: close to the convent ruins and perimeter, St Olof’s ruins and most striking of all, the nearby churchyard bell and Viking Age runestone.

Within the garden of remembrance itself, the memory grove contains many of the same themes and components I’ve addressed in publications (Williams 2011; 2012).

  • A water feature – in this case a fountain comprised over a cuboid stone placed on a circular arrangement of pebbles through which the water percolates.
  • This was situated within a paved circular area framed by bushes and with benches to create a private, secluded space for contemplation and prayer: in short, this is a space for the living demarcated by vegetation and with the presence of moving water from the fountain;
  • A lawn space for interments of ashes framed by trees and bushes, further creating an enclosed space for the living and the dead to commune separate from the more open burial plots of the inhumed dead. This is the space of the dead, adjacent to the space for sitting and ritual actions of commemoration by the living.
  • Various lanterns and flower holders line the interface between the paved space with benches and the lawned space.
  • Within the ‘space for the dead’ and overlooking the lawn where cremated ashes are interred, is a single cenotaphic feature. Elsewhere these are often natural boulders or sculpted stones in various designs. Here, we have a wheel-headed cross as a collective funerary monument with the words inscribed upon its lower half: ‘JAG LEVERL NI SKALL OCKSA LEVA: ‘I live so you shall also live’ – a Christian message replacing what normally would be inscribed on a grave-marker. It is those ‘of the dead’ but not marking a single grave or memorial subject.

In summary, the memory grove comparises a cenotaph and lawn for the dead and a fountain and paved area for the living with lanterns and flower holders serving as the interstitial space between the two zones.

This is essentially a modernist space, in which one might superficially see the collapsing of time and space into this secluded memorial environment. And yet there components, focused on a cenotaph evoking the form of a traditional gravestone, remind us of the absence-presence of the ashes of the cremated dead interred in this idyllic context. Meanwhile, the historic location: a place of Christian worship and burial for at least 770 years, and arguably given the presence of the runestone, Christian burial and memorialisation for upwards of 1000 years, the community space for the dead draws on the deep-time Viking-period and medieval past.

As well as these lithic, metallic, plastic, glass, wooden and vegetal dimensions to the memory grove itself, we must also mention the material cultures of its maintenance. Swedish churchyards have a systematic structure and facilities for staff and mourners equally, indicated by a range of well-ordered gardening tools stashed close by for maintaining both the memory grove and nearby inhumation grave plots. For visitors to the memory grove more specificially, there is also a flower-holder dispenser and miniature rakes and trowels for those tending their graves. This is a space facilitating more than contemplation of individual loved ones and a facility to incorporate the collective dead into a temporal collapse reaching back centuries, this is a space to facilitiate ritual work for the dead.

The point here is that this reveals how recent and modern memorial environments draw upon the distant past in their significance and use in the contemporary churchyard, and how memory groves need to be considered as an integral part of Swedish churchyards as cultural heritage environments.

To learn more about my thoughts on memory groves from an archaeologist’s perspective, check out my two publications.

Williams, H. 2011. Cremation and present pasts: a contemporary archaeology of Swedish memory groves, Mortality 16(2): 113-30. DOI: 10.1080/13576275.2011.560451

Williams, H. 2012. Ash and antiquity: archaeology and cremation in contemporary Sweden, in A. M. Jones, J. Pollard, M. J. Allen and J. Gardiner (eds) Image, Memory and Monumentality: Archaeological Engagements with the Material World, Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 207-217.

Williams, H. and Wessman, A. 2017. The contemporary archaeology of urban cremation, in J.I. Cerezo-Román, A. Wessman and H. Williams (eds) Cremation and the Archaeology of Death, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 266–96

Williams, H. and Williams, E. 2019. Cremation and contemporary churchyards, in S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High, E. Koskinen-Koivisto (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. London: Routledge, pp. 367–383.