Addressing the Unknown: the Funeral Bier as a Medium

Abstract

The funeral bier was a common object in Christian funerals in Finland from the Middle Ages up to the Second World War. The bier was used throughout Europe for carrying the deceased into the church or to the gravesite, in the funerals of both the nobility and commoners. The biers were simple wooden stretchers, but some of them also carried death-related imagery and texts. They also served as stands under the coffins, and images of such arrangements also appeared alongside texts in printed funeral works.
The funeral bier has been a largely overlooked object in scholarly studies in art, cultural, and literary history. This article focuses on the funeral bier and its use as a medium of communication in Early Modern Finland. The aim is to show how messages between the living and the dead, and the transcendental and the mundane in a broader sense could have been conveyed during and after the Lutheran funeral through the funeral bier. As an object, the bier was combined with text in two different ways: adding image compositions featuring biers to printed texts and adding texts to actual biers. This is illustrated with selected cases of Finnish funeral biers depicted in 17th-century funeral works, and extant biers from the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on how the funeral bier could have served as a medium for addressing the unknown, that is, for communicating with the transcendental realm.