Cardboard, Hot Glue, and a Crazy Idea: An Exclusive Guest Post From Kyle Scheele, Author of How to Host a Viking Funeral

By Kyle Scheele / February 8, 2022 at 1:30 am

Hardcover $24.99 ~~$25.99~~

How to Host a Viking Funeral: The Case for Burning Your Regrets, Chasing Your Crazy Ideas, and Becoming the Person You're Meant to Be

In Stock Online

Hardcover $24.99 ~~$25.99~~

For his 30th birthday, Kyle Scheele said goodbye to his 20s by burning a cardboard Viking ship to symbolically let go of his regrets, mistakes and anxieties of the past decade. It’s an interesting meditation on letting go of the past which can be a big burden to carry. His “Viking burial” went viral online and is part of a trend on various social media platforms. Here, the author writes about the inspiration for his book, encouraging others to let go and building a better tomorrow.

Like many of the best stories in my life, this whole thing started as a dumb joke.

In May of 2016 I turned 30 years old. But instead of having a birthday party, I decided to have a Viking funeral for my 20s.

I built an 8-foot-tall, 16-foot-long Viking ship out of cardboard and hot glue, then I dragged it out into an empty field, doused it with various accelerants, and invited a bunch of my friends over to shoot Roman candles at it.

It was a fun evening, and everyone seemed to enjoy the absurdity of the whole thing. But after the ship had burned and my friends returned home, I sort of assumed that things would go back to normal.

But that’s not what happened.

Some friends of mine made a video about the project, and in it, I said that if you want to have room for better things in the future, you have to let go of some things from the past.

That idea seemed to resonate with people, because I started to get messages from strangers about it. They’d say something like:

Hey, Kyle.
I saw your Viking birthday thing.
It was weird.
But somehow it inspired me to let go of some of my own stuff.
So, thanks.
P.S. I just wish I could let go of my stuff with a cool Viking funeral like you did.

When I got one message like this, I thought Aw, that’s nice.

When I got two messages like this, I thought, That’s funny. They both pretty much said the same thing.

But when an entire year had passed and I was still getting these messages, I thought Well, if you need a Viking funeral, I can help with that.

So, I decided I would build and burn one more ship. But this one wouldn’t be for me, and it wouldn’t be about letting go of my twenties. Instead, it would be a chance for anyone who wanted to let go of something from their past.

I encouraged people to write down something they wanted to let go of and mail it to me. It could be a regret, a mistake, a limiting belief, a habit. Anything really, as long as it was something they wanted to put behind them.

I promised that I would build another Viking ship, fill it with the submissions, and set it on fire as a symbolic act of letting go. It would be a Viking funeral for the people we used to be.

Over the next two and a half years, I collected more than 20,000 of these submissions from people around the world. Some were heartbreaking; some were hilarious. But each of them taught me something about regret, heartache, and the things that hold us back.

And in December of 2019, I put them inside a giant ship and set them ablaze.

How to Host a Viking Funeral is the story of this project from start to finish. It’s a story about cardboard and hot glue, about chasing crazy ideas, and about looking to the past to build a better tomorrow.