The Confusing Horned Helmets Depicted in the Oseberg Viking Age Tapestries

Ancient Origins

By ThorNews

If you claim that Vikings did not use horned helmets, you are right. If you claim that Vikings used horned helmets, you may also be right. However, horned helmets were probably only used on very special occasions if we are to interpret images depicted on textiles found in the Oseberg Viking ship grave.

Historians and archaeologists do agree that Vikings did not use horned helmets, and that this is a myth created, among others, by Richard Wagner’s opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (The Ring of Nibelung) that premiered in 1876.

 Costume designer Carl Emil Doepler got his inspiration from Germanic artworks, and in the opera he equipped the evil characters with horned helmets while the heroes got helmets decorated with wings made of feathers.

This is a monochrome photograph taken of Hoffman's 14 set designs (unknown number) for Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen opera in 1876. (Public Domain)

Thanks to Wagner’s opera, horned helmets still are a powerful symbol representing Vikings and the Viking Age.

From Richard Wagner’s opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen”, 1876 (Source: ThorNews)

Religious Motifs
In the autumn of 834 AD, two elderly women were buried inside a Viking ship in Vestfold, Southeast Norway. They were placed next to each other in a made bed inside a burial chamber placed right at the mast.

Ever since the excavation in 1904-1905, there have been put forward many theories about who these women were.

One dominating theory is that the oldest of the women was a powerful völva sorceress, while others believe she was a priestess of the Norse goddess Freyja – the goddess associated with love and fertility, but also with seiðr sorcery and death.

Inside the Oseberg ship grave there were, in addition to the beautifully decorated Viking ship itself, hundreds of objects for both everyday use and solemn occasions, including one richly decorated wooden cart probably used in religious ceremonies.

Wooden cart found at the Oseberg burial mound, Norway. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The grave also contained the largest collection of textiles and textile tools ever discovered in a single Viking Age grave, and all the beautiful and colorful fabrics are uniquely well-preserved due to the surprisingly good storage conditions inside the burial mound.

The hoard includes the famous tapestry showing a religious procession, the so-called Oseberg Tapestry, many other textiles such as exotic silk thread embroideries imported from Central Asia were found. There were also discovered several narrow tapestries thought to have lined the grave chamber.

They portray a variety of people, some obviously wearing a costume, along with wagons, animals and buildings, most likely representing different religious scenes.

The Oseberg Tapestry
The Oseberg Tapestry consists of two parts: a left and a right side, and the scene on the left side most likely represents a religious procession of three horse-drawn wagons followed by people on foot.

The Oseberg Tapestry – Left Side. (Watercolor Reconstruction: Mary Storm / Photo: Museum of Cultural History, Oslo)

The front panel of the ceremonial cart found in the Viking ship grave is decorated with intertwined animals, including cats, implying that the older woman may have been a priestess of Freyja.

 It is tempting to draw the conclusion that one of the two persons in the wagon depicted in the Oseberg Tapestry, could represent the priestess herself.

It seems like the figure with the horned helmet is leading the procession. He is somewhat larger than the others, something that may indicate his high status. The figure is possibly portraying the god Odin.

The Oseberg Tapestry – Right Side. (Watercolor Reconstruction: Mary Storm / Photo: Museum of Cultural History, Oslo)

The right side of the Oseberg Tapestry can also be interpreted in many different ways, but it is clear that the horse riders and the people walking with spears all are a part of the procession, and the building depicted to the left could possibly be a Norse temple.

The horned figure also appears in another textile fragment discovered inside the burial chamber. He is holding a pair of crossed spears in one hand facing a man wearing something resembling a bear skin.

Oseberg textile fragment: Horned figure (left) with crossed spears facing a person wearing bear skin. (Drawing / Photo: Museum of Cultural History, Oslo)

It is tempting to interpret the scene as Odin and a Norse berserker warrior (Old Norse: ber-serkir, meaning “bear-shirt”) who was said to be Odin’s special warriors.

The fragment also portrays a group of women bearing shields interpreted to be “shieldmaidens” (Old Norse: skjaldmær), women who had chosen to fight as warriors.

Confusing Horns
So far, there has been found only one complete helmet dating back to the Viking Age (c. 793 – c. 1066 AD), the Gjermundbu helmet, and it did not have any animal horns mounted. Neither the sagas nor other written sources from the time tell anything about Vikings wearing horned helmets.

Gjermundbu helmet, the only helmet found that dates to the Viking Age. (CC BY 2.0)

Besides, fighting with long horns on top of the head would be very impractical even for a highly skilled Viking warrior.

Nevertheless, depictions in fragments found in the Oseberg ship grave document that horned helmets were known in the Norse culture.

Maybe they were used during special religious ceremonies and as part of a costume portraying Odin?

Or, are the tapestries only telling tales with roots in Norse mythology where Odin the Allfather is depicted as the most powerful among gods and humans – highlighted by his increased size and horns?

Hopefully, future research will give us more answers about the exciting and still undiscovered Norse culture.

Top image: Section of tapestry discovered in the Oseberg ship burial mound showing a figure wearing a horned helmet. (Watercolor reconstruction: Mary Storm, 1940 / Photo: Museum of Cultural History, Oslo) (Source: Thornews)

The article ‘The Confusing Horned Helmets Depicted in the Oseberg Viking Age Tapestries’ originally appeared on ThorNews and has been republished with permission.

Was It Just a Boss Spying on His Workers? First Viking Age Tower Found in Denmark

Ancient Origins

Archaeologists have recently excavated a very tall structure that can only be elucidated as a tower, in Jutland, Denmark. The “tower” was placed next to larger hall-type buildings, and a possible ritual building. Experts consider it an extremely unique discovery from the Viking Age, as the high building is unknown to Danish archaeology and architecture.

 A Viking Age Tower That Could Be Seen from a Distance
The newly excavated site of Toftum Næs, Jutland and the special features – such as the unique and unfamiliar architecture – that have been registered there, have managed to impress local and international archaeologists. Kamilla Fiedler Terkildsen – an archaeologist and curator at Viborg Museum – and her colleagues from Viborg Museum were the first to unearth the tower in 2014, during excavations of a settlement from the Viking Age.

A drone image of the Viking Age tower (with pit-houses on top of the north wall) and north-south facing house. North is on the left-hand side. (Photo: Andree Gothe )

Impressed and excited with the rare discovery, Terkildsen told Science Nordic ,

“It could be seen from some distance away. It must’ve been an impressive landmark for the place and for the nobleman who lived there. It’s unique in its construction and would have required a great deal to build. I really wonder where they got the idea from.”

She also added that the tower is about ten meters (32.8 ft.) high and is based on large, heavy posts

The tower area with a fenced ceremonial house and a north-south facing house dating to the Iron Age and Viking Age. The tower is indicated by the red arrows. ( Illustration: Tom Lock )

 The Tower is Architecturally Unique for the Viking Age and Danish Archaeology
Terkildsen and her team realized quickly that they had unearthed a Viking Age tower, an extremely rare, possibly the first of its kind in Denmark; and they weren’t wrong. The tower was first noticed as cropmarks on aerial images of the landscape, before the excavation began. What made them curious about the high structure, however, was its distinctive construction and design, which they had never spotted or seen before in Danish archaeology. So, in order to find out more about the peculiar structure, they asked for advice from the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, “They called and asked if I have ever seen something similar. I hadn’t,” co-author Mads Dengsø Jessen, an archaeologist at the Danish National Museum, who helped Terkildsen excavate the tower told Science Nordic .

A ‘Viking Village.’ ( Lukasz Wiktorzak/ArtStation ) Experts believe it would be extremely rare to find a tower in a Viking Age village.

Examining the Viking Age Tower
The tower is estimated to be around 1300 years old, dating back somewhere to the 700s, in the Iron Age. However, the entire site was active up until the end of the Viking Age, around 1000 AD. The archaeologists suggest that the tower was part of the entrance to a larger settlement with several spectacular halls, like others of the kind that have been found in just a few places in Jutland.

The discovery of foreign coins and jewelry imply that the site had contacts with Western Europe, while archaeologists also discovered a fenced house of worship, a type of ceremonial structure used for performing rituals. However, according to Terkildsen, the tower stands out the most, “The site itself is very interesting and one of the few examples of the presence of a chieftain in Jutland, but we emphasise the tower, because there’s nothing like it anywhere else,” she tells Science Nordic .

Coins ( Pernille Rohde Sloth ) and Viking jewelry ( Kamilla Fiedler Terkildsen ) discovered at the site of the Viking Age tower in Jutland, Denmark.

 Usage and Importance of the Tower in the Viking Age The materials discovered at the site indicate that the settlement belonged to a very wealthy nobleman, who possibly had many workers. As Jessen says :

 “You couldn’t see very far (from the tower), but you could monitor the river valley, which you can’t do from the ground. So the question is whether the pit houses were workshops or residential, or both. One could imagine that the owner wanted to keep an eye on the workers on site.”

Furthermore, the structural fluctuation of the site at Toftum Næs, in particular the changes that seem to have taken place during the main use-phase both at the site in question and with regard to the overall development of aristocratic sites with production areas and at the Viking Age towns, are now open for debate amongst Viking Age archaeologists and historians.

Top Image: Stampe 515 ( Public Domain ) and 516 ( Public Domain ) from a series called ‘Everyday Life in the Viking Age’ and the high-ground, southern part of the settlement at Toftum Naes, Denmark. The arrow indicates where the tower once stood. (Illustration: Kamilla Fiedler Terkildsen )

By Theodoros Karasavvas

Viking women: raiders, traders and settlers

History Extra

A detail of the decorative carving on the side of the Oseberg cart depicting a woman with streaming hair apparently restraining a man's sword-arm as he strikes at a horseman accompanied by a dog. Below is a frieze of intertwined serpentine beasts. c850 AD. Viking Ship Museum, Bygdoy. (Werner Forman Archive/Bridgeman Images)

In the long history of Scandinavia, the period that saw the greatest transformation was the Viking Age (AD 750–1100). This great movement of peoples from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, heading both east and west, and the social, religious, political and cultural changes that resulted from it, affected the lives and roles of women as well as the male warriors and traders whom we more usually associate with ‘Viking’ activities.

 Scandinavian society was hierarchical, with slaves at the bottom, a large class of the free in the middle, and a top level of wealthy local and regional leaders, some of whom eventually sowed the seeds of the medieval Scandinavian monarchies. The slaves and the free lived a predominantly rural and agricultural life, while the upper levels of the hierarchy derived their wealth from the control and export of natural resources. The desire to increase such wealth was a major motivating factor of the Viking Age expansion.

 One way to acquire wealth was to raid the richer countries to the south and west. The Scandinavians burst on the scene in the eighth century as feared warriors attacking parts of the British Isles and the European continent. Such raiding parties were mainly composed of men, but there is contemporary evidence from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that some warbands were accompanied by women and, inevitably, children, particularly if they had been away from Scandinavia for some time. The sources do not reveal whether these women had come from Scandinavia with the men or joined them along the way, but both are likely.

 Despite popular misconceptions, however, there is no convincing evidence that women participated directly in fighting and raiding – indeed, the Chronicle describes women and children being put in a place of safety. The Viking mind, a product of a militarised culture, could certainly imagine women warriors, as evidenced by their art and mythology, but this was not an option for real women.

 Settlement
 In parts of Britain and Ireland and on the north-western coasts of the European continent, these raids were succeeded by settlement, as recorded in contemporary documents and shown by language, place-names and archaeology. An interesting question is whether these warriors-turned-settlers established families with Scandinavian wives or whether they integrated more quickly by taking local partners. There is strong evidence in many parts of Britain for whole communities speaking Scandinavian as the everyday language of the home, implying the presence of Scandinavian-speaking women.

 Metal-detectorist finds show that Scandinavian-style jewellery was imported into England in considerable numbers on the clothing of the female settlers themselves. In the north and west of Scotland, Scandinavian speech and culture persisted well into the Middle Ages, and genetic evidence suggests that Scandinavian families and communities emigrated to places such as Orkney and Shetland en masse.

 Not all of these settlers stayed in the British Isles, however. From both the Norwegian homeland and the British Isles, ambitious emigrants relocated to the previously uninhabited Faroe Islands and Iceland and, somewhat later, to Greenland and even North America. The Icelandic Book of Settlements, written in the 13th century, catalogues more than 400 Viking-Age settlers of Iceland. Thirteen of these were women, remembered as leading their households to a new life in a new land. One of them was Aud (also known as Unn), the deep-minded who, having lost her father, husband and son in the British Isles, took it on herself to have a ship built and move the rest of her household to Iceland, where the Book of the Icelanders lists her as one of the four most prominent Norwegian founders of Iceland. As a widow, Aud had complete control of the resources of her household and was wealthy enough to give both land and freedom to her slaves once they arrived in Iceland.

 Slavery
 Other women were, however, taken to Iceland as slaves. Studies of the genetic make-up of the modern Icelandic population have been taken to suggest that up to two-thirds of its female founding population had their origins in the British Isles, while only one third came from Norway (the situation is, however, the reverse for the male founding population).

 The Norwegian women were the wives of leading Norwegian chieftains who established large estates in Iceland, while the British women may have been taken there as slaves to work on these estates. But the situation was complex and it is likely that some of the British women were wives legally married to Scandinavian men who had spent a generation or two in Scotland or Ireland before moving on to Iceland. The written sources also show that some of the British slaves taken to Iceland were male, as in the case of Aud, discussed above.

 These pioneer women, both chieftains’ wives and slaves, endured the hardships of travel across the North Atlantic in an open boat along with their children and all their worldly goods, including their cows, sheep, horses and other animals. Women of all classes were essential to the setting up of new households in unknown and uninhabited territories, not only in Iceland but also in Greenland, where the Norse settlement lasted for around 500 years.

 Both the Icelandic sagas and archaeology show that women participated in the voyages from Greenland to some parts of North America (known to them as Vinland). An Icelandic woman named Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is particularly remembered for having been to Vinland (where she gave birth to a son), but also for having in later life gone on pilgrimage to Rome and become a nun.

A page from the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' in Anglo-Saxon or Old English, telling of King Aethelred I of Wessex and his brother, the future King Alfred the Great, and their battles with the Viking invaders at Reading and Ashdown in AD 871 (c1950). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

 Mistress of the house
 These new settlements in the west were, like those of the homelands, rural and agricultural, and the roles of women were the traditional ones of running the household. Although free women did not by convention participate in public life, it is clear that the mistress of the household had absolute authority in the most important matters of daily life within its four walls, and also in many aspects of farm work.

 Runic inscriptions show that women were highly valued for this. On a commemorative stone from Hassmyra, in Sweden, the deceased Odindisa is praised in runic verse by her husband for her role as mistress of that farm. The rune stones of the Isle of Man include a particularly high proportion commemorating women.

 Those women who remained in Scandinavia also felt the effects of the Viking Age. The evidence of burials shows that women, at least those of the wealthier classes, were valued and respected. Much precious metalwork from the British Isles found its way into the graves of Norwegian women, usually presumed to be gifts from men who went west, but some were surely acquired abroad by the women themselves.

 At the top level of society, women’s graves were as rich as those of men – the grave goods of a wealthy woman buried with her servant at Oseberg in Norway included a large and beautiful ship, several horses and many other valuable objects. Such a woman clearly had power and influence to be remembered in this way. With the establishment of the monarchies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden towards the end of the Viking Age, it is clear that queens could have significant influence, such as Astrid, the widow of St Olaf, who ensured the succession of her stepson Magnus to the Norwegian throne in the year 1035.

 Urbanisation and Christianity
 Another of the major changes affecting Viking Age Scandinavia was that of urbanisation. While trade had long been an important aspect of Scandinavian wealth creation, the development of emporia – town-like centres – such as Hedeby in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway, Birka in Sweden, or trading centres at York and Dublin, provided a new way of life for many.

 The town-like centres plugged into wide-ranging international networks stretching both east and west. Towns brought many new opportunities for women as well as men in both craft and trade. The fairly standard layouts of the buildings in these towns show that the wealth-creating activities practised there were family affairs, involving the whole household, just as farming was in rural areas. In Russia, finds of scales and balances in Scandinavian female graves indicate that women took part in trading activities there.

 Along with urbanisation, another major change was the adoption of Christianity. The rune stones of Scandinavia date largely from the period of Christianisation and show that women adopted the new religion with enthusiasm. As family memorials, the inscriptions are still dominated by men, but with Christianity, more and more of them were dedicated to women. Those associated with women were also more likely to be overtly Christian, such as a stone in memory of a certain Ingirun who went from central Sweden on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

 The Viking Age, then, was not just a masculine affair. Women played a full part in the voyages of raiding, trading and settlement, and the new settlements in the North Atlantic would not have survived very long had it not been for their contribution. This mobile and expansive age provided women with new opportunities, and sagas, rune stones and archaeology show that many of them were honoured and remembered accordingly. 

Judith Jesch is professor of Viking studies at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015).

Archaeologists are Ecstatic that a Major Viking Age Manor is Finally Found in Sweden

Ancient Origins

For centuries it has been speculated where the manor of the royal bailiff of Birka, Herigar, might have been located. New geophysical results provide evidence of its location at Korshamn, outside the town rampart of the Viking Age proto-town Birka in Sweden.

The results will be published in the international scientific journal Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt.

During spring of 2016 a number of large presumed house terraces were identified by the authors at Korshamn. As a consequence high resolution geophysical surveys using ground-penetrating radar were carried out in September 2016. Korshamn is one of the main harbour bays of the island of Björkö, situated outside the town boundaries of the Viking town of Birka. The survey revealed a major Viking period hall on the site, with a length of around 40 meters. Based on the land upheaval the area of the Viking hall can be dated to sometime after 810 AD. The hall is connected to a large fenced area that stretches towards the harbour basin.

Example of a reconstructed Viking long house in the Vikingmuseum in Borg, Vestvågøy/Lofoten, Norway. (Jörg Hempel/ CC BY SA 2.0 )

"This kind of Viking period high status manors has previously only been identified at a few places in southern Scandinavia, for instance at Tissø and Lejre in Denmark. It is known that the fenced area at such manors was linked to religious activities" says Johan Runer, archaeologist at the Stockholm county museum.

During the survey a predecessor for the Viking Age manor was also identified at the site: a high status manor that existed during the Vendel period, prior to the establishment of the Viking Age town of Birka. Both the identified buildings and their continued use from the Vendel period to the Viking Age correlate well with the "ancestral property" of Birka's royal bailiff Herigar as mentioned in Rimbert's Vita Anskarii. Herigar was Christianized by Ansgar, archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, during his first mission c. 830 AD, and he built the first church on his land.

"The consequences of our discoveries cannot be overestimated: in terms of the emergence of the Viking town of Birka, its royal administration and the earliest Christian mission to Scandinavia," says Sven Kalmring, researcher at the Zentrum für Baltische und Skandinavische Archäologie, Schleswig.

Map of Birka. ( Holger.Ellgaard/CC BY SA 3.0 )

The new discovery was made just outside the Viking town’s boundaries. "The results highlight the benefits of using non-intrusive geophysical surveys for the detection of archaeological features and, once again, prove to be an invaluable tool for documenting Iron Age building remains in Scandinavia," says Andreas Viberg, researcher at the Archaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University.

The research is a collaboration between Zentrum für Baltische und Skandinavische Archäologie, Stockholm county museum and the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University.

The results will be published in the international scientific journal Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt .

Top image: Reconstruction of the Viking age manor. Source: Jacques Vincent

The article, originally titled ‘ Major Viking Age manor discovered at Birka, Sweden’ was originally published on Science Daily. Source: Stockholm University. " Major Viking Age manor discovered at Birka, Sweden ." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 January 2017.

The truth about Viking berserkers

History Extra

Viking Berserker figures. The one on the left is wearing a helmet with horns. His companion wears the mask of a wolf or bear. Sweden, 6th century. (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

There were few established military institutions in Scandinavia at the start of the Viking Age, circa 800, but a number of such organisations gradually developed as society came increasingly under the rule of a single king. The foremost institution was the retinue, a brotherhood of warriors serving a common master. It developed to become the main source of power for the medieval kings and evolved into a noble elite in the Middle Ages.
But there was a more sinister brotherhood of warriors in Scandinavia that could not find any place in the post-heathen world of Christianity. Instead it only survived in the realm of the sagas, the art and the folklore, often becoming shield-biting demons of war and symbols of evildoing. But behind the myth and the shroud of history, the sources reveal the existence of men thriving on the border between life and death, fuelled by war and distinguished by their ecstatic battle fury.
The description of ‘berserkers’ and ‘wolfskins’ in the sources is on the boundary between fantasy and reality, and it is difficult for us today to imagine that such people can have ever existed, possessed of incontrollable destructive power. But they did. The berserkers and the wolfskins (also known as ‘heathen wolves’) were a special group of very skilled and dangerous warriors associated with the god Odin.

 

Coveted warriors

If there were elite troops such as berserkers and wolfskins available on the battlefield, they were put in the front of the phalanx [a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry] to resist the main weight of an attack, or at the front when launching an attack. But berserker troops could be a double-edged sword, as they were difficult to control in a battle and were often ill-suited to formation warfare. Instead, they seem to prefer to operate in smaller groups, attacking independently. Olav Haraldsson (St Olav) put the berserkers in front of his own phalanx at the battle of Stiklestad in the year 1030, but instead of holding the line they attacked and thereby contributed to the king’s downfall.

_{This marginal illumination from the Saga of Saint Olaf shows his death at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030. (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)}
Viking warriors looked to the god Odin to give them aggression and courage in battle, but the berserkers took this a step further. According to the sources they could rout an outnumbering force, and when they attacked they howled like mad dogs or wolves. It was said that neither iron nor fire could injure them, and they didn’t know pain. After a battle they were as weak as infants, totally spent both physically and psychologically.
It is difficult to find any clear difference between a berserker and a wolfskin. Sometimes they appear to be the same, under the general description of berserker, and at other times they are portrayed as two different types of warrior. In some contexts, the wolfskins are even more closely connected with the Odin cult than the berserkers seem to be.

 

Brotherhood of war

Originally berserkers developed their own brotherhood of professional warriors who travelled round and took service with different chiefs. What distinguished them was that they had bears and wolves as totem animals, and clad themselves in their skins. Irrespective of whether it was a bear or a wolf, the warriors believed they were endowed with the spirit of the animal. Designs showing warriors clad in what could be bearskins occur, among other places, on the Torslund plates from Öland, thought to date from the seventh century.
In the Fornalder sagas (‘Sagas of Earlier Times’) and in several other sagas, the king’s or the chieftain’s guard is described as made up of berserkers, usually 12 in number. The berserkers often comprised an elite troop in addition to the guard or the army in general. In sea battles they were usually stationed at the prow, to take the leading point of an attack. In the battle of Hafrsfjord, c872, they appear as shock troops for Harald Hårfagre (Finehair), in groups of 12.
The berserkers are spoken of as fearsome enemies to meet. They were often said to be so intoxicated by battle-lust that they bit their shields, attacked boulders and trees and even killed each other while they were waiting for battles to begin. A set of chessmen from the 12th century found on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides includes a chess piece of a warrior biting his shield.
The title of berserker is thought sometimes to have been inherited from father to son, and there are known examples of entire families of berserkers. One such family known from the sagas is Egil Skallagrimson. Egil’s father, Skallagrim (‘ugly skull’), and his grandfather Kveldulv  (‘nightwolf’) were also berserkers.
The concept of ‘berserk’ also turns up independently of ‘berserker’. The idea of ‘going berserk’ could apply to more than just the members of a warrior brotherhood. Harald Hardråde (Hardruler) “went berserk” at the 1066 battle of Stamford Bridge, for example. The expression is also used in relation to warriors who are not thought to have been wearing any distinctive uniform of animal skins. Olav Haraldsson’s berserkers, who wrecked the battle of Stiklestad for him, are an example of this.
_{King Harold II, the Saxon king of Britain, beholds the body of his rebellious brother Tostig, whom he has just defeated at the battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}

 

The earliest sources

The earliest written sources of what might be berserkers are found in Roman writings from the first century AD. In his book Germania, the historian Tacitus describes correspondingly fantastic elite warriors among the German tribes in northern Europe. In the sixth century, the East Roman historian Prokopios wrote of “the wild and lawless heruli” from the north, describing how they went almost naked into battle, clad only in loincloths – this was to show disdain for their wounds. They wore neither helmet nor coat of mail, and used only a light shield to protect themselves. The people who were described as ‘heruli’ probably had their origin on Sjæland or Fyn in today’s Denmark, but they can also be traced to other parts of Scandinavia, including Norway.
The heruli are said to have had a kingdom on Fyn. This may have survived until into the sixth century, but more of them had previously been driven out of Scandinavia by the Danes. The heruli often took service as warrior bands in the Roman army. They appeared in the same way as the berserkers, in small groups in the service of chieftains or kings, and there is a possibility that the origins of the berserkers may be found among the mysterious heruli.
The berserkers are often mentioned in sagas, skaldic poems [composed at the courts of Scandinavian and Icelandic leaders during the Viking and Middle Ages] and other literature from the Middle Ages. In the sagas, which were written in a Christian context, the memory of these warriors has been extended to become a label for those who stand out from the norms of society: thugs and freebooters, pirates and so on. In the earliest Icelandic compendium of law, Grågås, it is said that a raging berserker can either be bound or condemned to exile.

 

“Wolf-heathens”

The oldest known written source about berserkers is Haraldskvadet, a 9th-century skaldic poem honouring King Harald, attributed to the skaldic poet Torbjørn Hornklove. Writing about the battle of Hafrsfjord [date unknown], he writes: “Berserkers roared where the battle raged, wolf-heathens howled and iron weapons trembled”.
_{Battle of Hafrsfjord. (World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)}
In Grette’s Saga it is said of the warriors in that same battle: “… such berserkers as were called wolf-heathens; they had wolf-coverings as mail… and iron didn’t bite them; one of them… started roaring and bit the edge of his shield… and growled viciously”.
In the Volsung Saga, describing events in the sixth century, it is said that the berserkers were in Odin’s lifeguard and that they “went without armour, were as mad as dogs and wolves, they bit their shields, were as strong as bears or oxen, they killed everybody, and neither fire nor iron bit them; this is called going berserk”.
The descriptions in the sagas of violent men and killers cannot all be linked to the berserkers, however. Distinctions are made, for example, between ‘berserkers’ and ‘warriors,’ and between ‘normal’ killers and men who fought duels. And the Old Norse saga texts never call the berserkers mad or insane. They regard the berserkers as something more than just socially problematic and unusually aggressive. The sagas distinguish them from other men by ascribing to them a particular ‘nature’ that made one both scornful and fearful of them at the same time.

 

The mushroom theory

In 1784 a priest named Ödmann started a theory that ‘going berserk’ was the result of eating fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria). That explanation gradually became more popular, and remains so today. Ödmann based his hypothesis on reports about Siberian shamans, but it is important to note that he had no personal observations of the effects of eating this type of mushroom.
White agaric has also been suggested as a cause of the berserk fury, but considering how poisonous this is, it is quite unthinkable that it would be eaten. Eating agaric mushrooms can lead to depression and can make the user apathetic, in addition to its hallucinogenic effects. Berserkers are certainly never described as apathetic!
Poisoning with the fungus Claviceps purpurea has also been suggested – it contains a compound used to synthesise the hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). However, if mushrooms had been so important for the berserkers, they would surely have been mentioned in the sagas, which they are not.
The most probable explanation for ‘going berserk’ comes from psychiatry. The theory is that the groups of warriors, through ritual processes carried out before a battle (such as biting the edges of their shields), went into a self-induced hypnotic trance. In this dissociative state they lost conscious control of their actions, which are then directed subconsciously. People in this state seem remote, have little awareness of their surroundings and have reduced awareness of pain and increased muscle strength. Critical thinking and normal social inhibitions weaken, but the people affected are not unconscious.
_{Fly Agaric mushroom. (Photo by Eye Ubiquitous/UIG via Getty Images)}

Diminished responsibility

This condition of psychomotor automatism possibly resembles what in forensic psychiatry is described as ‘diminished responsibility’. The condition is followed by a major emotional catharsis in the form of tiredness and exhaustion, sometimes followed by sleep. Researchers think that the short-term aim of the trance may have been to achieve an abreaction of strong aggressive, destructive and sadistic impulses in a socially defined role.
The Old Norse social order and religion were able to accommodate this type of behaviour, and it is understandable that the phenomenon disappeared after the introduction of Christianity. A Christian society considered such rituals and actions as demonic and thought that they must have resulted from supernatural influences.

Dr Kim Hjardar is the co-author, with Vegard Vike, of Vikings at War, which will be published in hardback in October by Casemate Books.
Hjardar holds a MPhil in Nordic Viking and medieval culture from the University of Oslo and works as a lecturer in history at St Hallvard College. He is also archaeological conservator at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo.

Viking women: raiders, traders and settlers

History Extra

A detail of the decorative carving on the side of the Oseberg cart depicting a woman with streaming hair apparently restraining a man's sword-arm as he strikes at a horseman accompanied by a dog. Below is a frieze of intertwined serpentine beasts. c850 AD. Viking Ship Museum, Bygdoy. (Werner Forman Archive/Bridgeman Images)

In the long history of Scandinavia, the period that saw the greatest transformation was the Viking Age (AD 750–1100). This great movement of peoples from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, heading both east and west, and the social, religious, political and cultural changes that resulted from it, affected the lives and roles of women as well as the male warriors and traders whom we more usually associate with ‘Viking’ activities.
Scandinavian society was hierarchical, with slaves at the bottom, a large class of the free in the middle, and a top level of wealthy local and regional leaders, some of whom eventually sowed the seeds of the medieval Scandinavian monarchies. The slaves and the free lived a predominantly rural and agricultural life, while the upper levels of the hierarchy derived their wealth from the control and export of natural resources. The desire to increase such wealth was a major motivating factor of the Viking Age expansion.
One way to acquire wealth was to raid the richer countries to the south and west. The Scandinavians burst on the scene in the eighth century as feared warriors attacking parts of the British Isles and the European continent. Such raiding parties were mainly composed of men, but there is contemporary evidence from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that some warbands were accompanied by women and, inevitably, children, particularly if they had been away from Scandinavia for some time. The sources do not reveal whether these women had come from Scandinavia with the men or joined them along the way, but both are likely.
Despite popular misconceptions, however, there is no convincing evidence that women participated directly in fighting and raiding – indeed, the Chronicle describes women and children being put in a place of safety. The Viking mind, a product of a militarised culture, could certainly imagine women warriors, as evidenced by their art and mythology, but this was not an option for real women.

 

Settlement

In parts of Britain and Ireland and on the north-western coasts of the European continent, these raids were succeeded by settlement, as recorded in contemporary documents and shown by language, place-names and archaeology. An interesting question is whether these warriors-turned-settlers established families with Scandinavian wives or whether they integrated more quickly by taking local partners. There is strong evidence in many parts of Britain for whole communities speaking Scandinavian as the everyday language of the home, implying the presence of Scandinavian-speaking women.
Metal-detectorist finds show that Scandinavian-style jewellery was imported into England in considerable numbers on the clothing of the female settlers themselves. In the north and west of Scotland, Scandinavian speech and culture persisted well into the Middle Ages, and genetic evidence suggests that Scandinavian families and communities emigrated to places such as Orkney and Shetland en masse.
Not all of these settlers stayed in the British Isles, however. From both the Norwegian homeland and the British Isles, ambitious emigrants relocated to the previously uninhabited Faroe Islands and Iceland and, somewhat later, to Greenland and even North America. The Icelandic Book of Settlements, written in the 13th century, catalogues more than 400 Viking-Age settlers of Iceland. Thirteen of these were women, remembered as leading their households to a new life in a new land. One of them was Aud (also known as Unn), the deep-minded who, having lost her father, husband and son in the British Isles, took it on herself to have a ship built and move the rest of her household to Iceland, where the Book of the Icelanders lists her as one of the four most prominent Norwegian founders of Iceland. As a widow, Aud had complete control of the resources of her household and was wealthy enough to give both land and freedom to her slaves once they arrived in Iceland.

 

Slavery

Other women were, however, taken to Iceland as slaves. Studies of the genetic make-up of the modern Icelandic population have been taken to suggest that up to two-thirds of its female founding population had their origins in the British Isles, while only one third came from Norway (the situation is, however, the reverse for the male founding population).
The Norwegian women were the wives of leading Norwegian chieftains who established large estates in Iceland, while the British women may have been taken there as slaves to work on these estates.  But the situation was complex and it is likely that some of the British women were wives legally married to Scandinavian men who had spent a generation or two in Scotland or Ireland before moving on to Iceland. The written sources also show that some of the British slaves taken to Iceland were male, as in the case of Aud, discussed above.
These pioneer women, both chieftains’ wives and slaves, endured the hardships of travel across the North Atlantic in an open boat along with their children and all their worldly goods, including their cows, sheep, horses and other animals. Women of all classes were essential to the setting up of new households in unknown and uninhabited territories, not only in Iceland but also in Greenland, where the Norse settlement lasted for around 500 years.
Both the Icelandic sagas and archaeology show that women participated in the voyages from Greenland to some parts of North America (known to them as Vinland). An Icelandic woman named Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is particularly remembered for having been to Vinland (where she gave birth to a son), but also for having in later life gone on pilgrimage to Rome and become a nun.

_{A page from the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' in Anglo-Saxon or Old English, telling of King Aethelred I of Wessex and his brother, the future King Alfred the Great, and their battles with the Viking invaders at Reading and Ashdown in AD 871 (c1950). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}

Mistress of the house

These new settlements in the west were, like those of the homelands, rural and agricultural, and the roles of women were the traditional ones of running the household. Although free women did not by convention participate in public life, it is clear that the mistress of the household had absolute authority in the most important matters of daily life within its four walls, and also in many aspects of farm work.
Runic inscriptions show that women were highly valued for this. On a commemorative stone from Hassmyra, in Sweden, the deceased Odindisa is praised in runic verse by her husband for her role as mistress of that farm. The rune stones of the Isle of Man include a particularly high proportion commemorating women.
Those women who remained in Scandinavia also felt the effects of the Viking Age. The evidence of burials shows that women, at least those of the wealthier classes, were valued and respected. Much precious metalwork from the British Isles found its way into the graves of Norwegian women, usually presumed to be gifts from men who went west, but some were surely acquired abroad by the women themselves.
At the top level of society, women’s graves were as rich as those of men – the grave goods of a wealthy woman buried with her servant at Oseberg in Norway included a large and beautiful ship, several horses and many other valuable objects. Such a woman clearly had power and influence to be remembered in this way. With the establishment of the monarchies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden towards the end of the Viking Age, it is clear that queens could have significant influence, such as Astrid, the widow of St Olaf, who ensured the succession of her stepson Magnus to the Norwegian throne in the year 1035.

Urbanisation and Christianity

Another of the major changes affecting Viking Age Scandinavia was that of urbanisation. While trade had long been an important aspect of Scandinavian wealth creation, the development of emporia – town-like centres – such as Hedeby in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway, Birka in Sweden, or trading centres at York and Dublin, provided a new way of life for many.
The town-like centres plugged into wide-ranging international networks stretching both east and west. Towns brought many new opportunities for women as well as men in both craft and trade. The fairly standard layouts of the buildings in these towns show that the wealth-creating activities practised there were family affairs, involving the whole household, just as farming was in rural areas. In Russia, finds of scales and balances in Scandinavian female graves indicate that women took part in trading activities there.
Along with urbanisation, another major change was the adoption of Christianity. The rune stones of Scandinavia date largely from the period of Christianisation and show that women adopted the new religion with enthusiasm. As family memorials, the inscriptions are still dominated by men, but with Christianity, more and more of them were dedicated to women. Those associated with women were also more likely to be overtly Christian, such as a stone in memory of a certain Ingirun who went from central Sweden on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The Viking Age, then, was not just a masculine affair. Women played a full part in the voyages of raiding, trading and settlement, and the new settlements in the North Atlantic would not have survived very long had it not been for their contribution. This mobile and expansive age provided women with new opportunities, and sagas, rune stones and archaeology show that many of them were honoured and remembered accordingly.
Judith Jesch is professor of Viking studies at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015). You can follow her on Twitter @JudithJesch