New clues from old bones: Some Vikings were much more violent than others

These bones came from all over Norway — from the north, and from the Oslo Fjord region — and a surprising number of them showed evidence of brutal deaths.

Some had skulls crushed by blunt force. Others were slashed in the back or leg with swords. A few had arrowheads still embedded in their bones.

“There was a lot of violence in the relatively few human remains that we had to examine,” said Lisa Strand, an osteologist whose assessment of the Viking remains was part of her PhD studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

All told, nearly 40 per cent of the Viking remains she looked at showed evidence of a violent death.

As Strand and a small group of researchers would discover, these Viking bones were not just from unlucky individuals, they were part of a pattern.

And a key piece of the puzzle was that they were Vikings from the place we now call Norway.

How universal was violence?

In a new episode of 63 Degrees North, Strand and her collaborators talk about how they came to understand the significance of the violence she recorded.

Everyone knows that Vikings are violent, right? The name itself comes from the Old Norse word víkingr which means pirate or raider.   But were all Vikings equally violent?

Previous research (to which Strand was a contributor) showed that Vikings moved to and settled all over greater Europe. Danish Vikings moved  to England,  Swedish Vikings infiltrated the Baltic; Norwegians moved to Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. Even more surprising was that some of these Vikings weren't even Scandinavians – from a genetic standpoint, anyway.

In Norway, it’s a very, very common thing that males have weapons in the burials, in Denmark, only a small part of the burials would have weapons.

So … were all Vikings equally violent?

Or perhaps Vikings weren’t a monolithic group of marauding warriors as was previously believed?

A look across the North Sea

Viking bones, the researchers realized, were only a part of the evidence they needed to understand Viking violence.

What they needed was to figure out what shaped Viking societies, and how those forces may have shaped how—and why—people died.

So they decided to look across the North Sea, at Viking deaths in Denmark. And one of the most surprising clues they found involved not only how many of these Vikings had died violent deaths, but exactly how they died.

Beheading, not battle deaths

Nearly all of the Danish Vikings had been executed – by having their heads cut off!
That’s not something you do in battle, Strand said.

“It’s quite time consuming to decapitate someone, even if you are in a battle.  You don’t take time to cut their head off. No, no. It’s quite grim, but it’s true,” she said on the podcast.

This was a critical clue, because it suggests that there were people in Denmark, people who were a strong leaders, who had enough power to order an execution.

“The fact that in Denmark, we’re seeing mostly executions, points to the idea of a more centralized authority,” said David Jacobson, a sociologist from the University of South Florida who was part of the research team.

Another key clue: Grave goods

Among the iconic artefacts from the Norwegian Viking age are the Viking ships from the Museum of the Viking Age.

Jan Bill, an archaeologist and curator of the ship collection, has studied the Gokstad ship in detail, including trying to learn more about the man who was buried in this beautiful ship. He was also one of Strand’s PhD supervisors.

“So we have a man apparently dead in battle and we have this magnificent grave, which highly indicates that he was on very top level society, a king or something like that,” Bill said.

But finds like the Gokstad ship are relatively rare.

Instead, Bill, now working with Jacobson to better understand the violence that the researchers had documented, realized they needed other information.

And one clue that has endured since the Viking Age is grave goods.

50 times more weapons

There was plenty of evidence to be found in both countries.

The Viking sword is the handgun of the Viking age, because you couldn’t really use it for anything else than killing other people, or threatening to kill them.

“We saw that in both places there were burials with weapons, but the proportions were very different. While in Norway, it’s a very, very common thing that males have weapons in the burials, in Denmark, only a small part of the burials where you would have weapons,” Bill said.

This wasn’t just a trivial difference, he said.

“I was surprised to see how extreme they were. ..Looking at Norway and, and Denmark, you have reason to believe that there were about 50 times as many weapons available among the Norwegians if measured per capita, so to speak, compared to Denmark,” he said.

One factor that might have played a role in this striking difference was the availability of iron. Bill says Norway had much more iron available as a raw material than Denmark, so it was easier to make swords to begin with.  Nevertheless, there were still a LOT more weapons in Norway.

Swords were Viking-age handguns

Does that mean that Norwegian Vikings were a lot more violent? Bill said you can look at modern-day society, where the amount of handguns in a society is correlated with the amount of murders in that same society.

“And you could kind of say that the Viking sword is the handgun of the Viking age, because you couldn’t really use it for anything else than killing other people, or threatening to kill them,” he said.

The combination of these and other puzzle pieces turned their investigation into something bigger.

It became more than a story about how people died, but how communities functioned, how justice was delivered, and what held different Viking societies together— or pushed them into conflict.

To hear the full story, listen to the latest episode of 63 Degrees North, a podcast from NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

References:
Jan Bill, David Jacobson, Susanne Nagel, Lisa Mariann Strand (2024)
Violence as a lens to Viking societies: A comparison of Norway and Denmark,
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology,
Volume 75, 2024, 101605, ISSN 0278-4165, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101605

Lisa Mariann Strand, Sam Leggett, Birgitte Skar Multi-isotope variation reveals social complexity in Viking Age Norway, iScience, Volume 25, Issue 10, 2022, 105225,
ISSN 2589-0042, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105225.

Margaryan, A., Lawson, D.J., Sikora, M. et al. Population genomics of the Viking world. Nature 585, 390–396 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2688-8