Listen: Bones reveal surprising differences among Vikings

An investigation into Viking skeletons reveals a hidden story of violence, power, and the surprising differences between neighboring Viking societies.

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,” says Lisa Strand, an osteologist whose assessment of the Viking remains was part of her PhD studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

All told, nearly 40% 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.

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.

So… were all Vikings equally violent?

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

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.

Nearly all of the Danish Vikings had been executed by having their heads cut off.

That’s not something you do in battle, Strand says.

“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 says 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,” says David Jacobson, a sociologist from the University of South Florida who was part of the research team.

Among the iconic artifacts 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 says.

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.

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 says.

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

“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 says.

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.

Does that mean that Norwegian Vikings were a lot more violent? Bill says 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 says.

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.

Source: Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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