Viking Berserkers in Sagas

The berserkers are the most famous warriors of the Viking age, and they have passed into popular imagination as wild, untameable fighters who bit their shields, foamed at the mouth, and went into battle in a state of ecstatic fury. They appear again and again in the Old Norse sagas and in the older heroic poetry of the North, and they have given modern English the adjective berserk, meaning an uncontrolled rage. Their history, however, is more complicated than the modern stereotype, and they belong to a wider European family of ecstatic warriors who could fight with a fury that seemed to come from the gods.

This article is part of the Norse Folklore section, which itself sits within the wider survey of European Folklore.

The Name

The word berserkr (plural berserkir) is an Old Norse compound. The first element, ber- (sometimes explained as berr, “bare”, or as a word for “bear”), is the part that gives the figure his animal character. The second, -serkr, means “shirt” or “coat”. A berserker is, on one reading, a “bear-shirt” — a man who wears the bear’s skin in battle, or who has the bear’s spirit enter into him.

The compound ulfheðinn (plural ulfheðnar) is built the same way. The ulf- is the wolf; the -heðinn is a word for shirt or hide. The ulfheðinn is a “wolf-shirt” — a man who wears the wolf’s skin in battle. The two figures are closely related, and the sagas often mention them together as the most terrible of the warriors.

The Bear and the Wolf

The names point to an older religion. The bear in particular was thought to be the animal form of Odin himself: Odin is called the “bear-god” in some late medieval sources, and a number of place-names in Sweden and Norway preserve the memory of an older bear-cult. The ulfheðinn, in turn, may be a follower of the older wolf cult that was to persist, in transformed form, in the legends of the werewolf across northern Europe.

In some accounts the berserker was a man who went into battle wearing the bear’s skin over his armour, with the bear’s head drawn up over his own. In other accounts he went naked, or bare-chested, and his fury was the fury of the animal that had entered into him.

The Ynglinga Saga and the Blót

The earliest literary reference to the berserkers is in the Ynglinga saga of Snorri Sturluson, written about 1225. Snorri tells of a great warrior-king, Frey, who had a great hall at Uppsala in Sweden, and who maintained a personal bodyguard of twelve champions. Of these, Ýrsa was the mightiest, and he had a band of twelve berserkers. Snorri says that these warriors “roared” in battle, that “they were as strong as bears or bulls” and that they “killed men at a single stroke”.

Snorri’s other great reference is to the blót — the sacrificial feast. At certain festivals, especially the great feast of spring, the berserkers were set to fight one another in a kind of ritual duel, to the delight of the crowd. The berserker is, in some readings, a man set apart for a sacred office, and the wildness of his fighting is the wildness of the god who is honoured at the feast.

The Sagas of the Berserkers

The Icelandic sagas preserve a number of vivid berserker stories. In Grettis saga, the hero Grettir fights a berserker called Glamr in a haunted farmhouse at Þórsnes. Glamr is the picture of the late berserker: he howls through the night, breaks the door, and is shot with a magic arrow that he pulls out of himself before he dies. In Egils saga, the great skald Egill Skallagrímsson, in his old age, faces a band of berserkers who have been terrorising his neighbourhood, and defeats them at the farm of Borg. In Gísla saga, the hero Gísli Súrsson is ambushed by a band of berserkers on the island of Geldingahólmur and kills them all in a single bloody day.

The pattern is recognisable. The berserker is the great menace of the wild. He is a creature of the borderland, half human and half beast, and he is finally overcome by a hero who is at once more civilised and more cunning. The story, in a way, is the story of the conversion of the North: the older wildness is overcome by the new Christian order.

Grágás and the Law

The Icelandic legal code known as the Grágás (“Grey Goose”) contains an interesting provision: berserkers who disturb the peace are to be outlawed. A berserker who goes about roaring in the marketplace, or who refuses to put down his weapons when asked, is to be treated as a wolf — a vargr — and may be killed on sight.

The Grágás provision is a remarkable document. It shows that the berserker, by the time the laws were written down in the thirteenth century, was a known problem. The wild warrior was no longer a sacred figure; he was a criminal. The change from the Ynglinga saga of the 1220s to the Grágás of the same century is the change from the older heroic age to the new Christian Iceland.

The Svinfylking

A figure often associated with the berserker is the svinfylking — the “swine array” or “boar formation” — a wedge-shaped battle formation in which the best warriors stood at the point. The formation is described in several saga accounts, and it is said to have been used by the berserkers themselves when they charged the enemy line. A king or a great champion would stand at the point, and his bodyguard of berserkers would form the mass behind him.

The svinfylking is a military formation as well as a mythic one. The figure of the boar-headed standard — the gunnfan — carried by some of the early Scandinavian war-bands is part of the same pattern, and the association of the boar with the warrior in the North is an old one.

The Berserker and the Úlfheðinn

The saga writers generally distinguish the berserker (the bear-warrior) from the ulfheðinn (the wolf-warrior), but the distinction is not always clear. Some sources treat the two as the same figure under different names. The wolf cult, in particular, has a wider European history. The wolf-warriors of the continental Germanic tradition belong to the same family, and the werewolf legend of the early medieval west is part of the same story. The figure of the wolf in northern folklore is examined in detail elsewhere on this site.

A Comparison with the Sami Shamans

The wider world of the northern forest was home to the Sami people, the Finno-Ugric population of what is now northern Scandinavia, and the Norse had long contact with them. The Norse sources sometimes refer to the Sami as practitioners of a particular kind of magic — the seiðr, or shamanic practice — and the figure of the Sami shaman, with his drum and his journey to the world of the dead, is sometimes set beside the figure of the Norse berserker. The comparison is examined in the survey of forest spirits and mountain beings and the wider range of northern mythological figures.

The Modern Echo

The figure of the berserker has been an enduring source of inspiration. The bearskin caps of the early nineteenth-century Danish and Russian grenadiers, the furiosa and in-furore champions of the modern sports arena, the table-top role-playing game of the Dungeons and Dragons tradition, the popular image of the Viking raider in twenty-first-century media — all draw on the same older figure. The berserker is, in the most literal sense, a man who has gone into a fury that he cannot control, and that image is one of the most potent in the European bestiary of the human.

Sources and Further Reading

Price, Neil S. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Oxbow Books, 2002.
Bauschatz, P. C. The Well and the Tree: The World According to the Vikings. University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Wernhoff, Åke. The Encyclopedia of Norse Myth and Legend. Cassell, 2001.
Boyer, Régis. Les Vikings et leur civilisation. Mouton, 1976.