For nearly three centuries, Scandinavian sailors raided, traded, farmed and settled from Newfoundland to the Volga. The Viking Age left ships in burial mounds, Arabic silver in Gotland fields, and a shelf of stories written down long afterward. These tiles follow the evidence rather than the legend, and correct a few things everybody knows.
Every tile in a Vikings game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Voyages and Trade
nine stories
1The raid that shocked a continent
On the tile: Lindisfarne793
On June 8, 793, raiders struck the island monastery of Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumbria. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that heathen men came and miserably destroyed God's church there with plunder and slaughter, and later northern writers added whirlwinds, lightning and fiery dragons in the air. The community was not erased, though. Christian life went on, and a carved ninth-century stone found on the island shows armed warriors on one face and the Day of Judgment on the other.
Norse crews began wintering at Dublin in 841, in a fortified ship camp called a longphort. In 902 they were expelled, and many went to northern England. They came back in 917, and the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde suggests it was in England that they learned how to run a town and then brought the idea to Ireland. Excavations by the National Museum of Ireland between 1962 and 1981 uncovered fenced plots, houses and a succession of waterfronts.
Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, Hedeby was one of the largest and most important trading towns of the Viking world, planted on the narrow neck of land between the North Sea and the Baltic. In the tenth century the town became embedded in the Danevirke, the rampart system that controlled that borderland and the portage across it. The National Museum of Denmark calls it Denmark's most important trading center of the period. Borders move: the site lies today near Schleswig in northern Germany, and UNESCO listed Hedeby and the Danevirke together in 2018.
On Friday, July 16, 1999, a television crew came to a farm on the Swedish island of Gotland to film a news story about the looting of archaeological sites. The crew got its footage and went home. The searching continued after they left, and out came the largest Viking silver treasure known: two silver hoards and a bronze one, roughly 76 kilograms in all, with more than 14,000 coins, mostly Arabic dirhams. The youngest coin identified was struck in 870.
In 911, after an attack on France and the peace talks that followed, a Viking chieftain named Rollo came away with the stretch of northern France that became Normandy. Five generations later his descendants were French dukes, deep in the power struggles among the French counties. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde counts William the Conqueror, who took England in 1066, as Rollo's great-great-great-grandson, which makes the Norman Conquest a late and very well-dressed Viking arrival.
The Saga of Eirik the Red tells how Eirik went to live in the land he had discovered and called it Greenland, because, he said, people would want much more to go there if the land had a good name. That is the story, and it is a good one. It is also a saga, carried orally for more than two hundred years before it was written down in the thirteenth century, so the sales pitch is tradition rather than testimony. Settlers followed the name across the water anyway.
In the year 993 a burst of cosmic radiation, probably an enormous solar storm, left a spike of carbon in tree rings all over the world. Researchers found that spike inside fir and juniper wood from the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, counted the rings outward from it, and arrived at one year: the trees were cut in 1021. The same wood carries the marks of metal tools, which the area's Indigenous residents did not use.
Among the finds pulled from the bog at L'Anse aux Meadows were three butternuts and a piece of butternut wood. Butternut trees do not grow in Newfoundland, and their northern limit is eastern New Brunswick, so somebody from that small Norse camp had been far south of it, into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Wood chips of linden, another tree of the same warmer country, turned up in the same deposits. Nobody wrote it down; the garbage did.
Harald Sigurdsson fled Norway as a teenager after the battle of Stiklestad in 1030. He served a prince in Kyiv, then reached Constantinople around 1034 and spent some eight or nine years in the Byzantine emperor's Varangian guard before getting out with his earnings. He came home wealthy, took the Norwegian throne in 1045, and in 1066 invaded England, where he was killed at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. He is remembered as the last of the great Viking kings.
One of the great Viking ship burials of Norway held two women. The elder was between seventy and eighty when she died, probably of cancer; the younger was just over fifty, and nobody knows what killed her. They were buried aboard the ship in the year 834 with goods rich enough to suggest political or perhaps religious authority. The Museum of the Viking Age in Oslo is candid about the rest: who they were, and which of them the grave was for, remains open.
The Gokstad ship was built of oak around the year 890, 23.22 meters long and 5.18 wide, its keel cut from a single straight piece. The nine rows of planking below the waterline are only two to three centimeters thick, which is a large part of why the hull was so light and quick. When it was excavated, thirty-two shields hung along each side, painted yellow and black. The stem tips had rotted, and no evidence shows a dragon head was ever fitted.
Tree rings show that the largest ship in the Skuldelev find was built of oak in the neighborhood of Dublin around 1042. It was a warship about thirty meters long, driven by sixty oars with a crew of roughly sixty-five to seventy, and it ended its working life scuttled in a Danish fjord. The Viking Ship Museum spent 2000 to 2004 building a full-size reconstruction, the Sea Stallion from Glendalough, and in 2007 sailed it from Roskilde back to Dublin.
To guard Roskilde from the sea, or at least control who came up it, stone-laden hulls were sunk across a narrow channel in the fjord, three of them first and two more added later, apparently because the first three had begun to break up. Everything removable had been stripped out beforehand: deck, mast, rudder, rig, oars. By July 1962 sheet piling ringed the site, a cofferdam of about 2,500 square meters, and the water came down by stages while the excavators lay on narrow wooden bridges to keep off the timbers.
When the Viking Ship Museum built Ottar, a reconstruction of a seagoing cargo ship from about 1030, the hull was not the hard part. The ninety-square-meter wool sail took the fleeces of as many as two hundred Spelsau sheep, small animals that each give about five hundred grams of usable wool, and the yarn had to be spun very tight and woven very dense to hold wind. Textile researchers from five countries worked on it.
For all the Viking helmets in films and advertisements, almost none survive. The National Museum of Denmark counts one from the whole Viking Age, out of a warrior's grave at Gjermundbu north of Oslo, buried with the only complete coat of mail of the period. It has a spectacle-shaped guard for the face, hanging plates for the neck, and no horns. Oslo's Museum of Cultural History says it is no longer alone: a long-doubted helmet from Yarm in England has been judged authentic.
Everyone knows the horned Viking helmet. "Helmets from the Viking Age with horns on them have never been found," says Ingrid Ystgaard, an archaeologist at NTNU. Aarhus University's history site points to a likely source: the premiere of Wagner's Ring cycle in 1876, whose costume designer gave the northern heroes horns. From there the picture spread into films, comics and children's books. The National Museum of Denmark adds the objections: horns would snag in a fight and crowd a ship. Real horned helmets exist, but they are Bronze Age and look ceremonial.
Motorway work in Uppland, Sweden, uncovered funnel-shaped pits that had been packed with pine, covered with turf and set alight. Small ones near settlements, dated to about AD 100 to 400, rarely gave more than fifteen liters of tar per burning. The big ones, out in the forest and dated from about 680 to 900, ran up to ten times larger and yielded at least two to three hundred liters. Andreas Hennius of Uppsala University reads that jump as the supply line that kept a growing fleet watertight.
Norse sagas and other medieval sources mention a sólarsteinn, a sunstone. In 1967 the archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou proposed that it was a crystal, calcite or cordierite or tourmaline, used to read the polarization of the sky and place the sun behind cloud. Experiments since say the trick works under clear or thin cloud and fails in fog. What is missing is an object. As Stephen Harding of the University of Nottingham has noted, the case would be settled by a Viking ship found with a calibrated sunstone aboard.
Combs of bone or wood are among the commonest finds of the Viking period, often kept in boxes of their own, and tweezers and ear picks turn up beside them. The National Museum of Denmark describes Viking men as clean and pleasant smelling, bathing on Saturdays and combing their hair. The habit is fossilized in the calendar. Danish lørdag comes from Old Norse laugardagr, the washing day, while the English Saturday took its name from the Roman god Saturn instead.
Viking Age skates were made from the metatarsal bones of horses or cattle, the underside rubbed flat and polished, sometimes greased with pig fat. The best ones curved up at the front to ride over bumps in the ice. Some have holes at toe and heel for straps, although fastening mattered less than you would expect: the skater did not lift a foot, but pushed along with an ice pole. The Swedish History Museum says they come in many sizes, likely used by children as well as adults.
A Viking house had neither chimney nor windows. The smoke from the long fireplace running down the middle of the floor, where the food was cooked, escaped through a hole in the roof, and with so little ventilation there was a great deal of it indoors. People sat and slept on plank beds along the walls. If the farm had no separate stable, the animals were stalled at one end of the same building, which at least kept the heat in on a February night.
Officially a Viking Age woman ranked below a man and could not appear in court. In practice she had leverage. The Icelandic sagas set out divorce rules: a wife could demand a divorce if her husband struck her three times, or if he settled abroad and then neglected her for three years. From the moment the ship sailed, securing the harvest was her work. As for the famous keys at the belt, the National Museum of Denmark counts them in only about five percent of women's graves.
The standard outfit for a Viking Age woman was a close-fitting strap dress held at the shoulders by a pair of shell-shaped brooches, often with beads strung between them, and over it a cloak fastened by a small round or trilobed brooch. Men wore a tunic down toward the knee, trousers and a cloak. Ordinary cloth was local wool and flax, woven at home by women. The wealthy added furs and silk and gold thread carried up from Byzantium.
For most of the Viking Age a coin was not worth what it said; it was worth its metal. Traders carried small balances and sets of weights, and a deal was closed by weighing out the silver required. That is why hoards are full of hacksilver, jewelry and ingots and coins cut into pieces to make the scale come level. The National Museum of Denmark puts the wider use of struck coins as money in Denmark in the eleventh century.
The Althing, an open-air assembly representing the whole of Iceland, was established at Thingvellir in 930 and went on meeting there until 1798. For two weeks each summer free men gathered to set laws, understood as a covenant between them, and to settle disputes. They camped in booths whose walls were built of turf and boulders, and fragments of about fifty of them still show in the ground. After Iceland accepted Christianity in 1000, laws were among the first things written down, and the old law book is known as Grágás.
Meat, fish, vegetables, cereals and milk products all mattered in the Viking diet, and sweetness came from berries, fruit and honey. Most households were self-sufficient farms, so the cooking followed the seasons, and the work wanted fat in the food, especially in winter. The National Museum of Denmark quotes a poem in which Thor, bargaining with a ferryman for a lift across a sound, mentions his own last meal: "I ate in peace before I left home, herrings and oatmeal, so I am still full."
Viking children worked. They looked after the fire and helped make food indoors, and outside they tended animals, labored in the fields and gathered firewood, berries and fruit in the woods. They played too. Excavators have turned up small wooden ships, swords, dolls and animal figures that were most likely toys. Childhood did not run long, though. In Iceland a male was legally an adult at sixteen, and a girl counted as an adult once she married, which came early.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday carry the names of Tyr, Odin, Thor and Frigg. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde points out the twist: the pattern is borrowed. Rome named its days for gods and planets, the north copied the scheme, and the Norse substituted their own gods for the Roman ones, so Mars became Tyr, Mercury became Odin, Jupiter became Thor and Venus became Frigg. English kept the substitutions. Sunday and Monday stayed with the sun and moon.
About a thousand hammer-shaped Viking pendants have been found across northern Europe, and for a long time scholars debated what exactly they were meant to be. In the spring of 2014 a metal detectorist on the Danish island of Lolland turned up one with something no other example carries: runes. They are tiny, the spelling is off and one letter is reversed, but they say that this is a hammer. The object identifies itself, which almost never happens.
Norse mythology reaches us mostly through two 13th-century Icelandic books, and the orderly one is Snorri Sturluson's. Snorri was a chieftain elected lawspeaker at the Althing in 1215, and at his farm at Reykholt he produced his Edda, a handbook of myth and skaldic verse, and the Heimskringla, a history of Norway's kings. He was working more than 150 years after the Viking Age. In 1241 armed men acting in the interests of the Norwegian crown came to Reykholt and killed him.
The older runic alphabet, used in the Iron Age, had twenty-four letters. At the start of the Viking Age it was reworked into the Younger Futhark, which had only sixteen, so fewer signs had to cover the same speech. The Vikings did not write on paper; they cut runes into stone, wood and iron. Short inscriptions turn up on everyday objects from Viking towns: a memo, a love token, or just the name of whoever owned the thing.
A stone raised in the parish of Rök in Östergötland, Sweden, in the early ninth century carries 760 characters, which makes it the world's longest runic inscription. It was never meant to be easy: parts are written in code. Four Swedish scholars who published a reading in 2020 found a frame of nine riddles, five about the sun and four about Odin and his warriors, and understood the text as a father consoling himself that his dead son was summoned to fight at Ragnarök.
Around the year 965 King Harald Bluetooth raised a large rune stone at Jelling in memory of his parents, Gorm and Thyra. The inscription goes on to say that this Harald won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. The National Museum of Denmark notes that the stone is often called Denmark's birth certificate, both because the country is named in the text and because the monument is solid evidence of a change of religion.
Bluetooth was meant to be a placeholder. In late 1997, after a standards committee in Toronto turned down their wireless link, Ericsson's Sven Mattisson and Intel's Jim Kardach went to a bar and fell to talking about Vikings. Mattisson described a novel he had read, Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, in which King Harald Bluetooth gathers quarreling factions at an assembly. Kardach heard his own problem in that and proposed the king's name. Marketing never found a better one, and the logo kept the runes Hagall and Bjarkan, Harald's initials, bound into one mark.
A chamber grave at Birka in Sweden, excavated in 1878, held a sword, an axe, a spear, armor-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields and two horses. The occupant was taken for a man for well over a century. Bone study and then a genomic analysis published in 2017 found no Y chromosome: the skeleton is female. A 2019 reassessment in Antiquity argued the warrior reading is still the best supported, while warning that biological sex is not the same thing as gender.
Vikings did not drink from the skulls of their enemies. The belief starts with the Danish scholar Ole Worm, who in 1636 quoted a Norse poem in which a hero looks forward to drinking in Valhalla from the curved branches of skulls. That is a poetic way of saying drinking horns, since horns grow on an animal's skull. Worm's Latin version turned the line into the skulls of the slain, and the Vikings have been living with the reputation ever since.