Viking Axes in the Sagas and the Law: Sources and Corrections

In the Icelandic sagas, axes have names, owners and reputations. A Norwegian king's gold-mounted gift axe split on its first job and was sent back rusted, with a verse calling it a fraud. Skarphéðinn's axe Rimmugýgr, the "Ogress of Battle", was dug out of the wall of his burnt house with its temper intact. Norwegian law set the broad-axe level with the sword at the weapon-muster. And the Mammen axe, iron inlaid with silver and buried with a magnate in the winter of 970-71, gave its name to an art style. The sagas and the law were written down in the 1200s. This page gives the source for every slide.

Every factual claim in our Viking axes carousel and in its caption, with its source. Section numbers 01 to 05 match the number at the top of each slide; 07 to 10 are the later slides' places in the carousel. The sixth image is a real engraving of the Mammen axe, printed in 1883, and the last three are photographs of the axe we sell. The other pictures are modern illustrations, not finds.

How we cite the sagas. We read Egils saga in the normalized Old Norse text on heimskringla.no and Njáls saga in the modern-spelling text on snerpa.is, and give their Icelandic chapter numbers. G. W. Dasent's 1861 English translation of Njáls saga numbers its chapters one lower: his 91 is our 92. Unless a translator is named, the English glosses on this page are ours. The sagas were written in Iceland in the thirteenth century, about people who lived two to three hundred years earlier. They are not Viking Age records, and neither is the Norwegian law under 04.

Slide by slide

Cover. "A king sent him a golden axe. He sent it back rusted."

The story is Egils saga, chapter 38. Þórólfr, the son of Skalla-Grímr, is leaving Norway for Iceland, and at their parting King Eiríkr, whom the saga elsewhere calls blóðöx, Bloodaxe, puts an axe in his hands as a gift for his father: Öxin var snaghyrnd ok mikil ok gullbúin, upp skellt skaftit með silfri, ok var þat inn virðiligsti gripr. In W. C. Green's 1893 translation, free on sagadb.org: "The axe was snag-horned, large, gold-mounted, the hilt overlaid with silver; it was most valuable and costly." "Hilt" is Green's word; the Icelandic skaft is the haft. Snaghyrnd means that the two tips of the edge stood out in points.

"Golden" on the cover means gold-mounted, gullbúin: an iron axe dressed in gold and silver, not an axe of gold. In spring, when Skalla-Grímr took it down again, var þá skaftit svart af reyk, en öxin ryðgengin, "the haft was black with smoke, and the axe rust-eaten". What happened in between is under 01.

Sources: Egils saga ch. 38 (heimskringla.no); Egil's Saga, tr. W. C. Green (1893), ch. 38.

01. He broke it on the first job

Skalla-Grímr tók við öxinni, helt upp ok sá á um hríð ok ræddi ekki um: he "took the axe, held it up and looked at it for a while, and said nothing about it", and hung it by his bed. That autumn at Borg, cattle were driven home for slaughter. He had two oxen led side by side, pushed a large flat stone under their necks, and struck both at one blow with the king's gift. The axe went on into the stone, svá at muðrinn brast ór allr ok rifnaði upp í gegnum herðuna, "so that the whole edge broke out and it split up through the hardened steel". He looked at the edge and again said nothing, went into the fire-hall and thrust the axe up on the beams above the door. Lá hon þar um vetrinn, "there it lay through the winter"; Green has it lying "in the smoke", and the black haft in spring bears him out.

When Þórólfr sailed again, his father handed the axe to him with a verse. Its third line is fox es illt í öxi, "there is foul deceit in the axe". Cleasby and Vigfússon's Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874) gives fox as "a fraud in selling" and cites this very line. The verse goes on to tell the axe to travel back aftr með roknu skafti, "with its smoke-blackened haft". That is the slide's "sent it back rusted, with a verse". It never reached the king: when Þórólfr came aboard his ship, þá kastaði hann öxinni fyrir borð á djúpi, svá at hon kom ekki upp síðan, "he threw the axe overboard into deep water, so that it never came up again". The verse is put in Skalla-Grímr's mouth by the saga; whether it is older than the saga cannot be shown.

Sources: Egils saga ch. 38, and the end of ch. 40 for the axe thrown overboard (heimskringla.no); Green (1893), ch. 38; R. Cleasby and G. Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), s.v. fox.

02. His axe had a name: the Ogress of Battle

The name is in Njáls saga, chapter 120. Skarphéðinn Njálsson walks among the booths at the Althing with öxi þá í hendi er hann hafði drepið Þráin með og hann kallaði Rimmugýgi, "the axe in his hand with which he had killed Þráinn, and which he called Rimmugýgr". Rimma is "a battle, tumult, fray" in Cleasby and Vigfússon; a gýgr is an ogress or giantess. Dasent's translation renders the name "the ogress of war". "Ogress of Battle" is ours, for the same two words. How he carried it is in chapter 92: öxi sína reidda um öxl, "his axe raised over his shoulder", and again in chapter 119.

The ice is chapter 92. The river Markarfljót was too deep to wade, and a sheet of ice "as slippery as glass" had formed on the far side, where Þráinn Sigfússon and his men stood. Skarphéðinn hefur sig á loft og hleypur yfir fljótið meðal höfuðísa og stöðvar sig ekki og rennir þegar af fram fótskriðu. Svellið var hált mjög og fór hann svo hart sem fugl flygi. Dasent: "Skarphedinn takes a spring into the air, and leaps over the stream between the icebanks, and does not check his course, but rushes still onwards with a slide. The sheet of ice was very slippery, and so he went as fast as a bird flies."

The twelve ells are Skarphéðinn's own words, spoken at the Althing in chapter 120: Þessa öxi hafði eg í hendi þá er eg hljóp tólf álna yfir Markarfljót, "I had this axe in my hand when I leapt twelve ells across Markarfljót". Chapter 92, which tells the leap, gives no distance. That is why the slide says he boasted it. We give no modern equivalent: the ell was not one fixed length.

Sources: Njáls saga ch. 92, 119 and 120 (snerpa.is); The Story of Burnt Njal, tr. G. W. Dasent (1861), ch. 91 and 119; Cleasby and Vigfússon (1874), s.v. rimma.

03. The fire took him. It did not take the axe.

Chapter 130 is the burning of Njáll's farm at Bergþórshváll by Flosi and his men. Skarphéðinn went to the end of the house: Þá varð brestur mikill. Reið þá ofan öll þekjan. Varð Skarphéðinn þá þar í millum og gaflhlaðsins. Mátti hann þaðan hvergi hrærast. "Then there was a great crash. The whole roof came down. Skarphéðinn was caught between it and the gable wall, and could not move from there."

Chapter 132. After the burners had gone, Hjalti Skeggjason and the household searched the ruins, and where the roof had fallen against the gable, Hjalti told them to dig. So the "they" who dug on the slide are Njáll's friends, not the burners. Hann hafði rekið öxina í gaflhlaðið svo fast að gengið hafði allt upp á miðjan fetann og var hún ekki af því dignað. Dasent: "he had driven his axe into the gable-wall so hard that it had gone in up to the middle of the blade, and that was why it was not softened." Digna, Cleasby and Vigfússon say, is "to lose temper (of steel)", and they cite this passage. The slide's "that, says the saga, is why" follows Dasent. The Icelandic can also be read more plainly, "and it had not lost its temper from that". Either way the saga-writer knew that fire ruins a hardened edge, and noted that this one came through.

Then Hjalti lifted the axe: "Þetta er fágætt vopn og munu fáir bera mega." Dasent: "This is a rare weapon, and few would be able to wield it." Kári answered, "Sé eg mann til hver bera skal öxina", "I see a man who shall bear the axe": Þorgeirr skorargeirr, whom he thought the greatest man of that family. In chapter 145 Þorgeirr fights með öxinni Rimmugýgi er átt hafði Skarphéðinn, "with the axe Rimmugýgr that Skarphéðinn had owned".

Sources: Njáls saga ch. 130, 132 and 145 (snerpa.is); Dasent (1861), ch. 131; Cleasby and Vigfússon (1874), s.v. digna.

04. Axe or sword. The law did not mind which.

The law is the older law of the Gulathing, the assembly of western Norway, Gulaþingslǫg, chapter 309, "Um vápnaþing", on the weapon-muster. It stands among the chapters on the levy, next to the rules for building boat-sheds and making the ship's sail. We read it in R. Keyser and P. A. Munch's edition, Norges gamle Love indtil 1387, vol. I (Christiania, 1846), p. 101, on the page image of the scan, because the machine-read text garbles several words. The king's steward or a landed man announces the muster in autumn and holds it in spring, and all men must attend, fríalser ok fulltíða, "free and of full age". Then, in our normalization: Nú skulu menn vápn sín sýna sem mælt er í lǫgum. Skal maðr hafa breiðøxi eða sverð, ok spjót ok skjǫld þann at versta kosti er liggja skulu járnspengr þrjár um þveran, ok mundriði seymðr með járnsaumi. Nú liggja aurar þrír við fólkvápn hvert.

"Now men shall show their weapons, as is laid down in the law. A man shall have a broad-axe or a sword, and a spear, and a shield, at the least one with three iron bands lying across it and the handgrip fastened with iron nails. Three aurar are due for each people's weapon that is missing." "The shield bound with iron" on the slide is short for the three iron bands and the iron-nailed grip. The broad-axe and the sword stand side by side in one list, and a missing one cost the same fine: that is the slide's "in the law, the axe stood level with the sword". The law is Norwegian, for the men of the Gulathing. The manuscript it is printed from, the editors write, is neppe yngre end Midten af det 13de Aarhundrede, "hardly younger than the middle of the thirteenth century". Parts of the law are older than the manuscript; the age of this clause is not known.

Sources: Gulaþingslǫg ch. 309, in Norges gamle Love I, ed. R. Keyser and P. A. Munch (1846), p. 101, and the editors' description of the manuscript (our normalization and gloss).

05. This axe gave its name to an art style

The Mammen axe is in the National Museum of Denmark, Nationalmuseet, in Copenhagen. The museum's page "An axe with double meaning" says it "is made of iron with silver inlay" and "is decorated in the so-called Mammen style, which is named after this particular find", a style of the 900s that lasted until around 1000. On one side is a tree, which "may symbolise the Christian Tree of Life or the pagan tree Yggdrasil"; on the other "an animal figure", perhaps the rooster Gullinkambi or the Phoenix. Both readings make it a bird, and the museum does not choose between them.

The grave: "The grave from Mammen" tells how "in 1868 a farmer began to dig into the mound Bjerringhøj at Mammen near Viborg", and that "a magnate was buried in the grave during the winter of 970-71 AD". "At his feet lay two axes"; this is the one with silver. "It is not known whether the deceased was Christian or pagan." The museum adds that he "presumably" belonged to the circle around King Harald Bluetooth, and no more than that.

The rest is from a paper by Rimstad, Mannering, Jørkov and Kanstrup, "Lost and found: Viking Age human bones and textiles from Bjerringhøj, Denmark", Antiquity 95 (2021). The farmers who opened the mound "removed the finds and shared them amongst the village farmers" (the slide's "the village shared out the finds"), until Arthur Feddersen of Viborg Cathedral School heard of it and came to save what he could. A re-excavation in 1986 gave "a dendrochronological date for the burial of AD 970-971". The bones had been "missing for more than 100 years" and turned up in a misplaced box in the National Museum, stored with the finds from another Viking Age burial, Slotsbjergby on Zealand. The authors conclude that the grave's owner was "an adult, most likely male", and that the bones may be a mix of two people. The slide follows the museum's word, magnate.

The picture is an engraving from Joseph Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times: The Iron Age (Edinburgh, 1883), the Wikimedia Commons file "Axe head Mammen Anderson 1883", in the public domain. It is an engraving, not a photograph.

Sources: Nationalmuseet, "The grave from Mammen" and "An axe with double meaning"; C. Rimstad, U. Mannering, M. L. S. Jørkov and M. Kanstrup, Antiquity 95 (2021), pp. 735 to 752. Image: J. Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times: The Iron Age (1883), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Object: Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.

07. What would you name your axe?

Skarphéðinn called his Rimmugýgr (see 02). Name yours in the comments, and we will send you our free Viking name generator: real Old Norse given names and bynames, each shown with the medieval source it is attested in.

08. Made to be used, not hung on a wall

The axe on slides 08 to 10 is our Viking axe with a decorated head and carved handle. Its product page gives a carbon-steel head with etched decoration, and calls the axe fully functional, built to be used as well as displayed. The photograph shows the rest: a bearded profile, with the lower edge drawn down below the line of the haft into a hook; a wolf etched at the beard, its fur lines running down into it; and a panel of knotwork near the top.

09. Carved, scorched, bound

The page says the handle is carved wood and that the axe is handmade and 20 inches (50.8 cm) long overall, a one-handed axe. The photograph shows the haft scorched in bands to darken the grain, carved near the head with rune-style signs and banded patterns, fixed with metal pins, and wrapped in cord for the grip. The page does not name the wood or the cord.

10. Now name yours

The same axe: carbon steel, etched, handmade, 50.8 cm. "Ready to use" is the page's "fully functional". It is a modern axe and copies no particular find.

Caption. The law, the Mammen axe and the dates

"Norway's Gulathing law asked every man at the weapon-muster for 'a broad-axe or a sword, and a spear and a shield'. In the law, the axe stood level with the sword." See 04: the clause is addressed to all free men of full age.

"The Mammen axe, iron inlaid with silver and buried with a magnate in the winter of 970-71, gave its name to a whole Viking art style." See 05. The Mammen style is dated by the museum from the 900s to around 1000.

"The stories come from sagas and laws written down in the 1200s, about people two or three centuries earlier." The stories are the two sagas and the law, whose people and rules belong to the tenth and early eleventh centuries. The Mammen axe is not a text but an object, from a grave dated 970-71 (05).

The product paragraph is covered under 08 to 10.

The caption does not mention it, but the axe was also what foreigners remembered. Anna Komnene, writing in twelfth-century Constantinople, calls the emperor's Varangian Guard "the axe-bearing barbarians" (Alexiad II.9). The rest of the caption is covered under the cover and 01 to 03.

What we do not claim

• That the sagas or the Gulathing law are Viking Age sources. The sagas were written in Iceland in the 1200s; the law's manuscript is Norwegian, from the middle of that century or a little earlier.
• That the king's axe was made of gold. It was gold-mounted, with silver on the haft.
• That it ever got back to the king. Þórólfr threw it overboard.
• That Vikings despised decorated axes. The king's axe failed on the job; the Mammen axe, decorated in silver, went into a magnate's grave.
• That anyone measured Skarphéðinn's leap. Twelve ells is his own boast.
• That the Mammen man was a prince, or certainly a man. The museum says magnate, and "presumably" of Harald Bluetooth's circle; the bone study says "most likely male".
• That the tree and the bird on the Mammen axe are Christian, or pagan. Nobody knows.
• That the illustrations on the cover, 01 to 04 and 07 show real finds. They are modern pictures.
• That our axe copies any Viking find. It is a modern, handmade axe with etched decoration.

Corrections

None yet. If you find an error, tell us, with a citation.

Frequently asked questions

Why did Skalla-Grímr send back the king's axe?

In Egils saga, King Eiríkr Bloodaxe sent Skalla-Grímr a large gold-mounted axe with silver on the haft. On its first job, slaughtering oxen, it went into a stone and the edge split. He hung it in the smoke all winter and sent it back rusted, with a verse: there is foul deceit in the axe. His son threw it overboard on the way.

What was Skarphéðinn's axe called?

Rimmugýgr, from rimma, battle, and gýgr, ogress: the Ogress of Battle. In Njáls saga Skarphéðinn carries it over his shoulder and leaps the river Markarfljót with it, sliding on across the ice. After the burning of Njáll's farm it is found driven into the gable wall with its temper intact, and passes to Þorgeirr skorargeirr.

What did the Gulathing law say about axes?

Norway's Gulathing law told every free man of full age to show, at the spring weapon-muster, a broad-axe or a sword, a spear, and a shield with three iron bands across it. The axe and the sword stood in the same list and carried the same fine if missing. The manuscript dates from the middle of the 1200s or a little earlier.

What is the Mammen axe?

An iron axe inlaid with silver from a grave at Mammen in Denmark, dug into by a farmer in 1868 and now in the National Museum in Copenhagen. The magnate in the grave was buried in the winter of 970-71. The axe gave its name to the Mammen art style, and its tree and bird can be read as Christian or pagan.