Beards in the Viking Age: Sources and Corrections

A medieval Norwegian law book says that if you take hold of another man's beard with an angry hand, you owe him full compensation, the same as for shoving him overboard or off a jetty, while grabbing his hair and jerking him towards you costs half. A walrus-ivory figure three centimetres tall, which the National Museum of Denmark calls the closest we have ever come to a portrait of a Viking, wears a long braided goatee. In 793 Alcuin scolded the Northumbrian nobles for cutting their beards and hair to look like the pagans. And the greatest lawyer in Njáls saga is a man on whom no beard grew. This page gives the source for every slide, and says plainly what is still uncertain.

Every factual claim in the five content slides of our Viking Age beards carousel, and in its caption, with its source. Section numbers match the number at the top of each slide.

Slide by slide

Cover. Grabbing this in anger cost as much as shoving a man off a jetty

The cover line comes from the Gulathing law of medieval Norway, in the chapter headed Um fullrétte er hér, "Here, about full compensation". Its clause reads: Maðr tekr í kamp öðrom heiptugri hendi, þá skal hann bøta hánom fullum rétte. A man who takes hold of another man's beard with an angry hand must pay him full compensation. The clause just before it sets the same full compensation for shoving a man overboard or off a jetty, fyrir borð, eða af bryggiu.

The law's word is kampr, which Cleasby and Vigfússon's Old Icelandic dictionary glosses "a beard, moustache", so the stricter translation is "beard or moustache". The anger is part of the offence: the clause counts a grab made heiptugri hendi, with an angry hand, and nothing else. And the law is medieval, not Viking Age. Its main manuscript, the Codex Rantzovianus, was written about 1250. The Gulathing law has older layers, but none of them can be dated to the Viking Age.

Sources: Gulathing law ch. 195, printed in R. Keyser and P.A. Munch, Norges gamle Love indtil 1387, vol. I (Christiania, 1846), pp. 69 to 70. The machine-read text of these pages renders kamp as famp, so the reading here was taken from the page images. Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), s.v. kampr.

01. His beard was worth more than his hair

Chapter 195 is a price list for humiliations, and it runs in order. Poking a man with a stake or a pole costs half compensation, or full if he falls. Shoving him into the fire costs full compensation and a ring-fine to the king as well. Shoving him overboard or off a jetty costs full. Taking hold of his beard with an angry hand costs full. Then: Maðr tekr í hár öðrom ok kippir til sín, þá skal bøta hölfom rétte. Take a man by the hair and jerk him towards you, and it is half. Jerk him towards you and shove him away again, and it is tuttan, which is full. If two men drop their weapons and pull each other's hair, the law calls it vingretta, and neither of them gets anything.

So in the law's own list, a grab at the beard is priced with the shove off a jetty and at twice a grab at the hair. The slide gives no figure in silver, on purpose. Full compensation in Gulathing law scaled with the rank of the man insulted, so there is no single amount, and the slide says only that it rose with his rank.

The same word turns up on a Viking Age runestone. Ög 131, at Heda church in Östergötland, Sweden, dated by its carving style, reads þurkiR : resþi : kuml : þusi : eftiR : onut : konb : faþur : sin: Þorgeirr raised these monuments in memory of Onund Kampr, his father. Lena Peterson's Nordiskt runnamnslexikon takes konb as a byname, from kanpr, kampr, lip-beard or moustache. Onund Kampr is Onund Moustache. It is the only securely read facial-hair byname on a Viking Age runestone. No runestone securely names a man "Beard".

Medieval Iceland had one beard law, and it points the other way. The Christian law section of Grágás, the Icelandic law book, orders priests to have their moustache and beard cut off and their tonsure renewed once a month; a priest who will not obey the bishop owes a three-mark fine. No clause in Grágás requires a layman to wear a beard, and beardlessness is not named among the insults it punishes. On Gotland, the later Guta lag prices a torn-out beard like any other hair-pulling, by the size of the patch.

Beard names are far commoner in the books than on stone. The Icelandic Book of Settlements, Landnámabók, has Önundr breiðskeggr (Broad-beard), Hrólfr rauðskeggr (Red-beard) and Þorsteinn kolskeggr (Coal-beard), and at least twelve men simply called Skeggi. Gunnlaugs saga names the Dublin king Sigtryggr silkiskegg, Silk-beard, and Snorri's Hálfdanar saga svarta a king in Sogn called Haraldr gullskeggr, Gold-beard. These are thirteenth-century books, and Forkbeard shows how late a byname can be written down. Sveinn tjúguskegg, the Danish king who died in 1014, first appears with it about 1140, in the Roskilde Chronicle, and Snorri's Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar says he was síðan, later, called it. Our free Viking name generator gives real Norse bynames like these, with the medieval source for each.

Sources: Gulathing law ch. 195, Keyser and Munch, Norges gamle Love I, pp. 69 to 70; Ög 131 in the Scandinavian Runic-text Database (Rundata), and Lena Peterson, Nordiskt runnamnslexikon (2007), s.v. KanpR; Grágás, Konungsbók, Christian law section § 6, in Vilhjálmur Finsen's Danish translation, Grágás: Islændernes Lovbog i Fristatens Tid (1870), whose wording is that priests shall have their moustache and their chin- and cheek-beard cut off; Guta lag 19 § 32, in C.J. Schlyter, Samling af Sweriges gamla lagar VII (1852), read in machine-read text only, so we give the principle and not the fines; Landnámabók (Sturlubók), in five parts on heimskringla.no, of which the link opens the first; Gunnlaugs saga ch. 8; Heimskringla, Hálfdanar saga svarta ch. 3 and Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar ch. 38; Chronicon Roskildense, "Swen, cognomine Tyuvskeg".

02. Three centimetres, and a braided beard

The figure is carved from walrus ivory and stands three centimetres tall. It came from a burial mound at Fløgstad in Sørum, north-east of Oslo, where it lay in a soapstone bowl with six bone buttons and a die. The same grave held a double-edged sword, a spearhead, a whetstone, smith's tongs and a spur, so it is read as a rider's grave. The National Museum of Denmark, which holds the figure, dates the grave to the second half of the 900s; the figure is dated by that grave, not on its own. The museum's curator, Peter Pentz, takes it for a gaming piece from hnefatafl, a Viking board game.

In the museum's press release, the figure, which is partly damaged (delvist beskadiget), has a centre parting with a side wave, the ears free and the hair cut short at the nape, and et stort overskæg, et langt flettet gedebukkeskæg og bakkenbarter: a big moustache, a long braided goatee and sideburns. Pentz calls it "the closest we have ever come to a portrait of a Viking". We have read the press release and the abstract of Pentz's 2025 paper, not the paper itself, so we do not repeat what the paper argues about who the figure is, and we do not call him a king or a warrior.

One small figure is not a census. Art has conventions, and the archaeologist Steven Ashby warns that the exaggerated beards on a group of small Viking Age figurines, the best known from Rällinge in Sweden, "should clearly not be seen as direct representations of popular styles of grooming". The faces we have vary. On the Oseberg wagon, from a burial of 834, the front support carries a head with a long beard and a long moustache; on the rear support the heads have long moustaches, one of them a hint of a short-cropped beard, but a smooth chin. None of the men on the Oseberg tapestries has a visible beard, as Marianne Vedeler of the Museum of Cultural History points out.

Sources: National Museum of Denmark, "Nationalmuseet opdager nye detaljer i vikingernes frisure", press release, 27 August 2025; B. Amundsen, "This is how a Viking's hair and beard may have looked", Science Norway, 17 September 2025, for the size, the grave goods and Marianne Vedeler on the Oseberg tapestries; P. Pentz, "Understanding the Flygstad (Fløgstad) Figurine: Gaming Pieces, Kings, Gender and Fertility Rites", Medieval Archaeology 69 (2025), 169 to 199, doi:10.1080/00766097.2025.2518811, abstract only. Published accounts give the find year as 1796 or 1797, so we give neither. Steven P. Ashby, "Grooming the Face in the Early Middle Ages", Internet Archaeology 42 (2016); Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Oseberg wagon C55000/224, quoting the description in the 1926 Oseberg catalogue. The burial is tree-ring dated to 834; the wagon was made before that.

03. Northumbria copied the look

In 793, the year Lindisfarne was raided, the scholar Alcuin wrote to King Æthelred of Northumbria and his nobles. The letter reads the raid as a judgement, and turns on the court: Considerate habitum, tonsuram, et mores principum et populi luxuriosos. Ecce tonsura quam in barbis et in capillis paganis adsimilari voluistis. Consider the dress, the haircut and the luxurious habits of princes and people. Look at the cut of beard and hair in which you wanted to resemble the pagans. He goes on to ask whether the terror of the people whose fashion they wanted to copy does not now hang over them.

Three limits. Alcuin writes paganis, pagans. He does not say Danes or Vikings; the link to the raiders comes from the context of the letter. Tonsura in barbis is a cut of the beard, so it tells us the pagans' beards had a style worth copying, not that they were big. And the letter is a sermon, not a description.

The slide's last line rests on the other outside writers, and none of them describes a big beard on a Norse or Rus man. The geographer Iṣṭakhrī, writing about 951, says of the Rus that "some men shave their beards and some plait them"; but he never saw them, he worked from earlier writers and informants, and he counts the Slovenes as one of his three sorts of Rus. Leo the Deacon's History gives the Rus prince Sviatoslav, in 971, a shaved chin, or a sparse one in the Latin of the 1828 edition, and a long, bushy moustache. Leo was probably not an eyewitness, and Sviatoslav, a third-generation Rus prince with a Slavic name, was not a Viking. Ibn Faḍlān and Ibn Rusta mention no beards on the Rus at all. Three lines often passed round online as Viking details, about men who shave their beards, pluck them, or have shaved chins, are about other peoples in Ibn Faḍlān's account: the Bashkirs, the Oghuz and the Pechenegs.

Sources: Alcuin to King Æthelred of Northumbria, 793, ep. 22 in P. Jaffé, W. Wattenbach and E. Dümmler (eds), Monumenta Alcuiniana (Berlin, 1873), p. 182, and in C. Chase (ed.), Two Alcuin Letter-Books (1975), p. 55; Iṣṭakhrī in P. Lunde and C. Stone (trans.), Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness (Penguin, 2012), § III.24, where "plait" translates a verb that can also mean twist; Leo the Deacon, History IX.11, in A.-M. Talbot and D.F. Sullivan (trans.), The History of Leo the Deacon (Dumbarton Oaks, 2005), at Hase p. 157.

04. The wisest man had no beard

Njáls saga was composed in Iceland about 1280 (scholars put it between about 1270 and 1290), about events around the year 1000. One of its oldest manuscripts, and the one with the most complete text, Reykjabók, AM 468 4to, was written, in the Árni Magnússon Institute's words, around or shortly after 1300. It is a saga, not a record, and everything below is what the saga says.

Chapter 20 introduces Njáll: en sá hlutur var á ráði hans að honum óx eigi skegg. Hann var lögmaður svo mikill að engi var hans jafningi. But one thing about his lot was that no beard grew on him. He was so great a lawyer that no one was his equal. The narrator does not call him skegglauss, beardless. That is his enemies' word.

Hallgerðr is the first to use it, at a feast in chapter 35. In chapter 44 women who have spent the night at Njáll's farm report that one of his farmhands is carting dung onto the hummocks, because, he said, the hay would come up better there. Hallgerðr answers that he should have had dung carted onto his own beard, to be like other men: köllum hann nú karl hinn skegglausa en sonu hans taðskegglinga, let us call him the Beardless Old Man and his sons Dung-beardlings. Cleasby and Vigfússon gloss taðskegglingar as "dung-beards". The joke is that if manure makes grass grow, he should have manured his chin. Some scholars also hear a slur on the sons' paternity in the word, so we give the manure joke as the saga's own setting for it, not as the only reading. Gunnarr, hearing it, calls Njáll the man "who is worth the most".

The taunt costs lives at once. In chapter 45 Njáll's sons kill Sigmundr, who had made verses on it, and at the settlement Gunnarr rules that anyone who repeats the words may be killed without compensation. In chapter 91 Hallgerðr says them again from a doorway, "Go home, Dung-beardlings", and everyone present except Þráinn becomes liable for the words. When the sons tell their father, Njáll's first question is a lawyer's: Nefnduð þér nokkura votta að orðunum? Did you name any witnesses to the words? They had not. Þráinn is killed in the next chapter.

The words come back a last time in chapter 123, at the settlement for the killing of Höskuldr. The arbiters set triple compensation, six hundred in silver, and the money is piled up in the Law Council; Njáll lays a silk robe and a pair of boots on top. Flosi picks up the robe and twice asks who gave it, and no one answers. When Skarphéðinn asks whom he suspects, he says: Það ætla eg að til hafi gefið faðir þinn, karl hinn skegglausi, því að margir vita eigi er hann sjá hvort hann er heldur kona eða karlmaður. I think your father gave it, the Beardless Old Man, because many who look at him cannot tell whether he is a woman or a man. Skarphéðinn answers that Njáll has had sons with his wife, so he is a man; then he throws Flosi a pair of blue breeches and calls him the bride of the Svínafell troll every ninth night. Only after that does Flosi push the money away and refuse a penny of it. The peace breaks, and in chapters 128 to 130 Flosi burns the house at Bergþórshvoll with Njáll inside.

So the beard taunt is not the last insult before the peace broke; Skarphéðinn's is. The burning has larger causes as well: the killing of Höskuldr, Flosi's duty to avenge him, and Hildigunnr throwing Höskuldr's blood-soaked cloak over Flosi in chapter 116. The slide says only what the saga shows: the taunt came back at the settlement, the peace broke, and the house burned. When the bodies are found, the man who judges them, Hjalti Skeggjason, says that Njáll's body and face look brighter than any dead man's he has seen.

Sources: Brennu-Njáls saga, Old Norse text on sagadb.org, chs. 20, 35, 44, 45, 91, 92, 116, 123, 128 to 130 and 132, cross-checked against the text on Wikiheimild; G.W. Dasent (trans.), The Story of Burnt Njal (1861), whose chapter numbers run one lower from about chapter 81 on, so our chapter 123 is his 122; Cleasby and Vigfússon, s.v. tað-skegglingar; Ármann Jakobsson, "Masculinity and Politics in Njáls saga", Viator 38 (2007), 191 to 215, for the manure reading. Chapter numbers follow the standard 159-chapter division.

05. They called it the beard-axe

Cleasby and Vigfússon list skeggja, "a kind of halberd, also called barða", and skegg-øx as the same weapon: the beard-axe. Hjalmar Falk's study of Old Norse weapons (1914) records that the lower blade's almost rectangular extension was called skjegg, beard, in Norwegian dialect. It is the part of the blade that hangs down below the line of the head. Egils saga uses the word in chapter 40, where a man puts skeggöxi eina, a beard-axe, into Egill's hands, and the saga adds þau vopn voru þá tíð: those weapons were in fashion then.

The same beard word sits inside a line of Völuspá on the end of the world, skeggöld, skalmöld, which Edward Pettit's edition translates "axe-age, sword-age". It is an axe-age, not a beard-age: the beard is inside the axe.

The axe on slide 09 is our Fenrisulfr bearded axe, with a head of AISI 1065 steel on a carved ash handle.

Sources: Cleasby and Vigfússon, s.v. skeggja and skegg-øx; Hjalmar Falk, Altnordische Waffenkunde (1914), pp. 109 to 110; Egils saga ch. 40, Old Norse text on sagadb.org; Völuspá, st. 45 in the heimskringla.no text (the Codex Regius reading; Snorri's Edda has skeggjöld); Edward Pettit (ed. and trans.), The Poetic Edda (Open Book Publishers, 2023).

What we do not claim

• That any of this is Viking law. The Gulathing law survives in a manuscript of about 1250, Grágás in thirteenth-century manuscripts and Guta lag later still. They are medieval Norwegian, Icelandic and Gotlandic law.
• A figure in silver for the beard grab. Full compensation varied with the rank of the man insulted.
• That cutting a man's beard was a crime in law. The laws price taking hold of a beard; we found no clause about cutting a layman's beard.
• That a beard was legally required. The only beard law in medieval Iceland ordered priests to have theirs cut off.
• That Vikings dyed or bleached their beards with lye. No Norse, Arab, Byzantine or English source says so. The nearest real text is Pliny, in AD 77, on Gauls and Germans reddening the hair of the head with soap: seven centuries early, the wrong peoples and not beards.
• That Vikings wore beads or rings in their beards. Some beards were braided; no text, find or museum record shows a bead or ring in one. The combs found on Viking sites are combs; Ashby calls the suggestion that small combs in early medieval graves were beard combs difficult to substantiate.
• That most Viking men had beards, as a measured fact. Beards are common in Viking Age art, but, as Ashby puts it, it is impossible to say quite how widespread they were.
• That beardlessness shamed every Norseman. Priests were shaved by law, Leo the Deacon gives Sviatoslav a shaved or sparse chin, Ásmundr skegglauss (Beardless) appears in Landnámabók and Grettis saga as an ordinary byname, and the wisest man in Njáls saga had no beard.
• That a beard joke caused the burning of Njáll. It came back at the settlement; the burning had larger causes, and the last insult before the peace broke was Skarphéðinn's.
• That Sveinn was called Forkbeard in his lifetime, or that any source describes his beard. The byname is first written down about 1140, and no medieval source describes his face.
• That the Fløgstad figure is a king or a warrior. It is a walrus-ivory figure from a tenth-century rider's grave.
• That our Gnezdovo mask pendant on slide 10 copies one particular museum object. It is a 925 silver pendant after a mask-pendant type found at Gnezdovo, near Smolensk. The type is in the scholarly literature; the specific original, its hoard and its museum number could not be confirmed. The beards on these masks are ornament, not evidence of how men wore theirs.

Corrections

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

Frequently asked questions

Did Vikings have beards?

Many did, but nobody can say how many. Beards are common in Viking Age art: the Oseberg wagon, from a burial of 834, has long-bearded heads, and a walrus-ivory figure from a tenth-century grave at Fløgstad in Norway wears a long braided goatee. But the same wagon also has a smooth chin under a moustache, the men on the Oseberg tapestry are shown without beards, and outside writers describe Rus men who shaved their beards or plaited them.

Did Vikings braid their beards or wear beads in them?

Some braided them; there is no evidence for beads. The Fløgstad figure has a long braided goatee, and the geographer Iṣṭakhrī, writing about 951 from other men's reports, says some Rus plaited their beards while others shaved them. No text, find or museum record shows a bead or ring in a Viking Age beard, and no source says Vikings dyed their beards with lye.

Was there a Viking law about beards?

Not a Viking Age one. The laws that mention beards are medieval. The Norwegian Gulathing law, in a manuscript of about 1250, made taking hold of a man's beard with an angry hand cost full compensation, the same as shoving him off a jetty and twice a grab at his hair. The Icelandic law book Grágás has one beard clause, and it orders priests to cut theirs off. Neither required a man to wear a beard.