Horses in the Viking Age: Sources and Corrections

Two horses from the Viking Age layers at Coppergate in York, dated 850 to 900, carry two copies each of the DMRT3 mutation that makes ambling gaits possible, and ten of the thirteen Viking Age horses tested from Iceland carry it too. No older horse in the 2016 ancient-DNA study has it. Today it sits in 98 per cent of the Tennessee Walking Horse gene copies sampled, and in more than nine in ten Icelandic horse gene copies, against about six in ten in the Viking Age. And in Hrafnkels saga a man goes out to his stallion at the door and calls him "my fosterling". This page gives the source for every slide, and says plainly what is still uncertain.

Every factual claim in our Viking Age horses 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.

Slide by slide

Cover. The oldest horses known to carry the gait gene lived in Viking York and Iceland

The cover rests on one paper: Saskia Wutke and sixteen colleagues, "The origin of ambling horses", Current Biology 26 (2016). The team genotyped 90 ancient horses, from the Copper Age to the eleventh century, at one position in the DMRT3 gene. The variant they were looking for, which they call the "A" allele, is the mutation a 2012 study had tied to ambling and pacing; the ordinary form is "C". In the paper's supplementary Table S1 the earliest horses with the A allele are the two from York, dated 850 to 900, and the Icelandic horses, dated 850 to 1050. Every older horse in the table is C/C.

The working word on the cover is "known". The claim is about the horses that have been tested, and the testing is thin: two horses from York, thirteen from Iceland, ten from Sweden and Denmark, and none from Norway. A later and much larger study of ancient horse genomes, Fages et al. (2019), reports that the ambling allele "was first identified in a heterozygous horse dating back 730 years ago", from the Mongol Empire. Its dataset included two Viking Age Icelandic horses, but it counted any allele supported by a single read as absent, and we could not confirm whether those two genomes had usable reads at the DMRT3 site. We read that as a tension between two studies, not a refutation, and it is why the cover says "known" and not "first".

Sources: S. Wutke et al., "The origin of ambling horses", Current Biology 26 (2016), R697 to R699, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.07.001, main text and Supplemental Information, Table S1, pp. 7 to 9; A. Fages et al., "Tracking five millennia of horse management with extensive ancient genome time series", Cell 177 (2019), 1419 to 1435, including the note to Figure S5.

01. Two horses from Coppergate

Table S1 lists two samples from York, Coppergate, Yat07 and Yat12, both dated 850 to 900 and both A/A: two copies of the mutation each. They are the only English horses in the table. In the paper's own words, the result tracks "the origin of gaitedness to Medieval England between 850 and 900 AD".

The slide says less than that, on purpose. York in those years was not simply English. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the Great Army going "from the East-Angles over the mouth of the Humber to the Northumbrians, as far as York", and fighting there. The two horses therefore lived, at least for part of that half-century, in a town the Great Army had taken, and a horse in Viking-ruled York could itself have been brought in from somewhere else. The paper does not discuss that possibility, and with two horses from one site nobody can settle it. That is why the slide says the York horses "may have come from elsewhere", and it says the mutation was found there, not that it began there.

The slide's date for the taking of York, 866, needs a note. The Chronicle, in Ingram's translation, enters the army's march on York under the year 867. Modern histories usually put the capture of the city in late 866; we have not read the chronicle behind that exact date ourselves, so treat the year as the conventional one.

Sources: Wutke et al. 2016, Table S1, p. 8 (Yat07, Yat12); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, J. Ingram (trans.), 1823, s.a. 867, on Project Gutenberg.

02. Ten of thirteen

The thirteen Icelandic horses in Table S1 are all dated 850 to 1050. Six are A/A, four are C/A and three are C/C, so ten of the thirteen carry at least one copy of the mutation. Two pairs of rows in the table are marked as the same horse sampled twice, one pair as certain and one as likely, and we count each of those once. One of the A/A horses comes from burial XIII in the cemetery at Dalvík (Brimnes); a different grave in the same cemetery, burial XII, is the one with the beheaded dog on our Viking Age dogs page.

None of the ten horses from Sweden and Denmark carries the mutation. They are seven from Uppsala, with date ranges running from 600 to 1160, and three Danish horses, two of them from the Iron Age and one dated 1000 to 1300. So only some of the ten are Viking Age, which is why the slide says so. Norway, where most of Iceland's settlers came from, is not in the table at all.

The authors' reading is stated in the paper's summary: the presence of the allele in Icelandic horses of the ninth to eleventh century "strongly suggests that ambling horses were brought from the British Isles to Iceland by Norse people". They also argue that the settlers then selected for the trait, and that the founder effect in so small an island population strengthened it. The slide gives that as their view, in their words, and not as settled fact.

Sources: Wutke et al. 2016, summary, and Table S1, pp. 8 to 9 (FoEq02 to FoEq77; FoEq47 and FoEq48 "same individual", FoEq76 and FoEq77 "likely same individual"; Upps01 to Upps10; P098, P108, P82).

03. The same mutation, in your breed

The breed figures come from the paper that found the mutation: L.S. Andersson et al., "Mutations in DMRT3 affect locomotion in horses and spinal circuit function in mice", Nature 488 (2012). Its Table 1 gives the frequency of the A allele by breed. Tennessee Walking Horse, 0.98, from 33 horses. Paso Fino, 1.00, from 45. Standardbred pacer (USA), 1.00, from 40. The Missouri Fox Trotter, the Peruvian Paso and the Rocky Mountain Horse are also at 1.00. The Thoroughbreds (29 horses) and Arabians (18) had none, and neither did the Swedish Warmbloods, Shetland ponies or Gotland ponies tested.

"98 per cent of gene copies" is the plain-English form of an allele frequency of 0.98: of all the copies of the gene in the horses sampled, 98 in a hundred carried the mutation. A figure of 1.00 means every horse sampled, not every horse alive, and the samples are small, 17 to 45 horses for most of the gaited breeds.

"Possible, not certain" is the paper's point too. The mutation, it says, "is permissive for the ability to perform alternate gaits", and for pace, two copies are "required, but not sufficient", since many Standardbred trotters and some Icelandic horses with two copies do not pace. Training and other genes still matter. And the table records frequencies, not family trees. A Paso Fino and a Viking Age Icelandic horse can share the mutation without the one descending from the other, and no study we read traces modern gaited breeds back to Viking horses.

Sources: L.S. Andersson et al., Nature 488 (2012), 642 to 646, doi:10.1038/nature11399, abstract, main text and Table 1, read in the PubMed Central author manuscript.

04. Six in ten then, nine in ten now

The Viking Age figure is in Wutke's supplementary Table S2: for the thirteen Icelandic horses, the frequency of the A allele is 0.62, about six gene copies in ten. The modern figure comes from T. Kristjansson et al., "The effect of the 'Gait keeper' mutation in the DMRT3 gene on gaiting ability in Icelandic horses", Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics 131 (2014): "The estimated frequency of the A-allele in the Icelandic horse population in 2012 was 0.94." The same study says the frequency "has increased in recent decades" and that selective breeding for lateral gaits has apparently changed it "in relatively few years". Andersson's 2012 table has a different figure, 0.89 for a random sample of 162 Icelandic horses. It is a different sample of the same population, and it points the same way.

The caption says Icelandic breeders chose the gait. That rests on two findings with a gap between them. Wutke's team argue that the Norse settlers selected for the trait; Kristjansson's team measured the rise over recent decades. What happened to the frequency in the centuries between is not measured by anyone we read.

The old figure is a sample, not a census, and the slide says why. At least seven of the thirteen come from sites in Rúnar Leifsson's catalogue of Viking Age burials in Iceland, and the table itself labels several by grave number. Grave horses were chosen. An ancient-DNA study of Viking Age Icelandic horses by Heidi Nistelberger and colleagues found a male to female ratio of 18 to 1 among horses from burials, against 0 to 3 from non-burial sites. Leifsson concludes that the grave horses were "symbolic representatives of their species and not necessarily killed because of their individuality or because they were favourite animals". A group chosen like that need not look like the herd it came from.

Sources: Wutke et al. 2016, Supplemental Information, Table S2, p. 10 (Iceland: C/C 3, C/A 4, A/A 6; A 0.62); T. Kristjansson et al., J. Anim. Breed. Genet. 131 (2014), 415 to 425, abstract; Andersson et al. 2012, Table 1; R. Leifsson, Ritual Animal Killing and Burial Customs in Viking Age Iceland, PhD thesis, University of Iceland (2018), synopsis and site catalogue; H.M. Nistelberger et al., "Sexing Viking Age horses from burial and non-burial sites in Iceland using ancient DNA", Journal of Archaeological Science 101 (2019), 115 to 122.

05. He called his horse my fosterling

In Hrafnkels saga freysgoða, chapter 3, Hrafnkell owns a stallion he calls Freyfaxi. He gives the god Freyr a half-share in the horse, Hann gaf Frey, vin sínum, þann hest hálfan, and swears to kill any man who rides it án hans vilja, without his leave. In chapter 4 he hires a shepherd, Einarr, and repeats the warning. In chapter 5 about thirty ewes go missing, and Einarr catches Freyfaxi and rides him in search of them. Let go, the horse runs down the valley to Hrafnkell's farm and neighs loudly at the door, hneggjaði hann þá hátt. A serving woman goes out and reports that Freyfaxi is at the door in a sorry state. Hrafnkell goes out to him and says:

Illa þykir mér, að þú ert þann veg til ger, fóstri minn, en heima hafðir þú vit þitt, er þú sagðir mér til, og skal þessa hefnt verða. Far þú til liðs þíns. It grieves me that you have been treated so, my fosterling, but you kept your wits when you came home to tell me, and this shall be avenged. Go back to your herd.

The translation on the slide is ours. Fóstri is a foster-child or foster-brother; John Coles's 1882 English translation softens it to "my pet". The next morning, in chapter 6, Hrafnkell rides up to the shieling with an axe and kills Einarr, and the saga's feud begins.

Hrafnkels saga was written in Iceland in the late thirteenth century, about people of the tenth, and many scholars read it as fiction. It shows what a thirteenth-century Icelandic writer thought a man might feel for a horse. It is not a record of a real stallion.

Sources: Hrafnkels saga freysgoða, chs. 3 to 6, Old Norse text on sagadb.org; J. Coles (trans.), The Story of Hrafnkell, Frey's Priest (1882), on sagadb.org.

07. Comment your horse's name

Our free Viking name generator draws on 519 given names and bynames, each attested in a named medieval source, among them Landnámabók, Snorri's Heimskringla, the family sagas and the Poetic Edda, and each result shows the source it comes from. It runs in your browser, and it will take any name you type, yours or your horse's.

08. A real name, with its source

Jóreiðr is one of the women's names in it. The Icelandic Book of Settlements, Landnámabók, has her twice in its fourth part, on the East Quarter. Chapter 7: Þeira sonr var Síðu-Hallr. Hann átti Jóreiði Þiðrandadóttur, their son was Hallr of Síða; he married Jóreiðr, daughter of Þiðrandi. Chapter 9, the line the slide paraphrases: Hallr á Síðu átti Jóreiði Þiðrandadóttur, Hallr of Síða married Jóreiðr, daughter of Þiðrandi. The chapter goes on to trace bishops and the priest Ari the Learned among their descendants. Landnámabók is a thirteenth-century compilation about the settlement of Iceland, so the name is attested in a medieval book about the Viking Age, not on a Viking Age object.

Sources: Landnámabók (Sturlubók), part IV, chs. 7 and 9, in Guðni Jónsson's edition on heimskringla.no.

09. Put a name on steel

ERIKSSON follows the Norse pattern of naming a man after his father, and the same book shows it at work. In part III, chapter 7, Landnámabók names the children of Eiríkr of Goðdalir, and among them are Þorgeirr Eiríksson and his sister Gunnhildr Eiríksdóttir: Eiríkr's son and Eiríkr's daughter. The second name described the father, not the family, so it changed with every generation.

The blade on the slide is our Raven's Beak seax, a hand-forged knife with a 5.5-inch carbon steel blade, a leather-wrapped grip and a cast raven's-head pommel. The name is optional: you choose it, and we laser-engrave it to order.

Sources: Landnámabók (Sturlubók), part III, ch. 7, in the same edition on heimskringla.no.

10. The horse of the myths

The slide takes Sleipnir from Snorri Sturluson's Edda, written about 1220. In Gylfaginning, in the list of the gods' horses (chapter 15 in the usual numbering), Snorri writes: Sleipnir er baztr, hann á Óðinn. Hann hefir átta fætr. Sleipnir is the best; Óðinn owns him. He has eight legs. Chapter 42 tells how he was born: a mare lured the giant builder's stallion Svaðilfari away from his work, and Loki, who had promised the gods to stop the building, later bore a foal that var grátt ok hafði átta fætr, was grey and had eight legs, the best horse among gods and men. Snorri leaves the reader to see Loki in the mare.

That is myth, and the slide says so: a myth, not a breed. Our Sleipnir pendant on slide 10 is 925 sterling silver, about 11 grams, with the horse in the centre, ringed with runes: a band of the twenty-four runes of the older futhark in alphabet order, broken by four roundels with knot and stave symbols. The runes are a decorative border, not an inscription that can be read as words.

Sources: Snorri Sturluson, Edda, Gylfaginning chs. 15 and 42, Old Norse text on heimskringla.no.

Caption. Gunnarr's horse, and the import ban

Njáls saga, written about 1280, has the fullest account of a horse fight in the sagas. In chapter 58 a stallion owned by Starkaðr's family is said to be unbeatable, and Hildigunnr answers that Gunnar að Hlíðarenda á hest brúnan, Gunnarr at Hlíðarendi has a brown horse that will dare to fight theirs. In chapter 59 the horses are led together, Gunnarr carries hestastaf mikinn, a great horse-goad, and the horses rennast að og bítast lengi, run at each other and bite for a long time. Þorgeirr Starkaðarson and Kolr shove their horse into Gunnarr's, Gunnarr shoves back, and Þorgeirr Starkaðarson strikes Gunnarr's horse svo að út hljóp augað, so that its eye burst out. Gunnarr goes to his horse and says to his brother Kolskeggr: Högg þú hestinn. Ekki skal hann lifa við örkuml. Strike the horse. He shall not live maimed. Kolskeggr kills it.

This is a saga written three centuries after the events it describes. It shows how a thirteenth-century Icelander pictured a horse fight, not a dated Viking Age event, and we do not show the killing on a slide. G.W. Dasent's 1861 translation, The Story of Burnt Njal, has the fight as its chapter 58, "How Gunnar's horse fought"; its chapter numbers already run one lower than the Old Norse text's here.

The caption also says what the sources do not support, starting with the import ban. Many horse sites say the Althing banned the import of horses in 982. We found no medieval source for that date, and no one we read could say where it comes from. The bans we can date are modern. Björnsson and Sveinsson's book The Icelandic Horse is quoted as saying that importing horses was not forbidden until 1882, when a law banned the import of foreign farm animals; we have not seen that book or the 1882 law. An official bill of 1931 in the Althing records that Law no. 56 of 10 November 1905 and Law no. 25 of 9 July 1909 banned innflutningur á útlendu kvikfé, the import of foreign livestock, to keep out animal diseases, and that those laws were repealed in 1926 and replaced in 1928. The ban in force today is Law 54/1990 on the import of animals, whose article 2 forbids bringing in hvers konar dýr, tamin eða villt, any animals, tame or wild; its article 1 lists horses among livestock.

Sources: Brennu-Njáls saga, chs. 58 and 59, Old Norse text on sagadb.org, and Dasent's translation, ch. 58; Alþingi 1931, bill no. 21, explanatory notes; Lög um innflutning dýra nr. 54/1990, arts. 1 and 2; J. Björnsson and K. Sveinsson, The Icelandic Horse, cited second-hand.

What we do not claim

• That the Vikings invented the gaited horse, or spread it around the world. Wutke's team write that the evidence "strongly suggests" Norse people took ambling horses from the British Isles to Iceland, and that the horses "may have spread" across the continent later. The press release that went with the paper said more than the paper does.
• That ambling began in England. The two York horses lived in a town under Viking rule and may have been brought there, and no Norwegian horse was tested.
• That your Tennessee Walker, Paso Fino or Standardbred descends from Viking horses. They share the mutation; shared descent is not shown.
• That one gene makes the gait. The mutation is "permissive", in Andersson's word. Other genes and training also matter.
• That the Vikings called the gait tölt. Cleasby and Vigfússon's Old Icelandic dictionary (1874) lists tölta, to amble, and tölt, an ambling pace, but cites no medieval text for either. It marks the ambling sense of vakr as modern usage, and the medieval word it gives for an ambling horse, gangari, is a translation of the Latin ambulator.
• That the sagas describe the tölt. We found no saga passage describing an ambling gait.
• That the Althing banned horse imports in 982, or that Iceland has banned horse imports for a thousand years. The bans we can date are from 1882, 1905, 1909 and 1990, and the 1905 and 1909 laws were repealed in the 1920s.
• That the Icelandic horse is unchanged since the Viking Age. Its gait allele went from about 0.62 in the Viking Age sample to 0.94 in 2012.
• That Viking Age grave horses were their owners' beloved horses. They were chosen for burial, almost all male in the one DNA study, and Leifsson reads them as symbolic, not as favourites.
• That Freyfaxi was a real horse, or that no one could ride him. Hrafnkell's oath forbade riding him without leave, Einarr rode him, and the saga is a thirteenth-century story.
• That horse fights are a dated Viking Age sport. The fullest descriptions are in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sagas.
• That Sleipnir is history. He is Snorri's myth, and our pendant is jewellery after that myth, not a copy of an object.

Corrections

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

Frequently asked questions

Did the Vikings have gaited horses?

Some of the horses in Viking Age York and Iceland carried the gene mutation that makes ambling gaits possible. A 2016 ancient-DNA study found it in both horses tested from Coppergate in York, dated 850 to 900, and in ten of thirteen Viking Age horses from Iceland. The mutation makes extra gaits possible, not certain, so the study shows the potential was there, not how each horse moved.

Did the Vikings bring the tölt to Iceland?

The gene behind it was already in Iceland's early horses. The study's authors say the evidence strongly suggests Norse people brought ambling horses from the British Isles to Iceland, but the samples are small and no Norwegian horse was tested. There is no evidence the Vikings called the gait tölt, and we found no saga that describes it.

Did Iceland ban horse imports in 982?

We found no medieval source for it. The import bans that can be dated are modern: a law of 1882 is reported to have banned foreign farm animals, laws of 1905 and 1909 banned the import of foreign livestock, and the ban in force today is Law 54/1990.

Is the Icelandic horse the same as the Viking horse?

Not in its gait gene. In the thirteen Viking Age Icelandic horses tested, about six in ten gene copies carried the gait mutation; in the Icelandic horse population of 2012, more than nine in ten did, a change the 2014 study puts down to selective breeding for lateral gaits.