Viking Weapons and Armor: Swords, Spears, Axes and Shields

Viking weapons fell into five main types: spears, axes, swords, bows and arrows, and knives, including the long single-edged seax. For defence there was the round wooden shield, and helmets and mail shirts for the few who could afford them. Spears and axes needed far less iron than a sword and were within reach of ordinary warriors, while the sword stayed a costly mark of rank.

Many stories about the Viking wars have been told throughout history, and the courage of Viking warriors became part of the legend.

Courage was not the only thing that made them dangerous, though, and neither was their equipment.

Viking weapons were much like those of their neighbours, and many of the best sword blades were bought from the Frankish lands. What gave Viking armies their edge was the ships that let them choose where and when to fight, as our article on why the Vikings were so successful in war explains. This article is about the weapons themselves: what they were, who could afford them, and what the sources really say.

Viking Weapons and Armor

Conflicts such as the battle of Clontarf were part of life in the Viking Age, alongside the raids the Vikings are famous for, and a free man was expected to be able to defend himself and his honour.

Weapons were kept close. The Old Norse poem Hávamál (st. 38) advises a man never to step a foot away from his weapons out in the open, because he cannot know when on the road he will need his spear. The Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan, who met the Rus on the Volga in 922, describes the same habit: each man carried an axe, a sword and a dagger and was never without them, and their swords were of the Frankish kind, with broad, ridged blades (trans. J. E. Montgomery).

Viking weapons could be divided into offensive and defensive. Since the Norse men were known for their raids, offensive weapons are mentioned more often.

However, the Vikings also had so-called defensive weapons in their war equipment, which served to defend against enemy strikes.

We should mention that the Vikings did not carry weapons only in battles. The weapons also served to emphasize social status.

So the question is, did all Vikings have the means to own just any weapon? Were the poor Vikings armed as well as the rich ones? Lastly, what Viking weapons were most commonly used in the Viking era?

We will try to clarify these and other important issues and dilemmas below, so stay with us.

Types of Offensive Viking Weaponry in the Viking Age

The Vikings left no written descriptions of their own weapons. Runes were used for short inscriptions on stone, metal and wood, and while many runestones remember men who died abroad, they do not describe how anyone fought. What we know comes from foreign writers who met them, from Icelandic sagas and Norwegian laws written down two or three centuries later, and above all from archaeology.

Archaeologists find Viking weapons in graves, in lakes, near fords and on battlefields, and many of these finds are now displayed in collections such as the National Museum of Denmark's Viking weapons.

According to archaeologists, Viking warriors used the following types of weaponry:

1. Swords (mostly double-edged),
2. Spears,
3. Axes (work axes and broad battle axes),
4. Bows and arrows,
5. Knives, including the long single-edged seax.

Swords

Swords were the most prestigious weapons of the Viking Age, and not every warrior had one. The National Museum of Denmark notes that it was mostly people of high status who were buried with swords.

Swords also carried meaning beyond the fight. They were handed down from generation to generation and given as gifts to bind men to a lord. In Haralds saga hárfagra (ch. 41) Snorri Sturluson tells how King Æthelstan of England sent Harald Fairhair a gold-hilted sword, and when Harald took it by the hilt, the messenger declared that he had now become Æthelstan's thegn. Swords were also laid in graves and sunk in lakes and bogs, perhaps as offerings.

The National Museum of Denmark gives a normal length of around 90 cm. Most swords were double-edged, though single-edged swords were also made, notably in Norway. Blades were forged in Scandinavia or imported from the Frankish Empire, and some were pattern-welded: rods of iron and steel twisted and forged together, which leaves a wavy pattern down the middle of the blade.

Along the middle of many blades runs a groove, the fuller, which saved valuable metal and made the sword lighter. Hilts were fitted with bone or antler, or on rich swords with silver and gold, and the pommel balanced the weight of the blade.

The most famous blades carry the inlaid name +VLFBERH+T. They were made in the Frankish lands, probably along the Rhine, from the ninth to the eleventh century. More than a hundred are known, and not all are of the same quality, because smiths elsewhere copied the name onto weaker blades. Swords were given names in the sagas too: King Hákon the Good's sword Kvernbítr, a gift from Æthelstan, was said to have cut a millstone to the eye (Haralds saga hárfagra, ch. 43), and the hero Sigurðr's sword Gramr was forged from his father's broken blade (Völsunga saga).

The myths have a famous sword of their own. In the Eddic poem Skírnismál, the god Freyr owns a sword that fights by itself against the giants.

When Freyr fell in love with the giantess Gerðr, he gave that sword to his servant Skírnir as the price for winning her for him.

Snorri adds in Gylfaginning that Freyr later killed the giant Beli with a hart's antler for want of it, and that at Ragnarök he will fall fighting the fire giant Surtr, because he no longer has the good sword he gave to Skírnir.

Spears

The spear was a weapon an ordinary warrior could afford. A spearhead needed far less iron than a sword, and a spear kept the enemy at a distance. Some spears were made for thrusting and lighter ones for throwing.

A spear was a socketed iron head on a wooden shaft. Which weapon was the commonest is harder to say than it looks. Jan Petersen, in his 1919 study De norske vikingesverd, found it hard to show that any one kind of weapon was more common than the others in Norwegian graves. The sword is in fact the weapon found most often there: Petersen relays Oluf Rygh's count of about 1,500 swords, about 1,000 spears and a little over 1,200 axes, and warns that swords, as the largest finds, attract the most attention. Graves show what families chose to bury, not what every man carried.

Not every spear was plain. Some spearheads had sockets decorated with silver, and one from Gotland names both its owner and its maker in runes cut into the silver inlay: "Rani owns this spear. Bótfúss carved" (G 225, Gotlands runinskrifter).

The spear also had a place in myth. Odin's spear is Gungnir, which according to Snorri's Skáldskaparmál never stops in its thrust. In Völuspá (st. 24) Odin hurls a weapon into the enemy host, usually understood as a spear, and so begins the first war in the world.

Men copied the gesture. In Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 44) Steinþórr throws a spear over his enemies' band before a fight, "according to old custom, for luck", and the gesture is usually read as dedicating the enemy to Odin.

Axes and Battle Axes

Axes were as much tools as weapons. In a world built of wood, every farm needed them for felling trees, building houses and ships, and splitting firewood. Petersen admits that it is often hard to tell a work axe from a battle axe, and that many were probably used as both. The same shapes live on in modern Viking axes.

Many axes have a "beard", where the lower part of the blade hangs down below the rest of the head. Old Norse called such an axe a skeggøx, "beard-axe", a word found in Egils saga.

Battle axes were made for war. The National Museum of Denmark describes axe heads that are large but very thin, and so relatively light to wield; pictures from the time show them on shafts over a metre long, probably swung with both hands. Today this type is often called the Dane axe, and axes like it became especially common in the late Viking Age.

In Old Norse it was a breiðøx, a "broad axe". The older law of the Gulathing in western Norway, preserved in a thirteenth-century manuscript, required every free man of full age to come to the weapon muster and show "a broad axe or a sword, and a spear and a shield" (Gulaþingslǫg, ch. 309). In law, the axe stood beside the sword.

Rich men carried decorated axes. The axe from the magnate's grave at Mammen in Jutland, buried in the winter of 970 to 971, is inlaid with silver in a style that archaeologists now call the Mammen style after this very find.

Some axes had names. In Magnúss saga ins góða (ch. 29) Snorri tells how King Magnus the Good, king of Norway and Denmark, threw off his mail shirt before the battle of Lyrskov Heath in 1043 and fought two-handed with the axe Hel, which had belonged to his father, King Olaf Haraldsson. It bears the same name as Hel, the ruler of the dead. In Njáls saga Skarphéðinn's axe is called Rimmugýgr, roughly "battle-ogress".

Saga heroes deal tremendous blows with their axes, but sagas are stories, not tests: no source tells us how well a Viking axe did against a helmet or a mail shirt.

Bows and Arrows

Bows and arrows were used in war as well as for hunting. The National Museum of Denmark notes that a battle could open with arrows before the lines closed, and longbows have been found at Hedeby, one of them 193 cm long (Viking combat techniques).

The Gulathing law made bows part of the naval levy: for every rowing bench of a levy ship, the farmers had to provide one bow and two dozen arrows.

The most famous bow in the sagas belonged to Einarr Þambarskelfir. At the sea battle of Svolder in the year 1000, Snorri says in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, an arrow struck his bow in the middle and it broke in two. King Olaf asked what had broken so loudly. "Norway, from your hands, king," Einarr answered.

The Viking-Age Seax

A knife at the belt was everyday equipment in the Viking Age, used for eating and for all kinds of work. The seax (Old Norse sax) is the single-edged knife of the early medieval Germanic world, from small belt knives to long blades that were short swords in all but name.

The large fighting seax, though, was not standard Viking equipment. It belongs above all to Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish lands, and the long seax with an angled "broken back" is above all an English form of the later Anglo-Saxon period. Petersen's description of the ordinary armed Viking lists sword, spear, battle axe, shield and arrows, with no seax.

In the sagas the word is simply sax. In Grettis saga (ch. 18) Grettir takes a sax from a burial mound, so good a weapon that he said he had never seen a better.

The other names come from elsewhere. Scramasax is a Frankish word recorded in Latin by the sixth-century historian Gregory of Tours (Histories IV.51), who describes two assassins armed with "strong knives, which they commonly call scramasaxes", and langseax, "long seax", is a modern term for the longest blades.

The seax is a deep subject in its own right, from how the word is actually pronounced to the size typology and the famous runic Seax of Beagnoth in the British Museum, an Anglo-Saxon blade of the ninth or tenth century, 72 cm long, found in the Thames at Battersea and bought by the museum in 1857. Our full guide explains what a seax is in detail.

Types of Defensive Viking Weapons in the Viking Age

Viking warriors also used equipment that protected them in battle.

This defensive equipment included:

1. Helmets,
2. Shields,
3. Mail shirts (often called chainmail).

Helmets

Helmets were rare. Only two nearly complete Viking-Age helmets are known: the Gjermundbu helmet, found in nine pieces in a rich grave in Ringerike, Norway, in 1943, together with the remains of a mail shirt, and the Yarm helmet from northern England, which was only recently shown to be Viking-Age. Parts of other helmets have been found in Denmark. The National Museum of Denmark points out that helmets were not usually placed in graves, but also that relatively few Vikings may have worn one. Neither surviving helmet has horns. Horned Viking helmets come from nineteenth-century art and opera costume, and no source from the Viking Age describes Vikings wearing them.

Shields

The round wooden shield was the warrior's main protection. It was made of thin boards, with a hole in the middle for the hand grip and an iron dome, the boss, over it to protect the hand. Often the boss is the only part that survives in the ground.

The nearly complete shield found at the Trelleborg fortress in Denmark in 2008 is of pine and about 80 cm across, and the Gokstad ship burial in Norway held 64 round shields. Ingvald Undset's 1898 guide to the Gokstad ship notes traces of a binding, probably of leather, round the edge, and the National Museum of Denmark suggests that shields were covered with hide to keep the thin boards from splitting. The Gulathing law asked for a shield with at least three iron bands across it and a hand grip fastened with iron nails.

Mail Shirts (Chainmail)

A mail shirt, made of thousands of small iron rings linked together, was the most expensive protection a warrior could own, and very few had one. The Gjermundbu grave in Norway held the remains of one, found in many small pieces; according to Science Norway, the original shirt would have weighed 8 to 10 kg and could have taken half a year to make. Helmet and mail together are almost unique among the many thousands of Scandinavian weapon graves of the Viking Age, though they occur in some rich graves of the 900s in the lands of the Rus.

Mail shirts could have names too. Snorri says in Haralds saga harðráða (ch. 94) that Harald Hardrada's mail shirt was called Emma. It reached halfway down his legs and was so strong that no weapon had ever caught in it. At Stamford Bridge in 1066 it did him no good: in the verse Snorri gives him before the battle, Harald says that his men go forward without mail, because their gear lies down at the ships.

Viking Weapons and Armor: The Takeaway

Many Viking warriors were farmers who owned a spear, an axe and a shield, while a sword, a helmet or a mail shirt marked a richer man or a king's follower.

Their weapons were good but not unique. The best sword blades came from Frankish workshops, and their enemies fought with much the same equipment. What made Viking armies dangerous was how they used ships, surprise and speed.

Some fought with a sword, some with a spear or an axe, and the sagas remembered the best of those weapons by name.

Until our next meeting,

Skål!

Keep exploring: our guide to what a seax is, the best Viking axes, medieval weapons and types of Viking shields, or shop our Viking axes collection.

Viking Weaponry FAQ

Did all Viking warriors carry swords?

No. A sword took a great deal of iron and skilled work, so it was costly and marked a man of rank, and many of the best blades were imported from the Frankish lands. Ordinary warriors were far more likely to carry a spear or an axe, with a shield.

What was the most common Viking weapon?

No one can say for certain. Spears and axes needed far less iron than a sword, and the National Museum of Denmark describes them as the weapons ordinary warriors could afford. Norway's older Gulathing law required every free man of full age to show a broad axe or a sword, a spear and a shield at the weapon muster. Yet in Norwegian graves swords are found more often than spears or axes, partly because families buried swords with men of standing and, as the largest finds, swords were the most noticed.

What is a Viking seax?

The seax, sax in Old Norse, is a single-edged knife with a thick back, ranging from small belt knives to long blades that were short swords in all but name. A knife was everyday equipment in the Viking Age, but the large fighting seax belongs above all to Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish lands. The names scramasax and langseax are not saga words: the first is a Frankish word recorded by the historian Gregory of Tours, and the second is a modern term.

Did Viking weapons have their own names?

Some did, in the sagas. King Hákon the Good's sword was called Kvernbítr, King Magnus the Good fought with an axe called Hel that had belonged to his father, King Olaf, Skarphéðinn's axe in Njáls saga was Rimmugýgr, and Harald Hardrada's mail shirt was called Emma.

Did Vikings wear horned helmets?

No. Only two nearly complete Viking-Age helmets are known, from Gjermundbu in Norway and Yarm in England, and neither has horns. Horned Viking helmets come from nineteenth-century art and opera costume. Helmets of any kind were rare and expensive.