Dogs in the Viking Age: Sources and Corrections
A medieval Norwegian law book tells you how to decide whether a dog is a lap-dog: put your hand round its neck and see if your fingers meet. The same law puts the lap-dog at the top of its price list, at twelve aurar, double the greyhound. A dog burnt on a pyre at Heath Wood in Derbyshire has bone chemistry that points to Scandinavia, not England. In Iceland, where excavators recorded the position, the dog usually lies at the dead person's feet, and several of those dogs were killed with a blow to the skull to put them there. 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 dogs carousel, with its source. Section numbers match the number at the top of each slide.
Slide by slide
Cover. Put your hand round your dog's neck
The test comes from the Older Frostathing Law of medieval Norway, in the chapter headed Um kofanrakka ef drepinn er, "On a lap-dog, if it is killed". Its definition reads: En þat er kofan, ef maðr tekr hendi sinni um hálsinn svá at saman taki fingrinn. It counts as a lap-dog if a man can put his hand round its neck so that his fingers meet.
Sources: Frostathing Law XI.24, printed in R. Keyser and P.A. Munch, Norges gamle Love indtil 1387, vol. I (Christiania, 1846), pp. 234 to 235.
01. Kofanrakki: the lap-dog
Kofanrakki is the law's word for the lap-dog, and Cleasby and Vigfússon's Old Icelandic dictionary glosses it "a lap-dog", citing this same page of the Norwegian laws. The law is medieval, written down long after the Viking Age, and the way it reached us is weaker than that makes it sound. The Older Frostathing Law survives in no medieval manuscript at all. Keyser and Munch printed it from seventeenth-century paper copies of the lost Codex Resenianus, so the oldest copy anyone can read is a transcript from the 1600s, and the hand test reaches us at third hand.
The law names a kind of dog, not a dog. For a real Old Norse name, attested in Landnámabók, the sagas or the Edda, our free Viking name generator gives each one with its source.
Sources: Keyser and Munch, Norges gamle Love I, p. 234; Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. kofarn-rakki ("a lap-dog, N.G.L. i. 234").
02. The smallest dog cost the most
The chapter sets what you paid for killing another man's dog. The lap-dog costs twelve aurar. The mjóhundr, the slender hound or greyhound, costs six. The hunting dog (veiðihundr) and the cattle dog (nautahundr) cost half a mark each, which is four aurar. The house-guard (húsvǫrðr) costs one eyrir. The next chapter, XI.25, prices a hawk on a man's hand at a full mark, eight aurar. So the list runs 12, 6, 4, 4, 1, and the lap-dog is the most expensive dog in the law: twice the greyhound, and more than the hawk.
Straight after the tariff comes the exception: Ef hundr bítr sauði, þá er sá hundr ógildr. A dog that bites sheep is of no legal worth, and may be killed without compensation.
Sources: Frostathing Law XI.24 and XI.25, Keyser and Munch, Norges gamle Love I, pp. 234 to 235; Laurence M. Larson, The Earliest Norwegian Laws (1935), whose translation of XI.24 reads "he shall pay twelve oras". The printed numeral is xij. Machine-read copies of the page misread it, one of them as iij, three, so we checked it against the page image, and Larson's translation reads it the same way.
03. Whole animal, half a pig
Heath Wood, at Ingleby in Derbyshire, is a cemetery of fifty-nine mounds and the only known Scandinavian cremation cemetery in the British Isles. The excavators argue that it may have been a war cemetery of the Viking Great Army, from 873 to 878. Mound 50 held burnt bone from a horse, a dog, a pig, a sheep or goat and possibly an ox, no more than one of each.
The dog's bones come from all regions of the skeleton and from both the left and right sides of the body: a whole dog went on the pyre. So did the horse, with no butchery marks. The pig is four fragments, all from its left side, and the report raises the possibility that only that side was ever there, as a food offering. The dog was over eleven months old and, in the specialists' words, roughly of medium size, its bones a little smaller than those of a reference dog that stood about 0.55 m at the shoulder.
Sources: J.D. Richards and others, "Excavations at the Viking Barrow Cemetery at Heath Wood, Ingleby, Derbyshire", The Antiquaries Journal 84 (2004), 23 to 116, with the animal bone reported by Bond and Worley. The report itself warns that this burnt bone was extremely hard to identify.
04. The dog was not from England
A 2023 study measured strontium isotopes in the Mound 50 bone. The dog's 87Sr/86Sr ratio is 0.7150. The authors' own conservative range for the area around Heath Wood is 0.7091 to 0.7131, and an animal outside it is taken not to have lived there long. The horse, at 0.7158, is outside it too. The authors read the values as pointing to the Baltic shield regions of Scandinavia, that is Norway or central and northern Sweden, and call them the first evidence for people and their animals, horses and dogs included, crossing the North Sea in the late ninth century. If Heath Wood is the Great Army's cemetery, as its excavators suggest, the dog probably came over with that army.
The limits matter. Only the horse's species identification was re-checked for this study. The dog is a dog on the evidence of its burnt bone, and it has never been confirmed by DNA. The pyre had been raked, so it could not be shown that the dog was burnt together with the human. And the authors themselves allow that the animals could have died soon after reaching Britain, and that dogs, which eat scraps of human food, can carry a signal from their diet.
Sources: T. Löffelmann, C. Snoeck, J.D. Richards, L.J. Johnson, P. Claeys and J. Montgomery, "Sr analyses from only known Scandinavian cremation cemetery in Britain illuminate early Viking journey with horse and dog across the North Sea", PLOS ONE 18(2) (2023), e0280589.
05. At the feet, often after a blow to the skull
Rúnar Leifsson's doctoral study of animal burial in Viking Age Iceland records dog bone in 32 of the 355 Viking Age burials known in Iceland in 2011. There is never more than one dog in a grave, and unlike horses, dogs were never buried on their own: always with a human. The dog's position was recorded in nine of those graves, and in seven of them it lay at the dead person's feet. Leifsson suggests this was perhaps mimicking the dog curled up and resting by its owner, as in life. At Gautlönd a man lies in a foetal position with the dog placed under one of his knees. Five of the 32 dogs show arthritis or healed fractures, and Leifsson reads the arthritic ones as animals kept past their working use.
The cost is in the same bones. Poleaxing, a blow that breaks the skull above the brain, is the killing method recorded most often for these dogs: certain in at least four, and probable in three more. At Dalvík (Brimnes), burial XII, a single dog's head lay by the dead person's feet without the body, and that dog had been beheaded without being stunned first. Not every dog was killed at the funeral. At Dalvík burial IV the skull is intact, and Leifsson writes that it is not certain how the dog died or whether it was killed at all; at Daðastaðir only two dog teeth went into an elderly woman's grave, most probably as amulets.
Sweden has a counter-example to the careful placement. At Old Uppsala, in boat grave 36 at Prästgården, a woman was buried with a hen and a dog, and the excavator wrote that the dog seems to have been taken by its tail and slipped down between the boat and the wall of the pit.
Sources: Rúnar Leifsson, Ritual Animal Killing and Burial Customs in Viking Age Iceland (PhD thesis, University of Iceland, 2018), pp. 229, 269, 276 and 306; Anne-Sofie Gräslund, "Dogs in graves: a question of symbolism?", in B. Santillo Frizell (ed.), PECUS. Man and Animal in Antiquity (Swedish Institute in Rome, 2004), 167 to 176, at 167, quoting the excavator. Leifsson's seven poleaxed dogs and one beheaded dog are the whole of the direct evidence for how Icelandic grave dogs died, not a sample from a larger count.
What we do not claim
- That the Frostathing Law dates from the Viking Age. It is medieval Norwegian law, and its oldest surviving text is a seventeenth-century transcript of a lost manuscript.
- That there was one price for a dog. Of the medieval Norse law codes we checked, only the Frostathing sets prices, and it grades them by kind of dog. Grágás, the medieval Icelandic law book, sets none: its chapter on dog bites opens by saying that dogs have no immunity.
- That any modern breed is a Viking dog. No Viking Age dog genome has ever been sequenced, and breeds with studbooks and fixed standards are nineteenth- and twentieth-century creations. The variety in dogs is ancient; the breeds are not.
- That the Heath Wood dog was a big hound. The report's own bone specialists measured a medium dog, and its species rests on burnt bone, never confirmed by DNA.
- That these dogs were pets in the modern sense. The specialists leave companion, status symbol and guide for the dead all open, and in Iceland several of the dogs were killed to be put in the grave.
- A percentage of Viking graves that held a dog. No such figure has been published; every number in this literature counts from a different base.
Corrections
None yet. If you find an error, tell us, with a citation.
Frequently asked questions
Did the Vikings bury dogs with their dead?
Yes, in many places, from Iceland to the Danelaw. In Iceland dog bone is recorded in 32 of the 355 Viking Age burials known in 2011, and where the position was recorded the dog usually lay at the dead person's feet. Some of those dogs were killed for the burial: most were killed with a blow to the skull, and one was beheaded without being stunned first.
What breed were Viking dogs?
No breed. Breeds with studbooks are nineteenth- and twentieth-century creations, and no Viking Age dog genome has ever been sequenced. The bones show a range of types instead: at the Valsgärde boat graves in Sweden, which run from the Vendel Period into the Viking Age, the dogs averaged about 61 cm at the shoulder, sight hounds among them, while in Viking York reconstructed dogs stood between about 52 and 70 cm, with smaller terrier-sized dogs as well (Nichols 2021; O'Connor 1989).
How much was a dog worth in Norse law?
The medieval Norwegian Frostathing Law priced the killing of another man's dog by its kind: twelve aurar for a lap-dog, six for a greyhound, four for a hunting or cattle dog and one for a house-guard. A dog that bit sheep was worth nothing. The Icelandic law book Grágás sets no price for a dog at all. Neither is Viking Age law.