Viking Filed Teeth: Sources and Corrections

More than 130 men from the Viking Age had fine horizontal lines filed across the front of their upper front teeth, and about half of them were buried on Gotland. Fewer than 7 per cent were buried with a weapon. They lay in everyday dress, with brooches, belts, knives, a few keys and, once, part of a set of scales. No trace of colour has been found in a groove, and nobody knows what the mark meant; the leading guess is a sign shared within a closed group of traders. This page gives the source for every slide, and says plainly what is still uncertain.

Every factual claim in our filed-teeth 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. Apart from the museum photograph on the fourth slide, the pictures are modern illustrations, not finds.

Slide by slide

Cover. The Vikings who filed their teeth were almost never buried with a sword.

The cover rests on two counts. Writing on the Russian finds in 2021, Matthias Toplak, Valerie Palmowski and Tamara Pushkina state: "Less than 7% of all currently known individuals with filed teeth were buried with weapons." Jenny Radon's 2019 Uppsala thesis, which catalogues 92 of these men grave by grave, finds weapons in three graves: a sword in the chamber grave Bj 886 at Birka, a sword in grave 351 at Ire on Gotland, and a fighting knife, huggkniv, in grave 25 at Slite. "Almost never" is our shorthand for those figures.

"The Vikings who filed their teeth" means those men, not the Vikings in general. It was the custom of a small group, clustered at a few sites, set out under 02.

Sources: M.S. Toplak, V.E. Palmowski and T. Pushkina, "Two male individuals with modified teeth from Gnezdovo, Russia", Fornvännen 116 (2021), p. 325; J. Radon, Filade tänder i ljuset av sina sammanhang (MA thesis, Uppsala, 2019).

01. Two or three lines, on the same two teeth

The founding paper is Caroline Arcini's "The Vikings bare their filed teeth" (2005). Its abstract reads: "The type of modification is a horizontally filed furrow on the frontal upper part of the tooth crown. The furrows are single or, more usually, multiple, and are found on the front teeth in the maxilla. The affected individuals are 24 men from the Viking Age (ca. 800-1050 AD), found in present day Sweden and Denmark. The marks are so well-made that it is most likely they were filed by a person of great skill." The slide's "so well made that she judged it done by a person of great skill" is that last sentence, which she hedges with "most likely".

The full paper is behind a paywall and we have read only that abstract. The detail on the slide comes from the report on the Ridgeway Hill mass grave, 'Given to the Ground' (Loe, Boyle, Webb and Score, 2014), whose authors had the full text: "In all cases, one or both of the medial incisors showed filing marks, and in a third of cases these were also found on the lateral incisors." And: "Most of the individuals had two or three furrows while a few had only one." The medial incisors are the two upper front teeth. "The same two teeth" is true of Arcini's 24; later finds add the upper canine and, rarely, a lower tooth.

"The lines show only when the lip lifts" rests on the same report, which notes after Arcini that "the individuals would have had to smile quite broadly to display the modification", and on the 2024 synthesis cited under 02, in which the filings "would have been scarcely visible beneath upper lips and potential moustaches".

The grooves were first noticed around 1990, on skeletons from Scania, and were published in 1991 as wear from craft work. Arcini's 2005 abstract is the first to call them deliberate: "for the first time" in skeletal material from Europe.

Sources: C. Arcini, "The Vikings bare their filed teeth", American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128 (2005), 727 to 733, abstract only; L. Loe, A. Boyle, H. Webb and D. Score, 'Given to the Ground': A Viking Age Mass Grave on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth (Dorchester, 2014), ch. 5; Radon 2019, on the discovery.

02. Half of them on one island

The numbers are from the current synthesis, by Matthias Toplak and Lukas Kerk, "Body Modification on Viking Age Gotland", in Current Swedish Archaeology 31, dated 2023 and published in 2024: "Currently, more than 130 individuals with filed teeth are known from the Scandinavian Viking Age (Ahlström Arcini 2018:76). Half of them have been found on Gotland." Then: "Forty-six biologically male individuals with filed teeth were observed in the cemetery of Kopparsvik, south of present-day Visby. The cemetery encompassed some 330 burials, lying in what appear to be two separate areas, most of them dating from around 900 to 1050 CE."

Their Table 1 lists 42 sites. By our addition: Gotland 67 (Kopparsvik 46, Slite 13, single cases at eight more sites), Uppland 16 or 17 (Sigtuna 8 or 9, Birka 4), Scania 8, Öland 6, Västergötland 1, Denmark 34, Russia 2, England 1. The Danish figures are relayed from a 2017 study we have not read, and Toplak and Kerk warn that "some filings are so shallow that even their intentional character is doubtful".

The slide's "900 to 1050" is the date of the Kopparsvik cemetery. The custom as a whole runs longer: Anna Kjellström (2014) finds it at Birka "perhaps as early as in the middle of the eighth century", and at Sigtuna "as late as the beginning of the twelfth century".

Sources: M.S. Toplak and L. Kerk, "Body Modification on Viking Age Gotland: Filed Teeth and Artificially Modified Skulls as Embodiment of Social Identities", Current Swedish Archaeology 31 (2023), 79 to 111, pp. 82 to 87 and Table 1, CC BY; A. Kjellström, "Spatial and Temporal Trends in New Cases of Men with Modified Teeth from Sweden (AD 750 to 1100)", European Journal of Archaeology 17 (2014), 45 to 59, abstract only.

03. Keys and scales, not swords

The man on the fourth slide was buried at Skolgården, by Resmo church on Öland. Jenny Radon's catalogue tells the story: in 1948 a grave came to light when a water pipe was laid outside the old village school. The digging damaged it, the workmen picked up the finds, and the grave was dated to the later Viking Age from them: a ring pin and en del av en vågsats, part of a set of scales. Individen i graven som hittades 1948 har nyligen befunnits ha filade tänder: the man in the grave found in 1948 has recently been found to have filed teeth. Radon reads the scales as a strong sign of a link to trade.

The photograph is the Swedish History Museum's own image of a male cranium, captioned: "In the upper jaw, horizontally filed furrows on the upper frontal part of the teeth crowns show that deliberate dental modifications were made. Grave find, Skolgården, Resmo, Öland, Sweden. SHM 24033." That caption is the slide's "the museum records filed furrows on his upper teeth". The slide's "almost certainly", that this skull is from the grave with the scales, rests on the accession number. Radon counts one man with filed teeth from Skolgården and files him, and the scales, under SHM 24033; Toplak and Kerk also count one; and the museum's public record dates acquisition 24033 to 1948. What we have not seen is a museum record that names the cranium and the scales together, so the link is almost certain, not proven.

Photo: The Swedish History Museum, Stockholm, "Object from the exhibition We call them Vikings produced by The Swedish History Museum", via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0. Cropped by us, with text added. The slide and the caption credit it as "Swedish History Museum, SHM 24033, CC BY 2.0".

The rest of the slide is about the others. At Kopparsvik, Toplak and Kerk write, the men with filed teeth "were buried in what was presumably their everyday dress, with penannular brooches, belts and often with knives, in almost the same way as most of the individuals in the surrounding graves". Radon counts keys in six of their graves, four at Kopparsvik and two at Slite, with iron bits and ornamented bronze handles; in the whole Kopparsvik cemetery such keys occur in only eight men's graves, four of them men with filed teeth. "Fewer than 7 per cent" is the count under the cover.

There are exceptions. The richest is Birka Bj 886, which Toplak and Kerk describe as the "burial of a male individual with filed teeth, equipped with sword, shield and gaming board".

Sources: Radon 2019, text, catalogue and appendix 1, Resmo Skolgården (RAÄ 95:1, SHM 24033); Swedish History Museum, image caption for SHM 24033, and its accession record 24033; Toplak and Kerk 2023, p. 83 and fig. 5, p. 90.

04. From Dorset to Smolensk

The Ridgeway Hill report describes skull 3736, a man of 25 to 35: "Both upper first incisors had two horizontal grooves which had been deliberately incised into the anterior surfaces of the crowns, with some polishing on the surface." Under magnification the grooves had "well-defined sharp margins", unlike the grooves left by growth disturbance. Five other skulls show possible modifications, which the authors call "less convincing". It is one man, and they call it "a rare, if not unique, example of deliberate dental modification from Britain".

The grave held "between 47 and 52 individuals", all of them male, and all beheaded. Three radiocarbon dates combine to "cal AD 970-1025". Skull 3736 was not among those tested for isotopes, so where he grew up is unknown. The report weighs several explanations for the grave, among them the St Brice's Day massacre of 1002, and does not settle on one; nor do we.

The Russian cases are in Toplak, Palmowski and Pushkina (2021), from Gnezdovo, 13 kilometres west of Smolensk. In mound C-140 a man of 25 to 35 had "horizontal furrows or deep, crescent-shaped grooves on all four upper incisors", with no finds. In mound C-222 a second man, buried in a rare coffin with an axe, a knife and a belt buckle, had grooves on his upper left first incisor and upper left canine. The authors call them "the first known evidence for this custom beyond the Baltic".

Norway and Iceland: none known. Toplak and Kerk write that "evidence for this custom is still lacking from Norway, probably due to the bad preservation of bone", and no Icelandic case appears in any list we have read.

Sources: Loe et al. 2014, ch. 2 (radiocarbon), ch. 3 (skull 3736) and ch. 5, with the summary; Toplak, Palmowski and Pushkina 2021, pp. 322 to 325; Toplak and Kerk 2023, p. 86.

05. Nobody knows what it meant

Warriors first. Arcini's 2005 paper suggested a band of warriors, a hird, and, as Radon relays, she ruled it out in 2008 because very few of the men show injuries from violence. Toplak and Kerk: "Very few of all currently known individuals with filed teeth, however, have been buried with weapons." "Fewer than one in fourteen" restates "less than 7%". The slide gives both reasons after "Arcini dropped the idea"; her own reason in 2008 was the wounds, and the weapon count came later, in 2018 and 2021.

Slaves next. Kjellström and Zachrisson, both in 2014, raised the idea that the men were unfree, partly from early graves at Birka and Bollstänas where men appear to have been sacrificed or executed. Toplak and Kerk answer that such a reading "must be considered unlikely as a general explanation", since other men with filed teeth had weapons, fine dress fittings and even horses. It may fit a few cases.

The traders' sign is Toplak's idea, first set out in 2015 and 2016. In 2021 he and his co-authors called it convincing "to interpret the custom of teeth filing as a rite of initiation and sign of identification for a closed group of merchants, similar to the later guilds". In 2024, with Kerk, he put it more cautiously: "We therefore theorize". The evidence is where the men lie: Kopparsvik, Slite, Birka and Sigtuna were trading places, and most of the Kopparsvik men lay in a part of the cemetery where 80 per cent of the dead were men, which the authors "cautiously" read as a burial ground for seasonal visitors. Arcini's own abstract of 2005 had already allowed "a certain occupational group (such as tradesmen)". It is a hypothesis, and the slide calls it a guess.

Colour. Radon, citing Arcini 2005, p. 732: Inga spår av färg har dock kunnat påvisas när tänderna undersökts i svepelektronmikroskop, no traces of colour could be shown when the teeth were examined under a scanning electron microscope. Arcini's only guess at colour was "some kind of black paste, perhaps made of soot", in Toplak and Kerk's summary. Red appears in none of the scholarly sources we read.

Sources: Radon 2019, relaying Arcini 2005, 2008 and 2010 and Kjellström 2014; Toplak and Kerk 2023, pp. 88 to 89 and 104 to 105; Toplak, Palmowski and Pushkina 2021, p. 325; Arcini 2005, abstract.

07. Would you have joined?

"Cut by a skilled hand" is Arcini's "person of great skill", under 01. "To belong to the crew" borrows the traders' hypothesis under 05, and is a question, not a finding. How the grooves were made is not known either: Toplak and Kerk report only that "similar filings can be achieved with a file of steel", in a modern experiment. No Viking Age file has been tied to any groove. The question is a thought experiment; please leave your own teeth alone.

Sources: Arcini 2005, abstract; Toplak and Kerk 2023, p. 82, citing Arcini 2005, p. 732.

08. A mark others gave you

The byname on the card comes from Haralds saga hárfagra in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, chapter 23. When Haraldr had won the whole land, Earl Rögnvaldr cut his hair, which had gone úskorit ok úkembt 10 vetr, uncut and uncombed for ten years. Var hann áðr kallaðr lúfa, en síðan gaf Rögnvaldr jarl honum kenningarnafn ok kallaði hann Harald hinn hárfagra: before, he had been called lúfa, and then Earl Rögnvaldr gave him a byname and called him Harald the fine-haired, because he had hair bæði mikit ok fagrt, both thick and fair. So the byname was, in the saga's own words, given to him by someone else. Heimskringla was written in the thirteenth century, long after Harald's time; it is a saga, not a record.

"The Norse had no surnames" means no fixed family names. A man was known by his given name, his father's name, and often a byname, and the father's name changed with every generation. Every byname in our Viking name generator is attested in a named medieval source, with its meaning checked against Geir Zoëga's Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910).

Sources: Heimskringla, Haralds saga hárfagra, ch. 23, Old Norse text on heimskringla.no.

09. Early shall he rise

The line is Hávamál, stanza 58: Ár skal rísa, sá er annars vill fé eða fjör hafa; sjaldan liggjandi ulfr lær of getr né sofandi maðr sigr. Early shall he rise who wants another man's wealth or life; seldom does a lying wolf get a leg of meat, or a sleeping man victory. The translation is ours. "The sleeper, it goes on, wins nothing" is the slide's short form of the last half-line. Hávamál survives in the Codex Regius, written in Iceland around 1270.

The blade is our Damascus seax dagger: an 8-inch pattern-welded blade of 1075 high-carbon steel, a bone grip and a Damascus guard and pommel, in a tooled leather sheath. "Damascus" here means pattern-welded steel, not the historical crucible steel. AR SKAL RISA is the stanza's opening, Ár skal rísa, in capitals without accents. The words are optional: you choose them, and we laser-engrave them to order, letter for letter.

Sources: Hávamál, st. 58, Old Norse text on heimskringla.no.

10. A band worn as a sign

"Norse animal interlace" is our description of the ring's ornament, not the name of one art style. Stylised animals run through Viking Age art: the Swedish History Museum's Viking World display on animal ornament lists six styles of them, which overlap "without any definitive borders between them".

The ring is our sterling silver Viking ring: a 925 silver band of about 7 grams, made to order in your size, with a slender animal in relief running round it. It is a modern design and copies no particular find. "A mark you could hide" is from Toplak and Kerk: "If necessary, tooth filings could be shown, but they could also remain hidden."

Sources: Swedish History Museum, The Viking World, "Viking era art: stylised animals"; Toplak and Kerk 2023, p. 104.

Caption. Who, where, and how rare

Arcini. The caption calls her an osteologist; Radon names her among the osteologists who have studied these men. "Arcini dropped the warrior idea in 2008" is under 05; the 7 per cent figure is later, from 2018 and 2021.

Birka, Sigtuna, Öland, Denmark. All in Toplak and Kerk's Table 1, under 02.

How rare. In the early Christian cemetery at Varnhem in Västergötland, Bertilsson and colleagues (2023) examined 171 individuals and found "one case of filed front teeth". At Ridgeway Hill it was one man in about fifty. Even at Kopparsvik the 46 lay among some 330 graves. It was never the custom of most Vikings.

What the sources do not support. Red dye: no colour has been found in any groove, under 05. Filing to look frightening: the idea appears in press coverage of 2006 and, as Radon relays, among Arcini's early speculations, but the graves do not bear it out; few of the men had weapons, and the lines were scarcely visible, under 01. That most Vikings did it: see "How rare", above.

Sources: C. Bertilsson et al., "Caries prevalence and other dental pathological conditions in Vikings from Varnhem, Sweden", PLOS ONE 18 (2023), e0295282; Radon 2019; Toplak and Kerk 2023, Table 1.

What we do not claim

• That the Vikings filed their teeth, or that it was common. More than 130 men are known across about three centuries, most of them at a few sites, and all were men as far as sex could be judged, almost all of them adults; three Danish cases are of unclear sex, and one Kopparsvik individual is catalogued as juvenile.
• That 24 of 557 Vikings had filed teeth. The 557 comes from press reports of 2006 and included women and children; 24 is the count of men in Arcini's paper, not a rate.
• That 80 per cent of cases are from Gotland. The current count is about half.
• That the counts are final. They come from a 2024 synthesis, the Danish cases are relayed and partly doubted as intentional, and Norway's absence may be down to poorly preserved bone.
• That the grooves were painted red, or painted at all. No colour has been found in any groove.
• That they were filed to look frightening, or that the men were warriors or berserkers.
• That the mark proves slavery, a rite of passage or a test of pain. Each has been proposed; none is established. In 2018 Arcini rejected a rite of passage because she knew of no case under the age of 20.
• That the men were traders, or that the grooves were a guild badge. That is the leading hypothesis, labelled as one.
• That they were Gotlanders, or foreigners. Strontium results from Kopparsvik have been read both ways by the same author, eight years apart.
• That the grooves were cut with a steel file, or that it was extremely painful. A steel file works in a modern experiment; only in a few cases did a groove reach the nerve.
• That many of the Ridgeway Hill men had filed teeth, or that the grave is from the St Brice's Day massacre. One man did, and the grave's cause is unknown.
• That the teeth were sharpened to points. The Scandinavian type is horizontal grooves; Toplak and Kerk (p. 81) contrast it with tooth modification elsewhere, "mostly of sharpening of the teeth or decoration by chipping". Nor that the Vikings learned the custom abroad.
• That Harald Bluetooth's byname has anything to do with filed teeth. Toplak has raised it as a possibility; no study supports it.
• That the link between the Resmo cranium and the scales is proven. The slide and the caption rest it on the shared accession number, SHM 24033; we have not seen a museum record naming both.
• That the blade, the ring or any picture other than the museum photograph copies a Viking find.

Corrections

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

Frequently asked questions

Did the Vikings file their teeth?

Some Viking Age men did, not the Vikings in general. More than 130 are known, all men as far as sex can be judged and almost all adults, with fine horizontal lines filed across their upper front teeth. About half were buried on Gotland, 46 of them in one cemetery at Kopparsvik. None are known from Norway or Iceland.

Why did some Vikings file grooves into their teeth?

Nobody knows. The idea that they were warriors was dropped, because fewer than 7 per cent were buried with weapons and few show battle wounds. Slavery fits a few cases at most. The leading hypothesis, from the archaeologist Matthias Toplak, is a sign shared within a closed group of traders, but it is a hypothesis.

Were Viking filed teeth painted red?

There is no evidence for it. Caroline Arcini examined the grooves under a scanning electron microscope and found no trace of colour. Her own guess was a black paste, perhaps made of soot, and that too is only a guess. We found no scholarly source for red dye.

Could you see Viking filed teeth?

Only just. The lines sit on the front of the upper front teeth, and a man would have had to smile quite broadly to show them. Toplak and Kerk add that they were scarcely visible beneath the upper lip and a moustache, so the mark could be shown or kept hidden.