Vikings Weren’t Average — And Neither Were Their Axes

The Raiders Who Rowed, Fought, and Cast a Long Shadow

Picture this: a monk, breath caught in his throat, watching from behind a cloister wall as longships pull ashore. The men who leap out aren’t cloaked shadows — they’re bright-haired, broad-shouldered, and terrifyingly real. Not giants, but not average. And each carries an axe like it was born with him.

Vikings Weren’t Average — And Neither Were Their Axes

The Raiders Who Rowed, Fought, and Cast a Long Shadow

Giants of Memory

When people today picture Vikings, they often imagine giants — towering warriors with golden hair, thunderous voices, and axes that required two hands and a lifetime of grudges. It’s an image forged in the fires of saga, cinema, and fear. But beneath the helmets and hype lies a fascinating question:

Were Viking raiders really that big?

Not just metaphorically, but physically — taller, stronger, broader than the average folk of their time?

This essay explores that question with both sword and scalpel. The myth of the towering Norseman isn’t just poetic license — it’s rooted in archaeological remains, contemporary eyewitness accounts, and the logic of elite warrior culture. While the average Norse farmer may not have turned heads, the men who took to longships weren’t drawn from the average population.

They were exceptional — and they were remembered that way.

So before we dismiss the legends, let’s look again at the bones, the chronicles, and the cultural memory of those who faced the Northmen and lived to write about it. The raiders weren’t mythical giants — but they weren’t average either.

I. Measuring the Dead: What the Bones Say

When trying to answer the question of Viking stature, bones don’t lie — but they do speak in averages, and averages can mislead. It's like asking how tall an NBA player is and including the referees in the data set.

From the skeletal remains recovered in Viking-era burials across Scandinavia and the British Isles, we know that the average height for Norse males during the Viking Age was around 5 feet 7 inches to 5 feet 9 inches (170–175 cm). For context, that made them taller than many of their medieval counterparts. Anglo-Saxon males averaged closer to 5 feet 5 inches (165 cm), with Frankish and Celtic populations in the same range or slightly shorter, depending on region and era. So yes — statistically, your average Viking would have had a slight height advantage when entering a monastery uninvited.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Among the more dramatic finds — such as the mass grave at Repton in Derbyshire, the “execution pit” at Ridgeway Hill, or the ship burials at Balladoole and Oseberg — we often find men significantly above average height, some nearing or even exceeding 6 feet (183 cm). In an age where malnutrition and manual labour kept most people’s growth in check, that sort of stature would have been noticed. It would have made an impression — on a battlefield, in a negotiation, or while looming over a cowering monk.

Of course, not every Viking skeleton tells the tale of a towering titan. The burial evidence is varied. Icelandic graves, for example, often reflect a more modest, even stunted physicality — a likely reflection of environmental hardship and genetic drift in an isolated population. But crucially, these weren’t the men setting sail in longships across the North Sea. They were the ones who stayed home.

Archaeological bias is also a factor. Warrior graves, especially those with ornate grave goods or found in prominent locations, are not representative of the entire population. They represent a warrior class — those who had the means, the social status, and the physical fitness to raid, fight, and (importantly) survive. So when we dig up a grave with a six-foot warrior buried with a sword and a drinking horn, we’re not just looking at a man. We’re looking at a memory — a curated statement about who mattered, and why.

So yes, the average Norseman might not have cast a literal shadow over his Anglo-Saxon neighbours. But the ones who joined warbands, crossed seas, and carved their names into the chronicles of Europe? They were bigger, stronger, and often built for war. And the bones — carefully buried or hastily dumped — still whisper their story.

II. Words of Witness: What the Sources Say

Bones may tell us how tall the Vikings stood in death, but the written word reveals how tall they loomed in memory. And if the chroniclers and eyewitnesses are to be believed, the raiders from the North didn’t just arrive — they towered.

Perhaps the most famous account comes from Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab envoy whose travels brought him face to face with a group of Norse traders — likely Swedish Rus’ — along the Volga River. His astonishment is clear:

“I have never seen more perfect physical specimens. They are as tall as date palms, blond and ruddy.”

Now, one must forgive the poetic licence. Date palms can grow upwards of 70 feet, which would make these Norsemen more suitable for a Marvel franchise than historical study. But hyperbole aside, the description speaks to something real: a visceral impression of power, stature, and otherness. Ibn Fadlan wasn’t measuring — he was marvelling.

A few centuries later, John of Wallingford, a 13th-century English chronicler writing about earlier Viking raids, echoes this sentiment. Though more removed in time, he’s closer in geography, and perhaps in collective trauma:

“They were a people of great stature, fair-haired, and terrible in battle.”

By this point, the Vikings had long since transitioned from raiders to rulers in places like York, Dublin, and Normandy. Yet their original impact still thundered through English memory. The association with height and hair — the physical markers of difference — had survived.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, though more focused on recording raids and battles than physique, nonetheless presents the Norsemen as an overwhelming force. Their arrival is marked with dread. One doesn’t write reams about average men with above-average punctuality. One writes about the shock of being overcome — physically, strategically, existentially.

What’s notable across these texts isn’t just the repetition of Viking size and strength — it’s the tone. These aren’t ethnographic notes. They’re testimonies of awe, fear, and fascination. The Vikings are remembered the way a rabbit remembers a hawk: not by its scientific taxonomy, but by the terrifying swoop of shadow.

Of course, we must treat medieval sources with caution. They were not dispassionate recorders of height and bicep circumference. They were storytellers, monks, clerks, poets, and sometimes agenda-driven political mouthpieces. But the consistency of Viking physical portrayal — from Baghdad to Winchester — suggests that something impressed itself upon the eye.

Whether it was true height, superior diet, strategic grooming, or the sheer psychological force of raiders who dared to strike at the sacred and flee by sea — the result is the same: a historical image of Norsemen who weren’t just foreign, but formidable.

And if chroniclers exaggerated? Well, they exaggerated what mattered. You don’t inflate the size of a kitten. You inflate the size of the beast that nearly ate your kingdom.

III. The Selective Warrior Class

It’s easy to forget, in an age of mass standing armies and career soldiers, that not everyone in the Viking Age was built — or permitted — to raid. The men who went a-viking weren’t farmers moonlighting as pirates. They were part of a selective warrior class, drawn from the more capable strata of Norse society, and their very presence on a longship implied a life of preparation, discipline, and brutal opportunity.

Raiding was no pastime. It demanded a precise mix of physical prowess, technical skill, and social connection. You needed to be strong enough to row a warship for days, fast enough to leap ashore with a shield and axe, and terrifying enough to convince a monastery to hand over its silver before you started swinging. This wasn’t work for the underfed or faint-hearted.

From an early age, many young Norse boys would have been trained in the art of survival and combat. This wasn’t institutional military schooling, but a culture of physicality embedded in daily life: hunting, wrestling, woodwork, rowing, climbing, sailing. Their play often mirrored war. The saga literature — even if stylized — captures this rhythm. In Egil’s Saga, the title character kills his first boy at age seven. Extreme? Certainly. Exaggerated? Maybe. But the message is clear: Norse culture valued early strength and assertiveness, especially for those destined to lead or fight.

In many communities, particularly in coastal regions of Norway and Denmark, to “go Viking” was a rite of passage — a way to earn wealth, status, and scars. These expeditions were usually led by chieftains or petty kings who had access to ships, weapons, and networks of men. You didn’t just sign up at a village noticeboard. You were invited — because you had the skills and the sinew to make it worth the captain’s while.

And let’s be honest: there was a filtering mechanism at play. If you weren’t strong enough, fast enough, or loyal enough, you simply didn’t make it. The sea, the sword, or the settlement weeded you out. Viking warbands were forged in violence and endurance. By the time they landed on foreign shores, they were lean, dangerous, and often hungry — for silver, land, or legend.

So when modern writers flatten “the Vikings” into some vaguely rustic Scandinavian type — a generic bearded man with decent carpentry skills — they miss the point. The Vikings who appeared on England’s coast in 793, or who later marched up the Seine to besiege Paris, were not average. They were the Norse elite in motion: raiders, adventurers, sometimes mercenaries, sometimes conquerors. They weren’t the population; they were the tip of the spear.

And if they made an impression, it’s because they were meant to.

They didn’t just sail across the sea — they crossed into memory. Strong of limb, fierce of eye, and chosen not by chance, but by challenge.

IV. The Saga Ideal: Memory Amplified

If archaeology gives us bones and chronicles give us whispers, the Norse sagas give us thunder. They echo with the footsteps of men whose strength defied nature, whose presence could silence a hall, and whose legends were as tall as the longships they sailed.

Now, let’s be clear: the Íslendingasögur — the Icelandic family sagas — were written centuries after the Viking Age, mainly in the 13th and 14th centuries. They are not eyewitness accounts. They are memory, mythology, and moral instruction, wrapped in poetry and blood. But dismissing them as pure fantasy is like ignoring Shakespeare because he took liberties with history. The sagas reflect ideals — and ideals are never invented out of nothing.

Take Harald Hardrada, the so-called last great Viking king. According to Heimskringla (Snorri Sturluson’s great compilation of Norse kings’ sagas), Harald was tall, strong, and striking — a warrior who commanded attention before even drawing his sword. His enemies feared him. His allies followed him. His body, we’re told, towered over other men, even in death. Now, maybe he was six feet tall. Maybe he simply felt that way when he burst into your city with fire and steel. The point is: height, strength, charisma — these were part of the warrior’s arsenal.

Then there’s Egill Skallagrímsson — poet, berserker, blacksmith of verse and violence. Egils Saga presents him as grotesque and magnificent: bald as a stone at 25, but able to crush men’s skulls well into his sixties. He’s no golden-haired prince. He’s closer to a Norse Wolverine — blunt, brutal, brilliant. His saga doesn’t just celebrate his strength; it venerates his refusal to be ordinary.

These figures are amplified, yes — but not invented. Their strength is exaggerated the way all memorable traits are in oral cultures. It’s not about accuracy; it’s about impact. The fact that saga writers consistently describe heroes as tall, broad-shouldered, iron-gripped tells us what mattered. These weren’t abstract virtues. They were cultural touchstones, passed down from generations who remembered the kind of men who survived the raids, won the duels, and sat at the high seat.

It also matters who was doing the remembering. The sagas were mostly written in Iceland — a land settled by Norse outcasts, warriors, and opportunists. Many early settlers traced their ancestry directly to raiders and kings. Their tales weren’t just entertainment. They were identity. If your great-grandfather was the size of a bear and could cleave a man in two, you were not going to forget it. You were going to write it down.

So yes, the sagas are full of exaggeration. But exaggeration is a kind of truth. It's what a culture chooses to remember, and why. And when an entire civilization chooses to remember its ancestors as big, bold, and dangerous — you can be sure they didn’t come from small stock.

V. Skeletal vs Symbolic — What’s the Difference?

When we talk about the Vikings, we are often speaking in two registers at once. One is literal: bones, burial sites, isotopes, femur measurements, carbon dates. The other is symbolic: saga giants, date-palm metaphors, golden-haired warriors swinging axes the size of ploughshares. These aren’t in conflict — they’re in conversation. And if we want to understand Viking physicality, we need to listen to both voices.

First, the bones. As discussed, the average Viking man buried in Scandinavia or the Danelaw stood about 5'7" to 5'9". That’s respectable for the early medieval period, even slightly tall. Add in the notable outliers — six-footers in warrior graves from Repton to Ridgeway Hill — and you have the raw material for later impressions of exceptional stature.

But bones don’t tell us everything. They don’t record presence, posture, bearing, or charisma. A skeleton doesn’t show you the gleam in a raider’s eye as he jumps from the ship. It won’t explain why Anglo-Saxon monks remembered their attackers as terrifying giants. Bones give us data. Memory gives us meaning.

This is where things get tricky for modern historians. In our pursuit of accuracy, we often throw cold water on the flames of legend. We warn against over-romanticising, caution against saga exaggerations, and repeat the mantra: “The Vikings weren’t really that tall.” But in doing so, we risk flattening the very thing that made them so memorable.

There’s also a strange double standard at play. When a medieval source describes famine or plague, we take it seriously. But when it says the Danes were taller than everyone else, we shrug and say, “Ah, just storytelling.” Why? Because it challenges our expectation of ‘normality’? Because it makes the past too dramatic?

The symbolic memory of Viking physicality wasn’t just for decoration. It was functional. It explained how a small band of foreign raiders could repeatedly disrupt kingdoms. It justified paying Danegeld. It coloured sermons, royal chronicles, and dinner-table tales for centuries. And crucially — it was repeated across cultures. Arab travelers, Anglo-Saxon monks, Norse poets — they didn’t all conspire to inflate Viking stature. They simply remembered what stood out.

Here’s the key: symbolic doesn’t mean false. It means amplified, shaped by awe, fear, admiration, and trauma. You don’t build myths around mediocrity. You build them around the men who took what they wanted and left fire behind them. Even if they were only a few inches taller, their reputations were a head above the rest.

So let the bones speak — but let memory speak, too. Because in the end, the Viking raiders didn’t just conquer land. They conquered imagination. And that, perhaps, is the tallest legacy of all.

VI. Seen in Death: The Viking Corpse as Cultural Shock

One of the subtler yet more telling threads running through early medieval accounts of Viking incursions is this: the Anglo-Saxons had time to look. They didn’t just glimpse raiders in the chaos of a burning monastery or fleeing over a ridge. After the battles, they saw them dead — laid out on blood-wet fields or washed up on riverbanks. And what they saw left an impression.

This detail complicates the modern claim that chroniclers exaggerated Viking stature due to fear or cultural othering. It’s one thing to mistake a shadowy warrior in a flash of terror for a towering brute. It’s quite another to examine the body of a man killed in battle, close up, and still remark on his exceptional size and appearance.

Take the mass grave at Repton, for example. It contained the bones of what was likely part of the Great Heathen Army overwintering in Mercia around 873–4. Among them, one central burial — of a man estimated to be over 6 feet tall, with battle wounds and a sword — stands out. Is he the Ivar of legend? Possibly. But more importantly, he was someone worth burying at the centre. Someone whose stature mattered.

Written accounts also reflect this post-mortem observation. Chroniclers didn’t just describe Norsemen as large in battle; they described dead Danes as being tall, fair, and fearsome. These weren’t the fleeting impressions of panicked monks. They were funerary observations, battlefield reckonings, and moments of awe that occurred after the chaos — when men could see clearly what had come for them.

Even centuries later, authors like John of Wallingford wrote about the imposing build and golden hair of the Danes in England. This suggests not just a cultural memory, but perhaps even a preserved memory of specific bodies. Monastic scribes were often present at or after battles. They saw what raiders looked like when they stopped moving. And still, they called them tall.

If anything, death may have amplified their presence. The care with which Viking elite bodies were buried — often with swords, ships, and grave goods — signals not just wealth but admiration. Even in foreign soil, their bodies demanded narrative.

And unlike modern historians, the medieval mind didn't separate strength from meaning. A tall corpse wasn’t just an anatomical fact — it was a story. A warning. A mark of destiny. When the raider dies, and still his body draws the eye, the legend begins.

So yes — the Viking’s legend was born in battle. But it was often written in the silence after.

VII. Burial Beyond Borders: Sutton Hoo and the Pre-Viking Elite

Long before the word “Viking” terrified English shores, before Lindisfarne burned or Repton trembled, a ship was buried deep in East Anglian soil. It was vast. It was opulent. And it was unmistakably Scandinavian in style. The Sutton Hoo burial — dated to the early 7th century — is often described as “Anglo-Saxon,” but the lines between Saxon, Angle, Frisian, and Dane were never so clean.

Let’s start with the facts: a 90-foot ship, laid in a trench and covered with a burial mound, containing weapons, treasure, feasting gear, and a warrior’s helmet with strong Swedish parallels. This was no Christian inhumation. This was a pagan king’s farewell, fit for Valhalla. Yet the candidate most commonly proposed for the body — which disintegrated in the acidic soil — is King Rædwald of East Anglia, a baptised Christian who ruled over a largely landlocked, agrarian kingdom.

It makes little sense.

Why would a land-focused king of an allegedly Christian realm be buried in a ship, helmeted and armed, surrounded by symbols of pre-Christian heroism? Why would his tomb echo the elite burial traditions of coastal Scandinavia and the Baltic — regions supposedly unconnected to England until the Viking Age?

Unless, of course, the connection was always there.

East Anglia, with its low-lying coasts and access to North Sea trade routes, was in close contact with Frisia, Denmark, and Sweden. Archaeological finds at places like Ipswich and Rendlesham show Scandinavian-style artefacts well before the Viking Age. Cultural entanglement was not a product of Viking raids — it was already embedded in trade, diplomacy, and elite identity. So, the man buried at Sutton Hoo may not have been “Anglo-Saxon” in the neat ethnic sense. He may have been Frisian, part-Danish, or at least shaped by North Sea warrior culture.

That changes the narrative.

It suggests that the image of the tall, ship-riding, gold-decked, axe-bearing lord was already present in the minds of Britons long before the first monastery burned. That the shock of 8th- and 9th-century raids was not the appearance of something foreign — but the return of something ancestral.

And here’s the clincher: the average stature of elite male burials like Sutton Hoo was taller than the general Anglo-Saxon average. The bodies may be lost, but the measurements that survive point to men of exceptional build and gear. As at Repton, so too here — it is the elite who cast the longest shadows.

Perhaps, then, the men of Sutton Hoo were precursors to the Viking raiders, not their antithesis. The bones of Norse heroism were already buried in English earth — centuries before they came back across the sea.

Conclusion: Not Giants, But Giants in Memory

So, were the Vikings giants?

No. Not literally.

They were, on average, a little taller than their Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, or Celtic contemporaries — and some of their warrior dead were significantly so. But what they truly towered over was the imagination of those they encountered. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t pause to describe average day-labourers. It trembles at the sight of heathen armies and their “long ships full of terror.” Ibn Fadlan didn’t write a dispassionate inventory of merchant stock; he described men as tall as trees and perfect of form.

The Vikings who went raiding weren’t ploughing fields on Thursday and pillaging on Friday. They were a physical and social elite — hand-picked, self-selected, or forged by hardship and hunger into something formidable. They were strong because they had to be. Rowing for hours. Fighting in shield walls. Carrying back silver, slaves, or stories. This was strength with purpose — not aesthetic, but survival.

We should be cautious of conflating myth with truth — but we should also be suspicious of the urge to sand down every edge of the past until it fits nicely into our modern skepticism. Yes, sagas exaggerate. Yes, monks dramatise. But when multiple, independent cultures — from Baghdad to Britain — all preserve images of Norsemen as tall, striking, and terrifying, it would be more strange if none of it were true.

There’s a reason why the “Viking” still looms in pop culture, even if wildly distorted: we’ve inherited the echo of memory that began in the cries of monks and the boasts of poets. These weren’t just men. They were the ones chosen, or driven, to leave home and face down foreign kingdoms. They were the ones buried with swords. They were the ones people remembered.

And so, even if their femurs suggest a respectable 5'8", their legend stands taller. Not every Norseman was a giant. But the ones who came storming up the rivers of England, who broke through monastery doors and held towns to ransom — they didn’t have to be average. In fact, they couldn’t afford to be.

The rest stayed home. The rest became bones in quiet ground.

These were the ones who crossed the sea, and crossed into history. They were not gods. But in the memory of those who watched them come and feared they might never leave — they may as well have been.

Author’s Note: Bones, Echoes, and the Trouble with Tidying History

This essay grew out of a conversation — or perhaps several overlapping ones. A question about Viking height turned into a winding exploration of memory, myth, and how much meaning a skeleton can carry. Along the way, I kept circling back to a simple thought: history loses something when we make it too neat.

There’s a trend — sometimes well-meaning, sometimes reactionary — to downplay the Viking Age. “They weren’t that big of a deal,” we’re told. “They weren’t really that tall.” “They weren’t all warriors.” True — but also not the whole truth. In trying to flatten legend into data, we risk removing the very thing that made these people worth remembering.

Take Sutton Hoo. If a Christian king was buried like a pagan sea-lord, maybe the categories are wrong. Maybe “Anglo-Saxon” and “Scandinavian” were always more fluid than we admit. Maybe our whole migration narrative needs a re-think. Especially if, as recent DNA studies suggest, Scandinavian ancestry was already deeply woven into early medieval Britain, even before the raids began.

Or consider the Viking dead. The monks who described them had time to look. These weren’t panic hallucinations in firelight. They saw the bodies. They wrote them down. And not a single chronicler says the Danes were small, weak, or forgettable. You don’t build cultural trauma — or oral epics — around mediocrity.

And that absence is telling. We have reams of medieval commentary complaining about ugly enemies, degenerate peoples, and cowardly foes — but no such language is directed at the Vikings. In fact, quite the opposite. Whether written by terrified monks or awed travellers, the language is consistent: tall, fair, fierce, well-formed. This isn’t just poetic flourish. It’s repetition across time and geography, from England to Baghdad. And absence, sometimes, is evidence.

And then there’s the matter of tone. This essay is not an attack. But it is a reply. A call and response, to borrow from rhythm and blues. Historians don’t work in a vacuum. One voice offers a thesis; another returns the verse. In this case, the response was prompted by reading popular posts that seemed to smooth the Vikings down too far — making them safe, average, unimpressive. But history isn’t a chorus of agreement. It’s a sea of counterpoints, echoes, riffs.

Ironically, the most compelling support for these arguments can be found not just in archaeology or sagas, but in the work of serious scholars — including some who co-host popular history podcasts that try to “de-mythologise” the Viking Age. I couldn’t help but smile when I realised one such scholar, whose work I admire for its nuance and precision, sits side by side with writers whose blog titles suggest the Vikings weren’t all that interesting. It’s a strange academic duet — one voice grounding the past in source-critical complexity, the other sanding it smooth for mass appeal.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. I’m not an academic. But I’ve spent years in the weeds of this material — reading the sources, mapping the burials, following the threads of linguistic drift and boat timbers. And more and more, I’m convinced that the complexity of the Vikings is being smoothed over, not in pursuit of truth, but for the comfort of tidy narrative.

But the truth is messier. And much more interesting.

The Viking raiders weren’t gods, nor were they monsters. They were elite men, shaped by survival, chosen by their kin, remembered by their foes. They rowed for hours. They fought with both hands. They cast long shadows — in bone, in memory, in legend.

And if they stood taller than the rest, in body or in myth, it was for good reason.

They were not average — and neither were their axes.

For those interested in exploring the deeper sources behind this piece — from primary texts to the latest archaeological and genetic research — here is a curated selection of recommended reading.

Essential Reading List: Vikings, Bones, and Memory

Primary Sources

• Ibn Fadlan, Risala – A 10th-century travel account that famously describes the physical appearance of Norse traders (Rus').

• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – A key record of Viking activity in England, full of terse but vivid references to Norse raiders.

• Chronicle of John of Wallingford – A 13th-century source preserving earlier traditions about the Danes’ fearsome stature and presence.

• Norse Sagas (e.g. Egils Saga, Heimskringla) – Semi-legendary but invaluable in understanding cultural ideals of strength and stature.

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Academic Works

• Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora – A masterful look at how Viking identity shifted across time and space, from raiders to settlers.

• Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings – Richly detailed and grounded in archaeology; essential for understanding Viking society and worldview.

• Stefan Brink & Neil Price (eds.), The Viking World – A comprehensive academic anthology on every aspect of Viking life, belief, and expansion.

• Else Roesdahl, The Vikings – A concise and reliable introduction by a leading Viking Age scholar.

• Steven Ashby, A Viking Way of Life – Offers an excellent overview of daily life and warrior culture.

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DNA, Anthropology, and Bioarchaeology

• Martin J. Richards et al., “Viking Age Genomes Reveal Expansion and Admixture in Europe” (Nature, 2020) – A landmark DNA study tracing Norse genetic legacy across Europe.

• Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads – Blends archaeology, bioarchaeology, and narrative to reframe the Viking story.

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Challenging the Myths

• Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland – A sharp look at Icelandic society and how it diverged from mainland Norse cultures.

• Thomas Williams, Viking Britain – A critical, often poetic work that situates the Vikings within the British landscape and psyche.

© Richard Harpur @ Northvegr Journal, 2025. All rights reserved.
For permissions or inquiries, contact: northvegrjournal@gmail.com

Final Note: Axes, and the Trouble with Borrowing One

Among the many stories preserved from the Viking Age, few capture the blend of brutality and wit quite like the tale of Þangbrandr, a 10th-century Christian missionary sent to Iceland. According to the sagas, when one pagan Icelander refused to convert, Þangbrandr solved the theological impasse by splitting him with an axe.

As conversion strategies go, it was direct. Less “turn the other cheek,” more “cleave the doubting skull.”

But the real charm lies in how ordinary the axe was — not just a tool of war, but a weapon close at hand, the sort of thing you didn’t need to fetch. You just… had one. In some Icelandic law codes, it’s even implied that if someone borrowed your axe and used it to kill a man, you might be held responsible — not for the murder, but for lending out an obviously tempting object.

So yes, axes were practical. They cut wood, carved paths, ended arguments, and, occasionally, started new religions. They were more than Viking symbols — they were a kind of punctuation mark in Norse life: decisive, final, and rarely subtle

Of course, it’s worth pausing to consider what kind of man could actually wield a Viking double-handed axe — the massive, blade-heavy Dane axes made famous by the huscarls of later centuries. These weren’t tools for the frail or famine-thinned. A desperate, ill-fed coastal farmer — ribs sharp under a wool tunic, breathless from rowing — wouldn’t last long swinging six pounds of sharpened iron on a five-foot haft. The axe wasn’t just heavy; it was unbalanced, top-loaded, and utterly unforgiving. Mishandle it, and it killed you before your enemy. This wasn’t a weapon of desperation. It was a specialist’s blade — honed by training, muscle memory, and meals you didn’t miss. Which is why the men who wielded them weren’t random peasants — they were the elite. And when they came swinging, they weren’t looking for a fair fight. They were looking to end one.

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