"Saint Olga [aka Helga] ... was a regent of Kievan Rus' for her son Svyatoslav from 945 until 960. She is known for her obliteration of the Drevlians, a tribe that had killed her husband Igor of Kiev. Even though it would be her grandson Vladimir that would convert the entire nation to Christianity, for her efforts to spread Christianity through the Rus' Olga is venerated as a saint. While her birthdate is unknown, it could be as early as AD 890 and as late as 5 June 925." Source: Wikipedia. She is thought to have died in 969 AD.
Olga, a sinister beauty if I ever saw one -- assuming that her portraits are accurate -- was probably a Varangian, i.e. a Russified Viking. She turned to Christianity after her husband was killed and is "sometimes credited as founding, with her grandson Vladimir, what has come to be known as Russian Christianity (the Moscow Patriarchate within Eastern Orthodoxy). She was the ruler of Kiev as regent for her son, and she was the grandmother of St. Vladimir, great-grandmother of Saint Boris and Saint Gleb." Source: Thought Company.
Orthodox Easter Liturgy Mass, Moscow, 2016.
I'm not sure who Saint Boris and Saint Gleb were, but it sounds like Olga whelped a whole family of saints. She was a kind, compassionate and gentle Viking matriarch who displayed her Christian qualities of mercy and forgiveness when she dealt with the Drevlians, the Eastern Slavs who killed her husband:
"Igor's widow Olga avenged her husband's death in an extremely harsh manner, killing Drevlian ambassadors and nobility, burning their capital of Iskorosten to the ground and leveling other towns." (Wikipedia)
Her treatment of the Drevlian ambassadors is particularly memorable. According to Russia Insider, "Olga pretended to accept the ambassadors with honors. She invited them to the court on the next day. They were to be carried in boats by her own warriors as a special honor. But instead, she had a ditch dug near her own palace, and when the ambassadors, filled with their own significance, were carried in on longboats, she ordered them thrown into the ditch and buried alive."
I'm no Christian, but I've always liked the Russian Orthodox church. Persecuted by the Communists, criticized by modern liberals, the church is a force for tradition during a time of widespread social collapse in the West and any religion that has saints like Olga can't be all bad.
"In April 2021, she somehow managed it again – unearthing an impressive grouping of silver coins and pieces of cut silver armbands dating to around AD 1030.
"The coins were minted in England, Dublin, modern day Germany and the Isle of Man, demonstrating some of the extent of Viking trade and influence. They include representations of Kings Sihtric Silkbeard and Cnut while the cut silver would have been used to pay for goods."
"The Dane axe is an early type of battle axe, primarily used during the transition between the European Viking Age and early Middle Ages. Other names for the weapon include English long axe, Danish axe, and hafted axe." Source: Wikipedia.
These long axes look like they would be awkward and heavy, requiring a lot of strength to use, but "[i]n reality, battle axes in the Viking age were light, fast, and well balanced, and were good for speedy, deadly attacks, as well as for a variety of nasty, clever moves," according to Hurstwic.
Axes have several advantages over swords. They're cheaper, for instance, and most Viking farmers would probably have owned at least one short axe for chopping wood and so on:
"In a period when almost everything was constructed of wood, it is unsurprising that a large number of different axes existed. These were mostly used as tools for the construction of ships, houses and carts, as well as other objects, so many different sizes and types of axes were required. The axe was also put to very effective use on the battlefield. Sometimes it is difficult to tell whether an axe was used as a weapon or a tool. Perhaps the Vikings used their ordinary woodworking axes as weapons if the situation demanded it?" Source: National Museum of Denmark.
These were effective weapons. As seen in the video above, the long haft of the Dane axe could be used as a pole for parrying, striking and to maintain distance. Short-handled axes have one obvious disadvantage in that you have to get closer to your target for them to be effective, but there are all sorts of trade-offs when comparing these particular weapons.
The longer reach of the Dane axe made it particularly effective for fighting in shield walls:
"When in the shield wall, most attacks against your opponent are made overhead. The overhead attack is an attempt to hit over the top of the enemy’s shield while aiming at their head and trying to bash or split them in the head, neck, or shoulders. Most thrusts while in a shield wall formation would go against the enemy’s shield and open yourself up to similar attacks as you must open a small gap in the wall to allow you to thrust." Source: Spagenhelm.
"... the dane ax could be used to reach over the shield wall and be swung down upon the enemy’s heads and shoulders behind their shields. Their shields would also be shattered and split from the powerful overhead hacks by a dane ax armed viking warrior."
Maintaining distance and extending your reach were critical in these tightly packed shield wall battles. The Dane axe had its problems, but in general it was an excellent weapon, not only for swinging down over the shields, but for smashing through the shields themselves and for swinging at the legs of opponents. And the Dane axe could deliver devastating injuries. The next video shows a series of tests done on a pig carcass with various Viking weapons. The axe tests begin at around 10:23. Note: Even if a Dane axe couldn't penetrate mail armor, the impact alone could have been extremely damaging.
Dane axes had different types of blades. Some of them, for instance, had hook-shaped heads that could have been useful against cavalry. With an axe like that, a warrior could have reached up and hooked a rider off his horse, assuming he could get close enough in the first place, not an easy thing to do.
Inevitably, new developments made these kinds of axes obsolete. According to Wikipedia, "[w]hile the use of the Dane axe continued into the 14th century, axes with an armour piercing back-spike and spear-like spike on the fore-end of the haft became more common, eventually evolving into the Pollaxe in the 15th century [see next video]. The simple Danish axe continued to be used in the West of Scotland and in Ireland into the 16th century. In Ireland, it was particularly associated with Galloglas mercenaries."
The execution of Jarl Borg. Vikings Season 2, Episode 7
"The blood eagle is a ritualized method of execution, detailed in late skaldic poetry. According to the two instances mentioned in the Sagas, the victim (in both cases a member of a royal family) was placed prone, the ribs severed from the spine with a sharp tool and the lungs pulled through the opening to create a pair of 'wings'. There is a continuing debate about whether the ritual was a literary invention, a mistranslation of the original texts or an authentic historical practice." Source: Wikipedia.
The Blood Eagle was a particularly nasty form of sacrificial execution, but did the Vikings actually put people to death this way? As far as I can tell, the only primary documentary evidence for the practice comes from sources such as the Orkneyinga Saga, the Heimskringla, the Tale of Ragnar's Sons, and a handful of references in other texts.
Note: The Tale of Ragnar's Sons describes (among other things) the execution of King Aella of Northumbria, a scene also depicted in Vikings.
Jarl Borg (top video) in Vikings is an entirely fictional character, I believe. Aella, on the other hand, was apparently a real king, though the sources for his life are limited and very little is known about his reign. According to some accounts, he was executed by the Vikings after they invaded Northumbria following the king's execution of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok, another figure who may or may not have actually existed. How Aella died is a matter of conjecture, though, because the sources contradict each other:
"While Norse sources claim that Ragnar's sons tortured Ælla to death with a blood eagle, Anglo-Saxon accounts maintain that he died in battle, at York, on 21 March 867." (Wikipedia)
"Well into the last century, most historians of the Vikings accepted that the blood eagle was deeply unpleasant but very real. According to the eminent medievalist J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, its possible victims were not only Ælla of Northumbria but also Halfdán, the son of Harald Finehair (or Fairhair), king of Norway, and the Irish King Maelgualai [Mael Gualae] of Munster; in some interpretations, it is supposed that even Edmund the Martyr may have suffered the same fate."
One possibility is that the Blood Eagle was a real execution method sensationalized by later writers. For instance, the Welsh scholar and translator, Gwyn Jones, argues in A History of the Vikings (1968) that this "inhuman rite" was "unhappily no fiction ... but owes its eminence in pseudo-lore almost entirely to fiction ..." (footnote pp 119-220, 1968 edition)
It's also possible that the Blood Eagle is entirely fictitious. This seems to be the current consensus, but there's a lot of disagreement. Revisionist historians have challenged the idea that the Vikings were just a mob of cruel barbarians wearing horned helmets, but their depictions of "cuddly" Vikings went too far in the other direction. One of the main problems with our picture of the Vikings is that much of what we know about them was written by their enemies.
If the Blood Eagle is a literary invention, there's a good chance that this grisly method of execution was dreamed up by Christian writers trying to demonize the pagan Vikings. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here is debate about whether the blood eagle was historically practiced, or whether it was a literary device invented by the authors who transcribed the sagas. No contemporary accounts of the ritual exist, and the scant references in the sagas are several hundred years after the Christianization of Scandinavia." Considering the Christians' history of inventing martyr stories set in the Roman Empire, I wouldn't be surprised if they concocted similar atrocity stories about the Vikings.
When I first started to research this subject, I assumed there was a high probability that the Blood Eagle was a real thing because the Vikings are thought to have conducted human sacrifices and the Blood Eagle is, in a way, just another form of ritual sacrifice. As it turns out, though, the question of whether the Vikings actually killed people for religious purposes isn't all that straightforward.
There is some archaeological evidence that the Vikings may have sacrificed humans. For instance, "[a]t Trelleborg [Sweden] a sacrificial site was found from the time before the Viking fortress was erected in 980-81. In five c. 3 metre-deep wells human and animal skeletons were found, together with jewellery and tools. Of the total of five human sacrifices, four were young children aged between 4 and 7. " Source: National Museum of Denmark.
Blood sacrifice, including human sacrifice, was an intrinsic part of pagan religions. The historical sources for Viking human sacrifice are questionable, though, because they all seem to come, once again, from Christian accounts:
According to the National Museum of Denmark, "[t]here are several horrifying accounts of human sacrifices from the Viking period. The German bishop, Thietmar of Merseburg, describes how the Vikings met every nine years at Lejre on Zealand [Denmark] in January 'and offer to their gods 99 people and just as many horses, dogs and hens or hawks, for these should serve them in the kingdom of the dead and atone for their evil deeds.'"
A similar ritual (at a different location) is also depicted in Vikings.
"The German monk Adam of Bremen wrote a similar account in 1072 about the sacrificial tradition at [Gamla Uppsala] in Sweden, where the temple was devoted to Thor, Odin and Frey. Here the Vikings also met every 9 years to ensure the goodwill of the gods. 9 males of all kinds of living creatures were sacrificed in a holy grove nearby. According to Adam of Bremen dogs, horses and humans hung from the trees. The number 9 was apparently of magical significance to the Vikings and was involved in a number of rituals." (National Museum of Denmark)
"There has been extensive debate over whether these accounts were real or simply Christian propaganda."
I wouldn't be shocked to learn that the Vikings actually executed royal prisoners using the Blood Eagle. Even if the descriptions in the sagas were written for entertainment, they may have had some basis in fact. At this point, however, it looks like this particular form of execution was a literary invention derived from the skaldic poems and embellished by later Christian writers in yet another attempt to make the pagans look like cruel and bloodthirsty savages:
"One of the features of a skaldic poem is that it’s incredibly convoluted, like a cryptic crossword puzzle. If you have a reference to what appears to be the Blood Eagle in a skaldic verse, it’s quite likely this is a poetic conceit. Roberta Frank, at Yale, argues that the Blood Eagle is just the idea of a carrion bird scratching at the back of the dead. If you create lots of corpses, you are a very good warrior. That’s what is being referred to. But when later writers made prose stories around these skaldic verses, they seem to have interpreted it literally. So it’s quite likely that there was no such thing as this horrible form of torture, but it grew in the telling." Source: National Geographic (2017).
"First broadcast in cinemas, Vikings Live explores the world of these warriors, seafarers and conquerors.
"...With demonstrations, stunning close-up photography of the Viking objects in the [2014 exhibition Vikings: life and legend] and a torch-lit burial in the grounds of the Museum, the broadcast of Vikings Live is a reminder of how the Vikings have shaped our modern lives.
"Presenters Michael Wood and Bettany Hughes are joined by guests including exhibition curator Gareth Williams, Neil MacGregor and experts on Viking ships and swords, burial and beliefs, as well as their language and legacy."
"They recount tales of Viking raids, Norse history, kings and gods: a priceless collection of medieval manuscripts, bequeathed by an Icelandic scholar to the University of Copenhagen in the 18th century, that Iceland now wants back." Source: The Local (Nov. 2019).
"The UN cultural organisation UNESCO has called them 'the single most important collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts in existence', with the earliest one dating from the 12th century.
"Some of the texts — known as the Arnamagnaean Collection — have already been returned to Reykjavik, but 1,400 documents are still locked away in Copenhagen."
Note: The Arnamagnaean Collection is named after a scholar named Arni Magnusson, "a historian and literature and language expert who was born in Iceland but died in 1730 in Copenhagen, where he left his 3,000 or so manuscripts."
I'm not sure where this issue stands as of 2021. The quarrel over the ownership of these manuscripts is complicated by the entangled history of the two countries:
"The transfer of manuscripts from Denmark to Iceland took place as a result of numerous petitions from the Icelanders dating back to the 1830s and increasingly after the constitutional separation from Denmark in 1944, and it is undoubtedly connected to Iceland’s struggle for independence from Denmark. The demands for repatriation are founded on the fact that when Árni Magnússon bequeathed his collection to the University of Copenhagen this was also the university of Iceland." Source: University of Copenhagen.
"The ruined church and monastic buildings that still stand on the island today are not Anglo-Saxon; they are the remains of the new priory built on the island in the late 11th century by the monks of Durham. So where is the original monastery? And what happened to it after the attack?" Source: DigVentures.
"All that is known to survive are some carved stone monuments of Anglo-Saxon date, which were found by archaeologists clearing away some of the collapsed rubble from the priory ruins in the late 19th and early 20th century."
Note: "... a major ... geophysical survey funded by National Geographic was carried out by Durham University in September 2012. This has shown that there is limited archaeological evidence for the monastic boundary that had previously been postulated, but an alternative boundary has been identified, which is associated with an area of possible industrial activity. It also identified a probably infirmary cloister associated with the later priory and a possible structure aligned on the two standing churches." Source: Durham University.
Boat burials in Valsgarde, Sweden. Video from 2015.
"In an Iron Age cemetery in what is now Sweden, two warriors who died during the seventh century A.D. were lavishly buried in boats with an unexpectedly luxurious touch: soft bedding stuffed with feathers, to gently cradle the deceased on their journey into the realm of the dead." Source: Live Science.
"The burial site at Valsgärde, a farm in Uppsala, Sweden, near the country's southeastern coast, holds 15 boat burials dating from the third century B.C. — perhaps even earlier — to the 12th century A.D."
Various helmets discovered at Valsgarde.
"Researchers recently investigated the unusual feathery content in two of the graves, known as Valsgärde 7 and Valsgärde 8. Both burials contained 'richly equipped boats' that were positioned with their sterns pointing toward the Fyrisån river, as though poised for the occupants' journey to the afterlife. Pillows from the boats, dated to around 1,400 years ago, are the oldest bedding-related artifacts in Scandinavia, according to a new study."
The burials also included helmets, swords, knives, shields, cooking and hunting tools. "Horses and birds in the graves further hinted at the warriors' high-ranking status, though one of the animals - a Eurasian eagle owl -- was missing its head. Its decapitation may have had ritual significance for the burial and the feathers filling the cushions may have been selected for the symbolic meaning..."
"Appearing in the second half of the 10th century, the Dane axe is amongst [the] first lines of the evidence to signal the growing significance of axes in Viking culture. Its symbolic and practical significance is well-known and persists in contemporary images of the Vikings as a defining feature (along with longships, horned helmets, burning villages, etc.). Certainly, the archaeological record from this whole period contains many oxidized and degraded axe heads. Most of these, however, are rudimentary and heavy; it is not until the second half of the 10th century that the slender battleaxes become more visible in the archaeological record ..." Source: Society for Combat Archaeology.
"In the Old Norse written corpus, berserkers ... were warriors who purportedly fought in a trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word 'berserk' ... Berserkers are attested to in numerous Old Norse sources, with their name literally rendered as 'bear-coats', along with úlfhéðnar ('wolf-coats')." Source: Wikipedia.
"...It is proposed by some authors that the northern warrior tradition originated in hunting magic. Three main animal cults appeared: the bear, the wolf, and the wild boar."
The legend of the werewolf may be related to these ancient stories:
"Old Norse had the cognate varúlfur, but because of the high importance of werewolves in Norse mythology, there were alternative terms such as ulfhéðinn ('one in wolf-skin', referring still to the totemistic or cultic adoption of wolf-nature rather than the superstitious belief in actual shape-shifting). In modern Scandinavian also kveldulf ('evening-wolf'), presumably after the name of Kveldulf Bjalfason, a historical berserker of the 9th century who figures in the Icelandic sagas." (Wikipedia)
Berserkers, like Shieldmaidens, may be completely mythological. According to the National Museum of Denmark, there is little to no archaeological evidence that they ever existed. Assuming that they were real, however, and that the stories about their ultraviolent frenzies are accurate, what could account for their deranged behavior?
The Viking berserkers, we are told, went into battle in a trance-like rage and were supposed to be almost uncontrollable killing machines. Dressed in wolf and bear pelts, they would attack friend and foe alike and their homicidal madness sounds a lot like a drug-induced frenzy of some kind:
"This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe. When this condition ceased, a great dulling of the mind and feebleness followed, which could last for one or several days." -- Fabing, Howard D. (1956). "On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry. (Subscription-access only)
Note: A detailed commentary on berserkers in general and Fabing's paper can be found here.)
The legends suggest that the berserkers might have taken some kind of drug that caused these fits of berserkergang. Whatever it was, it came on with a rush of "shivering, chattering of the teeth and chill in the body," caused a spike in blood-pressure ("the face swelled and changed its color") and body temperature ("a great hot-headedness") and ended with a hangover with could last for days. No one really knows if the berserkers were high on something, but various candidates have been suggested:
"While some researchers believe the Berserkers simply worked themselves up into a self-induced hysteria before fighting, others maintain that it was sorcery, the consumption of drugs or alcohol, or even mental illness, that accounted for their behaviour. Some botanists have claimed that berserker behaviour could have been caused by the ingestion of the plant known as bog myrtle, one of the main spices in Scandinavian alcoholic beverages." Source: Ancient Origins.
The problem with the bog-myrtle theory is that the plant was commonly used to make beer back then and doesn't appear to produce this kind of dramatic effect on people. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn't find any mention of it in The Vaults of Erowid, a site which covers psychotropic plants and herbs in exhaustive detail.
Bog Myrtle (Myrica Gale) is a natural insect repellent, among other things. It was used (along with other herbs) to flavor beer in the middle ages until "hops supplanted gruit herbs for political and economic reasons." (Wikipedia). Bog Myrtle itself isn't psychedelic, as far as I can tell, but various mixtures of gruit herbs could act as euphorics and some of them had hallucinogenic or deliriant properties, so the idea that the Berserkers were stoned on some kind of herbal drink when they went into battle isn't all that outlandish.
"Helpful for enhancing lucid dreaming and astral work generally, bog myrtle was a flavoring for a type of European beer known as gruit up until the introduction of hops. The other components of gruit (1) were yarrow and wild rosemary. Some say this brew was behind the Berserkers [sic]. In northern Europe, bog myrtle and yarrow have been ingredients in fermented drinks made from grain, honey, or fruit since the Iron Age, and it is still used in Scandinavia to make a liqueur called 'snaps.'" Source: Alchemy Works.
(1) Medieval brewers used a wide variety of gruit herbs in their beer.
If the berserkers were high on something, the most likely candidate is gruit beer, but if they were that drunk it's hard to see how they could function very effectively. Some sources I've found speculate that they were tripping on the psychedelic amanita muscaria mushroom, but the psychoactive ingredient in the mushroom is muscimol, which is described as a "sedative-hypnotic," i.e., a tranquilizer -- just the opposite of what you would expect. Also, I've never heard of a psychedelic that consistently produces outbursts of violent rage. If the berserkers were taking a drug, it sounds like it was a medieval form of PCP.
Were the berserkers mentally ill? Again, it doesn't sound like it. Their furies seem to have been situation-specific, only occurring during battles or perhaps when they were working in their villages. If they were crazy they would've been prone to go berserk for no reason at all, but none of the sources I've found describe them flipping out at random. So, unless they were elite warriors who ate some plant that drove them into a homicidal rage the most plausible explanation for their reported behavior is that the berserkers are simply characters from Old Norse mythology. In other words, maybe they never actually existed.