The Berserkers

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Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr Kat Jarman and one of the things we'll be doing in this podcast is look at some of the very familiar myths and legends about the Middle Ages and there's an awful lot of them trying to disentangle the fact from the fiction. And you might be familiar with the term go berserk meaning to erupt in a furious rage or go wild or become crazy with anger. And that term derives from the berserkers who may be less familiar to some of you.

But you may know them as a select group of Viking warriors, renowned for their strength and ferocity in battle, who would enter the battlefield with a fierce cry, maybe dressed in bare skins, completely out of control perhaps, but very effective. But were these berserkers actually real? Were they warriors that you could expect to meet in battle during the Viking Age, howling and biting their shields? Or were they something else entirely, if they even existed at all?

To find out about this, today I've invited the ultimate expert on Berserkers, Dr. Roderick Dale, who has dedicated quite a significant part of his life to separating the facts from the fiction in this topic. Roderick did his PhD on the subject at the University of Nottingham and now works at the University of Stavanger in Norway. So welcome to Gone Medieval, Roderick.

So I think we're going to just launch straight into it. And I wanted to start with asking you a little bit more about this sort of popular perception of the Berserkers. And when you talk to people about it and what you study. What sort of thing do they have in mind? What sort of things have they learnt about the Berserkers? People have picked up a lot about Berserker.

I generally use the Old Norse term because the modern English term berserker has quite a specific meaning, which, as you mentioned in the introduction, implies the... They were people who went absolutely mad in battle, were totally uncontrollable, and basically were dangerous to both friend and foe. A lot of people will have learnt about this from fiction in the past 40-odd years, from role-playing games where you can be a berserker barbarian in Dungeons & Dragons or something similar.

It was, in fact, one of the earliest character classes to be created outside the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks was the Berserker. And... What people generally think is one of two things. Either they were warriors, uncontrollable warriors who wore bare skins, or... they were uncontrollable warriors who threw all their clothes and armour off and fought in the nude in battle these are however much later

constructions of what a berserker identity would be. That's basically what people know about them.

Okay, so that's quite an attractive idea though, isn't it? It's quite a sort of exciting, attractive idea and it fits, I think, quite well with a lot of people's perceptions of the Viking Age. But where does this come from then? What's the kind of origins of those stories of the Berserkers? The original origin and the earliest stories we have about them is the Old Norse literature that was written down mostly in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries.

The legendary sagas look at the time around the migration period following the fall of Rome, and they describe events that supposedly happened back then. then there's the islendingasrgr the sagas of the icelanders which record the settlement period through to around the year one thousand ish a little bit afterwards And there are also some contemporary sagas recording the events of the 13th century. And if anybody has read any of these sagas, just...

In passing, it is most likely they will have read the sagas of the Icelanders. Those are the ones that are the most popular stories. It's about people like Bernd Jarl, who got burnt in his house with his wife. in a feud in iceland or about eil skatlegrymsson the famous icelandic poet who's often said to be a berserker in later scholarship and popular culture

and who was very much at odds with Eric Bloodaxe, the famous Viking king, and his wife. So those are the stories that people know them from. And some of those are quite graphic and they're quite sort of violent aren't they? So that's where you get some of these quite attractive events I guess that people cling on to. People have read these sagas and they quite often focus on the violence in them, the holmgang, the duels, which is where in the sagas of the Icelanders you mostly see Basadgir.

And it's a shame, really, because the sagas have so much to do with law and culture and families. And our descriptions are... read like these are living people these are people we could be actually living next door to just a bit grumpier excellent I like that idea but so in terms of the the berserkers then um well let's just go back to the the name uh or the berserker

What does that actually come from? Now, we talked about the bearskins earlier on. Can you explain the origin of the name? The modern English Berserker comes from Old Norse Berserk. which is a compound word consisting of two elements, bear, which is disputed and can mean either bear, i.e. naked, or bear a bear. and the second half of the word means a shirt but it can also mean a coat of mail so a type of armor so they are either bear of shirt or They are wearing a bare skin shirt.

And bear of shirk doesn't actually mean they fought naked. There is absolutely nothing in Old Norse literature that talks about them actually fighting naked. I'm going to make this point quite firmly right now. We do get episodes of people throwing their armour off. Snoddy Stuttleson, the Icelandic historian from the 13th century, loves this motif.

And it's always a hot day, so they take their armour off. And every time they take their armour off in his History of the Norwegian Kings, they die. But also, with these stories, they are never about Berserkir themselves. It's always kings. So Harold Hardrada takes his armour off at the Battle of Stamford Bridge because it's too hot.

the other thing with the name berserkir is it is often connected with the old norse word ulfhedinn which in the plural is ulfhednar and people will have heard of it as the ulfhednar in english the wolfskins warriors who supposedly wore wolf skins and in old norse literature the two words are connected we see in vastela saga the saga of the people of athensdale in iceland that there is a line which actually says those berserks who were called wolfskins

They may have been a subgroup, or this may have just been a later rationalisation of the two, but the connection is made very strongly, and it's actually made very early as well. Because in the poem Haraldskveithi, the poem about Harold Fairhair, which is also known as the Raven's poem, it actually says in two of the verses... In one of the verses, the raven asks about the equipment of the beserkir, and the Valkyrie replies,

Those men are called wolfskins. Those men are called Ulfhithnar. And they carry bloody shields into battle. And they bloody spears. So the link is made early.

And the thing about this poem is that although it's only recorded from the 13th century, it's written down round about that time, because of the way Old Norse poetry works, We're fairly confident that it was actually composed sometime around 900, shortly after the Battle of Hafsfjord, which is about four kilometres to the west of where I'm sitting right now.

Right, excellent. So this actually shows that not all the sources are later in medieval period, but actually we do have references to berserkers from the Viking Age itself. And what about other sources? Because are there not some, if we go back to this idea of the bear skins, are there not also some pictures and representations of...

people wearing some kind of bear costume or headdress in the archaeological record or in their sort of pictorial record? Bears are more problematic from the... migration period through to the very beginning of the viking age we find images of figures wearing wolfskins and they appear to be wearing whole wolfskins so that you can't see their face and they just appear to have like a wolf's head. And these have often been connected to Basakir because of the literary connection I mentioned. So...

It's difficult to... comment specifically on them and say these absolutely are basergia but they are used a lot as evidence and they do suggest that there were people wearing animal skins in this fashion The closest we get to anything bear-like is the runestone Kelbu 56, which has a depiction of a person with a slightly bear-like head, but with droopy ears on it. So they could be a basset hound. Or a fresco in the Hagia Sophia in Kiev, which is called the Fight of the Geysers.

and appears to depict a man with his top half uncovered except wearing a kind of bearish sort of mask in an apparent jewel Pose? Opposing a man with sword and shield? From context, it's an entertainment, probably. But... These are the kinds of things we're looking at, and that then gets us to felt masks that were found at Heidebu in Denmark, where...

We have absolutely no idea how they were actually used, and it would be too speculative to say, this is what Berserkia did. But certainly in terms of appearing in an animal form, These masks suggest that there is some kind of guising, some kind of mumming going on that could be related to Basakir, even if those specifically were not part of that. Okay, so...

We have some imagery then of these animal headdresses or some sort of dressing up as animals. We have some evidence of the Berserkus that is contemporary, but a lot of it is much later. We'll get back to that again in a moment. But I just want to just mention one other quite common belief, which you may well now ruin for us. It's this idea that the sort of anger and rage came from drugs and especially from magic mushrooms that this...

was used to whip the berserkers into a mad range before battle. How about that? Where did that idea come from? And is there any truth in that at all? There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the use of magic mushrooms of any description in Scandinavia in the Viking Age to make people go berserk in battle. Ah. And so where on earth does that come from then? Because that is a very common belief.

It is. It's actually, it's the Swedish theologian Samuel Erdmann in 1784 suggested based on his knowledge of Siberian shamanism. that they used Amanita muscaria, the flyagaric mushroom, which is that famous red and white topped one that everybody can see, everybody has seen and everybody knows, to actually go berserk.

And then it was further popularized in 1956 when Howard Fabin performed experiments on prisoners in Ohio State Penitentiary, extracting what he thought was the... active ingredient, bufatenin, and feeding it to these prisoners and monitoring what actually happened. And he concluded that it matched the symptoms that he understood from Old Norse literature. Problem there is that his study really only highlights what he doesn't know about Old Norse literature.

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Obviously, let's get back to the facts and the evidence because you've gone through the literature. So if they aren't those mad and ferocious drug-fuelled warriors that we might think or want them to be... Who were they really and what does the literature say?

Although there's no evidence of the use of magic mushrooms, and similarly no evidence of the use of henbane, which was suggested in 2019 by an ethnobotanist, or of any of the... other causes of going berserk that have been suggested since Stefan Stefanius in 1644 decided that it was demonic possession because Odin was a black magician who was possessing men.

We really need to look at the Old Norse literature and try and get inside the heads of the audience and understand what they understood from it. Yeah, that's quite an important point, isn't it? The fact that these, I mean, they're obviously not written for us, but they were written in the 13th and 14th century for an audience that were expecting and were familiar with some of these concepts.

Yes, this is a problem actually we have with the Old Norse literature is that there will be assumed knowledge in there that we don't have. We don't have the keys to everything that's in there. But we can look at it and try and look at the cultural context within which it was written. And we can look at what kind of things we actually know.

would have been part of the experience of the people hearing these sagas and therefore what might they have understood by episodes featuring berserkir or mention of the word berserk but also And something that hasn't really been done much is trying to understand what the word actually means. Because we've discussed the etymology before.

But etymology is just a starting point. It isn't the meaning of the word. So trying to understand what they understood from Old Norse literature has got to be the first step in projecting a meaning backwards into the Viking Age. I know this is a bit of a tricky one for you to just summarise quite quickly, but if I can ask you, what do you think would be the main sort of takeaway message? So what would somebody living in 13th century or 14th century Iceland understand when they heard?

these stories about the Berserkers? What I concluded from actually reading through these episodes was that Berserkia were linked very closely to duelling. The sagas of the Icelanders feature many duelling episodes. where a Berserk will come along and challenge a poor farmer to a duel with the winner taking the farmer's farm and the farmer's wife and the farmer's daughter. it is understood that the farmer will be weak and unable to fight the berserker and win.

At which point the saga hero steps in and says, I'll be your champion in this duel. And fights the duel and kills the berserker and everybody's happy. And frequently the young champion gains a sword from this. recognition, and very occasionally actually takes a wife as a result. So there's the dueling episodes. Then there's also the episodes where you get Berserkir as members of a king's bodyguard. The most famous one is in Rolf Saga Kraka, the saga of King Rolf Kraki, where...

The saga presents his champions and his berserkiras, two groups of 12 people opposed to each other and who are slightly at odds, but they are his closest bodyguards. Interestingly, Snorri Sturklarsson, when describing these characters, actually describes the champions from Rolf's saga as Berserkir 2, which is a clue to what the word means, I think.

The other area that's particularly crucial for understanding what beserkir means is the chivalric sagas, where we find Christian beserkir, such as Antonius, who was Jesus's... it says in the saga but jesus christ did not forget his berserk's And there's also Josaphat, who is God's young berserk. So God had a berserk too.

And we find much the same in Carla Magna's saga, the Saga of Charlemagne, where the hero Roland says to Bishop Turpin as he's dying, you've been a great berserk against the heathen men. Okay. So there's quite an important religious element to this then, and the sort of pagans against the Christians coming in here as well. There is, there is, but the Basat can be both Christian and pagan.

So we're seeing Christian Bessafgid here. And the key element for me is when in the saga of Yvain, which is the retelling of Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. The two people whom Yvain is about to attack say, we don't want your lion fighting as your berserk. And this is a literal translation from Old French champion, meaning champion.

And this connection between Jules being a king's bodyguard and these Christian berserkers makes it quite clear that for the medieval audience berserk could mean champion and was very much linked to fighting these jewels and being a bodyguard. Right, so they were working for somebody in a very particular capacity and for a very good reason. So that's a very interesting point.

yes and i think that given that in the poem about harold fairhair that i mentioned earlier that dates from the viking age when it mentions his they are his warriors who are fighting in that capacity it seems quite clear that from the poem insofar as anything's clear in poetry that that's what they're actually doing

So I think it's perfectly reasonable to project a meaning of champion back to the Viking Age. And that is the core of the word. And then to that can be accreted... pagan rituals, the connection to the god Odin that Snorri Stuttleson makes, and various other social functions.

so we seem to have something here that that clearly has a defined feature in society and in particular in these sort of slightly military combative contexts that is existent in the viking age and then it continues and perhaps it then transforms its meaning through when obviously people change from paganism and convert to christianity and it takes on a whole new uh new meaning but perhaps the same sort of role but a different context. Would that sound right? Yes, in the Viking Age...

If you think about Bersethgir as king's bodyguards, who may have been thought to have a special connection to the god that gives victory in battle, and therefore might have led rituals that... connect to that god because they're thought to have that connection, and then taking that forward to the medieval period where the pagan connections are lost to some extent. although still remembered in part in the saga literature.

but also become transmuted into the possibility of them being Christian bodyguards, Christian defenders of the faith, the sort of the knight of Christ, then you have... social roles for them that fit the culture of the time, but absolutely do not fit the popular conceptions that have built up since then.

And it's more reasonable to project a medieval meaning back to the Viking Age than it is to think that the medieval meaning suddenly changed. And then we returned to a more... viking age meaning later yeah so perhaps that's reflecting more what our conceptions are of the Viking Age, which quite often are that sort of quite violent and very sort of out of control rage that perhaps fits more with our perception than it did with any previous times. Yeah.

yeah definitely i mean i really do think that when people are imagining the of popular culture it's projecting the present into the past and to some extent it ties into the noble savage trope the person free untrammelled from the hindrances of civilisation the conan the barbarian archetype that is very popular in popular culture, but you really wouldn't want to invite them round for dinner.

Okay, now that's a really different perspective, I think, on the berserkers than what most people really have in mind. But the one thing we haven't talked about yet is that idea of the howling and the biting of shields, which, again, is something that... that a lot of people have heard about. Can you just explain if there's anything to that at all? The howling and the biting of shields is connected to what in Old Norse is known as Besserskongar.

It's usually translated as going berserk, but that completely ignores the etymology of the word, which consists of the Old Norse word berserk, a berserk, and ganger meaning to go. But ganger is always used. of physical movement. It's not used in that transferred sense that we use it in English when we would say go berserk. So it's the movement of the beserk. And it features in the sagas frequently at the start of the dueling episodes. I can't recall any examples from Old Norse literature that...

have Berserskanger at the start of an actual massed battle. So that sort of suggests it's to do with whatever rituals are associated with Holmgang. And when we actually read these episodes, it's very easy to read them quickly and go, oh, he's howling, he's biting his shield, oh, he's gone berserk in battle. But actually, if you read it as a narrative, then you realise there are actual narrative pauses between the Besadskonger and the actual fight.

The example I always use is Eil's Saga, where he fights the Bessar, Jot the Pale, and Jot performs Bessarsganger. Eil says some poems that are quite scurrilous about Ljot basically slamming him. So Ljot then says, all right, you big lad, I'll fight you instead. You're going to be more of a challenge anyway.

But he's not ready for the duel yet, despite having performed Besef's Ganga at the start of this. So there's another narrative pause while Egil makes more scurrilous poetry about Lyot. Then they fight. Then Lyot wants a rest. Then there's a bit more poetry about how Lyot's a bit rubbish. And then they finish the fight and Lyot dies. From a narrative perspective, this is not somebody going berserk. It suggests that...

What Ljot is doing may be some kind of ritual at the start of Holmgang, because Holmgang was circumscribed by rules. And it's likely that the Basak performed... his ritual beforehand and i always think of it as culturally similar to a maori haka like the all-blacks performed before a rugby match It boosts your courage. It intimidates the other side. And in pagan Scandinavia, it may have been...

designed to get the god of victory and jewels on your side. That's a really, really interesting, a very important point, I think, because if you think of these people going into battle, going into a really situation where many of them may well... lose their lives in a duel or in a battle type situation that fits in quite nicely i think with with what they might need both the protection from from a deity but also to to sort of get them in the right atmosphere

Yeah. And it doesn't require mushrooms. It doesn't require alcohol. It doesn't require genetic abnormalities or any of the rest of that. It's a cultural phenomenon. It's a social phenomenon. And that is how it reads in Old Norse literature.

If we had descriptions from the period, it would be very interesting to see how they were. But sadly, we don't. But I think that's a brilliant summary, actually. And I think that although we may well now have disappointed quite a lot of people in this podcast, those who were expecting...

to have those myths and stereotypes confirmed. But actually, I think that that's adding a much more interesting and significant layer that we have these very significant cultural characters that perform roles that were important. both in battle and in society at large. So we're going to leave it there for today. Thank you so much, Roderick, for joining me and dispelling some of these myths. Thank you for having me.

And thank you to all our listeners out there. This has been Going Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and we'll be back with another episode next week. In the meantime, make sure you subscribe to Going Medieval by History Hit and tell all your friends and your family. to subscribe as well and leave us a review if you want to and we will see you again soon

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