Fighters who lost all fear in a sacred fury: the berserkers still fascinate us today. But what is source and what is later embellishment?
Few figures of the Viking world are as famous as the berserkers – warriors who were said to lose all fear and all pain in a raging battle-fury.
‘Berserkr’ probably means bear-shirt – a fighter in a bear’s pelt. Related are the úlfheðnar, the ‘wolf-coats’. Both are linked in the sources to Odin, the god of ecstasy and war. To go into battle in an animal’s pelt meant taking on something of the beast’s strength.
The poet Snorri describes how Odin’s warriors fought ‘without armour, mad as dogs or wolves’, bit their shields and feared neither fire nor iron. Such accounts are striking – but they come from a later time and are literarily heightened.
Much is speculated about the cause of the ‘berserker rage’: ritual ecstasy, self-suggestion, the adrenaline of battle, sometimes intoxicants too – though for the latter there is no firm evidence. In the Icelandic sagas, berserkers later often appear as feared troublemakers whom the hero defeats. As so often, the truth lies between history and legend.
Read more about Odin, the god behind the battle-ecstasy, in our portrait of Odin.