Berserker

The teeth go into the shield rim first. It is one of the details that turns up again and again, in prose and in carved ivory, and it is the moment before the thing becomes unmanageable: a man with no mail on, biting the edge of his own board, making a noise that the people beside him have heard before and moved away from.

Snorri Sturluson describes them in a single sentence that has done more work than any other line written about them. Odin’s men went into battle without armour, mad as dogs or wolves, biting their shields, strong as bears or wild bulls; they killed people at a blow, and neither fire nor iron touched them. These, he says, were called berserkers. Everything the word has meant since comes out of that.

The name itself is a small argument that has run for two hundred years. Old Norse berserkr breaks into ber and serkr. Serkr is a shirt, and that part nobody disputes. Ber is now usually taken as bear, giving bear-shirt, a man wearing the skin of the animal whose strength he borrows. The older reading was berr, bare, giving a warrior who went into battle with no armour and even no shirt, which produced the fine English word baresark. The bare reading fits Snorri’s description too well to be an accident and is now generally treated as a mistake made by people who had that same description in front of them. The bear reading has better company: alongside the berserkir the poems name the úlfheðnar, the wolf-coats, and a warrior class named for a wolf pelt makes a warrior class named for a bear pelt look obvious.

Both names appear together in the oldest place they appear at all. The poem on Harald Fairhair’s victory at Hafrsfjord has berserkers howling in the fleet and úlfheðnar with them, and that poem is close enough to the battle to count as reporting rather than legend. What it does not say is anything about how the state was reached.

That is the gap everyone has tried to fill. In 1784 a Swedish theologian suggested that berserkers ate fly agaric, the red mushroom, and the idea has been repeated ever since with a confidence that no ancient text supports. A more recent and more careful proposal points at henbane, which grows across Scandinavia, produces exactly the right catalogue of effects, and turns up in Viking Age burials in quantity. It is a better hypothesis than the mushroom. It is still a hypothesis, and the honest position is that no source from the period says a berserker took anything at all.

There is a plainer explanation available and the sagas keep offering it. In Egil’s saga the family runs the trait through three generations, and the grandfather is called Kveldúlfr, evening-wolf, because he grows heavy and dangerous as the light goes. The fury comes over these men, it is exhausting, and afterwards they are useless for a day. That reads much more like something inherited and worked up in a group than something swallowed.

What the state does is described consistently enough to be worth taking seriously as an observation. Pain stops registering. The man attacks whatever is nearest. Weapons that should end him do not seem to. That last claim looks supernatural until it is set beside the first: a man who does not notice being cut goes on fighting with wounds that would stop anybody else, and to the people watching, iron is simply failing to work.

The literary career of the berserker then splits in a way that says a good deal about who was writing. In the kings’ sagas he is an asset, stationed at the prow of the royal ship, spending his fury on the enemy. In the Icelandic family sagas he is almost always a problem: a large violent stranger who arrives at a farm, demands a daughter or a duel, and has to be dealt with by a cleverer man. The heroes of those sagas kill berserkers the way heroes elsewhere kill trolls.

The law finished him. Iceland’s medieval code sentenced anyone who went berserk to outlawry, and the men who had been with him were fined if they did not restrain him. A society that legislates against a thing is telling you the thing existed and had become intolerable. By the time Snorri wrote his admiring sentence about Odin’s men, the berserker had been illegal for generations and survived mainly in stories.

His powers, taken strictly from the sources, are three. He does not need armour. He does not feel what is done to him. He hits with a strength the writers reach for animals to describe, bears and bulls, and kills men at one blow.

The weaknesses are the same three read forward. The fury cannot be aimed, which is why the sagas are so full of berserkers killing the wrong people and why the law had to name the men standing next to him. It does not last, and what follows it is a collapse so complete that the saga writers treat the aftermath as the moment to attack. And he is not actually invulnerable; he only stops noticing, which works beautifully until the damage catches up with him. A man who cannot feel a wound still bleeds at the ordinary rate.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a berserker?

A berserker was a Norse warrior who fought in a state of uncontrollable fury called berserksgangr. Snorri Sturluson describes Odin’s berserkers as going into battle without armour, mad as dogs or wolves, biting their shields, as strong as bears or bulls, killing men at a blow, and untouched by fire or iron. The related úlfheðnar were named for wolf pelts rather than bear.

Does berserker mean bare-shirt or bear-shirt?

The second element serkr means shirt. The first is now usually read as bear, giving a warrior in a bear skin, which matches the úlfheðnar or wolf-coats named alongside them. The older reading of bare, meaning a man who fought unarmoured, is generally treated as a false etymology built out of Snorri’s own description.

Did berserkers take drugs or mushrooms?

There is no evidence that they did. The fly agaric mushroom theory was proposed by a Swedish theologian in 1784 and has been repeated ever since without support from any Viking Age source. A more recent suggestion favours henbane, which grows in Scandinavia and produces the right symptoms, but it remains a hypothesis rather than a finding.

Were berserkers real?

Warriors called berserkers and úlfheðnar are named in poetry composed close to the battle of Hafrsfjord, so the term was in use as a real description of real men. What is uncertain is how much of the surviving picture is accurate reporting and how much is later saga convention, in which the berserker functions as a monster for the hero to kill.

Why was going berserk banned?

Medieval Icelandic law made berserksgangr punishable by outlawry, and fined the men present if they failed to restrain the man having the fit. The Icelandic family sagas mostly present berserkers as violent nuisances who turn up at farms making demands, which suggests the practice had become a domestic problem rather than a military asset.

Related Entries

Odin, Einherjar, Valkyrie, Valhalla, Draugr, Fenrir, Ragnarök, Thor, Loki, Æsir, Jötunn, Fylgja, Hamingja, Werewolf, Skadi