Declan Taggart

“Tired of a warm boudoir and gloves filled with down”

The construction of Viking Age warrior identity

Þriðjudaginn 8. apríl 2025 kl. 16.30 / Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

Warriors remain a cultural staple across the globe, from kids playing with fingers for guns to the blood and guts of Gladiator and videogames like Elden Ring. That does not mean, however, that warrior identity is a straightforward topic for scholars, and this is as true for the Viking Age as for any other period in history. To put it simply, while many people can fight, not everyone who fights is a warrior. No word in Old Norse can even be said to unambiguously equate to the concept, although there are several that we can associate with it.

What, then, is a Viking Age warrior? The goal of this paper is to determine and elucidate that identity, exploring how it was constructed, maintained and propagated, and examining how it was perceived by and affected others in society, a dimension of warriorhood that is rarely considered. To do so, I turn to the archaeological, iconographic and textual sources of Scandinavia and its diaspora to see how warriorhood intersected with seemingly incongruous concepts like nobility and subservience, with religion and physical presentation, with the landscape, and with activities like sailing, showing off and, of course, violence.

While I will touch on and challenge previous arguments about the aesthetics, beliefs and values of the Männerbunde, Gefolgschaft or comitatus, as warrior groups have not-unproblematically been called over the last two hundred years of research, my main focus will be on the primary sources. Understandably, given the fragmentary nature of that corpus, many conclusions about early Northern warrior groups rely on evidence that is neither Viking Age nor from or about the Nordic countries. However, by concentrating on the primary source material, I hope to offer a reasonable reconsideration of how much it is really possible to say about early warrior identity as well as, ultimately, how valid the correlation is between the modern concept of the warrior and any in an Old Norse society.

Declan Taggart is a researcher at the University of Iceland working on warrior groups and their relationship with society. His wider interests include Old Norse mythology and religion, and he has published a book on change in representations of the god Þórr called How Thor Lost His Thunder (Routledge, 2018).

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.

—o—o—o—