Vikings on skates: the image is popular, the evidence thinner than it looks. Horse-bone skates are recorded from the layers of York, skis have emerged from the ice of Norwegian mountains, and Snorri Sturluson links a god to skis. Winter sport in the modern sense is not documented. This article sets finds, texts and modern interpretation side by side, says what I read myself, and marks openly where I could not check something.
Search for "Vikings and ice skating" and you quickly meet attractive sentences: Norsemen raced across frozen fjords on bone runners and hunted on skis all winter. Some of that holds; some is embroidery. The topic is therefore a good exercise in source criticism. There are finds you can hold, a handful of texts, and a great deal of modern interpretation in between.
I keep four layers apart. First, archaeological evidence: things that lay in soil or ice. Second, contemporary or nearly contemporary written sources. Third, later tradition, such as the Icelandic texts of the thirteenth century that report on the Viking Age after the fact. Fourth, modern interpretation, meaning what researchers, museums and authors conclude from all of it. Where I know something only second-hand, I say so.
A note on the reach of my research: only a few lookups were available for this article. I consulted the catalogue of bone artefacts from Coppergate in York, the Latin wording of Fitzstephen on winter amusements in London, the abstract of a scholarly paper on skis from Norwegian glacier ice, and secondary texts on the ski god Ullr. I could not verify skate finds from Haithabu or Birka. That is stated plainly further down.
In the Viking Age York was called Jórvík and stood under Scandinavian rule from about 866/867. The excavations at Coppergate, recorded as 16–22 Coppergate, produced a large body of organic finds, because the waterlogged ground preserved wood, leather, textile and bone unusually well. Among the bones are pieces interpreted as skates. For the town itself see Jórvík, Viking-Age York.
What did I actually see? The report on the osseous artefacts from 16–22 Coppergate by T. P. O'Connor of the Environmental Archaeology Unit at the University of York, available through the Historic England archive. The catalogue text is terse. In the entries I could read, six find numbers carry the keyword "SKATE": horse bones, some metatarsal (hind cannon), some metacarpal (fore cannon). The entries survive in a scanned copy with poor text recognition, and one further index entry is illegible. I therefore cannot give a reliable total. Figures such as "more than twenty", which circulate in books and online, I could not check and do not repeat.
For dating, the report gives, as I read it, a range from the late ninth to the early eleventh century. Again the text recognition is poor, so I treat it as a guide only. It is too coarse to place individual pieces. Anyone who needs more must consult the printed monograph on the bone, antler and horn finds from Coppergate, which I could not see.
A Viking-Age bone skate has no steel blade. It is a long bone, usually from a horse, smoothed on the underside and strapped to the shoe. It does not carry the foot on a sharp edge; it lets the foot glide over a smooth surface. The edge of the modern skate, which bites into the ice for push-off, did not exist. The usual reconstruction has the wearer push with a pointed pole. That reconstruction rests on the finds and on later descriptions; it is not a Viking-Age text.
The word "skate" is itself an interpretation. In the catalogue it is a keyword assigned by shape and wear. That one can glide on such a bone does not prove that anyone did. In favour of the reading are the form, the polish on the glide surface and comparison with well-described later bone runners of the Middle Ages and early modern period. That is a sound inference, but an inference. What else the pieces might have been, such as raw material, tool handles or blanks, is discussed in the literature, and I could not read the current state of that discussion in full.
It also matters what they were used for. Sport, children's play or quick travel over frozen water: the finds do not say. A bone in a rubbish layer does not reveal its purpose. Anyone who writes "races" or "Viking ice hockey" is writing fiction.
The working title of this article named Haithabu and Birka next to York. Both trading places produced plenty of bone and antler, Haithabu has its own specialist literature, and the towns are described in Haithabu and Birka. A reliable skate find from either place did not turn up in my research. The search results led to articles and volume pages I could not open and to retailers' texts that prove nothing. Afterwards a web text (secondary; I did not see the paper) pointed to a 2015 study by Edberg and Karlsson of 679 medieval skates from Birka and Sigtuna, saying the Birka pieces were shorter, simpler and made of cattle bone. I could not check this against the study and do not adopt it as a finding.
That does not mean such finds do not exist. It means I do not assert them here. Anyone working on Haithabu or Birka should check the excavation publications, for Haithabu for example the series "Die Ausgrabungen in Haithabu", which I did not consult. Without a page reference I will not write that bone skates lay there.
This caution is not formalism. In popular texts on Viking skates, find spots migrate from one text to the next without anyone naming a publication. The result is an impression of a custom attested all over Scandinavia. For the Viking Age proper, York is the secure case, and even there my statement rests on a catalogue, not on a worked-out interpretation.
The only written source regularly cited here comes from London. William Fitzstephen, a London cleric, wrote a eulogy of the city in the later twelfth century, the "Descriptio nobilissimae civitatis Londoniae". According to the preface of an edition I saw, he lived under King Stephen, wrote under Henry II and died in 1191. The exact year of composition I did not check. In the section "De ludis" he describes the games of London's youth, including activity on the ice.
"… singuli pedibus suis aptantes et sub talaribus suis alligantes ossa, tibias scilicet animalium …" – "… each fits bones to his feet and binds them beneath the ankles, namely the shin bones of animals …" William Fitzstephen, Descriptio nobilissimae civitatis Londoniae, section "De ludis", printed in Stow, Survey of London, 1598, p. 482; own translation of the excerpt, wording read only through a retrieval tool
The sentence belongs to a scene on a great frozen marsh outside the northern wall, where groups of young men amuse themselves. The name Moorfields does not appear in the passage I saw, although the literature regularly adds it. The text is valuable because it shows animal bones used as gliding gear. It is not evidence about Vikings. It was written more than two centuries after Scandinavian rule in York ended, in an Anglo-Norman city, and it describes Londoners.
Linking Coppergate and Fitzstephen is therefore an inference by similarity: same technique, same region, a few generations apart. Whether Londoners continued a Viking tradition or knew the technique independently cannot be settled clearly. As far as I know, views differ, and I could not read them in the original.
For skis the finds are better than for skates, but they come from different sources. In recent decades melting ice in Norway's high mountains has released objects that lay there for millennia: arrows, clothing, hunting gear, pack-horse equipment and skis. The Glacier Archaeology Program in Norway has worked on this for years. I read the abstract of a paper by Espen Finstad, Julian Martinsen, Runar Hole and Lars Pilø, published in 2018 in the Journal of Glacial Archaeology (volume 3, pp. 43–58). It treats skis from glaciers and ice patches in Norway and gives dates from the first millennium BCE to the Middle Ages. The abstract also mentions a find that provides the earliest evidence so far for fur on the underside of skis.
What the abstract does not contain are individual finds with measurements and dating methods. I therefore write only what it says: skis are archaeologically attested in Norway over a very long period, and fur soles are an old technique. Which pieces fall into the Viking Age I cannot read from this text.
One point matters for interpretation. Ice preserves what soil destroys, so glacier finds are more frequent than ski finds from settlements or graves, which skews the statistics. Skis lying in the mountains show that people used skis in the mountains, for hunting or on routes over passes. They say little about how common skis were in the lowlands or whether anyone put them on for pleasure.
A much-noted example is the pair of skis from Digervarden in southern Norway. According to a Smithsonian Magazine report, which I treat as a secondary source, the first ski was found in an ice patch in 2014. Seven years later two researchers found the second nearby. It is reported as just under 190 centimetres long and a little over 17 centimetres wide (reports give 187 to 188 and 17 to 18 centimetres), and the age is estimated at about 1,300 years. The report assigns the pair to the Iron Age and mentions Lars Pilø of the Glacier Archaeology Program. It draws no link between this pair and the Vikings.
That is the clean reading. Thirteen hundred years before today leads to about 700 CE, and researchers usually begin the Viking Age only at the end of the eighth century, with the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 as convention. The ski is thus a witness of Scandinavian Iron Age, and it shows how old the technique was before the Vikings enter the sources. Calling it a "Viking ski" simplifies. The precision of the date ("about 1,300 years") also depends on a method I have not seen.
Mythology supplies a second layer. Snorri Sturluson, the Icelander who compiled the Prose Edda in the thirteenth century, lists in his handbook for poets, the Skáldskaparmál, Ullr as a god who can be paraphrased through skis, bow, hunting and shield. According to a summary of the state of research that I read, Snorri tells no myths about him. In the Gylfaginning (chapter 31) Ullr is named as the son of Sif and thus Thor's stepson. From the Viking Age itself, the ninth and tenth centuries, no text connects Ullr with the ski. More is in Ullr; the author of the Prose Edda is covered in Snorri Sturluson.
Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish chronicler around 1200, knows Ullr as Ollerus, a cunning wizard with magical means of travel who takes Odin's place for ten years. Whether and how he brings bones, ships or skis into play there, I did not check. See Saxo Grammaticus. Skadi, the giantess regarded as a goddess of the hunt, is often shown on skis in modern times. I did not look up the source passages here; Skadi sets out what the texts allow.
The practical point: the ski god Ullr comes from late-recorded texts and from kennings, the paraphrases of skaldic diction. That shows the ski was understandable as a god's attribute in thirteenth-century Icelandic. It does not show that Vikings worshipped him when they put on skis. Reasoning back from Snorri to the Viking Age is a hypothesis.
Winter transport over snow and ice is another field with solid finds. The grave goods of the Oseberg ship burial include sledges, and the burial is treated in Oseberg. Number, build and dating of the pieces I did not re-check in this research; I mention them only as a pointer that sledges could belong to the equipment of an elite household. A sledge can be read as a load carrier, as a substitute for a wagon on snow, or as a showpiece in a grave, and the finds alone do not decide.
A general point follows. In Scandinavia winter was not a pause in which everything stood still. Frozen waters, snow and frost made some routes quicker and others impassable. That is plausible, but I do not want to stretch it. I gathered no concrete sources on journey times or winter transport in the Viking Age for this article. Anyone studying trade routes in winter should start with the sagas and travel accounts; Sagas of Icelanders offers an entry to the genre, without the genre proving the Viking Age.
Three questions cannot be closed, as I read the evidence. First, the number and spread of bone skates: without access to the main publications and without find lists from Haithabu, Birka and other sites, every map stays a draft. Second, function: whether they were sports gear, children's toys or means of travel depends on interpretation, not on texts. Third, the dating of the Norwegian ski finds: it is more or less precise from find to find, and only a few pieces belong securely to the years between 800 and 1050.
Conditions of survival also distort the picture. In York wet ground keeps bone and wood, in Norway's high mountains the ice does, in most settlements nothing does. Where nothing survived, finds are missing even if the thing was known. And the texts of the Viking Age itself, rune inscriptions and skaldic stanzas, are thin on everyday matters. The sagas, which say more, were written two to three centuries after the events they describe and belong to later tradition.
For an honest account that means: the Viking Age knew bone gliding gear, skis and sledges, probably in many parts of the North. How far people used them for sport remains open. Winter sport in the modern sense, with rules, competition and spectators, is a later invention, and attributing it to the Vikings is projection.
A few questions help with any text about "the Vikings" in winter. What kind of source is it: find, text or interpretation? How far is it from the ninth to eleventh century? Does the author give a find number, a page or at least a publication? If a text speaks of "dozens of skates all over Scandinavia" without saying where, it cannot be checked. And if a picture shows a warrior on skates, it is a modern picture, however old it looks. More on telling real from invented is in Nordic symbols: genuine or invented?, on daily life in Everyday life in the Viking Age, and on common clichés in What is typically Viking?.
A word on clothing and trade in winter: warmth came from wool, fur and leather, and furs were among the sought-after trade goods of the North. That is better documented than the sport reading and is described in Viking clothing and Viking trade. Games for long winter evenings, such as board games, are also attested archaeologically; see Hnefatafl.
Did the Vikings have ice skates? There are horse bones from York classified as skates and roughly dated to the late ninth to early eleventh century. They had no steel blade. Reading them as skates is plausible, but it is an interpretation.
Did Vikings ski? Skis are attested in Norwegian glacier ice over a long span, from the first millennium BCE to the Middle Ages. For the Viking Age in the narrow sense I did not check a single find. That the technique was known is very likely.
Was there a god of skiing? Snorri names Ullr in the thirteenth century as a god who can be paraphrased through skis. Cultic evidence from the Viking Age does not exist.
Is the London passage evidence for Vikings? No. Fitzstephen describes Londoners of the late twelfth century. It does show that bones were used as gliding gear in the Middle Ages.
Where can I read more? Best in the find publications on Coppergate and in Norwegian glacier archaeology; the source list below names what I saw myself.
Everyday Viking life · Birka – the trading hub · Hedeby · The Norse of Jórvík · Ullr – the god on skis.
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