Few claims about Vikings sound as final as this one: children tossed onto spear points, supposedly as a regular custom. Follow it back and you do not reach a victim's chronicle or an excavation. You reach a nickname in an Icelandic book whose surviving versions were written generations after the Viking Age. This article sets out the sentence, tests it, and separates it from what is actually known about violence against children. The material is thin, so the article stays short.
Landnámabók, the “Book of Settlements”, records Iceland's first settlers, their farms and their families. At one point it names a man called Ölvir with the nickname barnakarl, literally something like “children's man”, which the Cleasby-Vigfússon dictionary gives as “child's friend”. Then comes the reason for the name. Almost every modern version of the claim rests on this one sentence.
“Ölvir barnakarl hét maðr ágætr í Nóregi. Hann var víkingr mikill. Hann lét eigi henda börn á spjótaoddum, sem þá var víkingum títt. Því var hann barnakarl kallaðr.” – There was a distinguished man in Norway called Ölvir Barnakarl. He was a great Viking. He would not have children caught on spear points, as was then customary among Vikings. For that reason he was called Barnakarl.Landnámabók, part V, ch. 11, normalised text after Guðni Jónsson (heimskringla.no); my own translation
The references differ from edition to edition: Guðni Jónsson's text has the passage as part V, chapter 11, the Cleasby-Vigfússon dictionary (1874) as “Landn. 308”, and an English-language blog as chapter 379. These are probably different numberings of the same passage, though I have not checked them in detail. The dictionary also reads spjótsoddum for spjótaoddum, which does not change the sense. I have not consulted the manuscripts. Ölvir is no settler here. The chapter names him because his descendants came to Iceland, among them Ófeigr grettir and Þormóðr skafti, who settled in the south of the island. The Hauksbók version also mentions him as a relative by marriage of the seafarer Naddoddr, and Grettis saga names him as an ancestor in chapter 3, both without the spear story.
Three things stand out. First, the sentence is not really about a cruelty but about refusing one. Ölvir did not allow it, which implies he had authority over his men. The act itself has no place, date or victim.
Second, the generalisation sits in a subordinate clause: sem þá var víkingum títt, “as was then customary among Vikings”. That “then” looks backward. The writer is describing a past he did not witness, and he does not say how he knows.
Third, the verb carries more weight than most retellings suspect. Henda in Old Norse means “to catch with the hand”, according to Zoëga's dictionary; the sense “to throw” belongs to modern Icelandic. So the wording is literally about catching on spear points and says nothing of throwing, even if the image implies it. English renderings differ: Cleasby and Vigfússon say he “did not spit babies”, while the blog mentioned above quotes, without naming a translator, a version with children “tossed by spear-point”. So the popular word “catch” sits close to the wording, but it does not describe the exact act either. John Stanyan Bigg's English verse romance “The Sea-King” of 1848, as quoted in a forum post, turned this into tossing infants “from spear to spear”. That is not in Landnámabók. I have not seen the book itself.
Landnámabók is no eyewitness. It deals with the settlement of Iceland, traditionally placed between about 874 and 930. Its main surviving versions come from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Sturlubók from around 1275–1280 and Hauksbók from the early fourteenth century, even if older, lost texts probably reaching back to the twelfth century lay behind them. Its authors were Christians writing about the pagan ancestors of their own readers. Whether the sentence on Ölvir stood in an early version or came later, I cannot say.
That makes the passage interesting in both directions. It comes not from a victim or a hostile monk but from the tradition of the descendants, which undercuts the easy objection that this is only enemy slander. Yet it also has a narrative purpose: it explains an odd name and lifts an ancestor above his time. The darker the background, the brighter the forebear.
Old Norse literature likes to explain nicknames with small stories. Some presumably rest on genuine memory, while others may have been invented afterwards to fit the name. Testing the Ölvir case means keeping that second possibility open. The dictionary records that in more recent Icelandic the word means a man with many children. If the nickname originally meant something harmless, the spear story would be a later reading. That is my own suggestion, not a finding, and it cannot be proved.
The blood eagle shows a comparable path from terse wording to drastic image, though the sources differ. The parallel proves nothing about Ölvir. It only shows that the question is fair.
When looking for further evidence, John of Wallingford is an obvious name to check, as one of the familiar English voices on the Danes. The English chronicle attributed to him is known for something else: the remark that the Danes combed their hair, bathed on Saturdays and changed their clothes often (see Viking hygiene). None of the texts I consulted attributes the spear claim to it. I have not read the chronicle in full, so I cannot rule it out.
Another strand is more productive. Julia Barrow has studied twelfth-century English accounts of Danish attacks on monasteries. As accounts of the ninth century she considers most of them worthless, but as evidence of their own time they are revealing: communities used ninth-century destruction to explain changes in their way of life and to support refoundations and property claims. The authors drew on a small stock of images, above all the Passio Sancti Eadmundi by Abbo of Fleury from the late tenth century. There, in Barrow's summary, babies are snatched from their mothers' breasts and killed. Her essay does not mention spear points. Barrow calls the whole scene of violence a set of topoi, stock narrative patterns, drawn largely from Adrevald of Fleury, a monk who wrote about Viking raids on the Loire in the 860s. I have not read the passage in the original.
Abbo wrote more than a century after King Edmund's death, no earlier than his stay in England of 985 to 987, and he wrote a saint's legend. Barrow also notes that manuscript A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records no Scandinavian destruction of English churches in the eighth to tenth centuries. That does not prove none took place. It does show how far the most vivid scenes belong to the later texts.
Killed infants have been a fixture of the image of war since antiquity. The Bible has them repeatedly: 2 Kings 8:12, Isaiah 13:16, Nahum 3:10 and the well-known end of Psalm 137. In the Iliad, Priam fears that little children will be hurled to the ground when Troy falls (22.63 f.). Medieval clerics certainly knew the biblical passages. That Abbo or anyone else deliberately modelled a scene on them is not demonstrated here, but familiarity with the motif is a reasonable assumption.
The spear point is not limited to Vikings either. The saga of the Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson, written by Sturla Þórðarson in the 1260s, reports complaints from the Hebrides under the year 1262: the Earl of Ross and other Scots had gone to Skye and burned villages and churches, and it was affirmed that they had taken small children, “raising them on the points of their spears”, and shaken them until they slid down. I read this in James Johnstone's English translation of 1782, not in the Old Norse text. Here a Scandinavian text turns the image against its king's enemies, as an accusation from the injured side. The same Sturla is credited with the Sturlubók version of Landnámabók; whether that is more than coincidence cannot be said. In the First World War, the legend of children with severed hands circulated, while John Horne and Alan Kramer's “German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial” documents over 6,400 civilians deliberately killed and treats the rumours as rumours (so Vejas Liulevicius's review). That example shows the motif can stand alongside genuine crimes. A topos, a recurring narrative pattern, is no proof that nothing happened. It is only a reason not to read a report as a record.
Doubting a spear custom does not acquit the raiders. The violence was real and so was the abduction of people, as the articles on slavery and on whether Vikings were more brutal than others show. Children were very likely among the victims, if only because plunder and fire do not discriminate. Nor would it be right to declare the scene impossible: individual acts of this kind can be neither shown nor ruled out.
The doubtful claim is narrower: that this was a general custom. For that there is one subordinate clause in a late source. A practical point can be added, though it is only an argument: where captives were merchandise, raiders had a reason to keep saleable people alive. It says little about infants. I know of no find that shows the practice, but small children's bones survive poorly and such an injury would be hard to identify, so the lack of a find is a weak argument here.
Did Vikings really throw children onto spears? This cannot be clearly shown. There is an Icelandic statement about such a custom, but no contemporary report known to me and no archaeological proof.
Who was Ölvir barnakarl? According to Landnámabók, a distinguished Norwegian and great Viking whose descendants moved to Iceland. His nickname is explained by his refusal to allow this act. Grettis saga names him too, but probably belongs to the same tradition as Landnámabók. I know of no independent evidence for him.
What does barnakarl mean? Literally something like “children's man”, and “child's friend” in the dictionary. According to the same dictionary, in more recent Icelandic it means a man with many children.
Why is the image so widespread? It is drastic, brief and fits the cliché. A line from a Norse source also seems more credible than a monk's lament, although it too was written in hindsight.
Were Vikings dirty and brutal? · Childhood among the Vikings · The blood eagle · Slavery among the Vikings · The skull-cup myth · The sagas of Icelanders
Were Vikings more brutal than others? · Viking Childhood · The blood eagle · Typically Viking?.
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