Married for love, women bought, verses written to sweethearts, runes as love charms – a lot circulates about the Viking Age, and almost none of it comes from the Viking Age itself. This article lays the sources side by side: Icelandic and Norwegian law, skaldic verse, sagas, a rune stick from Bergen. For each it says what it yields, and it leaves open what cannot be shown.
Ask about love in the Viking Age and you are quickly handed one of two pictures. One is romantic: warriors wooing their wives with poetry, couples bound beyond death. The other is sober to grim: women as trade goods, marriages as plain deals between clans. Each can be fed with individual passages. Neither survives scrutiny in full.
The root problem is transmission. From the age of the Viking raids, roughly the late 8th to the 11th century, we have hardly any texts that describe feelings. Rune inscriptions of the period are short and mostly name people, kin and commemoration. What reports at length on courtship, marriage and desire was written later: law books of the High Middle Ages, sagas from the 13th century onward, skaldic verses that survive in those sagas or in manuscripts of that era. This article takes the source groups one by one and says what each yields and what it does not.
A note on method: I did not read the legal provisions mentioned here in the Old Norse original or in a full-text edition. I know them through scholarly accounts and summaries, as the source list at the end states. Where a claim rests only on such an account, the text says so.
The laws sound most like facts, which is exactly why they are tricky. For Iceland the collection is Grágás ("Grey Goose"; the origin of the name is uncertain, and it seems to have been applied to the Icelandic laws only later); for western Norway it is the Gulathing Law, named after the Gulating assembly. Both were written down in the High Middle Ages, when the countries had long been Christian. According to the English Wikipedia, the Gulathing Law was possibly first compiled under King Olaf the Peaceful (1066–1093), and parts may go back to heathen oral tradition as far as the 10th century; that article itself treats this as uncertain. The surviving manuscripts are later still. A law book also records what had to be regulated, not how most people lived.
Skaldic poetry, the intricate verse of court poets, touches love only at the edges. The verses are hard to date and were mostly transmitted in prose texts written centuries later. More on this below.
The sagas supply the scenes people remember: courtship, jealousy, divorce by simple declaration. But they are narrative literature of the 13th and 14th centuries about people said to have lived two or three centuries earlier. How much is memory and how much literary shaping must be judged case by case, and often cannot be judged at all.
Finally runes and finds. They are contemporary but silent about love. The one rune text regularly discussed as a love charm comes from Bergen and is well after the Viking Age (see its own section below).
Grágás treats marriage as a regulated process with several steps. According to a scholarly study I read through a retrieval tool (named in the sources), it began with betrothal, Old Norse festar. The right to betroth a woman lay with her legal guardian, the lögráðandi, normally a close male relative. A betrothal by someone without that right was not binding and could be dissolved without penalty.
A betrothal needed at least two specially named witnesses. The partners could not be related by blood or by spiritual kinship (godparenthood), and they had to hold a minimum amount of property jointly. By the study's account such a betrothal bound the parties for a year unless they agreed otherwise.
Money was central. The mundr (often rendered "bride price") was the groom's payment. Without it the marriage was not lawful according to the study, and children of such a union could not inherit from their parents. Its amount was agreed, but could not fall below a minimum tied to the usual price of a female slave, roughly one to one and a half marks. The bride's dowry, heimanfylgja, was not required for betrothal but was usually of similar size and treated as an advance on inheritance; a woman could not claim more dowry than her brothers could later expect to inherit.
Whether "bride price" is the right English or German term is a matter of interpretation. The word evokes the purchase of a woman. The sources, however, show a property arrangement between two families in which the woman kept claims of her own: on separation, by the same study, she could reclaim bride price and dowry. That is different from selling an object. Whether contemporaries felt it as a purchase, we do not know.
More on the legal order and the assembly where such cases were heard can be found in our articles on Viking law and the Thing.
By the wording of Icelandic law, hardly. The study states that the woman's consent to the betrothal was not legally required. A woman whose father had died had some latitude, and there were special cases. The sagas paint a different picture: there the bride's opinion is often sought or at least mentioned, and men who ignore it run into trouble. The study links this gap between law and saga to the later influence of the Church, which made the woman's consent a condition of a valid marriage. That is one explanation among several; whether older customs also gave more weight to consent cannot be decided from these sources.
Two things follow for the question of love. First, marriage was above all a matter between families, and the law did not require that the couple like each other. Second, that does not mean affection played no part. It means only that the law did not regulate it. Feelings are among the things a law book rarely records.
How did a courtship go? One example from Egil's Saga, which I know through a summary and have not read in full: the poet Egill recites a poem about a woman to his friend Arinbjörn and Arinbjörn asks who it is for. Only after a second poem does Egill name her. She is Ásgerðr, widow of his brother Þórólfr. The poem opens a marriage proposal in which Egill asks Arinbjörn for help. The form is worth noting. Egill does not court the woman directly but lets an influential third party speak, which fits what the law says about the guardian: anyone who wanted to marry had to negotiate with the relative who controlled the woman.
Whether this sequence mirrors reality in the 10th century, when Egill is supposed to have lived, we do not know. The saga was composed much later. It shows how an author of the High Middle Ages imagined a courtship, which is not the same thing.
For gifts and customs around weddings and baptisms, see our article Norse weddings, baptisms and gifts. For women in Norse society more broadly there are the pages Women and Viking women on the move.
Here the sources differ in a way worth knowing. By the study, Grágás allowed legal separation (lögskilnaðr) on four grounds: a forbidden degree of kinship, a serious wound one spouse inflicted on the other, a husband taking his wife abroad under compulsion, and the couple being "at variance". The bishop's leave was required. Only in the case of a marriage between relatives was separation mandatory. If a husband neglected his wife for six "seasons" (the study's term), she could seek the bishop's leave to reclaim her property and claim compensation. A second marriage without the bishop's leave counted as bigamy and was punished with lesser outlawry.
The Church clearly has a strong voice here. Sagas set in the heathen period show a simpler procedure instead, a public declaration by which a spouse ends the marriage; the study cites Heiðarvíga saga, chapter 41. It states explicitly that it is unclear whether such scenes preserve older customs. That cannot be established with certainty. It is equally possible that later authors invented the "heathen" divorce as a contrast to the church order of their own time.
The Norwegian Gulathing Law also knows a divorce at the woman's initiative. According to Alexandra Sanmark's article on the judicial systems of early medieval Norway, a woman who had been beaten three times "at the table or at an ale feast", that is before witnesses, could leave her husband and take the "husband's gift" with her (chapter G 54 by that account). That article treats marriage only in passing and does not explain the content of other chapters on dissolution. I therefore cannot report more than this one case for Norway with confidence.
The picture of a sexually free North is persistent. The evidence is thin. By the study, consensual intercourse outside marriage was an offence under Grágás, and illegitimate children were "law-listed to inherit" but, according to the study, hardly inherited in practice. The study does not treat concubines as a legal category; they appear there only as women who influenced men informally.
That does not fit the myth that everything was permitted in the heathen North. Nor does it automatically fit the opposite picture of strict Viking sexual morals. The Icelanders who had this law written were Christians, and the law reflects church rules. What applied in the Viking Age itself, we simply do not know for this area.
On secondary wives and multiple partnerships of men I have nothing reliable from the accounts I read. I leave the subject open on purpose rather than draw a picture from saga memories.
The skalds composed for rulers: praise of battles, ships and generosity. Love verse existed, but the word for it is a problem. Mansöngr (plural mansöngvar) literally means "maiden-song". Scholars like to apply it to medieval Norse love poetry. According to the English Wikipedia, Edith Marold and Bjarni Einarsson consider the term over-used: for some poems labelled this way there is no sign that contemporaries saw them as mansöngr. Marold's article is titled "Mansǫngr – a Phantom Genre?" (2007). In many medieval mentions the poem itself is also missing, so the genre's boundaries are disputed.
What is firm is that Grágás explicitly forbids composing mansöngvar about women. The provision stands in the younger additions of the manuscripts Konungsbók and Staðarhólsbók, in a section "on poetry". In Konungsbók, §238, it reads (as rendered by the English Wikipedia): "Ef maðr yrkir mansöng vm cono oc varðar scog gang." The penalty is full outlawry. The case was brought by the woman concerned if she was at least twenty; if she did not wish to prosecute, her legal administrator stepped in. The law does not explain what exactly a mansöngr is.
"If a man composes a mansöng about a woman, it carries the penalty of forest-going (full outlawry)."Grágás, Konungsbók §238 ("vm scaldscap"); my own translation from the Old Norse wording as given in the English Wikipedia article "Mansöngr"; I have not read the manuscript itself
Why the ban? The sources do not say. One could imagine protecting the honour of women and their families, since a poem that makes desire public could count as an insult. That is a guess, not evidence.
The sagas show how dangerous love verse could be. By the English Wikipedia's summary, the situation in three cases is as follows.
In Hallfreðar saga Hallfreðr's poems to Kolfinna are explicitly called mansöngvar. The saga presents them as destructive: they provoke violence, including libellous verses about Kolfinna's husband Grís. Hallfreðr finds, according to the saga, a different life through King Ólafr Tryggvason and religious poetry. That is a story with a clear Christian moral, and it should not be read as a sober report on love poetry of the 10th century.
In one manuscript of Óláfs saga helga (DG 8, around 1225–1250) Óttarr svarti composes a mansǫngsdrápa about Queen Ástríðr, which angers her husband, the king whose name the saga bears. Óttarr wins forgiveness with the Höfuðlausn ("Head-ransom"), which praises the king rather than the queen's beauty. Sigvatr Þórðarson helps him get a hearing.
The third case is Egill, mentioned above, whose poem for Ásgerðr is meant to lead to marriage. Here poetry is the path to a marriage, not a threat to it. In all three scenes a poem to a woman sits at the centre of a social conflict, and that fits the ban. Whether these conflicts are historical I cannot judge. All that can be said is that the saga authors of the 13th century knew the danger and told it.
The poetic language is a topic of its own: the skalds' metaphors, the kennings, also describe women, often through jewellery or gold. The wider background of Norse love language is collected in Norse words of love.
Here the temptation to exaggerate is greatest. Online one reads of runes with which Vikings supposedly bewitched women, of "love potions" and rituals. Let us check what the sources actually give.
Literature offers one famous example: the Eddic poem Skírnismál. The divine messenger Skírnir woos the giantess Gerðr on behalf of the god Freyr and, according to Stephen Mitchell's article (Norveg 1998, summarised here through a web version), threatens her with unwelcome companions and drink if she refuses. That is myth, not a description of lived practice, and the dating of the poem is disputed. It shows that coercing a woman by curse was conceivable as a narrative motif. It says no more.
As an object, research discusses a rune stick from Bergen, Bryggen inscription N B257. It was found in excavations at the Bryggen quarter; it has four sides and is broken at one end. The English Wikipedia dates it to about 1335; McKinnell, Simek and Düwel put it at 1380–1390, and the excavator Lorenzo Lozzi Gallo has suggested an earlier 14th-century date. So it is late medieval, more than two centuries after the end of the Viking Age, and from a Christian town.
On content: sides A and B contain, in the summary, protective formulas against elves, trolls and giants, as well as a defence against a valkyrie-like being and a "cunning woman". Side C holds, by the summary, an evil eye and a wish of distress and misery on the addressee, possibly a curse in case she refuses, side D the wish that the addressee love the writer "as herself", followed by unintelligible magic words. The feminine form sjalfri suggests the lines are addressed to a woman. McKinnell, Simek and Düwel see in it, in the Wikipedia account, love magic "of the most forbidden kind" and consider that both halves may form one unit: a blessing if the woman returns the love, a curse if not. The article points to parallels with Skírnismál, especially stanza 36.
It is a rare and revealing find. It shows that in late medieval Bergen someone used runes for love magic or at least wrote it down. For the Viking Age it proves nothing. The reading of individual lines is also uncertain; the summary itself speaks of tentative translations. Drawing a direct line to Vikings of the 9th or 10th century would be speculation.
The legal setting is similarly vague. According to Sanmark, Gulathing chapters G 32, 158 and 314 list sorcery among other offences for which a purgation oath was not admitted and an ordeal was prescribed instead. What those chapters say in detail, the article does not explain. That sorcery was punishable is thereby suggested; whether love magic is meant remains open. Further context on magic practices is in our article on seiðr; for runes in general see Runes for love and Rune magic.
The gods of the Edda, especially Freyr, Freyja and Frigg, are popularly seen as deities of love. That is only partly true. Freyr appears as a suitor in Skírnismál, yet the poem is as much about power, coercion and fertility as about affection. Whether people in the Viking Age invoked Freyr or other deities for love, we do not know; I know of no written evidence for it from that time. The Edda was written down in the 13th century and reflects the view of Icelandic Christians on an older world of belief. On how Christian the Edda is, see How Christian is the Edda?; for the goddess, Frigg has its own page.
The Laxdœla saga and Njáls saga contain famous scenes of love, jealousy and revenge. Whoever infers from them how Vikings felt takes two steps at once: treating the saga as a report on the Viking Age and treating the characters' feelings as the feelings of people then. Both are uncertain. Sagas are literature; their authors shaped conflicts after the narrative patterns of their time. What they show is which emotional situations were tellable in the 13th century, which is revealing but a different statement.
The law offers one more clue. If Grágás knows a ban on mansöngvar, it is because they existed or were feared. That is in itself a sign that desire was put into words, and in a way that had social consequences. More cannot be said.
For a first overview of the saga genre see the Sagas of Icelanders. On the link between law and society the article on Germanic tribal laws also helps.
Did people marry for love in the Viking Age? The sources do not let us decide. The law regulates contracts, not feelings. Affection appears in the sagas, but those texts are late.
What was the mundr? The groom's payment, which according to the Grágás account was needed for a lawful marriage. On separation the woman could reclaim it together with her dowry.
Could one write love poems about a woman? Under Grágás, no: a mansöngr about a woman carried outlawry. How strictly this was enforced in daily life, we do not know.
Was there love magic with runes? A rune stick from Bergen (14th century) is regarded as an example. For the Viking Age itself I know of no secure evidence.
Are the sagas reliable sources? Only to a limited extent for legal customs and feelings of the Viking Age: they were written in the 13th and 14th centuries and are narrative literature.
Norse weddings, baptisms and gifts · Norse words of love · Viking law · The Thing · Sagas of Icelanders · Women · Runes for love · Kennings
Norse words of love · Runes for Love & Bond · Viking women · Viking Law & Thing · The Icelandic Sagas.
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