Many lists of Viking weapons give the sling a passing clause: cheap, everywhere, surely in use. Test the evidence piece by piece and little survives. A fourteenth-century saga, a man in the margin of the Bayeux Tapestry, a thirteenth-century Norwegian handbook, some disputed stones from Sweden, plus one blurred line about the siege of Paris in 885. I could not trace a single sling from a Viking Age find. This article is therefore shorter than others on this site, and it says plainly where knowledge stops.
"Sling" blurs three different things. Old Norse keeps them apart, and the Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary lists them separately. The handslöngva is the hand sling: a strap or cord with a pouch, swung around and released at one end. The stafslanga gets a terse gloss, "a sling on a stick". The valslöngva is glossed as "war-sling" and catapult, so in many passages it means a machine. Plain slanga, according to the same entry, can mean either a sling or a catapult.
That matters in practice. A translated saga that says "sling" does not tell you, without a look at the original, whether a herdsman or a piece of siege equipment is meant. The description of Jomsborg in Jómsvíkinga saga speaks of throwing engines on a fortification, and those have nothing to do with a strap in the hand. Machines appear here only at the edges. The question is what can be shown for the hand sling and the staff sling.
The staff sling, then, is a stick with a short sling at its end. One cord is fixed; the other sits on the tip by a loop that slides off during the swing and lets the stone go. The staff acts as a lever, may be up to about two metres long according to English Wikipedia, and throws heavier missiles in a higher arc than the hand sling. Its Latin name is fustibalus.
For the bow there is at least the Hedeby harbour bow, arrowheads in large numbers and grave goods. The sling has none of that. My research turned up no surviving sling from Viking Age Scandinavia, and the one specialist study I could work through (only via a retrieval tool) names none either, though it deals with stones, texts and images, not organic finds. That does not mean none exists. I have not gone through excavation reports on leather and textile from waterlogged sites, and an entry there may have escaped me.
The absence itself is no surprise. Slings are made of plant fibre or leather and rot in the ground. The surviving pieces listed in English Wikipedia's overview come mainly from dry places such as Egypt, the Peruvian coast or Nevada. A sling was probably also a rare item in a richly furnished grave. All this explains the gap without filling it. The absence shows neither that the weapon was common nor that it was scarce.
There is a further problem. Even a piece of leather with two holes would first have to be recognised as a sling. A sword stays a sword; a strap can be many things.
Where the sling is gone, the ammunition ought to remain. Elsewhere it does: around 22,000 slingstones are reported from the Iron Age hillfort of Maiden Castle in southern England. For Sweden, Christoffer Hagberg asked in the Lund Archaeological Review in 2013 what counts as a slingstone at all. His answer is sobering.
He starts from the finds at Uppåkra in Scania. There 36 objects are registered as slingstones, 17 of them from the great weapon deposit of about AD 200 to 500 and four from a kitchen or storage layer of the early Vendel Period, the era before the Viking Age. They are round, about 2.5 centimetres across on average, and weigh 26.4 grams. The geologists Hagberg consulted take them for probable chalk fossils, possibly sponges. He concludes that it is anything but certain these objects were ever slung, though it remains possible. For the Iron Age as a whole he sees no strong evidence for such an artefact group, and in the Swedish literature he finds no clear definition of what a slingstone is meant to be.
His comparisons are medieval: four stones from Falkenberg in Halland, tied to the destruction of the castle there in 1434; 22 from Gotland, some of them thirteenth to fourteenth century; and piles of fist-sized stones from the medieval phase at Eketorp on Öland. The 26 stones from Falkenberg and Gotland average 410 grams at about 6.5 centimetres across, far heavier than the Uppåkra pieces. The series has a hole in it: between Uppåkra and the high medieval stones, Hagberg names nothing from the Viking Age. His list is no catalogue of all Scandinavia, and a round pebble in a settlement layer rarely catches anyone's eye. In this study, then, the ammunition is missing as evidence for the Viking Age too.
One often-cited image is not in the battle but in the margin. F. F. L. Birrell's guide for the Victoria & Albert Museum (1914) lists scenes from peasant life in the borders: ploughing, harrowing and slinging at birds. A man, then, taking aim at birds. Hagberg is careful: the figure seems to be hunting birds with a sling, or perhaps simply chasing them off. He sets beside it a drawing from the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch (a picture manuscript of the first six books of the Bible) from the eleventh century, in which Abraham drives off birds with a sling.
Three limits apply. First, the Tapestry shows peasants in northern France or England, not Scandinavia. Hagberg places it between 1066 and 1096, at the very end of the Viking Age. Second, this is evidence of daily life, not war. At Hastings, archers appear in the lower border; none of the descriptions I read mentions a sling in combat, although I have not checked every scene myself. Third, the borders are a pictorial world of their own, with fables and fantastical beasts. The farming scene is admittedly among their more down-to-earth parts.
What the image can carry: in the late eleventh century, in the makers' milieu, a sling was familiar enough as a farm tool to be stitched next to plough and harrow. About Hedeby or Trondheim it says nothing.
The passage the accounts I have seen rely on most is in Kjalnesinga saga. Its story lies in the ninth to eleventh centuries, but it was written only in the fourteenth and is regarded as late and heavily invented. Its hero Búi Andríðsson is introduced in chapter 3 like this: "Hann vildi aldri með vápn fara, heldr fór hann með slöngu eina ok knýtti henni um sik jafnan" – he would never go about with weapons, but went with only a sling, and always kept it tied around him.
Then comes the scene. The men of his opponent Þorsteinn are crossing a stream: "Þá heyra þeir, at þaut í slöngu Búa, ok fló steinn" – then they hear a rushing in Búi's sling, and a stone flies. It hits a man in the chest and he dies on the spot, and more stones hit more men. In the end such darkness falls that nobody can see his own toes, which gives a fair idea of the kind of text we are in.
Two points of wording tend to get lost in the secondary accounts I have seen. First, the sentence sets weapon and sling against each other: not with vápn, but with a sling. The narrator treats Búi's habit as remarkable, and accepted military kit would not be. That is an interpretation, but it follows the text. Second, the famous fight of chapter 11 at Orrustuhóll is often cited as a sling fight: Búi stands on the hill against twelve men, kills four and then takes up his sword. Yet in the chapter itself, whose word forms I had searched in two text editions (heimskringla.no, rafhladan.is), the sling does not occur. It says only that he carried stones up to him and "lét hann ganga grjót", he sent stones flying. Slung or thrown by hand, the passage does not say. By now Búi also has "good weapons". A reader may carry the sling over from earlier chapters, but it is not in the wording.
As evidence for Viking Age warfare, this does little. It shows that an Icelandic storyteller of the fourteenth century knew the weapon and its sound and thought it deadly.
Stones fly often in the sagas. According to the Hurstwic site, chapter 44 of Eyrbyggja saga has Steinþórr fall back onto a rockslide to have enough to throw, and in Finnboga saga Finnbogi knocks an opponent out with a stone. Such passages like to turn up beside the sling, but on that account no sling is involved. For these two sagas I have read only that summary, not the originals. The two things should stay apart: the stone as a weapon is well attested, which does not make the sling so.
Konungs skuggsjá, the "King's Mirror", is a Norwegian handbook framed as a talk between father and son. The dates I have seen vary between the early and the middle thirteenth century; the Viking Age lay far behind by then. In return, the text is clearer than any other, naming both forms outright:
"Another pleasant and useful diversion is to practice throwing with a sling both for distance and for accuracy, and with a staff sling as well as with a hand sling, and to practice throwing stone missiles."Konungs skuggsjá, ch. XXXVII, trans. Laurence M. Larson (The King's Mirror, 1917), as reproduced by De Re Militari
The chapter addresses the man in royal service, and the exercise comes straight after archery. So the text knows the sling as a practice weapon of a serious warrior. Through the author L. M. Enoksen, Hagberg adds that the stone throwing there probably means a special "weaponstone". Two further passages show use. For fighting on ships, the text lists long-handled scythes and long-shafted broadaxes, war-beams and staff slings, with darts and missiles of every sort. For defending a castle, chapter XXXIX names trebuchets large and small, hand slings and staff slings, as well as clay lumps with pebbles and slingstones kneaded into them.
So the text is anything but thin. It is merely late. Enoksen, as Hagberg reports, concedes this and argues that the Viking ideal lived on into the thirteenth century. That cannot be proved. The book describes a Norwegian royal court of the castle age, with trebuchets and siege gear, and slings were part of warfare elsewhere in Europe at the time too. Vegetius, the late Roman military writer, had already recommended that recruits practise throwing stones by sling and by hand. Whether the Norwegian text depends on him I do not know. Reasoning back from it to the year 950 remains an assumption.
Saxo Grammaticus, writing in Denmark around 1200, mentions slingers several times. I have not read the full text for this and follow Hagberg. In Book VII Harald Hildetand, advised by Odin, places slingers on the flanks behind the main force; in Book VIII they stand at the rear of the Swedish army. These are legendary battles of the distant past, told by a Latin-educated author who by his own words means to glorify the fatherland. That he knew classical battle descriptions seems likely; how much of this reflects Denmark cannot be said.
Book XIV sounds firmer: Bishop Absalon anchors at the cliffs of Stevns to load his ship with slingstones for the defence of the castle near Copenhagen. This is the author's own time, the twelfth century. What was to throw them remains open, since a shipload fits hand slings as well as machines. I have not checked the Latin wording.
One more word that wanders through lists. In chapter 11 of the Saga of Erik the Red, Karlsefni's people meet the Skrælings in Vinland, and these have valslöngur. Sephton translated this in 1880 as "war-slings, or catapults". The saga goes on to say that the opponents brought up poles with a very large dark ball attached, the size of a sheep's stomach, which flew over the company and struck with a hideous noise. Cleasby and Vigfusson file the passage under "catapult"; the Hurstwic site considers a hand sling more likely. Whatever is being described, it is the enemy's weapon, not the Norsemen's, and the company retreats before it. It proves nothing about Norse slings, at most that the author knew the word.
Abbo of Saint-Germain takes us closer to the Viking Age. He described the Danish siege of Paris in 885–886 as an eyewitness, in verse. In an English translation whose translator the page I saw does not name, stones from slings and war-machines mingle with the arrows during the assault on a tower. This is a report from the time itself, with three caveats. The passage does not say who wielded the slings; both sides are fighting. I could not consult the Latin original and so do not know whether hand slings are really meant. And Abbo is writing a heroic poem, not a weapons report. Modern overviews assign the slings to the attackers, but those I have seen give no reference to a passage. For the sling as a weapon around a Viking army this is the earliest hint I know of, not secure evidence.
For the staff sling in the North the list reaches only as far as the King's Mirror. The dictionary's sole reference for stafslanga is that very source. I can add no saga, runestone or grave find. With a wooden staff and a leather or fibre sling, any find would be hard to recognise anyway.
Outside the North the weapon belongs to siege and naval war. Alan Wong's overview on slinging.org names European armies, sieges and sea fighting but gives no dates beyond one caption. The wiki of the British re-enactment group The Vikings ties it to sieges in the Carolingian and Ottonian world without further evidence, and suggests, explicitly unconfirmed, a few in English fortified boroughs. The sea battle of Sandwich in 1217, for which English Wikipedia cites Matthew Paris as a pictorial source with staff slingers, fits the King's Mirror in time. I cannot get a Norse attestation earlier than the thirteenth century. Vikings with staff slings on board are thus an image that can be neither disproved nor supported.
The gaps can be named exactly. We do not know whether men on raids of the ninth and tenth centuries carried slings. I know of no find or rune inscription from that time, and the one contemporary report I know, Abbo on Paris, does not name the slingers. We do not know what a Norse sling looked like, what it was made of or how long it was. Nor do we know whether herders in the North used it as the man at Bayeux does. That is plausible: Hagberg names birds in the grain and wild animals near the herd as possible uses, and stones lie everywhere. Plausible, however, is not a find.
This leaves two readings open. In one, the cheap, perishable device was everywhere but invisible, and the late texts reflect old custom. In the other, it played hardly any part in combat until the castle and siege warfare of the high Middle Ages, and only then entered the sources clearly. The present state of knowledge does not decide between them. Hagberg's remark that slingstones need not be military applies here too: anyone wanting the weapon in a shield wall needs more than a man after birds.
Did Vikings use slings? Quite possibly, but it is barely attested from their own time. Abbo's poem on Paris in 885–886 mentions slings without naming the slingers. The sources that clearly describe use in the North are roughly 150 to 400 years younger, and no find is known to me.
Has a Viking sling ever been found? I have not found one. It would be leather or fibre and survive only in special conditions. An entry in an excavation report unknown to me is possible.
What is the difference between a hand sling and a staff sling? A hand sling is swung with cord or strap alone. On a staff sling the sling sits on a stick that acts as a lever and throws heavier stones in a high arc.
Where is the sling on the Bayeux Tapestry? In the border, with the ploughing and harrowing scenes. Birrell's V&A guide lists it among the everyday scenes of peasant life.
Viking weapons overview · Bow and arrow · The spear · Hastings 1066 · Saxo Grammaticus · The Sagas of Icelanders · Uppåkra · Vinland · Jomsborg
Bow & Arrow · Weapon Lore · How did Vikings really fight? · Viking armour: what graves, laws and sagas really tell us about shields, helmets, mail, lamellar and leather · The Spear.
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