Matted hair, unwashed for years, reeking across the meadhall – that is the Viking of cliché. The finds tell another story: daily combing, one fixed washing day a week and grooming kits worn on the belt. Fittingly, it was an English monk who complained the Northmen were a little too successful with the ladies precisely because they were clean.
Picture a Viking and you likely see tangled hair, a shaggy beard and a smell that bites three farms downwind. That image comes from the nineteenth century and the cinema – not from the ground. Because the object archaeologists find most often in Viking settlements is neither a sword nor an axe, but the comb. At Hedeby, at northern English Jorvik (York) and at Swedish Birka they come out of the earth by the dozen, indeed by the hundred. A people who buried their dead with a comb and wore their grooming tools openly on the belt clearly had a different relationship with cleanliness than the penny dreadfuls suggest.
The comb was everyday item and status symbol at once. It was usually made from red-deer antler, more rarely from bone or wood – material hard enough for fine teeth yet durable. Many combs were double-sided: a row of close-set teeth for detangling and against lice, a row of coarse teeth for thick beard and head hair. Elaborate pieces sat in decorated cases so the delicate teeth would not snap in a pouch. The comb travelled along – at sea, in the field, into the grave.
The most striking proof of Norse cleanliness hides in the calendar. The Old Norse word for Saturday is laugardagr: laug means bath or hot water, dagr means day. Literally, „bathing day". This is no accident and no later invention – the washing day survives to this day in the Scandinavian languages: Swedish lördag, Danish and Norwegian lørdag. Reserving one fixed day a week for a thorough wash was anything but a given in medieval Europe.
It becomes clearest with a thirteenth-century English chronicler, John of Wallingford, a monk at St Albans. In his chronicle he describes the Danes in England around the year 1000 – and does so with a certain bitterness. Their cleanliness, he grumbles, was practically an unfair weapon in the courtship of English women:
„They were wont, after the fashion of their country, to comb their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday and to change their garments often; and thus they laid siege to the virtue of married women and even won the daughters of nobles as their mistresses." John of Wallingford, Chronicle (public domain)
The source must be read with care: Wallingford wrote roughly two hundred years after the events, and the passage introduces his account of the St Brice's Day massacre of 1002, when King Æthelred had countless Danes killed. No other chronicler thinks daily hair care worth a mention. Yet even as a late prejudice the sentence is telling: the resentment is not aimed at unwashed barbarians but at conspicuously well-groomed men.
The comb rarely came alone. Many graves held small grooming sets, often threaded on a ring and carried on the belt: tweezers for plucking, ear scoops for cleaning the ears, pointed nail cleaners and toothpicks, plus razors. Some brushes were set with animal bristles. These objects survive in bronze, iron, antler and bone – materials that outlast centuries, while soap, oils and linen cloths have long since perished.
Washing was done with a lye of wood ash and animal fat – essentially an early soap, which also bleached the hair. Anyone who wanted lighter hair or beard could put that side effect to deliberate use. For bathing there were, depending on the region, hot springs, bath-houses and the famous sweat-bath tradition that lives on in the North today as the sauna. Cleanliness, then, was no luxury of a few chieftains but part of daily life – from the farmstead to the trading post.
So what did the hairstyles actually look like? Honestly: we know less than series and advertising posters suggest. Picture stones, small metal figures and a few written notes offer hints, but no seamless picture. A particularly fine piece of evidence is an Old English letter of around the year 1000, ascribed to Ælfric of Eynsham – the „Letter to Brother Edward". In it the author scolds English countrymen who dress in „Danish fashion", saying they walk about with „bared necks and blinded eyes".
Translated, that means: long hair or a deep fringe at the front, falling over the eyes – and short-cropped at the back, leaving the neck bare. Some researchers wryly call it the „reverse mullet": long in front, short behind, precisely the opposite of the notorious 1980s cut. To the Anglo-Saxons this look was evidently scandalously fashionable – and of all people churchmen adopted it, which sent the monk reaching for his pen.
The line between evidence and fantasy matters here: the crisply shaved undercut with woven braids, as worn by television heroes, is not historically secured. Braided hair certainly existed, as did bound and pinned-up hair, practical for work. But the millimetre-perfect tattoo-and-braid aesthetic of modern series is costume design, not a find.
In the North the beard was more than warmth – it marked the free, grown man. Proverbs and nicknames play on it, from „Forkbeard" to „Longbeard". It was tended with the same double-sided comb whose coarse teeth were made for dense beard hair. Some depictions show split beards or beards twisted into braids; a well-known little figurine from Iceland, often linked to the god Thor, clasps a carefully parted pointed beard with both hands. An unkempt beard counted as a disgrace rather than a martial statement.
That leaves the apparent witness for the opposite view: the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan, who met the Rus on the Volga around 922 and called them „the filthiest of God's creatures". Does that not contradict the washing day and the comb? Only at first glance. Ibn Fadlan objected not to the fact that the Rus washed, but to how they did it. Every morning a servant brought a large basin of water. The head of the household washed his face, hands and hair in it, dipped his comb, blew his nose and spat into the very same basin – and then it moved on to the next man.
For a Muslim, whose religious purity requires running water, this shared standing water was an abomination. But note: the Rus washed daily, with water and comb. Ibn Fadlan's verdict says less about Norse dirt than about two irreconcilable norms of cleanliness colliding. That is exactly the charm of the source – two cultures, two truths, the same basin.
Combs of antler and bone are among the most common Viking-Age finds (Hedeby, Jorvik, Birka, Ipswich), often double-sided and in decorated cases. Grooming sets with tweezers, ear scoop and nail cleaner are attested repeatedly. The word laugardagr („bathing day") for Saturday lives on in the Scandinavian languages. Ibn Fadlan records daily washing among the Rus – if in a shared basin. Ælfric's letter and John of Wallingford's chronicle transmit the „Danish fashion" and the daily hair care from an outside view.
The unwashed Viking barbarian is a cliché of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not a finding. Conversely, one must not tip into the other extreme: John of Wallingford wrote late and with irony, Ibn Fadlan judged by a foreign standard. And the perfectly shaved series undercut with braids is costume design, not a find. What is secured is a moderate but, for the age, above-average degree of grooming – no more, no less.
The Vikings were no scented saints, but neither were they the reeking savages of legend. A fixed washing day, a comb on the belt and a well-kept beard were for many as natural as the knife on the hip. Anyone who wears or gives a Norse motif today ties into a culture that cared about its appearance – and did so with craft that lasted for centuries. If you would like to translate that eye for detail into a piece of your own, our page on custom engraving is a good place to start. Bath drawn, comb up – and Skål.
Everyday Viking life · Ibn Fadlan & the Rus · Berserkers · Viking burials · Hedeby.