The Woodcarving of the Vikings

When we picture Viking art, we see runestones, silver jewellery and golden brooches. Yet the true material of the North was wood — and almost all of it has perished. What survived in burial mounds and waterlogged ground reveals a carving art of breathtaking density. This page walks through what remains, through tools and technique, and offers an honest guide to carving a simple animal-style relief yourself.

Wood was the North's true material

We nearly always judge past cultures by what happens to survive — and that is unfair. From the Vikings we have metal, stone and ceramics, because they endure in the soil. Wood, by contrast, rots within a few decades once it meets air and moisture. This produces a skewed picture: we imagine the Vikings as a people of smiths and stonemasons, when in fact their daily life was surrounded by wood from morning till night. Houses, ships, wagons, beds, doors, drinking vessels, spoons, chests, gaming pieces, looms, tool handles, fences, boats, skis, sledges — practically the whole of the household and all of the heavy engineering was made of wood.

And this wood was not bare and rough. Wherever Vikings made an object, they liked to adorn it. A bedpost became an animal head, a sledge board a carpet of tendrils, a church portal a surging sea of serpent bodies. It is reasonable to assume that the intricate patterns we know from metalwork actually originated in woodcarving — cheap, ubiquitous wood was the true stage of Norse ornament, and precious metal only its expensive copy.

What has survived

The few wooden finds we have we owe to two accidents: either an airtight, damp soil that kept the decay bacteria away, or a burial chamber sealed beneath a mound. The waterlogged ground of trading places such as Hedeby and Dublin has preserved thousands of wood fragments — spoons, combs, handles, coopered vessels, half-finished lathe work. They show the ordinary business of the workshop.

The great art, however, we know above all from a single find: the ship burial of Oseberg in Norway, dated by dendrochronology to the year 834. Beneath the mound lay not only the richly carved ship but a four-wheeled ceremonial wagon, several sledges, bed frames and five carved animal-head posts. No other find offers so deep a view of what Norse carvers could do when they gave their best.

For the late Viking Age the stave-church portal of Urnes on the Lustrafjord (around 1130) is the key piece: slender quadrupeds and serpents interpenetrating in endless, elegant loops. This style is so defining that the entire final phase of Viking art is named after it — the Urnes style.

The masters of Oseberg

What is special about Oseberg is that several distinct hands can be told apart here. The scholars who studied the material gave the individual carvers nicknames, because they recognised each one's personal style in the tool marks and the composition. To this day research speaks of the Academic (Akademikeren), whose work is strict, clear and controlled, and of the Baroque Master (Barokkmesteren), whose animal head overflows with wild, densely interwoven gripping-beast ornament.

This is remarkable: we know not a single name of these artists, and yet across more than a thousand years we can read their personality in the run of the cut. One is the perfectionist, the other the exuberant. That is precisely what craft is — the maker's hand stays in the piece. Anyone who carves or engraves today steps into exactly this tradition.

The carver's tools

We know the Vikings' tools very precisely, because a complete tool chest survives: the chest from Mästermyr on Gotland, sunk in a bog around the year 1000, holding some 200 tools for both smith and woodworker. It is our best source for what actually lay in a workshop.

The woodworker's basic kit was modest and feels familiar even now:

• The axe (øx) — for felling, rough shaping and splitting. The axe was the single most important tool; a good carver could bring out surprisingly fine surfaces with it.
• The adze (skarpa) — an axe set across the haft, ideal for hollowing and smoothing surfaces, as in boatbuilding or trough work.
• Chisels and gouges — flat and hollow irons for cutting outlines and for lowering the ground in relief work.
• The knife (knífr) — the most personal tool, carried by everyone. For chip carving, fine detail and small work.
• The spoon bit auger (nafarr) — a drill with a spoon-shaped tip that cut clean round holes. Several of them, in different sizes, lay in the Mästermyr chest.

To these were added draw knives, plane forerunners, files and punches. The astonishing thing: with this handful of implements they produced work that fakes machine precision.

How wood was won: splitting, not sawing

Here lies one of the most important and most frequently misunderstood points. A Viking carver did not reach for a saw to make a board. He split the trunk radially — like a cake into slices — along the natural grain. This produced wedge-shaped planks that were then worked flat with axe and adze.

This is not backwardness but a higher art: radially split wood follows the grain, does not tear, barely warps, and is markedly stronger than a sawn board whose fibres are cut through. From a single oak one could win dozens of even planks for a ship this way. Saws were known, but they played a minor role in woodworking — they were laborious to make and blunted quickly. The image of the Viking sawing boards is a modern misconception (see the myth-check below).

The three basic techniques

Norse carvers essentially mastered three techniques, often combined:

Chip carving is the oldest and simplest: with the knife, small triangles and grooves cut against one another are lifted from the surface. This creates geometric patterns, plaited bands and fillings. Chip carving needs little equipment and is the ideal way in.

Flat relief is the heart of the great animal styles. The motif is left standing on the surface while the ground all around is lowered. This makes animal bodies and tendrils stand out three-dimensionally without the material being fully pierced. Almost all Oseberg carvings are flat relief.

Openwork finally cuts openings right through the wood, so that a lattice of ornament results. It is known from chair backs, sledge frames and the open scrollwork of the showpieces. It is demanding, because the thin, pierced wood breaks easily.

The language of the animal styles

Viking art is not a narrative pictorial art like that of antiquity but pure ornament. Over some three hundred years it changed in recognisable stages, which research has named after find-spots. The Broa and Oseberg style (8th/9th century) brings forth the gripping beast — small animals gripping the frame and one another with their paws. The Borre style relies on the ring-chain pattern and squat animals. The Jellinge style stretches the bodies into ribbon-like, s-shaped serpents. The Mammen style fills them with tendrils and lobes. The Ringerike style lets elegant floral tendrils proliferate. And the Urnes style finally dissolves everything into the slender, interpenetrating loops that gave the church portal its name.

For your own work this means: a clean animal-style motif follows rules. It is symmetrical or rhythmic, the bodies form closed loops, there are no empty areas, and the bands cross over and under in alternation — like a real weave.

Guide: carving a simple animal-style flat relief

This guide is deliberately meant as a modern beginner's way in — with today's tools, but in the spirit of the old technique. Take your time; a first relief does not come together in one evening.

1. Choose the wood. For a start, soft, even wood such as lime, alder or pine is ideal — it cuts cleanly and forgives mistakes. Historically oak, maple, ash or birch were often carved, but these are harder for beginners. Take a flat, knot-free little board, roughly 15 by 20 centimetres.
2. Design and transfer the motif. Draw a simple animal in the Jellinge style: an elongated quadruped whose body forms an s-shaped loop and whose neck lappet curls up. Keep it symmetrical and closed. Transfer the drawing onto the wood with pencil or carbon paper.
3. Cut the outline (stop-cutting). With a sharp chisel or carving knife, run the outline vertically into the wood — not deep, just two or three millimetres. This vertical cut edge is the wall against which the motif will later stand. Work with the grain so nothing tears out.
4. Lower the ground. Now cut in from the surface at an angle towards the outline and lift out the chips. This lowers the background evenly around the animal. The motif emerges piece by piece as relief. Patience — many thin chips are better than one deep gouge.
5. Work the details. Now come the fine points: the eye, the articulation of the body, the toes, the notches that give the bands their pattern. Here the chip carving with the knife pays off. Make sure crossing bands run alternately over and under.
6. Smooth and oil. Finally the burr and fibres are pared off cleanly with the knife (classically one did not sand but cut smooth). Then rub in a thin coat of a plant oil — linseed oil works beautifully. The oil protects the wood, deepens the grain and makes the relief look alive.

Knowest how one shall write, knowest how one shall rede? / Knowest how one shall tint, knowest how one makes trial? / Knowest how one shall ask, knowest how one shall offer? / Knowest how one shall send, knowest how one shall sacrifice?Hávamál, stanza 144, translated by Henry Adams Bellows, 1923 (public domain)

Runes into wood — everyday, not a magic trick

The line from the Hávamál sounds mysterious, and indeed a great deal of esotericism has grown up around the carving of runes into wood. The evidence is more sober. Runes were constantly carved into wood — onto tally sticks, ownership marks, message staves, trade notes. The great body of Bryggen inscriptions from medieval Bergen shows business letters, name tags and coarse jokes on wooden sticks. That was simply writing, as others wrote on parchment. Putting runes into wood was everyday practice, not magic (more on this in the myth-check).

From the Viking hall to our workshop

The bond between wood and Norse ornament is no accident at Glanz & Gravur. Our wood discs are hand-ground and oiled — the same basic idea as the Viking-age carver who protected his finished work with oil so that the grain would live and the motif gain depth. Where the carver of Oseberg worked with chisel and knife, we use the laser: precise, repeatable and gentle on the material. The goal has stayed the same — a piece of wood that carries a story.

Anyone who wants to take up the knife themselves should be encouraged: the old masters had no machines, only sharp iron, good wood and patience. Their work endures where the soil protected it — and their hand is still legible today. That is exactly the appeal of craft: what you make carries your hand within it.

Read more with us

The Oseberg ship & the two women · Drawing Animal-Style Ornaments · The Mästermyr tool chest · The Urnes portal – the last animal style · Viking-age art styles.

Sources & literature

• Picture credit: photo Thorguds, CC BY-SA 3.0.
• A. W. Brøgger, Hj. Falk, H. Shetelig: Osebergfundet, Kristiania/Oslo 1917–1928 (Oseberg excavation report; attribution of the carvers' hands).
• James Graham-Campbell: Viking Art, Thames & Hudson, London 2013 (survey of the animal styles Broa to Urnes).
• David M. Wilson, Ole Klindt-Jensen: Viking Art, 2nd ed., Allen & Unwin, London 1980.
• Greta Arwidsson, Gösta Berg: The Mästermyr Find. A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland, Stockholm 1983.
• Hávamál, stanza 144, in: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda, New York 1923 (public domain).
• Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo — Oseberg collection (dating; animal-head posts).

Visit the Shop More posts