If the axe was the weapon of the common man, the sword was its opposite: costly, rare, inherited and often given its own name. Few objects of the Viking Age carried so much meaning. Let us take an honest look at what blade, sagas and finds really tell us.
A Viking sword was no mass product. It held weeks of forge work, rarer good steel and often imported blade blanks. It was correspondingly rare. Whoever owned a sword belonged to the upper ranks - or had earned his in battle, trade or inheritance. A good sword could be worth as much as several milk cows, and it was not given away carelessly but handed down over generations.
This value explains why the sword is so over-present in the record even though it lies in the ground far more rarely than axe or spear. Skalds sing of swords, sagas name them, kings give them away. The sword was less a plain tool than a sign: of rank, of family, of a promise. To draw it was to make a statement.
That is also why the sword was a social affair. A king bound followers to himself by giving them swords; a father passed to his son not just any blade but the grandfather's sword. In the skalds' poems the generous lord is therefore often simply the "sword-giver". Whoever could give swords away showed power - and bound loyalty to steel.
The typical Viking sword is a double-edged cutting weapon of about 90 centimetres overall. The blade is broad and relatively flat, often with a lengthwise groove - the so-called blood channel, a misleading name, for it has nothing to do with blood. The groove (fuller) saves weight without meaningfully weakening the blade; it makes the sword faster and better balanced. Such a sword usually weighed about one to one and a half kilograms - considerably lighter than many assume.
The hilt consisted of a guard, a tang faced with wood, horn or leather, and a pommel. It is the pommel and guard that let archaeologists date a sword best, because their shapes changed with fashion. Some pommels were three-lobed, others flat, still others adorned with silver and copper. The balance point lay close to the hand: a Viking sword was built for the swift cut and for wielding from the wrist, not for ponderous bludgeoning.
The sword was carried in a wood-lined, leather-covered scabbard, usually on a belt over the shoulder or at the hip. The scabbard was often lined inside with fleece or greased wool - the retained grease guarded the blade against rust. A sword was thus costly not only to make but to keep: it wanted oiling, care and protection from damp, or rust would eat the precious steel.
The finest blades of the early Viking Age were made by pattern welding. Several bars of iron and steel were twisted, folded and forge-welded together. After grinding and etching, a wave-, snake- or herringbone-like pattern emerged on the blade, depending on the twist. This pattern was at first a matter of technique: it was the smiths' answer to uneven raw material. By combining soft and hard layers you got a blade that was at once tough and edge-holding.
Over time pattern welding also became ornament: the patterns were deliberately arranged to gleam. Yet the better the available steel became, the less the effort was needed. From the 10th and 11th centuries onward, more homogeneous blades of uniform steel increasingly took over, and pattern welding receded. A single draw of good steel was now better than the most artful weave of poor steel.
The effort behind it was enormous. For a single pattern-welded blade the smith had to heat, fold and re-weld dozens of times without letting slag or cold shuts leave the blade to break in battle. A mistake in the middle of this days-long process could undo the whole work. No wonder good blades were traded and imported over long distances rather than made in every village forge.
Some blades carry an inlaid inscription that, between two crosses, spells the name +VLFBERH+T. Around 170 such swords are known. They rank as the top products of their day, and their workshops are thought to lie in the Frankish Rhineland - practically on our own doorstep. An Ulfberht sword was a kind of quality mark, forgeries included: there are blades with wrongly placed crosses, evidently cheaper copies hoping to trade on the good name. We have devoted a separate article to the Ulfberht swords and leave it here at this pointer.
With the sword, too, there is no getting past Jan Petersen. In his 1919 work he sorted the Norwegian Viking swords by the shape of pommel and guard into a system that he ran through with more than twenty letters - from type A to the special characters of the Norwegian alphabet. Later scholars refined the system, but the basic idea held: know the hilt shape and you can roughly place and date a sword. Thus a single find becomes a building block in the history of a whole class of weapon.
Incidentally, Petersen's system shows how international the Viking weapon was. Many of the finest blades came as blanks from the Frankish realm and were only fitted with local hilts in the north. A single sword could thus unite a Rhineland blade, a Scandinavian pommel and an inscription in Latin letters - trade good and status symbol at once.
Hardly anything shows the rank of the sword so clearly as the fact that it was given a name. In the sagas, blades are called "Leg-biter", "Snake-tongue" or "Heirloom". A named sword had a biography: it was inherited, given away, seized in battle, sometimes laid in the grave with a dead man or lifted back out of a burial mound. Historically graspable - if through the saga's lens - is Skofnung, the sword of a legendary Danish king, which lives on in several tales. Other names belong wholly to heroic poetry: Gramr, with which the dragon-slayer Sigurd kills the worm Fafnir, is pure legend.
This distinction matters. That swords were named and inherited is well attested. That a particular sword held magic powers, was indestructible or struck of its own accord belongs to literature - however fine the stories are.
Some swords followed their owner into the grave; others were deliberately bent or broken before being laid down - "killed", as scholars say, so that the weapon would follow the dead into the next world and no one would dig it up. Still others stayed above ground and travelled on through the generations. A sword was not replaceable like an axe; it had a history, and that history was part of its worth.
A good Viking sword was an excellent weapon: sharp, fast, balanced. But it was no wonder-cure. Against a shield or a helmet even the best blade did little if the blow sat badly; the sagas frankly tell of swords that bent in the fight and that the fighter first had to tread straight again. Poetry, by contrast, loves the flawless blade. In the Old English poem Beowulf the hero carries such an heirloom:
"Hrunting" they named the hilted sword, of old-time heirlooms easily first; iron was its edge, all etched with poison, with battle-blood hardened...Beowulf, trans. Francis B. Gummere, 1910, public domain
The "etched with poison" iron is a poetic image for exactly that patterned, pattern-welded blade we know from the finds. And yet Hrunting fails at the decisive moment - even the poet knew: the blade alone was not to be relied on.
This honesty sits already in the Norse sources themselves. Again and again the sagas tell of blades that bent in the fray and that the fighter had to straighten under his foot in the middle of the fight. The north's costliest status symbol was, in the end, only as good as the iron it was forged from - and the warrior who wielded it.
Viking swords were double-edged cutting weapons about 90 cm long with a fuller, pommel and guard, usually around 1 to 1.5 kg. Pattern welding is metallurgically attested and gave way from the 10th/11th century onward to more homogeneous blades. Around 170 blades carry the inscription +VLFBERH+T; their manufacture is thought to lie in the Frankish Rhineland. Petersen's 1919 typology orders the swords by hilt shape. That swords were named and inherited over generations is broadly attested in sagas and through graves.
Not every Viking carried a sword - quite the opposite. The sword was the costliest and rarest weapon; axe and spear were far more common. The "blood channel" drains no blood but saves weight. And the indestructible wonder-swords of the sagas - Gramr, which kills Fafnir, or blades that never dull - are heroic poetry, not metallurgy. Real blades could bend and needed care. Even the dramatic failure in single combat, where the sword "will not bite", stands already in the sources themselves.
The Ulfberht sword · The Viking Axe · The shield wall · Berserkers.
Sources: Jan Petersen, De norske vikingesverd (1919); Beowulf in the translation by Francis B. Gummere (1910, public domain); Alan Williams on Ulfberht blades and Frankish blade production; The Archaeologist, "The Viking Age Swords: The Pattern-Welding Technique"; Reliks / vikingsword.com on the Petersen sword typology.
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