Section 5 of 9
Sword, axe, shield, helmet and spear — what they were really like, and why the spear mattered most.
What a man carried was a question of means, not of taste. Everyone could afford a spear, almost everyone a shield, and only a handful mail and a sword. So a battle line of the age did not look like the uniform troop of the films but like a very unequal crowd: a few men in iron at the front and dozens in wool behind them.
9th–11th centuries
Blades inscribed +VLFBERH+T
A double-edged blade with a fuller — a groove that takes away weight without taking away strength. It cost as much as a good herd, carried a name and was handed down.
Field note
09
An object in context
archaeological find
The Mästermyr axe is an iron Viking Age object from a bog find on Gotland. The museum describes it first of all as a universal tool for timber and woodworking: the object itself resists the too-simple role of “a Viking weapon.”
11 entries, 1 of them disputed
A spear is cheap, made from a strip of iron and a shaft, reaches at a distance and works in formation. A sword cost as much as a good herd and few owned one — which is why everybody has one in the films and far from everybody has one in the graves.
Some fifty surviving swords carry the name, and part of them are made of crucible steel that Europe did not produce at the time — the material came from the east. Contemporary fakes exist too, with the crosses placed wrongly.
A blade outlived its owner and was family property, not a consumable. That is why a sword so often ends up in a grave: it was parted with the way a person is.
Thin lime or spruce boards, a rawhide binding round the rim and an iron boss at the centre with the fist behind it. Such a shield was not built to last: it absorbs a blow by splitting.
The helmet from Gjermundbu in Norway: a rounded cap of iron bands and a half-mask guarding the eyes and nose. Everything else we “know” about helmets of the age is reconstructed from fragments and images.
Tens of thousands of rings, every one riveted by hand. That is months of a smith’s work and the price of an entire farm. Most men stood in the line in wool and leather.
A broad blade on a long haft would go through shield and helmet, but the man wielding it stood unprotected. He could only work from behind the line — a weapon of discipline, not of fury.
A household axe has a heavy poll for splitting firewood. A war axe has a thin, wide blade and little weight — it is for striking fast, not for chopping all day.
A single-edged all-purpose blade: a tool and a weapon of last resort. It turns up in men’s and women’s graves alike, because it is first of all a household object.
Shields overlap at the rims, spears work over the top, the rear ranks push. The winner is not the man who strikes hardest but the side whose line did not come apart.
That the formation existed is not in doubt. What is argued is how tightly the shields locked: some researchers regard the solid “tortoise” as a later literary construction of the sagas and chronicles rather than a description of real fighting, where a man needs room to swing.
A sword in a grave marks the family’s status. That is why grave goods cannot reliably prove the person buried was a fighter — and that is exactly what the argument over grave Bj 581 at Birka turns on.