Jomsvikings

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jomsvikings were a legendary order of Viking mercenaries operating in the 10th and 11th centuries, and the rules they lived by were unlike anything else in the Norse world. A man between 18 and 50 who wanted to join had to prove himself in a ritual duel, a practice called holmgang, against a standing member. Only one known exception was ever made: a boy named Vagn Åkesson, who earned entry at age 12 by defeating a Jomsviking chieftain named Sigvaldi Strut-Haraldsson in single combat.

  Once inside, a Jomsviking could not show fear against an equal or weaker enemy. He could not speak ill of his brothers. He could not leave their fortress of Jomsborg for more than three days without the brotherhood's permission. All plunder was divided equally among every member. These were not pirates operating on instinct. They were something closer to a military brotherhood, governed by written rules and liable to immediate expulsion for breaking them.

  Where exactly Jomsborg stood has never been conclusively proven. It was said to lie on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, but historians and archaeologists still argue over the precise location. The sagas that describe the order date from the 12th and 13th centuries, centuries after the events they recount, and no contemporary written source places Jomsborg on a map. Yet three runestones, carved in stone by people who were alive during the battles the sagas describe, do mention the fighting. The tension between myth and physical evidence has followed the Jomsvikings ever since.

• 2. A Code Cut in Stone

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  Whoever designed the Jomsvikings' rules of membership understood something fundamental about small fighting forces: cohesion matters more than size. A Jomsviking was forbidden from quarreling with his brothers, and any blood feud between members had to be submitted to Jomsviking officers for mediation rather than settled by personal vengeance.

  The spoils rule was particularly striking. Every item taken in battle belonged to the brotherhood as a whole, not to whoever grabbed it. Redistribution was total and equal. Individual enrichment at the group's expense was not tolerated.

  The prohibition on women and children inside the fortress walls was absolute. No female could enter Jomsborg, and no female captive could be taken. Whether members were barred from marriage or relationships outside the walls is something the sagas leave genuinely unclear. The rules carved out a hard boundary between Jomsborg and everything beyond it.

  Entry to the order was not open to applicants who simply volunteered. The requirement of proven valor meant a prospective member had to fight his way in, literally, against someone already inside. The age ceiling of 50 was a practical acknowledgment that fighting strength has limits. The minimum age of 18 was standard, though Vagn Åkesson's admission at 12 shows the rule bent when the feat was undeniable. Sigvaldi Strut-Haraldsson, the man that twelve-year-old defeated, would later become one of the chieftains of the order itself.

• 3. Disputed Origins

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  Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark, appears in Gesta Danorum as the figure who conquered a settlement called Julinum and handed it to the Swedish prince Styrbjörn the Strong. Styrbjörn then used the men Harald provided to raid across the seas. That version credits Harald as the effective founder of the Jomsvikings.

  The Knýtlinga saga agrees on Harald's founding role but disconnects the Styrbjörn story from the Jomsviking narrative entirely. The Jómsvíkinga saga takes a different path and credits a man named Palnatoke, who received the territory from a figure described as the mythical Wendish ruler Burislav. Two other sources, Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa and Eyrbyggja saga, accommodate both versions by placing Styrbjörn in command of the Jomsvikings after the order was already established.

  The same sources suggest Jomsborg was not a purely Norse settlement. Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa records that many men from the "East land" arrived at Jomsborg among the Norse, implying a population of mixed origins. Some historians have argued that Jomsborg was less a military fortress than a fortified market center where a Danish garrison was imposed on the Wends, the Slavic people who inhabited the region.

  The roster of chieftains given across the sources includes Palnatoke, Styrbjörn the Strong, Sigvaldi Strut-Haraldsson, Thorkell the High, and Hemeng. The accounts of the harbor's size swing wildly, from 30 to 300 ships depending on the source, a discrepancy that itself suggests the number was not recorded but imagined.

• 4. Two Decisive Defeats

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  In 984 or 985, the Jomsvikings marched with Styrbjörn the Strong against his uncle, King Eric the Victorious, at the Battle of the Fýrisvellir near Uppsala. Styrbjörn was trying to seize the Swedish throne by force. The Jomsvikings were among his fighters, and they lost.

  The sagas attributed the Swedish victory to a pact King Eric made with Odin. Three runestones survive that appear to mark deaths from that battle. The Högby Runestone records that "the brave champion Asmund fell on the Fyrisvellir." One of the Hällestad Runestones, catalogued as DR 295, reads "he did not flee at Uppsala." The Sjörup Runestone carries a similar inscription: "He did not flee at Uppsala, but slaughtered as long as he had a weapon." An Icelandic skald named Þórvaldr Hjaltason, who fought on the Swedish side at Fýrisvellir, commemorated the battle in verse.

  Two years later, in 986, the Jomsvikings attacked Haakon Jarl in Norway and were defeated again, this time at the Battle of Hjörungavágr. The Jómsvíkinga saga devotes considerable attention to what happened after the battle. Jomsvikings captured by the Norwegians and facing execution reportedly displayed contempt for death. Their defiance impressed their captors enough that some of the condemned were eventually spared.

  The Jómsvíkinga saga itself identifies Hjörungavágr as the beginning of the end for the order. Back-to-back defeats within a few years, one against a Swedish king backed by Odin and one against a Norwegian jarl, left the Jomsvikings diminished in a way they would not recover from.

• 5. Betrayal at Svolder

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  By the year 1000, the Jomsvikings were weakened but not finished, and the Battle of Svolder brought them back into the historical record in the most damaging way possible. Olaf Tryggvason's Saga records that a Jomsviking force led by Sigvald Jarl abandoned King Olaf of Norway mid-battle and crossed over to fight alongside his enemies, helping to annihilate his fleet.

  One interpretation offered in the sources is that the betrayal was ideological. Olaf had been forcibly promoting Christianity across Scandinavia, and the Jomsvikings, despite their reputation for fighting for any lord who could pay them, were reputed to be devoted to the Old Norse gods. Switching sides at Svolder may have been an act against Christianization as much as a mercenary calculation.

  If that was the reasoning, it did not produce the intended outcome. The winner of Svolder was the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard, who took the Norwegian throne. Sweyn was himself at least nominally Christian. He and his father, Harald Bluetooth, had reportedly been baptized in 965. The Jomsvikings had sacrificed their most famous ally to put another Christian monarch on a Scandinavian throne.

  The order continued to decline over the following decades. King Magnus I of Norway eventually decided to end the threat permanently. According to the Heimskringla, he sacked Jomsborg in 1043 as part of consolidating his control of Denmark, destroying the fortress and killing many of its inhabitants. After 1043, the Jomsvikings disappear from the historical record entirely.

• 6. The Curmsun Disc

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  In the autumn of 2014, a golden disc bearing the name of Harald Bluetooth was re-discovered in Sweden. The object, now known as the Curmsun Disc, weighs 25.23 grams and is made of high-gold-content metal. On one face it carries a Latin inscription; on the other, a Latin cross with four dots enclosed inside an octagonal ridge.

  The inscription reads: "+ARALD CVRMSVN+REX AD TANER+SCON+JVMN+CIV ALDIN+" which translates as "Harald Gormsson king of Danes, Scania, Jomsborg, diocese of Aldinburg." The direct naming of Jomsborg on a physical object predating the sagas by centuries made the disc immediately significant for debates about the order's historicity.

  Researchers believe the disc was originally part of a Viking hoard found in 1841 in the Polish village of Wiejkowo, near the town of Wolin, by a man named Heinrich Boldt. How it ended up in Sweden between 1841 and its re-discovery in 2014 is not fully established.

  The connection to Wolin is potentially meaningful, since some historians have identified Jomsborg with Jumne, Julin, and Vineta, all names that appear in Danish and German medieval records, and Wolin sits in the same general region. A disputed text called the Gesta Wulinensis ecclesiae pontificum, said to have been discovered in the autumn of 2019, is the only medieval source claimed to name a precise location for Jomsborg, but that text remains contested among scholars.

• 7. Lives in Later Stories

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  E. R. Eddison's novel Styrbiorn the Strong and Henry Treece's juvenile historical novel Horned Helmet both place the Jomsvikings at the center of their narratives. Guy Gavriel Kay's novel The Last Light of the Sun uses a fictionalized version of Jomsborg, calling it "Jormsvik," in a story set in a world that closely mirrors 9th-century Britain and Scandinavia.

  Frans G. Bengtsson's novel The Long Ships retells the episode from the sagas where captured Jomsvikings facing execution in Norway remain proud and defiant, eventually earning grudging respect from their captors and in some cases surviving. The short story The King of Norway by Cecelia Holland, published in the anthology Warriors, centers on the Battle of Hjörungavágr.

  Tim Severin's Viking series includes an aging, diminished Jomsviking group that the protagonist Thorgils encounters. The manga Vinland Saga by Makoto Yukimura draws several major characters from the Jomsviking sagas, including Thorkell the High and Canute the Great. The manga presents them as an elite force during the invasion of England and invents a backstory for its protagonist's father, Thors, as a Jomsviking turned pacifist who fled Jomsborg.

  In 2016, the Swedish melodic death metal band Amon Amarth released an album titled Jomsviking, building a full narrative story around the order's world. The 2003 Polish film An Ancient Tale: When the Sun Was a God, directed by Jerzy Hoffman, depicts Jomsvikings as marauders. The television series Vikings: Valhalla, which premiered in 2022, places a Jomsviking settlement in what is today Pomerania, the coastal region of northern Poland where historians have long searched for Jomsborg.