Viking raid warfare and tactics

• 1. Introduction

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  Viking raid warfare and tactics is the subject of this documentary, and it begins not with a battle but with a payoff. In 882, during the siege of Asselt, the emperor Charles the Fat paid Viking raiders 2,412 lb of gold and silver to leave. He also granted them land and let them sail home with an alleged two hundred captives. How did raiders from a small, scattered Scandinavian population force a Frankish emperor into that position? The Viking Age ran roughly from the 790s to the late eleventh century, though raids on Scotland's western isles continued into the twelfth. What began as strikes on Christian England spread across mainland Europe, reaching present-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Naval battles between fleets were rare. Instead these bands won by using fast warships, psychologically unsettling tactics, skilled hand-to-hand combat and sheer fearlessness. Raiding gradually turned into something closer to settlement, with farmland claimed and trading posts built across new territory. None of this depended on outnumbering the enemy, since the raiders came from a comparatively small population. It depended on belief, shipcraft and tactics, and those three threads run through everything that follows.

• 2. Culture of War

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  Historian Clare Downham, in Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, defines Vikings as people of Scandinavian culture active outside Scandinavia. That definition stretches to cover Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Hiberno-Scandinavians and Anglo-Scandinavians alike. Her definition even reaches to residents of Norse colonies who identified more with the culture of their colonizers than with the local population they lived among. Their tactics and warfare grew out of Norse religion, later recorded in the Poetic Edda and the Icelandic sagas. Those sagas were written in the 13th and 14th centuries, after the Nordic world had converted to Christianity.

  Following the path of the god Odin, known as the path of warriorhood, was believed to grant entrance to Valhalla after death. A right relationship with Odin was treated as a requirement for fulfilling a warrior's role. Vikings fought within clans bound by strong loyalty, and boys were trained in warfare from a young age by their elders.

  By the late 8th century and through most of the 9th, Norse society was organized into minor kingdoms with little central authority. Communities instead followed laws made and announced by local assemblies called things. There was no police force or public executive body, so enforcing a verdict fell to whichever individual was party to the dispute. Violence became a routine feature of Norse legal life, and it extended beyond the individual to his entire kin group.

  "Success with its attendant fame; or death." That was the whole of Norse belief about life's outcomes. Only the moment of death itself was thought to be fixed in advance. Personal reputation carried enormous weight among Norsemen, and slander itself counted as a legal offense alongside physical or material injury. An insult was enough to justify a violent response under the law. That conviction, paired with the duty to avenge dishonor, built fearlessness into the expected character of a Norseman.

  Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson both used successful raiding campaigns to bolster their later claims to kingship. Wealth brought home from raiding functioned as political capital in Scandinavia. Norse society also relied on mutual gift-giving to secure alliances and loyalty, much like other cultures without strong central power. Expeditions offered a chance to gather loot through trading and raiding alike. Monasteries and churches made frequent targets because they held relics and luxury goods: precious metals, fine cloths, and books like the Codex Aureus. That gospel book was stolen by a Viking and later sold to an Anglo-Saxon couple, who wrote inside it: "I ealdorman Alfred and Wærburh my wife obtained these books from the heathen army with our pure money, that was with pure gold, and that we did for the love of God and for the benefit of our souls and because we did not wish these holy books to remain longer in heathen possession." That same appetite for portable wealth would draw Viking fleets toward far larger targets: whole coastlines, river systems, and eventually kingdoms.

• 3. Raids and Settlement

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  By the mid 9th century, Vikings were using rivers and stolen horses to push raids further inland. Coastal regions had been their preference before that, since such places were hard to defend. The Norse had been born into a seafaring culture, flanked by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Baltic and North Sea along southern Scandinavia. Seafaring peoples from Scandinavia had been reported near the Black Sea and in Frisia since the 5th century. Archaeology shows even earlier contact with the British Isles. What made the Viking Age distinct was the sheer scale of raiding, recorded in annals and chronicles written by the victims themselves. The Annals of St. Bertin and the Annals of Fulda preserve East and West Frankish accounts of these attacks. Regino of Prum's Chronicle, a history of the Carolingian Empire's final years, records them too. The Annals of Ulster and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles cover the raiding in Ireland and England.

  Some Viking fleets specifically targeted women, capturing them for craft production or as wives and concubines. A few historians suggest this reflected an uneven sex ratio among Vikings. Slaves were also captured outright for sale in the slave trade, a persistent motivation for these raids. Owning captives brought a raider prestige similar to what plunder itself provided.

  Regino of Prum's Chronicle claims Vikings burned the palace at Aachen to the ground, though archaeology shows no destruction of that scale at the site. Raids like it ran the length of the Viking Age, striking coastal monasteries and plundering towns, often leaving fires in their wake. Recent scholarship doubts how severe the physical damage from that arson really was, compared with its psychological impact. Fear spread so widely that some monks took the raids as a punishment from God. Because no Viking-authored account of these raids survives, the record comes entirely from the Christians who were attacked.

  Between 814 and 820, Danish Vikings repeatedly sacked Northwestern France along the Seine River, and monasteries in the Bay of Biscay along the Loire. These attacks began as hit-and-run raids, but the operations soon grew larger and more permanent. Eventually many raiders settled in these regions and turned to farming. Much of that shift traces to Rollo, a Viking leader who seized what is now Normandy in 879 and received it formally in 911, when Charles the Simple of West Francia granted him the Lower Seine. That grant became a forerunner to a wider Viking expansion into trading posts and farmland across Frankish, English and what is now Russian territory. By the 870s the Vikings held most Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, including Wessex, following the Great Heathen Army's sweep of Anglo-Saxon rulers from power in 865. That army was built from smaller bands already active in Britain and Ireland, and it aimed at conquest and settlement rather than raiding. A separate Norse dynasty founded by Ivarr held economic and political power over Ireland, England and Scotland from the late 9th century until 1094. In Ireland, coastal strongholds called longphorts grew out of early raids into lasting trading posts. Towns including Dublin, Limerick and Waterford trace their origins to them. None of this reach would have been possible without the ships that carried raiders there in the first place.

• 4. Warships

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  The English and Frankish kingdoms had no navy capable of striking Viking bases, a gap that let Norse shipbuilding carry the raids. Longships were fast but not designed for sea battle, something Vikings rarely fought anyway. These long, narrow vessels carried 50 to 60 rowing seamen alongside a complement of warriors, moving sizeable forces quickly to wherever they chose to land. Their shallow draft meant Viking ships could beach directly on open sand instead of docking at fortified harbours. That same design let them navigate rivers deep into Britain and the Continent. Raids were recorded far up the Elbe, the Weser, the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire and the Thames, among other waterways. In Eastern Europe Vikings used an equally extensive river network, though there they favored trade over raiding.

  Depending on local resources, most Viking ships were built from strong oak, though some used pine. Shipwrights split the wood rather than sawing it, hewing planks that kept the grain unbroken and produced strakes that were light, strong and flexible. Sails came into use during the 8th century, and hull design kept improving afterward. A single rudder in the stern handled steering, and a relatively short mast allowed the crew to rig and unrig quickly. That low mast, built for speed in favourable winds, could often pass beneath river bridges. Those bridges were built by Charles the Bald of West Francia between 848 and 877. The boats themselves drew only about a metre of water. The Gokstad ship, often cited as a typical example, measured close to 28 metres long and five metres wide.

  The poem Lausavisor, by the skald Vígfúss Víga-Glúmsson, describes a Knörr being used as a battleship. Not every Viking ship was built purely for raiding: later variants added a deeper hull for carrying goods, trading speed and mobility for greater cargo capacity. These sturdier cargo vessels stood in contrast to Drakkar warships, which were built purely for speed. A fast hull was only half the advantage; what raiders did with that speed once they reached a target is another matter entirely.

• 5. Naval Strategy

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  When Vikings sacked Frisia in the early 9th century, Charlemagne mobilized his troops the moment he heard. By the time he arrived, he found no raiders left. Speed was the entire point: travelling in small bands let Vikings slip in and out of a village or monastery, seize plunder, and vanish before reinforcements could respond. Fleets of more than a hundred ships did sometimes assemble, but usually for one temporary purpose, made up of smaller fleets each under its own chieftain. Acting together, these fleets could trap an army or split a kingdom's forces. This happened most often in the Francia raids between 841 and 892. It was during that same period that the Frankish aristocracy began paying Vikings off and hiring some as mercenaries for protection. That practice pushed Viking forces toward more organized structures.

  Viking ships rarely tried to ram an enemy vessel in the open sea, since their construction did not allow for it. When Vikings did attack a ship, the goal was to board and seize it, not sink it. Raiding served economic rather than political or territorial goals, so ransom, extortion and the slave trade were the real prizes. Naval battles among Vikings themselves were more common than clashes with other Europeans. One source describes this as "Dane against Norwegian, Swede against Norwegian, Swede against Dane." Most of these ship-to-ship fights amounted to infantry battles fought on a floating platform. Crews lashed their boats together prow to prow, then closed in with ballast stones, spears and longbows. Archers sheltered behind a shield wall built at the bow. Smaller craft sometimes broke off to flank the larger ships, depending on the size of the defending fleet. Once a Viking force left its ships behind and came ashore, an entirely different set of tactics took over.

• 6. Battle Tactics on Land

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  Historian Sprague compares these small, scattered Viking fleets to modern Special Forces units that "attack in small units with specific objectives." That approach terrified locals and left English and Frankish territories struggling to counter such unfamiliar tactics. In the 860s the formation of the Great Heathen Army brought a more organized style of Viking warfare, with large squads landing from fleets of hundreds of ships. Viking commanders also tracked the political situation in English and Frankish territories, timing their attacks for maximum advantage.

  One runestone debate captures Viking beach tactics: "It has been suggested that Sö 352 depicts an anchor and rope... It is perhaps more plausibly an anchor-stone." Vikings anchored their largest warships before storming a beach, though beaching a regular warship on land was the more common approach. Ambush was a favored tool: "Vikings were notorious for laying ambushes and using woods to lay in wait for armies approaching along established roads." Facing organized resistance, raiders formed a wedge with their strongest men at the front. They hurled spears, then drove the wedge through enemy lines to fight hand-to-hand, their preferred style of combat. They also fought behind shield walls, a tightly packed formation with shields forming a protective barrier. Survivors of sea battles were sometimes assigned to guard the ships during these land skirmishes.

  Sagas of the era describe berserkers, warriors said to draw magical powers from Odin that made them impervious to injury in battle. Those stories were exaggerated, but the term reflects a real trance-like state in which such men would "engage in reckless fighting." Christians in Frankish and English territory feared these fighters as agents of the devil. Why raiding intensified in the first place remains unclear, though some have linked it to growing trade creating new opportunities for piracy.

  Vikings struck holy sites far more often than Frankish or other Christian armies did, and they never arranged a battle time in advance. Their sheer unconventionality by European standards became a tactical advantage in itself. Deceit, stealth and tactical retreat carried no shame among Vikings, unlike among their opponents. Because religious sites were poorly defended, raiders often killed the clergy there or took them prisoner for ransom or slavery. Taking a town sometimes meant wholesale destruction, terrorizing the population into handing over hostages and loot. Raiders carried that loot home to Scandinavia as a mark of pride and power. In 882, the chieftains Sigfrid and Gorm "sent ships loaded with treasure and captives back to their country."

  Overwintering was a form of short-term occupation used by Viking warbands. Each year, once the harvest was in, they would descend on "monasteries, towns and royal estates." They then used the site as a fortified base for raids further inland. The Franks rarely campaigned in winter, even under Charlemagne, so once a warband had dug in, raising an army against it proved resource-intensive and slow. Occupying bands then withdrew in early spring, before the weather turned and fresh armies could be mustered.

  Later medieval writers went on to exaggerate the scale of Viking violence, and the famous "blood eagle" sacrifice has been called implausible by some historians. Specific acts of violence described in contemporary sources were not unusual for the period. Later authors dramatized Viking activity to cast pagan raiders as enemies of Christianity. Some warriors joining these forces were as young as 12 years old, admitted after basic physical tests that were considered easy to pass.

  During inland campaigns, a warband would store its loot in a ship that continued sailing upriver while the raiding party moved overland to a rendezvous point. This kept the plunder safe from counter-raids and let the Vikings carry away far more than they otherwise could. Every one of these tactics depended on the weapons each raider carried into that hand-to-hand fight.

• 7. Weapons and Armor

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  The Viking spear had a wooden shaft between two and three metres long, and its tip varied by purpose. Throwing spears carried tips of roughly thirty centimetres, while the tips on thrusting spears ran closer to sixty. Spears were the single most common weapon in the Viking arsenal, valued for being cheap and effective, and useful for hunting as well as fighting. As far back as the late Roman Iron Age, ending around 500 CE, the Norse were already known for skill with the light spear. Spears saw use as thrown projectiles in the rare naval fight, and in raids onshore and in open battle. Their low cost and longer reach than a sword made the spear the most common battlefield weapon across much of the world. That fact runs against popular belief.

  "In combat, archers formed up behind a line of spearmen who defended against a mounted attack." One surviving bow, recovered from an Irish grave, was made of yew with a rounded rectangular cross-section, flattened toward the tips and heat-bent toward the belly. Other bows, whole or in fragments, were made of yew and elm and have turned up at Hedeby. Arrow shafts, also found only in pieces, were cut from light, straight woods such as ash, pine, poplar and spruce, and fletched with three feathers. As one source puts it, "the Viking's long arrows are meant to be drawn to the ear for instinctive shooting, meaning that the archer does not sight on or even look at his arrow."

  The axe overtook the spear as the Vikings' most common weapon during the turbulent Migration Age, a period of heavy internal raiding within Scandinavia. It served as the first true siege weapon for raiding farmhouses, places where a spear or sword could do comparatively little damage. The axe was also an everyday tool for farm labour, logging, construction and shipbuilding, and it simply carried over into raiding. Sizes ranged from small handheld broadaxes usable in both farming and raids, to Danish axes that ran well over a metre long. Despite modern assumptions, the battle-axe was never treated as superior to the spear, and historical evidence shows its combat use was fairly limited. Most axe heads, though large and curved, weighed only 0.8 to 0.9 kilograms, making them light, fast weapons rather than ones relying on gravity and momentum. Points on each tip of the blade let a wielder hook an opponent or use the axe as a thrusting weapon. King Magnus of Norway inherited his axe from his father, Olav Haraldsson, who was later recognized as a patron saint. Magnus named the axe Hel, after the Norse goddess of death, a name Christians later linked to the word Hell. Magnus's axe still appears in the Norwegian coat of arms today, and axes of the era gradually took on Christian imagery alongside their traditional Viking motifs.

  Viking swords found in graves were most often double-edged, with blades around 90 centimetres long and 15 centimetres wide. A few single-edged swords near a metre long have also been unearthed, though they were rarer. Blades were pattern-welded and commonly decorated with copper inlays and icons, with a fuller cut down the centre to reduce weight. Hilts were made of bone, antler or precious metal, while scabbards and grips used wool, fleece or leather, often decorated with animal imagery. Because a sword cost far more than the common spear, it was treated as a weapon of the elite. Pommel styles absorbed the art of whatever lands a Viking had raided, and items such as belt loops were brought home from foreign territory. Warriors carried swords mainly as a backup, drawn once formation broke down or a primary weapon failed. The blades were built for slashing and cutting rather than thrusting, so edges were kept sharp while the tip was often left comparatively dull. A sword was treated as a personal object, and warriors gave their swords names, believing something that guarded a life deserved an identity of its own. That same emphasis on honour meant a sword's craftsmanship carried real prestige, which is part of why Vikings prized captured Frankish blades for their workmanship.

  A square marked off with sides between nine and twelve feet, lined with an animal hide, was the arena for a formal duel of honour. When two Vikings disagreed, one could challenge the other to settle it there, each bringing three shields and a shield-bearer to hold them. The challenged party struck first at the shields, and the opponent could parry and answer with one strike of his own at a time. Once a man's three shields were destroyed, he had to defend himself with just his sword. The duel ended the moment blood touched the hide, at which point the loser paid three marks of silver to be freed and have his honour restored.

  Few intact helmets have survived from Viking burial sites, usually turning up only as metal fragments. Historian Anne Pedersen has suggested that, despite depictions of warriors wearing helmets, most Vikings likely wore leather ones, which offered little protection and left scant archaeological trace. There is no evidence that Viking helmets carried horns, and any horns that did exist were most likely for ceremonial or display purposes, since horns would have been a hazard in real combat. Shields were round, easy to handle, and left the legs exposed if a warrior fought on horseback. Shields were built from wooden boards bound by a rim of leather or thin iron. A covering of thin leather helped resist splintering. Each shield measured about a metre across, with its handgrip hidden behind an iron boss. An enemy's weapon sometimes lodged itself in that shield, giving its bearer an opening to strike back. Chain mail fragments have turned up in a few especially wealthy Viking graves. In the 9th and 10th centuries, such armour would have cost an enormous amount in material, time and labour. That same iron boss, hidden behind a warrior's grip, was often the last piece of equipment standing between a raider and the fight he had sailed so far to find.