Viking names: what the real ones were, and what they actually meant

Viking names are one of those subjects where the internet has quietly stopped telling the truth. Scroll a few of the big lists and you will find Brutus, which is Latin, and Diesel, which is German and named after an engine. Neither of them belonged to anybody in tenth century Scandinavia.

The real ones are better anyway, mostly because Norse naming worked on a system that produced some of the finest insults ever attached to a human being.

How Norse names actually worked

There were no surnames. You had a given name and a patronymic, so Erik’s son Leif was Leifr Eiriksson and Erik’s daughter Freydis was Freydis Eiriksdottir. Iceland still does this.

The problem is obvious the moment you put four men called Thorstein in the same valley. So people collected a byname, which is where the system gets interesting. A byname was not chosen by the person who wore it. It was handed to you by everybody else, and it stuck.

Men’s names, and what they meant

• Bjorn — bear
• Ulf — wolf
• Hrafn — raven
• Erik — sole ruler, or ever-ruler
• Harald — army ruler, from herr and valdr
• Ragnar — from regin, the gods, and herr, army
• Leif — heir, or descendant
• Sven — boy, or young man
• Knut (Canute) — knot
• Halfdan — half Dane, usually because one parent was not
• Thorstein — Thor’s stone
• Thorbjorn — Thor’s bear

The Thor names are worth noticing. An enormous share of recorded Norse names are built on the god’s name, which tells you something about who people wanted their children under the protection of.

Women’s names, and what they meant

• Astrid — god, and beautiful
• Sigrid — victory, and beautiful
• Ingrid — the god Ing, and beautiful
• Gudrun — god, and rune or secret
• Gunnhild — battle, and battle. Both halves. Somebody had a point to make
• Helga — holy, or blessed
• Thora — the feminine of Thor
• Freydis — the goddess or lady of Freyr
• Aud — wealth, or fortune

Where the real names are written down

If you want proof rather than a list, go to Jelling in Denmark and look at the larger of the two stones there. The Danes call the pair the birth certificate of Denmark, which is only a slight exaggeration.

The inscription names the man who raised it. In Younger Futhark it reads haraltr : kunuk?, Harald the king, and it identifies him as Haraldr Gormsson. There is the entire naming system carved into a boulder. A given name, a patronymic telling you his father was Gorm, and a title. No surname anywhere, because there were not any.

The byname is not on the stone. Blát?nn, blue tooth, appears to have come from a dead tooth gone dark enough that the neighbours thought it worth mentioning, which is exactly how bynames worked. It is also why a wireless standard is named after a tenth century Dane, and why its logo is his initials, the runes hagall and bjarkan laid over each other.

Worth noting that stacking runes like that was uncommon in Viking Age carving. Bind runes are far more frequent before and after. So the Bluetooth logo is a genuinely Norse idea executed in a way a Viking Age carver would have found a bit odd, which is roughly the story of all modern Norse branding.

The bynames are the good bit

This is where Old Norse naming stops being a list and starts being comedy. Bynames recorded appearance, temperament, a single memorable incident or somebody’s trousers, and because your neighbours chose them there was no flattery involved.

• Ragnar Lodbrok — Ragnar Shaggy-Breeches. His saga says he had a special pair of trousers made for fighting a dragon. The trousers are what history remembered
• Ketil Flatnose — presumably self-explanatory
• Aud the Deep-Minded — one of the few bynames that is straightforwardly a compliment
• Erik Bloodaxe — earned largely by killing his own brothers
• Harald Fairhair — for the hair he refused to cut until he had united Norway
• Erik the Red — for the hair and possibly the temper
• Ivar the Boneless — and here the translators are genuinely stuck, because the Old Norse word for bone and the word for leg are the same. He may have been Ivar the Legless

One Viking name you use every day

Harald Gormsson ruled Denmark from roughly 958 to 986 and united a set of warring territories under one crown. His byname was Blatand, meaning blue tooth, most likely for a dead tooth that had gone dark.

In 1997 an Intel engineer named Jim Kardach was reading Viking history while trying to name a short-range wireless standard meant to unite the computing and mobile industries. He suggested Bluetooth as a placeholder until marketing produced something better. Marketing never did.

The logo is the best part. It is a bind rune, two Younger Futhark characters merged into a single glyph. One is Hagall, which carries the H sound, and the other is Bjarkan, which carries the B. HB, for Harald Blatand. It has been sitting in the corner of your phone screen the whole time.

Three things to ignore

Name generators. They recombine syllables until something sounds Nordic. What comes out is not a name anybody had.

Lists that include Latin or German names. If Brutus or Diesel appears, the list was assembled by someone who did not check, and the rest of it is not safe either.

Anything promising a name’s mystical meaning. These were words. Bjorn meant bear the way Smith meant blacksmith, and a Norseman called Ulf was no more a wolf than a man called Baker is a loaf.

Also read

If you are here because of a tattoo appointment, read the six Viking symbols that don’t mean what the internet says first. For more Nordic history stranger than the myth, try China Swedes, Forest Finns and the Great Migration.