@@jasminv8653 I do not want to go back to before Heilung... They are not historically accurate (save maybe by sheer blind luck) but that stuff slaps :P
I think rather than poo poo the folks who used imagery to differentiate cultures we should ask why. Things like Wagners operas etc, where the horned helmet arose from, at least in modern times was done for dramatic reasons more than because everyone believed vikings wore horned helmets. Hir Bronze Age ancestors definitely wore horned helmets and they also believed in the same gods. The Wagner horned helmet worked for its time just like the tattoos, long faux hawk hairdos and beards used today. Before the tv show Vikings came out Vikings had beards and that was about it. Truth is without the dramatics like those above Vikings pretty much looked like every other Northern European. Nothing special about that.
@@HesperianHorsePower Exactly. Nothing special. If you think putting tattoos on vikings is to pander to the feeble egos of current-day audiences, then I agree with you.
@@HesperianHorsePower I’m not poopooing anyone? I’m literally just saying it’s funny we stopped seeing horned helmets cus everyone knew it was fake and now we are using other visual signifiers that are fake. It’s funny!
"Right now"? It's always been a shambles. Us Viking Reenactors have costumes and don't have a studio budget yet we still get it right. We also have books 😁
When the Spanish came to northeastern Mexico they named some of the indigenous peoples the Rayados (raya means line in Spanish) because apparently they painted their bodies with black lines. The Romans called the Celtic peoples of Scotland the Picts (from latin pictus, painted) because supposedly they painted their bodies too. It is clear a detail like this draws a lot of attention, so if the Norse had a similar thing going on, you'd expect more than just one single source to talk about it.
To be clear the Picts didn't tattoo either, they wore woad on their skin. Europe actually didn't have any native tattooing culture, which is quite unusual as it's fairly widespread elsewhere.
@@PlatinumAltaria We actually don't know what the Picts had, if they had tattoos as we know them today, or painted their skin, or something else. We do not know that they didn't tattoo, we just aren't sure what Julius Caesar meant specifically. But as noted Otzi gives us evidence of tattoos in Europe well before the Romans or Picts, so Europe certainly had them. Greeks and Romans did use tattoos though, we have direct and indirect evidence. We also have found a Scythian mummy with tattoos. Not in Europe, but the Scythians were certainly present in Europe.
@@Lowlandlord When I say Europeans I'm referring to the ancestors of modern European cultures who were part of the Indo-European arrival in ~3000BCE, such as the Bell-Beaker culture. There were neolithic people in Europe and they probably had tattoos, but we don't know nearly as much about them and they had very little lasting effect. And the Scythians did colonise parts of Europe, but they were an Iranic culture.
I have been a Viking Age enthusiast for many decades and seen how popular culture and fashion change how people think the Norse looked. There is no old Norse word for tattoo... You said it exactly at the same time as I wrote it!
That was my first thought before I even started watching! If vikings had tattoos chances are that their word for it would’ve survived at least in stories, even if any such practice was outlawed. I mean, we managed to keep an old name for the mid-winter celebration even as the emphasis of that feast became somewhat Christian over the centuries.
There's also no Picts word for tattoo either, but they were known to be heavily tattooed. You could argue that the word Pictii meant painted one, but that was a latin word given to them by the romans. I'm guessing that means the Picts didn't actually have tattoos? There's many cultures around the word who were heavily tattooed but didn't have words for it. there are also many cultures that don't have a word for green or blue. Do those colours not exist among their people?
Heresy! We know full well that at least half of viking age society had runic face and neck tattoos and that 100% of vikings wore leather fetish gear and were covered in mud and poo.
@@teddypicker8799 Yup. They wore arm rings, beard beads, and all kinds of stuff. They also engaged in rhyming roasts called "flyting," making them the original rap battlers...
I think the best argument against Viking tattoos is the fact that there’s not one mention of them in the vast contemporary Old English texts written concerning vikings. E.g. battle of maldon. Hundreds of documents across centuries and nothing.
Yep, similarly the Frankish, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Frisian, Byzantine etc. texts. There are plenty of physical descriptions of Vikings and descriptions of their culture from across Europe and into the Arabic world yet no-one except Ibn Fadlan mentions tattoos.
There's no mention of drums, northern lights, and even though the Huns are mentioned they appear to speak the same language as the author and there's nothing special about them other than Atilla is there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Given we have the tattooed flesh of frozen slavs from before the Viking age, and even prehistoric men from the Alps -- I'd find it hard to believe at least some tattooing wasn't around. I'll accept it is probably a sub-culture but like everything we get from Saxo Grammaticus or Ibn Fadlan, I'd assume they barely got a glimpse of these people 3rd hand. Even Tacitus 1000 years earlier I'd throw handfuls of salt at, through he did mention northern and baltic peoples.
@@BrandanLee I’m not sure what your point is here. You’re basically redundantly repeating what Dr. Crawford said in the video, which is that indeed tattooing tradition did exist, but probably not in the Viking Age Northern and Western Europe. There were likely cultural enclaves across the world where tattooing was practiced, but from the evidence we do have, literary, linguistic and archeological, we cannot say that Vikings in that part of Europe practiced tattoos. Also your point about northern lights is a bad comparison. Written evidence like the Sagas or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle do not focus on natural phenomenons. They focus on people - their histories, behaviours and indeed appearance. So they facts that we have detailed descriptions of them all, but not a single mention of tattooing - in Viking age North/Western Europe I repeat - can safely help us conclude it did not exist in that area.
Just to add to this, as someone of (Polynesian) Samoan descent, tattoos (tatau) in Samoan culture weren't just decorations on the skin. They signified a person's status in society. I don't know if it's still as strict now, but when I was growing up it was a rite of passage for men to get the pe'a (malofie, which is the men's tatau) done in order to take part in village meetings as official adults and the women's tatau (malu) further back in time used to be reserved only for the chief's daughter. There's even a myth about how the tatau was brought to Samoa from Fiji by conjoined twins. So even if tattoos were prevalent throughout Norse culture to the extent it would be beneath mentioning if people had any in their myths etc, one would think that a myth about the origin of or a rite of passage denoting its place in society would have been told enough times to have been written down eventually. Just in case I'm misunderstood, I'm not saying don't get a Norse-inspired tattoo lol.
marco polo (1254- 1324 AD) in his book discusses the prolific tattoo industry in laos. heres one translated text if your interested in this specific segment: Kaugigu has its own king. The people are idolaters and speak a language of their own. They have submitted to the Great Khan and pay him a yearly tribute. The king is so lecherous that I assure you that he has fully 300 wives. Whenever any woman in the country excels in beauty, he takes her to wife. The province is rich in gold. It also abounds in precious spices of many sorts; but they are very far from the sea and for this reason are of little value as merchandise and are sold very cheap. There are plenty of elephants and animals of many other kinds and no lack of game. The people live on meat, milk, and rice. They have no grape wine, but make an excellent wine of rice and spices. All the people alike, male and female, have their flesh decorated in the following fashion. They have their flesh covered all over with pictures of lions and dragons and birds and other objects, made with needles in such a way that they are indelible. They make these on their faces, their necks, their bellies, their hands, their legs, and every part of their bodies. And this they do as a mark of gentility: the more elaborately anyone is decorated, the greater and the handsomer he is considered. First of all a man will have such images as he may desire sketched out in black all over his body. This done, he will be tied hand and foot, and two or more persons will hold him. Then the master craftsman will take five needles, four of them fastened together in a square and the fifth in the centre, and with these he will work all over his body, pricking out the images previously sketched. As soon as the pricks are made, ink is applied to them, and then the figure as sketched appears in the pricks. During the process the victim suffers what might well pass for the pains of Purgatory. Many even die during the operation through loss of blood
@@Toxicpoolofreekingmascul-lj4ydI agree..from what I’ve seen in classical sources, the Thracians are described by Herodotus as tattooed and the word he uses for tattooed is ευγενής (eugenēs) which also can mean “well born” or “noble”. Edit: I forgot to add, if I remember correctly, he says they adopted the practice from the Scythians who they bordered on the west coast of the Black Sea.
Agree with you. I'm Hunkpapa Lakota and we are required to have at least one tattoo on the inside of our wrist to show to the Owl Woman who guards to Spirit Road to the Next World.
I think it kinda ties in with Farya Faraji's videos on music from the viking age aswell, as there's a LOT of misinformation on that topic. There are people who genuinely believe that the vikings were throat singing etc. The probable reality is that the vikings were culturally not too dissimilar to any northern european civilization, like the germans, dutch, english, lithuanians etc. You'd have to kind of assume that for some reason the societies of the vikings would have somehow developed in complete isolation, which we know isn't true.
True, I was so blown away after Farya Faraji's video on viking music. It's interesting, though, to see how we have interpreted the vikings through our own culture.
People blame Heilung a lot for this, because they use throat singing. It's a bit odd since the band have always explained that they were inspired by Siberian shamans and that one of then literally was given his garb from a Siberian shaman. Also a lot of their texts and imagery are older than the viking age. In their shows they have a representation of the Egtved girl, a Bronze Age grave.
@@kurtwaldheim4048 oh now trhat u say i see it. its a bit sad though bc shamanism wasnt allowed to be practiced when the slavic russians took over sibiria mongolia etc. so its a point of identity for us when we already have forgotton so much of our customs
@@kurtwaldheim4048 I think blaming the artists is also bad. Heilung never claimed to be historically accurate or based solely on the vikings specifically as far as I know, though I could be wrong on that note . I think the blame lies on people that probably think "This sounds badass, so it must be viking" without really any critical thinking.
@@kurtwaldheim4048 It isn't just the throat singing, bardcore bands produce tonal music we're used to in the west instead of the modal music from before the 17th century, IOW they use chord progressions independent of the melody while modal music just supports the melody (a bit like bagpipes with their unchanging background drone).
It's really interesting to me, in Otzi, we have proof that Tattooing exists in Europe in prehistory, but that by the historical era it had so completely died out.
Because it's fashion - it comes and goes. The actual technique of tattooing is really not that strange. I accidentally got poked by a burnt splinter when I was a child, and the black mark stayed for many years. The idea has obviously appeared many times through history.
There are historical evidence that, at least one man (thought to be a noble) in Brittain had tattoos (on his calf/lower leg if I remember correctly) during the dark age/viking age. I do not know the exact source but historical tattoo researchers often point towards it to show that tattoos existed in "northern" europe at the time. I have read a research paper about it, but it was many years ago. Not norse nor "viking" but a neighbouring culture.
Modern tattooing obviously comes from encounters with peoples outside of Europe and initially was limited to sailors and to the upperclass where it was a prominent fad (though different designs). So either way modern tattooing has no relation.
Not just that. according to gree hostical writers celtic tribes in todays austria also had tattoos. The scythes of the iron age around the black sea were known for that too. Thing is, Ötzi has 63 tattoos, and they are believed to not have been about fashion or status. Fashion is the modern tatoo thing, and status was often in polynesia ect. But with Ötzi scientists believe the tattoos he had were part of "medical" treatment for his problems. (not the ones he died from) So different people did put pigment into their skin for different reasons.
Are you trying to tell me that my coworker's tattoo of Vegvisir with "Not all who wander are lost" written around it using elder futhark runes isn't an authentic Viking Age practice?
@@doseferatu lol yeah this seems to be completely lost on the "but history says" crowd. People do things and create their own culture. Most anyone I know with Norse tattoos does not do it to act like a historical Viking haha
as already mentioned, they actually did bathe and combed themselves. Even to the point they had a specific day to wash themselves (Saturday, which in Swedish is Lördag coming from Laugdag which is derived from Laugo (waterfall) and day).
@@meginna8354 We dont have the word laugo att all in Swedeish. But what I understand you had 3 slightly diferent languages before we started to group all as norse and I believe even the norse languages differed from each other. The old branches was east scandinavian germanic, central (or mainland) scandinavian germanic and western scandinavian germanic. East Scandinavian germanic is what we have identified as Gothic and the old language on Gotland. Central Scandinavian Germanic become Swedish and Danish over time and Western became Islandic, Faeroilandic, Norn and Norwegian.
To give credit where it is due, I know you don't like the Northman, but it got a lot of the material culture right, and it presented the Norse/Icelandic peoples as not having Tattoos.
The witchcraft element was only when Christianity came to the uk. Before that, the celts were very much tattooed- with woad. It wasn't for witchcraft, it was for expresion, stlye and also to intimidate opponents in battle..
Just to echo what you're saying - if tattooing was a common or even semi-common practice within viking culture, then you'd think that it would be mentioned (almost certainly) in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. They mention vikings, their behaviour and their appearance a lot over centuries and not once do they happen to say 'oh and they mark their skin with designs and symbols' -- but they have a good idea of their bathing practices? You'd think even if it wasn't considered noteworthy (which is doubtful, since there's no evidence of it occurring in England either), that there would at least be mentions of how this foreign culture decides to tattoo its people - are they earned, at what age, what do they depict, are there familial connections. But no, apparently this practice would have been somehow missed by the people making a point of documenting the viking existence in England. And considering the Anglo-Saxon chronicle goes out of its way to depict vikings and their behaviour as odd, violent and heathen that they would mention such a strange practice.
@@Toxicpoolofreekingmascul-lj4yd Ibrahim Ibn Ya ’qub at Turtushi was a Jewish-Arab trader from Cordobo who visited Hedeby and writes about it. I shall post the relevant part and my translation. I øvrigt fortalte han, at retten til skilsmisse tilkom kvinderne. Kvinderne skiller sig, når de har lyst til det. Man har også der en kunstig fremstillet øjensminke; når de anvender den, tager skønheden aldrig af, men tager endog til hos mænd og kvinder. Han sagde også: Aldrig hørte jeg hæsligere sang end slesvigernes, det er en brummen, som kommer fra deres struber, i lighed med hundegøen, dog endnu mere dyrisk end denne. Further he related that that the right to divorce belonged with the woman. That they would divorce when they felt like it. There is also in use an artificially made eye make-up; when used, their beauty will never fade, but even grow both in men and women. He also related; Never did I hear a more awful singing than that of the Slesvigers, it is a growling in their throats reminiscent of the bark of a dog, though even more animalistic than that. The latter is used to justify claims that Heilung makes "Viking music", though the band does not claim so themselves.
An interesting point about the cultural assimilation of the Rus' to Slavic culture is that in 907CE, almost 20 years before Ibn Fadlan met them, a Rus' expedition signed a treaty with the Byzantines in which the Byzantine sources name all 15 Rus' signatories, of whom 13 have Old Norse names (the other two being Finnic), however it also states that these individuals swore their oaths by the Slavic gods Perun and Veles. It's obviously not clear to what extent this was true across all Rus' society and how much it may have applied to different aspects of life or culture, however clearly there was already some degree of assimilation or syncretisation going on between Scandinavian and Slavic cultural elements a couple of decades before Ibn Fadlan's account. For anyone who's interested the Norse names are listed, the Greek rendering first followed by the attested Old Norse versions in brackets: Karly (Karli), Inegeld (Ingjaldr), Farlof (Farulfr), Ver/lemud (Vermu(n)dr), Rulav (Rollabr), Stemid/Stemir (Steinviðr), Karn (Karn), Frelav (Friðláfr), Ruar (Hróarr), Truan (Þrándr), Gudy (Góði), Ruald (Hróaldr); and Fost (Fastr). Unfortunately I can't find a source listing the two Finnic names but those are the attested Old Norse names of powerful Rus' men who seemingly worshipped (at least in part) Slavic deities.
Croatian Slavic Christians had a tattooing tradition well into the 18th century that defined them against other neighboring communities so its probably more related to that than anything in Scandinavia. The viking in France and Ireland also respectively assimilated to local culture very quickly
Well don't you think that the Rus may have seen the Slavic deities as identical to their own? Perun has so many attributes that are similar or identical to Thor, and so forth. The Greeks, Romans, etc all did that, so I wonder if the Rus wouldn't have done the same. Which is to say, I don't even think that if any of those Rus dignitaries went and visited their cousins in Scandinavia, that they'd even see each other as having two different religions.
"Unfortunately I can't find a source listing the two Finnic names" ... you are right, the references seem to run dry for those two Finnic names. Bizarre. And annoying to this Finn 😛 ... Hey, now I found the reference ... but it is a book that I cannot find online "Linguistic Interrelations in Early Rus. Northmen, Finns, and East Slavs (Ninth to Eleventh Centuries), Bohdan Struminski, 1996", pp. 162-6.
@@cohltonandrews9063Croatian here, it was mostly a Bosnian Croat cultural item. But it stems from ancient tattooing methods. We’ve found graves with tattoo needles buried alongside the dead too. It was indeed important.
I think the Norse saw the Slavic gods as their own gods, just by other names. Perun and Thor are so similar and we now know most European folklore stems from Indo-European. So to a Norseman living in Russia Perun was almost certainly the local name for the same guy. The Rus even took to wearing miniature axe pendants of Perun in place of Thors hammer in Eastern Europe. Just a local version of mjolnir.
Thanks again for the great info! I love films as much as anyone, but that industry is just a nightmare for people interested in history. Keep up the good work!
Here are some indications that the Vikings had tattoos: 1: On Iceland, preserved bones of Vikings with tattoo patterns have been found. 2. In the Old Norse Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, it is described how Ragnar Lodbrok had snake and dragon motifs tattooed on his body. 3. On some picture stones from the Viking Age, such as those on Gotland, there are images of people with tattoo patterns. 4: The Oseberg Ship Tapestry shows several figures with intricate tattoo-like patterns on their bodies. 5. The Valsgärde Burial Site in Uppsala, excavations uncovered bracteates (thin metal pendants) depicting warriors with apparent tattoo patterns. 6. The famous Spillings hoard from Gotland, Sweden, includes a silver figurine of a man with detailed tattoo-like markings on his face and torso.
In fact, heliographism is becoming popular again and I've seen that people use the sunburn technique a lot to tattoo Nordic runes and ornaments from the Viking era.
I have heard interpretations that Ibn Fadlan were speaking of their clothes or swords painted with various pictures. The verb خضر “to be green” is what was used. "From the tips of the toenails of each of them to his neck be greened" could be a metaphor for referring to a Frankish type of sword maybe. Also, if the Vikings were tattooed, Christians would probably lambast them for it.
I'm interested if you have a source of the claim "Christians would probably lambast them for it," as I would love to learn more about the matter. I am aware that it was not common practice in Christianity to receive tattoos historically, but it was also not common anywhere in Europe as far as I know, and previously it was only used for slaves in Rome and Greece, thought again my knowledge on this matter is far from academic. I ask because the current position that I think most adherents of the Christians faith would hold is neutral, i.e. it is neither exhorted or encouraged nor is it discouraged based on any theological position, I have seen negative positions on the matter concerning the fact that typically the representations present in tattoos are not highly Christian in nature.
@@junonismusica8670Pardon me, but you are not thinking about that quite right. Modern Christians are entirely irrelevant to the topic because of two reasons. The first one is that early Christians had VERY different beliefs from modern Christians except in two core tennets, and the second one is that modern Christians as a majority have absolutely no idea what the Bible actually says or what other Christians historically believed because they don't read Bibles. VERY few have read the Bible all the way through even once, let alone multiple times with actual comprehension and reflection. Because of that, they almost all have absolutely no idea that the Bible actually forbids tattooing and piercing in Leviticus because it was a pagan religious practice of the peoples around them asdociated with polytheism. So the reason he says that Christians would have lambasted Vikings and Norsemen for having tattoos back then is because, at the time, the only Christian people writing about Vikings and the Norse were all scholars and scribes and such who read the Bible possibly dozens or hundreds of times in their lifetimes and 100% knew that it prohibited tattooing and body piercing/modification/cutting. So he has a good point that all those priests and monks and stuff would almost certainly mentioned tattooed heathens had there been any, especially if it were a common practice. But modern Christians are completely different, and they ignore most of what the Bible says, so I can see where you were confused.
@@t.r.everstone7 There is far more widespread biblical literacy and competent scholarship today than at any time in history. Moreover, Protestant Christians are exhorted to do personal study, whereas other branches of the faith both past and present either don't encourage it or frown upon it due to their understanding of "private interpretation" and a general elevation of church tradition over biblically-derived doctrine (maybe not officially, but in practice scripture is subjugated to the disparate proclamations of councils). The doctrine, whereby what is prohibited/prescribed for ancient Israelites is the same for Christians, is biblically indefensible. You would have to read the New Testament, especially Paul, with your eyes shut to come to the conclusion of the Judaizers, i.e. that a Christian must keep the Torah. Paul clearly states that the Torah is prescriptively obsolete. Any foolish people, like the Galatians, who try to observe Torah and follow the Gospel, have fallen from grace. It is a perfectly reasonable doctrine to be neutral about tattoos because we are under a new covenant with different restrictions and different benefits. Under the new covenant, for example, we are guaranteed life in Christ, which is eternal. Under the old covenant, the people were guaranteed a certain plot of land as well as protection from pestilences, and special divine favor. They were also threatened with curses should they go against the covenant, which they did.
I'm delighted that you led with Ibn Fadlan, this is exactly what I was looking for! I'm reading Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm and he mentions the quote about tattoos, but doesn't go into detail about it, so ran right over to your channel to see what you had to say.
Absolutely love these types of videos, disproving common myths popularized by TV shows and other media with nothing backing them other than rule of cool.
William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum from the early 12th century mentions "picturatis stigmatibus cutem insigniti" or "the skin marked with painted stigmas" but it's though he was referring to ancient Britons and various roman sources. The use of the word stigma is interesting though, because it sounds more permanent than just paint, it could imply at least knowledge of tattoos. I think the funny thing with the Ibn Fadlan account is that they stop at the neck, yet all pop culture vikings have their tattoos on the shaved sides of their heads. Maybe they were designed to be easy to hide like yakuza ones, showing some kind of group membership you woudn't otherwise advertise.
Gee, could it possibly have just been the personal preference of the few folks who he came into contact with? See, this is the entire problem with relying solely on the attestation of one derpstick in history lol. Who bloody knows, yeah?
I don't think they were representative, I think their funerary customs would have been written about more in the christian world if they were. He was the only derpstick to write anything down in period though.
@@gunnargarisson4052His description of the funeral corresponds with Norse sources so there is no reason to dismiss him over this inconvenient detail. If there is a derpstick here it’s you.
Scythians were heavily tattooed. And even though the Scythians were long gone by the time of the Viking age some groups around eastern Europe that was somewhat descendent of them might have kept up the practice, and the Rus travelled a lot around where the Scythians used to live and trade.
The leather wearing weird haircut tattooed Norsemen view burns me up thank you for this I’ve argued this so many time that only the Rus people had tattoos and that wasn’t even super common with them.
I'm all about "Viking/Norse inspired" things. But yeah, people screaming from the mountain tops about how they are so historical and came from the ancient world, I have to just laugh and shake my head. But, like you said, nothing wrong with having them these days, and I see nothing wrong with them being associated with the modern practice or Norse Heathenry.
Look I hate LARPers as much as the next normie, but I’d bet my soul that some Vikings had tattoos. They traveled the planet assimilating what they liked from different cultures.
@@N0RZC he is not a historian. He does not even pretend to be one. You might as well call him theologian because he also talks of old Norse religion, anthropologist because he talks of old Norse society, or archeologist because he talks of old Norse material remains.
I just love this video - I have been skeptical to idea that vikings had tattoos - I can't read old norse, but I have read translation of the sagas and totter and saxo - Just as you say - no mention of tattoos - I just think they put tattoos on them in films, because that's what you in Hollywood connect with being tough. Thank you from Denmark - actually a Wonderfull evening - no wind, and the sun setting over Fuen (Fyn), so the great belt is fantastic.
Oh yeah, because every other culture in history has used them... You know full well that we had no reliable written account of our history... who bloody knows... but it definitely stands to reason, regardless of what any Christian writers had to discuss about us through the veils of their own agendas. Every culture used them. Individually, as today, with regard to placement and content.
I see both sides on this. I have runic tattoos, but I'm also not a person living in 970 AD, and don't claim to be. I have them because I'm a modern person, they're meaningful to me, and it's relatively common for people to get meaningful artwork tattooed onto them. On the other side of that, I totally understand that tattooing in the Viking period has no substantial evidence for being practiced. I kind of feel like I'm caught between pop culture nerds flipping out about how cool Vikings were with their tattoos, ZZ Top beards, and total berserker mode(which wasn't true for most Norse people), and history nerds trying to tell me, "Well akshually Vikings didn't have tattoos so you having them isn't historically accurate." Both groups lack social skills, in my observation and opinion. Pack sand, nerds.
Indeed! The second to that is that Vikings were transphobic and horrible human beings! Recently, transgender Viking warrior was found and identified as a transgender! Incredible, but true!
@@maxdamagusbroski I don't doubt that some people may have had tattoos, but the misconception is that it was a common practice amongst the norse which there is little evidence to support, as Dr. Crawford here points out
Even Ötzi in the stone age had tattoos. There where tattoos everywhere in human history, so of course in the Viking age there had tattoos as well. Of course not as much as shown in today's movies, but of course they had.....
Regal people of such high stock and culture wouldn’t mark their body in such a manner. Ancient Greeks never would have. Only the marauding kind from these peoples, of a more banal, reduced state would have this practice.
@@Azzury. You are assuming that "regal people of such high stock and culture" share your values ,but since you are not a "regal person" your notion of what values they held is subjective to say the least. Certainly, Maori royalty accepted tattooing, as by the way did the kings of Great Britain and Denmark in the last two centuries.
It would seem mostly pointless as well since the clothing was usually covering all of the body except the hands, neck and face, with some exceptions in the summer heat. Not much exposure to build upon unless it's something with belief value, in which case it would've been written about.
There are eyewitness accounts of the fact that Vikings did have tattoos. According to the accounts of Ibn Fadlan (Ibn Fadlan was a travelling ambassador in the 10th century), "they have bodies tall as date palm trees, with blond hair and ruddy skin. Each is tattooed from the tips of his toes to his neck with dark blue or dark green designs and all men are armed with an axe, sword, and long knife." The travelling merchant Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub (also in the 10th century) noted "the widespread use of darkened makeup around the eyes by all Vikings" in addition to his writings about the fact that Vikings had tattoos. Now, Vikings were widespread across all of Scandinavia and the northern-most parts of Europe. These eyewitness accounts were most likely not of the Norse (Norway) or the Danes (Denmark). It was most likely the Swedes (Vikings from Sweden) who had travelled down the river Volga. They are referred to as "Rus" and "Volga Bulgars" (or Varangians). Swedish Vikings had established settlements that would later become modern Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia.
I think you are absolutely right. In Norway, where I am from, there are no finds to indicate that they used tattooing tools. They have found one in Denmark but not in the rest of Scandinavia. In Russia they have found many tools for tattooing. This was something that happened outside of Scandinavia. Culturally speaking, tattoos were seen as indecent and the first tattoo places were not opened until the 1980s in Norway. If we had had culture in the area, they would not have started in the 1980s but existed long before this. My grandfather got a tattoo in the 50s but he did this when he worked on a boat that went to Asia. In Norway, we have no culture for this. Another thing we should think about is that they were afraid of dying from disease and piercing the skin and potentially getting diseases was something they avoided. That they painted themselves with colors made from the earth on the outside of the skin is more likely when we had bright colors on the clothes and not black/grey/white as Hollywood often presents them as. Make-up and strong colors are probably what he describes if he met Vikings from Scandinavia. They didn't want to die in bed they wanted to die on the battlefields and piercing the skin can make you die in bed when you don't have sterilization tools. The probability of tattoos in Scandinavia is minimal before 1980
The hygiene argument is hardly valid though. Lots of people throughout the world practiced and still practice extremely extensive body modification practices without any access to modern hygiene. Fear of infection does not seem to be very prevalent.
Dear Sir, Thank you for the wonderful video. I presume then that there are no Viking-age remains with visible skin. More generally, how rare is it for remains to be so well conserved that the skin is preserved?
If the Rus were tattooed, a likely design would have been a diving falcon, like pendants found in Birka in Sweden and in southern Finland, that very much resemble the heraldic symbol of Rurik and his descendants, that eventually turned into the Ukrainian trident. There is speculation that this diving falcon was some sort of sign used by those trading on the eastern routes.
I appreciate the videos, as a tattooist ive always tried to be careful of anything with meaning. I dont tattoo hoju on people or ta moko as they have special significance. Since your videos ive started telling people that the "viking compass" is not viking and isn't even really ancient. If they still want it im ok i just prefer that they are informed.
Around the same time as Ibn Fadlan’s account, a Sephardic Jewish merchant (and probably also spy) from Al-Andalus named Ibn Yaqub was writing about his experiences in the Danish city of Hedeby. He also noted the widespread presence of tattoos and makeup for both men and women to ‘enhance the beauty of their eyes.’
Interesting: The Swedish translation of what Ahmad Ibn Fadlan wrote in year 921 usually is "...deras kroppar var dekorerade..." that is "....their bodies were decorated....". I do not know what the source tells, and I assume it was written in Arabic. Painted or Tattooed? But needles that probably used for tattooing has been found i a bronze age tomb in Denmark. If that is correct, than the knowledge och use of tattoos in the Nordic will predate the Vikning era with 100 years. But there is a lot of "if"......... Maybe in the future we will find archaeological evidence of how common it was
The Norse Bronze Age ended in about 500BC. The Viking Age Started in about 800AD . Thats not 100 year difference thats a 1300 year difference. I cannot find any specific reference to the needles so I cannot find a date for them. But at a minimum there is over a millenium of time and all the cultural change that implies between the possible tattoo needles and the viking phenomenon.
@@magnusemilsson7205 the verb ibn fadlan uses is 'to be green' and idiomatically it does just stand for 'decorated' or 'beautified' in arabic. No direct synonymity to tattoos or paint. A beautifully decorated house can be 'green', a beautifully dressed woman can be 'green'. A good colloquial modern english comparison could be 'bedazzled'. *The Rus were bedazzled from head to toe*, is what ibn fadlan is actually trying to communicate. And somehow people read that as 'all vikings were tattooed'.
@@magnusemilsson7205 the arabic word used, 'green' is idiomatic for 'decorated' or 'beautified'. A beautifully decorated house or stunningly dressed woman can be 'green', no connection directly to either paints or tattoos. What Ibn Fadlan is trying to communicate is more like 'the Rus were bedazzled from chin to toe' and somehow people today will themselves into reading 'all vikings had sick full body tattoos' when nothing in the text indicates such.
Yeah never mind bog mumies with preserved tattoos, no one on record was named tattoo-face and I need a topic for this week's video. For the record the worlds oldest tattoos are seen on 'Otzi the ice man' found in the Alps.
I recently talked with someone who literally learned his viking history from the Vikings TV show. When I told him that he shouldn't take his history lessons from TV-shows, and that the information in TV-shows are really really inaccurate, he got really mad.
@@pupper5580the TV show did many of the things correct though. Showed how the Scandinavian lords and kings constantly at war with eachother for the throne. That explains why scandinavians remained so few today.
Just a random semi-relevant (maybe) fact, I remember reading about Christians in the Balkans (specifically Croatians) having a tendency to tattoo themselves heavily, particularly women and particularly their hands. This was done well into the 20th century and allegedly stemmed from the Ottoman invasion since Muslims wouldn't kidnap children with christian symbols tattooed on them (the tattoos are mostly intricate combinations of crosses and similar geometrical patterns). If I remember correctly the practice was believed by the historian who recorded it in the 19th century, to be far older than people themselves thought it was (they thought the origin of the whole custom was the Ottoman invasion) the historian believed it was a modification of an even older practice.
Yup, my grandma, Croatian from Bosnia had tattoos all over her hands, ( crosses, fishes, dots, circles).....she did say the custom was very old and men would do that as well back in the day. but she did say it was only to repel the Turks as they deemed it unsullied. Boys were tattoed so they would not be taken as court slaves.
Yeah well by that time there were lots of tattooing traditions already present within the Ottoman Empire. Bedouins and Berbers all had a tradition to tattoo their girls in particular.
@@Ivan-gp4tr Thanks for sharing. My family are Serbs from Bosnia, but I have never heard of such a custom. Just like the Croatians they were a target of Ottoman slavery, so I am wondering why this clever tactic wasn't used by them as well. Maybe it did, but I just never heard of it. Gotta research. ;) Pozdrav!
I understand your point, but I want to say the following. The Slavs also do not have a separate word for tattoo, despite the fact that the Scythians (who participated in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs) had a widespread practice of tattooing
@@meginna8354 no it doesn’t lol. It’s a 💖 heart, then Algiz (Y rune,) Uruz (U/Ooh Rune,) then Thurisaz (Unvoiced ‘th’ Rune,) then Uruz again, then Raido (R Rune.) That spells out, “💖 Yooh Thórr.” Or, more accurately, “💖 You, Thórr!” 🤣 It’s so Girly-Pop, I love it.
@@MrAlexH1991 That's not Algiz or "Ýr" rune as it's called in younger futhark, and represented an R sound anyway. That's the Maðr rune. The runes write out Muþur, lot's of runestones have this.
@@meginna8354 Ohhhhhhhh, I see where the disconnect is coming from now. I’m looking at the tattoo from an Elder Futhark lens, while you’re reading it from a Younger Futhark lens. But I don’t think it says, “💖 Mother,” because the Old Norse word for Mother is Móðir, not Móður. And in Younger Futhark runic writing, that last trilled ‘r’ sound at the end of a word would have been represented as an ‘yr’ rune (ᛦ) rather than with a Raid/Raidho rune (ᚱ.) So the word for “Mother,” which was “Móðir” would have been written as ᛘᚢᚦᛁᛦ, not as ᛘᚢᚦᚢᚱ. (Could still be wrong, though.) Which is why I surmised that the tattoo on his arm didn’t say “Muthur,” or “Mothur” or “Mothórr” but rather it’s TWO words, using Elder Futhark, spelling “Yoo (a well-transliterated Modern English “you,”) and then the name of Thórr. Though there is an element that’s still out of place with my observation, too. And that’s the fact that the Proto-Germanic/Proto-Norse/Old High German/Elder-Futhark-era name of Thórr wasn’t Thórr, but Thúnraz.
@@MrAlexH1991 Móður is the accusative noun case of Móðir, all cases except nominative actually. It's also the form it takes on many runestones where it's written exactly the same as on Jackson's arm. Móður/Móðir never had Ýr rune since the final r doesn't come from a Proto Norse "z".
Could the Norse have used body paints? I know it's not the same, but weren't there certain Celtic peoples who did, and were there not interactions between those cultures?
The Celtic people I assume you are referring to (Picts, Gaels, Britons) were using body paint prior to the middle ages during the bronze age and iron age. It is possible that the Norse used body paint during THAT time period however by the Viking age the practice had basically disappeared in all of northern Europe so it is highly unlikely that the Norse would have continued the practice after all their neighbors had stopped doing it 200 years or more ago.
Not in anything I've ever read. There are of accounts battles and weapons etc, but not of body art worn by the participants. We have them in Roman sources, hence the word: Pict. I haven't seen Dr Crawford mention it over the years either. As he said in the video there's no mention in the Sagas of tattoos, likewise there are no mention of body paints that I'm aware of. We also have several descriptions of what people wore. Harald Hardrada had a long maille shirt called "Emma". Bolli Bollarson, his retinue were dressed in scarlet. Bolli wore clothes made of fur and was covered by a scarlet cloak. The description goes on to describe his weapons and armour. Again, no mention of body art, painted or inked in.
I get where you're coming from as a literary scholar, but essentially all "bog mummies" with preserved skin had some tattoos. It's more likely they were ubiquitous but discrete than entirely absent. It's better to say that the tattoos on tv are excessive and likely inaccurate unless belonging to a group that uses them to brag and has a lot of money to use on tattoos - the Rus were very successful at trading European slaves to the middle eastern markets and likely both quite well off and relatively violent and amoral. They also had more cultural contact with other cultures that wore tattoos. The banning of tattoos by early Christian authorities might also be taken as a kind of indirect proof. But that could have easily started with Christian contact with the celts (who did have tattoos) or another pagan group and just become a folkloreish cultural taboo among Christians. Like christians not eating horse or using public bath houses. For some archeological findings see: KRUTAK, LARS, and AARON DETER-WOLF, editors. Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing. University of Washington Press, 2017. Deter-Wolf, Aaron, et al. "The world's oldest tattoos." Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 5 (2016): 19-24.
There's no Norse bog body with tattoo and no Scandinavian bog body with tattoos and i think the far away bog bodies with tattoos are not close to the Norse in time.
You literally just argued that some cultures had tattoos at some point in history. There are no norse "bog mummies" with tattoos. They had no word for that practice, there's no evidence that Norse people had them, so with that in mind your default position should be that they didn't have them.
I can't sight the sources but I've heard several historians say that Ibn Fadlan was prone to exaggeration in his writing, as writers do. You have a very valid point, prominent tattoos would probably have been mentioned by a culture that put so much emphasis on appearance
@IFeelQuiteHungry "the burden of proof would be on you to provide evidence to support the claim." Well can you prove that vikings did not not have tattoos? "All the Doc is saying here, in standard scientific procedure, is that no substantive evidence exists to support such a claim therefore we have no reason to believe it." There are no evidence that support that vikings did not have any tattoos at all.
@IFeelQuiteHungry to me saying they didn't have tattoos is a statement of fact without any proof of that. I do not have to prove anything! I didn't make a truth claim. Simply what is the evidence of it. It would ve like saying vikings were all bald without being asked to prove it. I like this guy's videos he has done a lot of research. I don't agree with everything he says but that is why I asked
@@tomchristensen2914no, the statement is "There is no evidence to indicate they had tattoos as we understand them." From there, the only substantiated perspective is that they did not have tattoos.
@thomaswillard6267 wrong again read the title In Parenthesis even. Which is what my reaponse was to.." VIKINGS DIDN'T HAVE TATTOOS""... literally in the title.. anyway I am not here to argue. My family is from Copenhagen Denmark and I am not illiterate in this topic one of the rules for the statement yiu cant prove a negative is if you cant prove it beyond the reasonable doubt then you also cant prove it's not true either... so please enjoy your day.. Skol
When someone tells me "im getting traditional Norse tattoos" I always change the subject quickly to avoid the 5 hour argument that usually ensues after.
Nonsense, there were plenty of earthquakes and tsunamis in medieval Europe, including: 1303 Crete Earthquake and Tsunami 1169 Sicily Earthquake and Tsunami 1343 Tyrrhenian Sea Tsunami 1456 Southern Italy Earthquake and Tsunami
@wulfgreyhame6857 And? Europeans might similarly had another term for it, like "skin paint". The fact that there's no specialized word for something proves absolutely nothing. See?
Is there a native Slavic word for tattoos? If we are arguing linguistically that it was a practice that the Rus adopted in Slavic lands because there is no word for it in there language is there one for it in the language of the people they adopted it from?
in russian the word for tatto is "nakolka" what translates to something like percings or punctures, which sugests that it come from times before modern tatto machines existed
well, ötzi had tatoos. now we only have to bridge a few thousand years, a few thousand kilometers, and a minor number of logical gaps. but those can be overcome, we just really have to try, right? :) joke aside, very valuable video, thanks you said that. is important (even without subject)
Such a fascinating topic, I never knew that the Rus were partially Norse-speaking. I wonder if the practice of getting tattoos would have been more common in later mediaeval Scandinavia or if it never caught on at all.
I wouldn't call the rus a "people". At least not a culturally unified one. The term appears to have originally been an exonym (which etymologically, most historians agree stems from the swedish region Roslagen) for a variety of different people, norse, slavic and finnic alike, none of which appear to have thought of themselves as "The Rus", at least not for the majority of the viking age to my knowledge. What is interesting however, is that in textual sources, norse names are completely dominant in the earliest texts detailing the "rus", and only gradually become more slavic over time.
@@hjalmarrsviakappa9666 It's a good point. I think early on they definitely saw themselves as Norse. The term "Rus" was give to them by outsiders. Their culture definitely evolved over time though until the term "Kievan Rus" did become an identity of it's own. It just took a few centuries.
The Finns still call Sweden Ruotsi. It is believed that the words Ruotsi, Rus and Roslagen (the coastal area just north of Stockholm) all have the same origin. And then both Russia, Belarus and Ruthenia have been named for the Rus that settled there. Now, the Rus that originally settled in Novgorod, Staraja Ladoga and Kiev were Norse and at least their leaders probably came from Roslagen. But they were always a minority and gradually became integrated with the Slavic people of the area. The Rus nobility kept intermarrying with the Swedish nobility for centuries though. Early in the viking age the Rus were definitely Norse. Later on they were more of a Slavic people with partially Norse heritage.
Informative video! Seeing the helm of awe way too many times on "viking" tattoos. If im getting one its gonna be runestone inspired serpents in nice colours! Cheers!
I have to laugh, I love the way you piss people off with hard cold facts. You have presented here a very solid argument which no doubt will upset a lot of folk...and will no doubt be completely ignored by both consumers and vendors in the name of "cool".
@@maxdamagusbroski Crawford defense crowd is so wild at times. This videos title is clickbait, then he goes back on that claim to say "well they probably didnt have tattoos" while trying for some reason to debunk contemporary writing that mentions vikings have tattoos. Like what the hell is going on here? Is this some American thing I'm not understanding, it seems so bizarre.
Excellent video, for an "old, grumpy man." 😆🤣 I really appreciate watching you and reading your books, and getting a thoughtful, logical, reasoned commentary. Keep up the good work!
If you, are always swaddled in heavy clothing, why would you *ever*, even think, of marking your skin up with cool designs? Like, Scandinavia is cold. The sea is cold. When are you gonna be showing off your tattoos?
How cold do you think it is during the summer there? Unless you are up near the arctic circle it is not freezing year round. Parts of Norway can hit the high 70'sF (24+C) in modern times. The Viking Age also falls during the Medieval Warm Period which saw the European continent having comparable temperatures to the mid to late 1900's and early 2000's. Do southern Norwegians, Swedes, or Danish people wear cold weather clothes in July or August nowadays? The average North Atlantic temps were 1C warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than they were as measured in 1996. It may not be as long as a North American summer, but summer is summer and it gets warm.
Until Professor Crawford tells us they were not a thing either, Berserkers fought in something between little and no clothing. If tattoos were a Scandinavian thing Berserkers in permanent war paint might have been a place to find them. But from the sound of it no descriptions of those either.
@@francesconicoletti2547 Hence, why they would be notable! Fighting in little to nothing marks them out as separate from what is considered the norm, meaning that most fought while clothed or semi-clothed. Fighting is also not something that one does most of the time. A brief period of less clothing, especially during high activity, wouldn't mean that they're wearing very little all the time. Human practices of skin marking are wider spread the better the weather is, such as scarification in Africa and South America, or tattooing, in Polynesia.
@@dhuh6760 Out of all the arguements I have seen on this video, "It's cold so it would be illogical for them to take tattoos!" is literally the dumbest, most braindead american take I have read.
Regarding Ibn Fadlan, I find it just as valuable analyzing the contemporary and cultural context of the historian themself as much as the subject of their study. That too yields interesting historical insights.
I really don't get why Ibn Fadlan is concidered a liar when it comes to the Rus. Some things he says like their" method/lack" of bathing is confirmed from anglo-saxon texts so why are we doubtful of everything else he wrote?
Tattoos were in the English speaking world before the word tattoo entered English. There’s mention of Jerusalem crosses, or Jerusalem letters, referring to tattoos people would get in the holy land as part of their pilgrimage
There was not a standardized word for it, but the words "painting" and "pricking" were used to describe that practice. There's no such references in old Norse texts.
I think that the modern fantasy viking look is influenced by the Christian European identity. Christianization was basically Europe culturally colonizing itself, that's why many conservative people think of Christianity as a Western European thing when it's actually a foreign and politically imposed religion that displaced the Indigenous beliefs of its new believers. Therefore, the Christian Anglo-Saxons (whose grandparents were polytheists) are portrayed with stereotypically Medieval European clothes, ornaments and hairstyles, while the Norse, who are polytheists, are portrayed with aesthetics that don't usually give a European vibe such as braids, shaved mohawks, leather jackets, face war paints and some other bunch of Native-American inspired stuff.
This makes sense. you would have thought that if tattoos were a common thing amongst the Norseman, that we would have seen historical writers mentioning and or describing it. Especially since Christianized Anglo Saxons could have capitalized on key physical differences between them and their pagan invaders, in their writing.
Some guys just want to pretend to be brutal Norse warriors, growing beard, making tattoos with symbols related to their "aesthetics" - this is their demands, so industry gives them depiction in pop-culture art to sell more products. Some just want a justification to their hidden regrets about tattoos, but it question of psychology, not history.
This is an interesting take on the subject. Especially the idea that it is from foreign influence. It makes me think of the Picts a bit since the Romans described them as being “painted”. I can’t help but wonder if tattooing in Europe was perhaps used more as a medicine for relieving arthritic pain(as believed was the case for Otzi the Iceman) as opposed to being for decoration.
It’s really funny that we traded the fake image of horned helmets for tattoos and leather jackets
For real. I want to go back to before History Channel and Heilung confused all of internet worse than the national romantics did in their day.
@@jasminv8653 I do not want to go back to before Heilung... They are not historically accurate (save maybe by sheer blind luck) but that stuff slaps :P
I think rather than poo poo the folks who used imagery to differentiate cultures we should ask why. Things like Wagners operas etc, where the horned helmet arose from, at least in modern times was done for dramatic reasons more than because everyone believed vikings wore horned helmets. Hir Bronze Age ancestors definitely wore horned helmets and they also believed in the same gods.
The Wagner horned helmet worked for its time just like the tattoos, long faux hawk hairdos and beards used today. Before the tv show Vikings came out Vikings had beards and that was about it.
Truth is without the dramatics like those above Vikings pretty much looked like every other Northern European. Nothing special about that.
@@HesperianHorsePower Exactly. Nothing special.
If you think putting tattoos on vikings is to pander to the feeble egos of current-day audiences, then I agree with you.
@@HesperianHorsePower I’m not poopooing anyone? I’m literally just saying it’s funny we stopped seeing horned helmets cus everyone knew it was fake and now we are using other visual signifiers that are fake. It’s funny!
The costume designers for every film/show adaptation of Viking culture ever are in shambles right now.
At least they can still dress the vikings in a combo of black leather fetish gear and big, casually draped sheepskins and bearskins.
Videogames, too. Looking at you, God of War & AC Valhalla
It’s a big distortion, as a 100 percent Scandinavian, it has struck me as ´foreign’ and unfortunately exaggerated in ubiquitousness.
i'm pretty sure they are not being created with historical accuracy in mind. And designers aware that those costumes are just for show.
"Right now"? It's always been a shambles. Us Viking Reenactors have costumes and don't have a studio budget yet we still get it right. We also have books 😁
When the Spanish came to northeastern Mexico they named some of the indigenous peoples the Rayados (raya means line in Spanish) because apparently they painted their bodies with black lines. The Romans called the Celtic peoples of Scotland the Picts (from latin pictus, painted) because supposedly they painted their bodies too. It is clear a detail like this draws a lot of attention, so if the Norse had a similar thing going on, you'd expect more than just one single source to talk about it.
To be clear the Picts didn't tattoo either, they wore woad on their skin. Europe actually didn't have any native tattooing culture, which is quite unusual as it's fairly widespread elsewhere.
@@PlatinumAltaria Ötzi and his 61 tattoos would like to disagree with that...
@@mnk9073 He didn't belong to any of the European cultures, he just lived in Europe. Understandable confusion.
@@PlatinumAltaria We actually don't know what the Picts had, if they had tattoos as we know them today, or painted their skin, or something else. We do not know that they didn't tattoo, we just aren't sure what Julius Caesar meant specifically. But as noted Otzi gives us evidence of tattoos in Europe well before the Romans or Picts, so Europe certainly had them. Greeks and Romans did use tattoos though, we have direct and indirect evidence. We also have found a Scythian mummy with tattoos. Not in Europe, but the Scythians were certainly present in Europe.
@@Lowlandlord When I say Europeans I'm referring to the ancestors of modern European cultures who were part of the Indo-European arrival in ~3000BCE, such as the Bell-Beaker culture. There were neolithic people in Europe and they probably had tattoos, but we don't know nearly as much about them and they had very little lasting effect. And the Scythians did colonise parts of Europe, but they were an Iranic culture.
I have been a Viking Age enthusiast for many decades and seen how popular culture and fashion change how people think the Norse looked. There is no old Norse word for tattoo... You said it exactly at the same time as I wrote it!
That was my first thought before I even started watching! If vikings had tattoos chances are that their word for it would’ve survived at least in stories, even if any such practice was outlawed. I mean, we managed to keep an old name for the mid-winter celebration even as the emphasis of that feast became somewhat Christian over the centuries.
Thank you, Bjorn. Your recommendation brought me here. I would love to see you two have a discussion someday.
Lol blame white Americans for these stereotypes lol
@@rdklkje13Not just midwinter celebrations. A lot of holidays and special things have kept their old pagan words.
There's also no Picts word for tattoo either, but they were known to be heavily tattooed. You could argue that the word Pictii meant painted one, but that was a latin word given to them by the romans. I'm guessing that means the Picts didn't actually have tattoos?
There's many cultures around the word who were heavily tattooed but didn't have words for it. there are also many cultures that don't have a word for green or blue. Do those colours not exist among their people?
Heresy! We know full well that at least half of viking age society had runic face and neck tattoos and that 100% of vikings wore leather fetish gear and were covered in mud and poo.
Amazing how Hollywood depictions went from colorful to drab.
And the tatoos were in Elder Futhark because they were deliberately being retro!
Yes! Mud and poo! Mud and poo!
@@gunnargarisson4052 Pud and Moo!
Historically accurate Vikings: “Who needs tattoos… When you have BLING???” 💍
Yeah they had arm rings right? The more the better. Going by Bernard Cornwall last Kingdom books
@@teddypicker8799 Yup. They wore arm rings, beard beads, and all kinds of stuff. They also engaged in rhyming roasts called "flyting," making them the original rap battlers...
Or SCARS 😊
Knowing media...
From: ”the skipper has a mighty scar”
To: "this yunga haven't earned even his 200th scar yet - uhh, what a noob".
Except they probably did 😅
I think the best argument against Viking tattoos is the fact that there’s not one mention of them in the vast contemporary Old English texts written concerning vikings. E.g. battle of maldon. Hundreds of documents across centuries and nothing.
Yep, similarly the Frankish, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Frisian, Byzantine etc. texts. There are plenty of physical descriptions of Vikings and descriptions of their culture from across Europe and into the Arabic world yet no-one except Ibn Fadlan mentions tattoos.
Very good point
There's no mention of drums, northern lights, and even though the Huns are mentioned they appear to speak the same language as the author and there's nothing special about them other than Atilla is there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Given we have the tattooed flesh of frozen slavs from before the Viking age, and even prehistoric men from the Alps -- I'd find it hard to believe at least some tattooing wasn't around. I'll accept it is probably a sub-culture but like everything we get from Saxo Grammaticus or Ibn Fadlan, I'd assume they barely got a glimpse of these people 3rd hand. Even Tacitus 1000 years earlier I'd throw handfuls of salt at, through he did mention northern and baltic peoples.
@@BrandanLeepre/indo Europeans mummies have tattoos. I wonder if they were present in the corded ware culture
@@BrandanLee I’m not sure what your point is here. You’re basically redundantly repeating what Dr. Crawford said in the video, which is that indeed tattooing tradition did exist, but probably not in the Viking Age Northern and Western Europe.
There were likely cultural enclaves across the world where tattooing was practiced, but from the evidence we do have, literary, linguistic and archeological, we cannot say that Vikings in that part of Europe practiced tattoos.
Also your point about northern lights is a bad comparison. Written evidence like the Sagas or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle do not focus on natural phenomenons. They focus on people - their histories, behaviours and indeed appearance. So they facts that we have detailed descriptions of them all, but not a single mention of tattooing - in Viking age North/Western Europe I repeat - can safely help us conclude it did not exist in that area.
Just to add to this, as someone of (Polynesian) Samoan descent, tattoos (tatau) in Samoan culture weren't just decorations on the skin. They signified a person's status in society. I don't know if it's still as strict now, but when I was growing up it was a rite of passage for men to get the pe'a (malofie, which is the men's tatau) done in order to take part in village meetings as official adults and the women's tatau (malu) further back in time used to be reserved only for the chief's daughter.
There's even a myth about how the tatau was brought to Samoa from Fiji by conjoined twins.
So even if tattoos were prevalent throughout Norse culture to the extent it would be beneath mentioning if people had any in their myths etc, one would think that a myth about the origin of or a rite of passage denoting its place in society would have been told enough times to have been written down eventually.
Just in case I'm misunderstood, I'm not saying don't get a Norse-inspired tattoo lol.
More good evidence - it shows that a culture which tattoos natively will have a whole vocabulary for different tattoos, not just one word.
marco polo (1254- 1324 AD) in his book discusses the prolific tattoo industry in laos. heres one translated text if your interested in this specific segment:
Kaugigu has its own king. The people are idolaters and speak a language of their own. They have submitted to the Great Khan and pay him a yearly tribute. The king is so lecherous that I assure you that he has fully 300 wives. Whenever any woman in the country excels in beauty, he takes her to wife. The province is rich in gold. It also abounds in precious spices of many sorts; but they are very far from the sea and for this reason are of little value as merchandise and are sold very cheap. There are plenty of elephants and animals of many other kinds and no lack of game. The people live on meat, milk, and rice. They have no grape wine, but make an excellent wine of rice and spices. All the people alike, male and female, have their flesh decorated in the following fashion. They have their flesh covered all over with pictures of lions and dragons and birds and other objects, made with needles in such a way that they are indelible. They make these on their faces, their necks, their bellies, their hands, their legs, and every part of their bodies. And this they do as a mark of gentility: the more elaborately anyone is decorated, the greater and the handsomer he is considered. First of all a man will have such images as he may desire sketched out in black all over his body. This done, he will be tied hand and foot, and two or more persons will hold him. Then the master craftsman will take five needles, four of them fastened together in a square and the fifth in the centre, and with these he will work all over his body, pricking out the images previously sketched. As soon as the pricks are made, ink is applied to them, and then the figure as sketched appears in the pricks. During the process the victim suffers what might well pass for the pains of Purgatory. Many even die during the operation through loss of blood
@@Toxicpoolofreekingmascul-lj4ydI agree..from what I’ve seen in classical sources, the Thracians are described by Herodotus as tattooed and the word he uses for tattooed is ευγενής (eugenēs) which also can mean “well born” or “noble”.
Edit: I forgot to add, if I remember correctly, he says they adopted the practice from the Scythians who they bordered on the west coast of the Black Sea.
Thanks for sharing this info..I’m very interested in the history of tattoos so this is fantastic. Cheers!
Agree with you. I'm Hunkpapa Lakota and we are required to have at least one tattoo on the inside of our wrist to show to the Owl Woman who guards to Spirit Road to the Next World.
What a beautiful site for a video. The sound of the stream behind you is very soothing. Thank you for this video, Doc. It's appreciated.
I think it kinda ties in with Farya Faraji's videos on music from the viking age aswell, as there's a LOT of misinformation on that topic. There are people who genuinely believe that the vikings were throat singing etc.
The probable reality is that the vikings were culturally not too dissimilar to any northern european civilization, like the germans, dutch, english, lithuanians etc. You'd have to kind of assume that for some reason the societies of the vikings would have somehow developed in complete isolation, which we know isn't true.
True, I was so blown away after Farya Faraji's video on viking music. It's interesting, though, to see how we have interpreted the vikings through our own culture.
People blame Heilung a lot for this, because they use throat singing.
It's a bit odd since the band have always explained that they were inspired by Siberian shamans and that one of then literally was given his garb from a Siberian shaman.
Also a lot of their texts and imagery are older than the viking age. In their shows they have a representation of the Egtved girl, a Bronze Age grave.
@@kurtwaldheim4048 oh now trhat u say i see it. its a bit sad though bc shamanism wasnt allowed to be practiced when the slavic russians took over sibiria mongolia etc. so its a point of identity for us when we already have forgotton so much of our customs
@@kurtwaldheim4048 I think blaming the artists is also bad. Heilung never claimed to be historically accurate or based solely on the vikings specifically as far as I know, though I could be wrong on that note .
I think the blame lies on people that probably think "This sounds badass, so it must be viking" without really any critical thinking.
@@kurtwaldheim4048 It isn't just the throat singing, bardcore bands produce tonal music we're used to in the west instead of the modal music from before the 17th century, IOW they use chord progressions independent of the melody while modal music just supports the melody (a bit like bagpipes with their unchanging background drone).
It's really interesting to me, in Otzi, we have proof that Tattooing exists in Europe in prehistory, but that by the historical era it had so completely died out.
Because it's fashion - it comes and goes.
The actual technique of tattooing is really not that strange. I accidentally got poked by a burnt splinter when I was a child, and the black mark stayed for many years. The idea has obviously appeared many times through history.
@@Rasbiff Yeah!
There are historical evidence that, at least one man (thought to be a noble) in Brittain had tattoos (on his calf/lower leg if I remember correctly) during the dark age/viking age. I do not know the exact source but historical tattoo researchers often point towards it to show that tattoos existed in "northern" europe at the time. I have read a research paper about it, but it was many years ago. Not norse nor "viking" but a neighbouring culture.
Modern tattooing obviously comes from encounters with peoples outside of Europe and initially was limited to sailors and to the upperclass where it was a prominent fad (though different designs). So either way modern tattooing has no relation.
Not just that. according to gree hostical writers celtic tribes in todays austria also had tattoos.
The scythes of the iron age around the black sea were known for that too.
Thing is, Ötzi has 63 tattoos, and they are believed to not have been about fashion or status.
Fashion is the modern tatoo thing, and status was often in polynesia ect.
But with Ötzi scientists believe the tattoos he had were part of "medical" treatment for his problems. (not the ones he died from)
So different people did put pigment into their skin for different reasons.
Jackson Crawford saying 'Cowboy Core' is everything I wanted from this Saturday
Are you trying to tell me that my coworker's tattoo of Vegvisir with "Not all who wander are lost" written around it using elder futhark runes isn't an authentic Viking Age practice?
Why does it have to be?
@@doseferatu lol yeah this seems to be completely lost on the "but history says" crowd. People do things and create their own culture. Most anyone I know with Norse tattoos does not do it to act like a historical Viking haha
@@officialstephencoe exactly. Just a weasely way for dorks to get to feel smart and superior
"Not all who wander are lost" is a line from a J.R.R Tolkien poem.
So you think that they think that it does not resemble historical vikings?
Next you're gonna tell me that Vikings didn't have top knots and hipster haircuts and that they trimmed their beards and bathed regularly.
as already mentioned, they actually did bathe and combed themselves. Even to the point they had a specific day to wash themselves (Saturday, which in Swedish is Lördag coming from Laugdag which is derived from Laugo (waterfall) and day).
Is it unthinkable that the suebian knot (or a variant of it) made its way north at some point?
@@Hauntedundead Old Norse Laug means pool or small water, Laugo must be a modern swedish word.
They didn't have clippers like your modern viking you encounter with a plastic sword ready for the great LARPing battle.
@@meginna8354 We dont have the word laugo att all in Swedeish. But what I understand you had 3 slightly diferent languages before we started to group all as norse and I believe even the norse languages differed from each other. The old branches was east scandinavian germanic, central (or mainland) scandinavian germanic and western scandinavian germanic. East Scandinavian germanic is what we have identified as Gothic and the old language on Gotland. Central Scandinavian Germanic become Swedish and Danish over time and Western became Islandic, Faeroilandic, Norn and Norwegian.
To give credit where it is due, I know you don't like the Northman, but it got a lot of the material culture right, and it presented the Norse/Icelandic peoples as not having Tattoos.
I’m sure some had “picked” tattoos they learned from other cultures. But most didn’t. You’re the expert and that’s why we listen.
no they didnt. it was not considered proper to mark the skin back then. Tattoos had back ten more to do with witchcraft than being a viking.
The witchcraft element was only when Christianity came to the uk. Before that, the celts were very much tattooed- with woad. It wasn't for witchcraft, it was for expresion, stlye and also to intimidate opponents in battle..
Just to echo what you're saying - if tattooing was a common or even semi-common practice within viking culture, then you'd think that it would be mentioned (almost certainly) in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. They mention vikings, their behaviour and their appearance a lot over centuries and not once do they happen to say 'oh and they mark their skin with designs and symbols' -- but they have a good idea of their bathing practices? You'd think even if it wasn't considered noteworthy (which is doubtful, since there's no evidence of it occurring in England either), that there would at least be mentions of how this foreign culture decides to tattoo its people - are they earned, at what age, what do they depict, are there familial connections. But no, apparently this practice would have been somehow missed by the people making a point of documenting the viking existence in England. And considering the Anglo-Saxon chronicle goes out of its way to depict vikings and their behaviour as odd, violent and heathen that they would mention such a strange practice.
Do they mention makeup around the eyes? We know from Ibn Yakub that they used that.
@@PalleRasmussen Ibn Yakub is like the only source that claims that the norse ppl had tattoes and nothing more... its sus
@@leisiyox he does not though. That is Ibn Fadlan.
How many contemporary written sources do we have to the Norse?
@@Toxicpoolofreekingmascul-lj4yd Ibrahim Ibn Ya ’qub at Turtushi was a Jewish-Arab trader from Cordobo who visited Hedeby and writes about it. I shall post the relevant part and my translation.
I øvrigt fortalte han, at retten til skilsmisse tilkom kvinderne. Kvinderne skiller sig, når de har lyst til det. Man har også der en kunstig fremstillet øjensminke; når de anvender den, tager skønheden aldrig af, men tager endog til hos mænd og kvinder. Han sagde også: Aldrig hørte jeg hæsligere sang end slesvigernes, det er en brummen, som kommer fra deres struber, i lighed med hundegøen, dog endnu mere dyrisk end denne.
Further he related that that the right to divorce belonged with the woman. That they would divorce when they felt like it. There is also in use an artificially made eye make-up; when used, their beauty will never fade, but even grow both in men and women. He also related; Never did I hear a more awful singing than that of the Slesvigers, it is a growling in their throats reminiscent of the bark of a dog, though even more animalistic than that.
The latter is used to justify claims that Heilung makes "Viking music", though the band does not claim so themselves.
@@PalleRasmussen I was wrong with the name, thanks, it was Ibn Fadlan
An interesting point about the cultural assimilation of the Rus' to Slavic culture is that in 907CE, almost 20 years before Ibn Fadlan met them, a Rus' expedition signed a treaty with the Byzantines in which the Byzantine sources name all 15 Rus' signatories, of whom 13 have Old Norse names (the other two being Finnic), however it also states that these individuals swore their oaths by the Slavic gods Perun and Veles. It's obviously not clear to what extent this was true across all Rus' society and how much it may have applied to different aspects of life or culture, however clearly there was already some degree of assimilation or syncretisation going on between Scandinavian and Slavic cultural elements a couple of decades before Ibn Fadlan's account.
For anyone who's interested the Norse names are listed, the Greek rendering first followed by the attested Old Norse versions in brackets: Karly (Karli), Inegeld (Ingjaldr), Farlof (Farulfr), Ver/lemud (Vermu(n)dr), Rulav (Rollabr), Stemid/Stemir (Steinviðr), Karn (Karn), Frelav (Friðláfr), Ruar (Hróarr), Truan (Þrándr), Gudy (Góði), Ruald (Hróaldr); and Fost (Fastr). Unfortunately I can't find a source listing the two Finnic names but those are the attested Old Norse names of powerful Rus' men who seemingly worshipped (at least in part) Slavic deities.
Croatian Slavic Christians had a tattooing tradition well into the 18th century that defined them against other neighboring communities so its probably more related to that than anything in Scandinavia. The viking in France and Ireland also respectively assimilated to local culture very quickly
Well don't you think that the Rus may have seen the Slavic deities as identical to their own? Perun has so many attributes that are similar or identical to Thor, and so forth. The Greeks, Romans, etc all did that, so I wonder if the Rus wouldn't have done the same.
Which is to say, I don't even think that if any of those Rus dignitaries went and visited their cousins in Scandinavia, that they'd even see each other as having two different religions.
"Unfortunately I can't find a source listing the two Finnic names" ... you are right, the references seem to run dry for those two Finnic names. Bizarre. And annoying to this Finn 😛 ... Hey, now I found the reference ... but it is a book that I cannot find online "Linguistic Interrelations in Early Rus. Northmen, Finns, and East Slavs (Ninth to Eleventh Centuries), Bohdan Struminski, 1996", pp. 162-6.
@@cohltonandrews9063Croatian here, it was mostly a Bosnian Croat cultural item. But it stems from ancient tattooing methods. We’ve found graves with tattoo needles buried alongside the dead too. It was indeed important.
I think the Norse saw the Slavic gods as their own gods, just by other names. Perun and Thor are so similar and we now know most European folklore stems from Indo-European. So to a Norseman living in Russia Perun was almost certainly the local name for the same guy.
The Rus even took to wearing miniature axe pendants of Perun in place of Thors hammer in Eastern Europe. Just a local version of mjolnir.
Thanks again for the great info! I love films as much as anyone, but that industry is just a nightmare for people interested in history. Keep up the good work!
"I wear all black, lots of leather, have an ungroomed beard and a mohawk, and am covered in tattoos because I'm a modern Viking."
That thumbnail tho? Masterpiece. 😂 I need you to keep making em like that
Here are some indications that the Vikings had tattoos:
1: On Iceland, preserved bones of Vikings with tattoo patterns have been found.
2. In the Old Norse Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, it is described how Ragnar Lodbrok had snake and dragon motifs tattooed on his body.
3. On some picture stones from the Viking Age, such as those on Gotland, there are images of people with tattoo patterns.
4: The Oseberg Ship Tapestry shows several figures with intricate tattoo-like patterns on their bodies.
5. The Valsgärde Burial Site in Uppsala, excavations uncovered bracteates (thin metal pendants) depicting warriors with apparent tattoo patterns.
6. The famous Spillings hoard from Gotland, Sweden, includes a silver figurine of a man with detailed tattoo-like markings on his face and torso.
In fact, heliographism is becoming popular again and I've seen that people use the sunburn technique a lot to tattoo Nordic runes and ornaments from the Viking era.
Glad you are sober and I’m going through the same struggles
I have heard interpretations that Ibn Fadlan were speaking of their clothes or swords painted with various pictures. The verb خضر “to be green” is what was used. "From the tips of the toenails of each of them to his neck be greened" could be a metaphor for referring to a Frankish type of sword maybe. Also, if the Vikings were tattooed, Christians would probably lambast them for it.
I'm interested if you have a source of the claim "Christians would probably lambast them for it," as I would love to learn more about the matter. I am aware that it was not common practice in Christianity to receive tattoos historically, but it was also not common anywhere in Europe as far as I know, and previously it was only used for slaves in Rome and Greece, thought again my knowledge on this matter is far from academic. I ask because the current position that I think most adherents of the Christians faith would hold is neutral, i.e. it is neither exhorted or encouraged nor is it discouraged based on any theological position, I have seen negative positions on the matter concerning the fact that typically the representations present in tattoos are not highly Christian in nature.
That's just an opinion
@@junonismusica8670Pardon me, but you are not thinking about that quite right. Modern Christians are entirely irrelevant to the topic because of two reasons. The first one is that early Christians had VERY different beliefs from modern Christians except in two core tennets, and the second one is that modern Christians as a majority have absolutely no idea what the Bible actually says or what other Christians historically believed because they don't read Bibles. VERY few have read the Bible all the way through even once, let alone multiple times with actual comprehension and reflection. Because of that, they almost all have absolutely no idea that the Bible actually forbids tattooing and piercing in Leviticus because it was a pagan religious practice of the peoples around them asdociated with polytheism.
So the reason he says that Christians would have lambasted Vikings and Norsemen for having tattoos back then is because, at the time, the only Christian people writing about Vikings and the Norse were all scholars and scribes and such who read the Bible possibly dozens or hundreds of times in their lifetimes and 100% knew that it prohibited tattooing and body piercing/modification/cutting. So he has a good point that all those priests and monks and stuff would almost certainly mentioned tattooed heathens had there been any, especially if it were a common practice.
But modern Christians are completely different, and they ignore most of what the Bible says, so I can see where you were confused.
Norse men were lambasted in the Anglo Saxon Chronical for bathing once a week and for their hair style so why not tattoos? 😆
@@t.r.everstone7 There is far more widespread biblical literacy and competent scholarship today than at any time in history. Moreover, Protestant Christians are exhorted to do personal study, whereas other branches of the faith both past and present either don't encourage it or frown upon it due to their understanding of "private interpretation" and a general elevation of church tradition over biblically-derived doctrine (maybe not officially, but in practice scripture is subjugated to the disparate proclamations of councils).
The doctrine, whereby what is prohibited/prescribed for ancient Israelites is the same for Christians, is biblically indefensible. You would have to read the New Testament, especially Paul, with your eyes shut to come to the conclusion of the Judaizers, i.e. that a Christian must keep the Torah.
Paul clearly states that the Torah is prescriptively obsolete. Any foolish people, like the Galatians, who try to observe Torah and follow the Gospel, have fallen from grace.
It is a perfectly reasonable doctrine to be neutral about tattoos because we are under a new covenant with different restrictions and different benefits. Under the new covenant, for example, we are guaranteed life in Christ, which is eternal. Under the old covenant, the people were guaranteed a certain plot of land as well as protection from pestilences, and special divine favor. They were also threatened with curses should they go against the covenant, which they did.
I'm delighted that you led with Ibn Fadlan, this is exactly what I was looking for! I'm reading Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm and he mentions the quote about tattoos, but doesn't go into detail about it, so ran right over to your channel to see what you had to say.
Absolutely love these types of videos, disproving common myths popularized by TV shows and other media with nothing backing them other than rule of cool.
It _does_ look pretty cool tho, let's be honest.
Linguistics tells us quite a bit about what a culture does and doesn’t value. I think Dr. Crawford is spot on here
5:01 Jackson gets buzzed by a hummingbird but seamlessly continues his monolog
The Pictish people in Scotland colored their bodies with a blue dye called "woad" if my memory serves me right/
William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum from the early 12th century mentions "picturatis stigmatibus cutem insigniti" or "the skin marked with painted stigmas" but it's though he was referring to ancient Britons and various roman sources. The use of the word stigma is interesting though, because it sounds more permanent than just paint, it could imply at least knowledge of tattoos.
I think the funny thing with the Ibn Fadlan account is that they stop at the neck, yet all pop culture vikings have their tattoos on the shaved sides of their heads. Maybe they were designed to be easy to hide like yakuza ones, showing some kind of group membership you woudn't otherwise advertise.
Nice thank you for adding this information
Gee, could it possibly have just been the personal preference of the few folks who he came into contact with? See, this is the entire problem with relying solely on the attestation of one derpstick in history lol. Who bloody knows, yeah?
I don't think they were representative, I think their funerary customs would have been written about more in the christian world if they were. He was the only derpstick to write anything down in period though.
@@gunnargarisson4052His description of the funeral corresponds with Norse sources so there is no reason to dismiss him over this inconvenient detail. If there is a derpstick here it’s you.
I dont think they had any tattoos. painted probably meant similar to warpaint that was washed off. This again, has nothing to do with Vikings though.
Thank you for another informative video, sir. And you definitely had an impact on the sales of cowoby hats, no doubt in my mind!
♡ muþur (mōður, moder, mother) - same spelling as on the runestone of Harald Bluetooth (the big Jelling stone).
Excellent! Glad to know it. Thanks for sharing Doc!
Scythians were heavily tattooed. And even though the Scythians were long gone by the time of the Viking age some groups around eastern Europe that was somewhat descendent of them might have kept up the practice, and the Rus travelled a lot around where the Scythians used to live and trade.
So?
Vikings also went to the Mediterranean. How many Greek or Roman warriors were tattooed?
And yet there's more archaeological grounds to argue for muslim revert vikings than tattooed ones.
Thank you! I am so sick of the false modern presentation of Vikings.
As a Swedish history nerd, I find it hilarious when (mostly) Americans get "viking" tattoos (Vegvisr), thinking it had anything to do with vikings.
Why do you care what other people do?
Why shouldn't he? @@josephl9931
@josephl9931 Why do you care what other people do?
@@peartree8338 Are you braindead?
@@peartree8338 are you braindead
The leather wearing weird haircut tattooed Norsemen view burns me up thank you for this I’ve argued this so many time that only the Rus people had tattoos and that wasn’t even super common with them.
I'm all about "Viking/Norse inspired" things. But yeah, people screaming from the mountain tops about how they are so historical and came from the ancient world, I have to just laugh and shake my head. But, like you said, nothing wrong with having them these days, and I see nothing wrong with them being associated with the modern practice or Norse Heathenry.
I didn’t even notice Vikings in media has tattoos until you mentioned it 😅
I think it's really only started to become a popular way to depict vikings in the last 15-20 years
I think those tattoo come from a steppe culture, a culture like the Scythians or something
Britons tattooed themselves.
Look I hate LARPers as much as the next normie, but I’d bet my soul that some Vikings had tattoos. They traveled the planet assimilating what they liked from different cultures.
0:27 a wild Johan Hegg appears
That topic definitely needs to be discussed.
Most trustworthy Norse historian i know of, Jackson Crawford.
He is not a historian though.
@@PalleRasmussen How is he not a historian?
@@N0RZC he is a linguist. That is what his Ph.D. is, and what he teaches.
@@PalleRasmussen He knows a shitton of Norse history, and teaches about both their language and their culture.
He is a historian and a linguist.
@@N0RZC he is not a historian. He does not even pretend to be one. You might as well call him theologian because he also talks of old Norse religion, anthropologist because he talks of old Norse society, or archeologist because he talks of old Norse material remains.
Good choice of Grimfrost advertisement with no tattoos 😀
I just love this video - I have been skeptical to idea that vikings had tattoos - I can't read old norse, but I have read translation of the sagas and totter and saxo - Just as you say - no mention of tattoos - I just think they put tattoos on them in films, because that's what you in Hollywood connect with being tough. Thank you from Denmark - actually a Wonderfull evening - no wind, and the sun setting over Fuen (Fyn), so the great belt is fantastic.
Oh yeah, because every other culture in history has used them... You know full well that we had no reliable written account of our history... who bloody knows... but it definitely stands to reason, regardless of what any Christian writers had to discuss about us through the veils of their own agendas. Every culture used them. Individually, as today, with regard to placement and content.
I see both sides on this. I have runic tattoos, but I'm also not a person living in 970 AD, and don't claim to be. I have them because I'm a modern person, they're meaningful to me, and it's relatively common for people to get meaningful artwork tattooed onto them. On the other side of that, I totally understand that tattooing in the Viking period has no substantial evidence for being practiced. I kind of feel like I'm caught between pop culture nerds flipping out about how cool Vikings were with their tattoos, ZZ Top beards, and total berserker mode(which wasn't true for most Norse people), and history nerds trying to tell me, "Well akshually Vikings didn't have tattoos so you having them isn't historically accurate." Both groups lack social skills, in my observation and opinion. Pack sand, nerds.
THANK YOU! This may be the biggest misconception I know of
Indeed! The second to that is that Vikings were transphobic and horrible human beings! Recently, transgender Viking warrior was found and identified as a transgender! Incredible, but true!
"makes it unlikely they were a common decoration." not common, means some did.
Is it though?
@@maxdamagusbroski I don't doubt that some people may have had tattoos, but the misconception is that it was a common practice amongst the norse which there is little evidence to support, as Dr. Crawford here points out
@@PalleRasmussen just watch the video. I don't doubt some norsemen had tattoos, but the idea that it was a widespread practice is the misconception
Even Ötzi in the stone age had tattoos. There where tattoos everywhere in human history, so of course in the Viking age there had tattoos as well. Of course not as much as shown in today's movies, but of course they had.....
Certainly the Scyths who inhabited the Eurasian steppe before the Rus had tattoos which are preserved archaeologically.
Regal people of such high stock and culture wouldn’t mark their body in such a manner. Ancient Greeks never would have. Only the marauding kind from these peoples, of a more banal, reduced state would have this practice.
@@Azzury. You are assuming that "regal people of such high stock and culture" share your values ,but since you are not a "regal person" your notion of what values they held is subjective to say the least. Certainly, Maori royalty accepted tattooing, as by the way did the kings of Great Britain and Denmark in the last two centuries.
The Dr. is Back!
I think Jackson has valid points. Just that there isn`t any old norse word for tattoo is pretty convincing.
It would seem mostly pointless as well since the clothing was usually covering all of the body except the hands, neck and face, with some exceptions in the summer heat.
Not much exposure to build upon unless it's something with belief value, in which case it would've been written about.
There are eyewitness accounts of the fact that Vikings did have tattoos.
According to the accounts of Ibn Fadlan (Ibn Fadlan was a travelling ambassador in the 10th century), "they have bodies tall as date palm trees, with blond hair and ruddy skin. Each is tattooed from the tips of his toes to his neck with dark blue or dark green designs and all men are armed with an axe, sword, and long knife."
The travelling merchant Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub (also in the 10th century) noted "the widespread use of darkened makeup around the eyes by all Vikings" in addition to his writings about the fact that Vikings had tattoos.
Now, Vikings were widespread across all of Scandinavia and the northern-most parts of Europe. These eyewitness accounts were most likely not of the Norse (Norway) or the Danes (Denmark). It was most likely the Swedes (Vikings from Sweden) who had travelled down the river Volga. They are referred to as "Rus" and "Volga Bulgars" (or Varangians). Swedish Vikings had established settlements that would later become modern Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia.
@@WolfHeathen You need to actually listen to the video, he already covers this in the first part.
They may have used (borrowed) the word their slavic nieghbours used. It may be where they got the practice, as well.
@@trikepilot101they may have done lots of things that there's no good evidence for.
Thank you for this
I think you are absolutely right.
In Norway, where I am from, there are no finds to indicate that they used tattooing tools.
They have found one in Denmark but not in the rest of Scandinavia. In Russia they have found many tools for tattooing.
This was something that happened outside of Scandinavia. Culturally speaking, tattoos were seen as indecent and the first tattoo places were not opened until the 1980s in Norway.
If we had had culture in the area, they would not have started in the 1980s but existed long before this.
My grandfather got a tattoo in the 50s but he did this when he worked on a boat that went to Asia.
In Norway, we have no culture for this.
Another thing we should think about is that they were afraid of dying from disease and piercing the skin and potentially getting diseases was something they avoided.
That they painted themselves with colors made from the earth on the outside of the skin is more likely when we had bright colors on the clothes and not black/grey/white as Hollywood often presents them as.
Make-up and strong colors are probably what he describes if he met Vikings from Scandinavia.
They didn't want to die in bed they wanted to die on the battlefields and piercing the skin can make you die in bed when you don't have sterilization tools.
The probability of tattoos in Scandinavia is minimal before 1980
The two Danish awls from Vesthimmerlands Museum are from the bronze age.
As far as I know we don't have Danish tattooing tools from the viking age.
The hygiene argument is hardly valid though. Lots of people throughout the world practiced and still practice extremely extensive body modification practices without any access to modern hygiene. Fear of infection does not seem to be very prevalent.
Dear Sir, Thank you for the wonderful video. I presume then that there are no Viking-age remains with visible skin. More generally, how rare is it for remains to be so well conserved that the skin is preserved?
If the Rus were tattooed, a likely design would have been a diving falcon, like pendants found in Birka in Sweden and in southern Finland, that very much resemble the heraldic symbol of Rurik and his descendants, that eventually turned into the Ukrainian trident. There is speculation that this diving falcon was some sort of sign used by those trading on the eastern routes.
All the dudes who got covered in ink the second they found out they have 2% Nordic dna are currently shaking in confusion and anger
In Dutch we have a word called 'nors' which means 'grumpy'. Pretty goddamn funny, if you ask me.
I appreciate the videos, as a tattooist ive always tried to be careful of anything with meaning. I dont tattoo hoju on people or ta moko as they have special significance. Since your videos ive started telling people that the "viking compass" is not viking and isn't even really ancient. If they still want it im ok i just prefer that they are informed.
In these modern times you are more likely to describe someone by their lack of tattoos.
Lol. That would be me. Too vain. 😂 I couldn't figure out where to put one that wouldn't wrinkle or sag.
@@HerMajesty1 Your wrinkles/sagging is going to be ugly regardless if theres a pretty tattoo on it or not.
exactly, pureskins are too rare nowadays
Around the same time as Ibn Fadlan’s account, a Sephardic Jewish merchant (and probably also spy) from Al-Andalus named Ibn Yaqub was writing about his experiences in the Danish city of Hedeby. He also noted the widespread presence of tattoos and makeup for both men and women to ‘enhance the beauty of their eyes.’
Interesting: The Swedish translation of what Ahmad Ibn Fadlan wrote in year 921 usually is "...deras kroppar var dekorerade..." that is "....their bodies were decorated....". I do not know what the source tells, and I assume it was written in Arabic. Painted or Tattooed?
But needles that probably used for tattooing has been found i a bronze age tomb in Denmark. If that is correct, than the knowledge och use of tattoos in the Nordic will predate the Vikning era with 100 years. But there is a lot of "if".........
Maybe in the future we will find archaeological evidence of how common it was
The Norse Bronze Age ended in about 500BC. The Viking Age Started in about 800AD . Thats not 100 year difference thats a 1300 year difference. I cannot find any specific reference to the needles so I cannot find a date for them. But at a minimum there is over a millenium of time and all the cultural change that implies between the possible tattoo needles and the viking phenomenon.
@@magnusemilsson7205 the verb ibn fadlan uses is 'to be green' and idiomatically it does just stand for 'decorated' or 'beautified' in arabic. No direct synonymity to tattoos or paint. A beautifully decorated house can be 'green', a beautifully dressed woman can be 'green'. A good colloquial modern english comparison could be 'bedazzled'. *The Rus were bedazzled from head to toe*, is what ibn fadlan is actually trying to communicate. And somehow people read that as 'all vikings were tattooed'.
@@magnusemilsson7205 the arabic word used, 'green' is idiomatic for 'decorated' or 'beautified'. A beautifully decorated house or stunningly dressed woman can be 'green', no connection directly to either paints or tattoos. What Ibn Fadlan is trying to communicate is more like 'the Rus were bedazzled from chin to toe' and somehow people today will themselves into reading 'all vikings had sick full body tattoos' when nothing in the text indicates such.
nothing indicates it was tattoos. it was a taboo in those times with gentiles with everyone. considered magic connected to the dead.
Yeah never mind bog mumies with preserved tattoos, no one on record was named tattoo-face and I need a topic for this week's video. For the record the worlds oldest tattoos are seen on 'Otzi the ice man' found in the Alps.
Bog mummies and Otzi are not vikings.
That still doesn't do anything whatsoever to disprove his argument that VIKINGS didn't have tattoos...
There is so much misinformation about what Vikings actually looked like. I blame the Vikings TV show.
I recently talked with someone who literally learned his viking history from the Vikings TV show. When I told him that he shouldn't take his history lessons from TV-shows, and that the information in TV-shows are really really inaccurate, he got really mad.
I blame americans taking TV as fact.
@@pupper5580the TV show did many of the things correct though. Showed how the Scandinavian lords and kings constantly at war with eachother for the throne. That explains why scandinavians remained so few today.
@@darkside791Every show has some sort of contflict. Following the pattern of entertainment is not something to be complimented for.
Any chance they used Woad, but not in patterns or letters? Maybe that was what Ibn saw. Do they have a word for Woad?
Just a random semi-relevant (maybe) fact, I remember reading about Christians in the Balkans (specifically Croatians) having a tendency to tattoo themselves heavily, particularly women and particularly their hands. This was done well into the 20th century and allegedly stemmed from the Ottoman invasion since Muslims wouldn't kidnap children with christian symbols tattooed on them (the tattoos are mostly intricate combinations of crosses and similar geometrical patterns). If I remember correctly the practice was believed by the historian who recorded it in the 19th century, to be far older than people themselves thought it was (they thought the origin of the whole custom was the Ottoman invasion) the historian believed it was a modification of an even older practice.
Yup, my grandma, Croatian from Bosnia had tattoos all over her hands, ( crosses, fishes, dots, circles).....she did say the custom was very old and men would do that as well back in the day. but she did say it was only to repel the Turks as they deemed it unsullied. Boys were tattoed so they would not be taken as court slaves.
Yeah well by that time there were lots of tattooing traditions already present within the Ottoman Empire. Bedouins and Berbers all had a tradition to tattoo their girls in particular.
@@Ivan-gp4tr Thanks for sharing. My family are Serbs from Bosnia, but I have never heard of such a custom. Just like the Croatians they were a target of Ottoman slavery, so I am wondering why this clever tactic wasn't used by them as well. Maybe it did, but I just never heard of it. Gotta research. ;) Pozdrav!
I understand your point, but I want to say the following. The Slavs also do not have a separate word for tattoo, despite the fact that the Scythians (who participated in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs) had a widespread practice of tattooing
The THUMBNAIL. 🤣🤣🤣 With the tattoo sayin, “💖 you, Thórr!” 💀💀💀
It actually says "heart-móður" = "heart-mom"
@@meginna8354 no it doesn’t lol. It’s a 💖 heart, then Algiz (Y rune,) Uruz (U/Ooh Rune,) then Thurisaz (Unvoiced ‘th’ Rune,) then Uruz again, then Raido (R Rune.)
That spells out, “💖 Yooh Thórr.” Or, more accurately, “💖 You, Thórr!” 🤣 It’s so Girly-Pop, I love it.
@@MrAlexH1991 That's not Algiz or "Ýr" rune as it's called in younger futhark, and represented an R sound anyway. That's the Maðr rune. The runes write out Muþur, lot's of runestones have this.
@@meginna8354 Ohhhhhhhh, I see where the disconnect is coming from now. I’m looking at the tattoo from an Elder Futhark lens, while you’re reading it from a Younger Futhark lens.
But I don’t think it says, “💖 Mother,” because the Old Norse word for Mother is Móðir, not Móður. And in Younger Futhark runic writing, that last trilled ‘r’ sound at the end of a word would have been represented as an ‘yr’ rune (ᛦ) rather than with a Raid/Raidho rune (ᚱ.) So the word for “Mother,” which was “Móðir” would have been written as ᛘᚢᚦᛁᛦ, not as ᛘᚢᚦᚢᚱ. (Could still be wrong, though.)
Which is why I surmised that the tattoo on his arm didn’t say “Muthur,” or “Mothur” or “Mothórr” but rather it’s TWO words, using Elder Futhark, spelling “Yoo (a well-transliterated Modern English “you,”) and then the name of Thórr. Though there is an element that’s still out of place with my observation, too. And that’s the fact that the Proto-Germanic/Proto-Norse/Old High German/Elder-Futhark-era name of Thórr wasn’t Thórr, but Thúnraz.
@@MrAlexH1991 Móður is the accusative noun case of Móðir, all cases except nominative actually. It's also the form it takes on many runestones where it's written exactly the same as on Jackson's arm. Móður/Móðir never had Ýr rune since the final r doesn't come from a Proto Norse "z".
Are you at Boulder creek lol live been looking to meet you to autograph my books lol
Could the Norse have used body paints? I know it's not the same, but weren't there certain Celtic peoples who did, and were there not interactions between those cultures?
The Celtic people I assume you are referring to (Picts, Gaels, Britons) were using body paint prior to the middle ages during the bronze age and iron age. It is possible that the Norse used body paint during THAT time period however by the Viking age the practice had basically disappeared in all of northern Europe so it is highly unlikely that the Norse would have continued the practice after all their neighbors had stopped doing it 200 years or more ago.
@jockjammer3443 Yes, that is essentially what I was asking/ referring to.
Body art. They were artisans
Not in anything I've ever read. There are of accounts battles and weapons etc, but not of body art worn by the participants. We have them in Roman sources, hence the word: Pict. I haven't seen Dr Crawford mention it over the years either. As he said in the video there's no mention in the Sagas of tattoos, likewise there are no mention of body paints that I'm aware of. We also have several descriptions of what people wore. Harald Hardrada had a long maille shirt called "Emma". Bolli Bollarson, his retinue were dressed in scarlet. Bolli wore clothes made of fur and was covered by a scarlet cloak. The description goes on to describe his weapons and armour. Again, no mention of body art, painted or inked in.
According to Ahmad al-Tartushi (950) the people of Haithabu used make-up.
I get where you're coming from as a literary scholar, but essentially all "bog mummies" with preserved skin had some tattoos. It's more likely they were ubiquitous but discrete than entirely absent.
It's better to say that the tattoos on tv are excessive and likely inaccurate unless belonging to a group that uses them to brag and has a lot of money to use on tattoos - the Rus were very successful at trading European slaves to the middle eastern markets and likely both quite well off and relatively violent and amoral. They also had more cultural contact with other cultures that wore tattoos.
The banning of tattoos by early Christian authorities might also be taken as a kind of indirect proof. But that could have easily started with Christian contact with the celts (who did have tattoos) or another pagan group and just become a folkloreish cultural taboo among Christians. Like christians not eating horse or using public bath houses.
For some archeological findings see:
KRUTAK, LARS, and AARON DETER-WOLF, editors. Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing. University of Washington Press, 2017.
Deter-Wolf, Aaron, et al. "The world's oldest tattoos." Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 5 (2016): 19-24.
That sounds dangerously nuanced!! 😅
@@agingerbeard And reasonably well cited 🤭
I try I guess? lol
@@TheGrinningViking lol
There's no Norse bog body with tattoo and no Scandinavian bog body with tattoos and i think the far away bog bodies with tattoos are not close to the Norse in time.
You literally just argued that some cultures had tattoos at some point in history.
There are no norse "bog mummies" with tattoos. They had no word for that practice, there's no evidence that Norse people had them, so with that in mind your default position should be that they didn't have them.
I can't sight the sources but I've heard several historians say that Ibn Fadlan was prone to exaggeration in his writing, as writers do. You have a very valid point, prominent tattoos would probably have been mentioned by a culture that put so much emphasis on appearance
"for the modern Viking"
For modern pirates, raiders, thieves, and traders? I know, I know, marketing and language change, but still.
Thank you for the great videos! Still got the runes tattooed cause I like'em!
Has anyone really said they have tattoos? And how can you actually prove that? I want to see where to find that they didnt
@IFeelQuiteHungry "the burden of proof would be on you to provide evidence to support the claim." Well can you prove that vikings did not not have tattoos?
"All the Doc is saying here, in standard scientific procedure, is that no substantive evidence exists to support such a claim therefore we have no reason to believe it." There are no evidence that support that vikings did not have any tattoos at all.
@IFeelQuiteHungry to me saying they didn't have tattoos is a statement of fact without any proof of that. I do not have to prove anything! I didn't make a truth claim. Simply what is the evidence of it. It would ve like saying vikings were all bald without being asked to prove it. I like this guy's videos he has done a lot of research. I don't agree with everything he says but that is why I asked
@@tomchristensen2914no, the statement is "There is no evidence to indicate they had tattoos as we understand them."
From there, the only substantiated perspective is that they did not have tattoos.
@thomaswillard6267 wrong again read the title In Parenthesis even. Which is what my reaponse was to.." VIKINGS DIDN'T HAVE TATTOOS""... literally in the title.. anyway I am not here to argue. My family is from Copenhagen Denmark and I am not illiterate in this topic one of the rules for the statement yiu cant prove a negative is if you cant prove it beyond the reasonable doubt then you also cant prove it's not true either... so please enjoy your day.. Skol
To quote Mrs. Simpson on my """"viking""""-inspired tattoos (including the horrible vegvisir) "I just think they're neat".
When someone tells me "im getting traditional Norse tattoos" I always change the subject quickly to avoid the 5 hour argument that usually ensues after.
Nobody has ever told you that, keep lying buddy
Let me guess you're an American?
I'm a reenactor and I'm one of two in our group that doesn't have tattoos 😪
Good for you.
Tattooing must have been pretty rare in Europe until the 18th C, when we adopted a Polynesian word for it.
Huge waves must have been rare in Europe too, then, until Westerners visited Japan and discovered the word Tsunami.
@@alwynvorster3447 Shockingly we don't have a lot of tsunamis given that we're miles from any oceanic plate.
Nonsense, there were plenty of earthquakes and tsunamis in medieval Europe, including:
1303 Crete Earthquake and Tsunami
1169 Sicily Earthquake and Tsunami
1343 Tyrrhenian Sea Tsunami
1456 Southern Italy Earthquake and Tsunami
@@alwynvorster3447 We did. We called them "Tidal waves". Incorrect, nothing to do with tides, but people didn't know that.
@wulfgreyhame6857 And? Europeans might similarly had another term for it, like "skin paint". The fact that there's no specialized word for something proves absolutely nothing. See?
Beautiful background location🤍
Is there a native Slavic word for tattoos? If we are arguing linguistically that it was a practice that the Rus adopted in Slavic lands because there is no word for it in there language is there one for it in the language of the people they adopted it from?
Nope. No tattoo word in Slavic languages. Although it was a common practice came from Scythians. Maybe there had been a word but didn’t reach us
no word and no tattoos among Western Slavs reported
in russian the word for tatto is "nakolka" what translates to something like percings or punctures, which sugests that it come from times before modern tatto machines existed
I've read this book and it is a riveting read. Love how ibn fadlan describes different cultures especially how they mourn the dead.
well, ötzi had tatoos. now we only have to bridge a few thousand years, a few thousand kilometers, and a minor number of logical gaps. but those can be overcome, we just really have to try, right? :) joke aside, very valuable video, thanks you said that. is important (even without subject)
ötzi wasn't a viking, he was found in the alps.
Interesting. Being a non-tattooed person i can now claim it as part of my Viking heritage. Thanks!
I looked up the younger futhark and transliterated the runic text on the thumbnail. Sir you got a chuckle out of me.
I knew there was a joke there. What did he write on his arm?
@@coolhandluke212 It transliterates as: MUTHUR. So, my guess is it's simply: "❤Mother" :D
You had to look it up? Lol oh well, at least you did your due diligence. Cheers brother 👍
Could it be a miss translation from a full body tattoo to a full body garment
Such a fascinating topic, I never knew that the Rus were partially Norse-speaking. I wonder if the practice of getting tattoos would have been more common in later mediaeval Scandinavia or if it never caught on at all.
They were literally descended from Norse adventurers and traders who had pushed inland from the Baltic coast and eventually settled around Kiev.
I wouldn't call the rus a "people". At least not a culturally unified one.
The term appears to have originally been an exonym (which etymologically, most historians agree stems from the swedish region Roslagen) for a variety of different people, norse, slavic and finnic alike, none of which appear to have thought of themselves as "The Rus", at least not for the majority of the viking age to my knowledge.
What is interesting however, is that in textual sources, norse names are completely dominant in the earliest texts detailing the "rus", and only gradually become more slavic over time.
We know it was done in central Asia by the Scythians.
@@hjalmarrsviakappa9666 It's a good point. I think early on they definitely saw themselves as Norse. The term "Rus" was give to them by outsiders. Their culture definitely evolved over time though until the term "Kievan Rus" did become an identity of it's own. It just took a few centuries.
The Finns still call Sweden Ruotsi. It is believed that the words Ruotsi, Rus and Roslagen (the coastal area just north of Stockholm) all have the same origin. And then both Russia, Belarus and Ruthenia have been named for the Rus that settled there.
Now, the Rus that originally settled in Novgorod, Staraja Ladoga and Kiev were Norse and at least their leaders probably came from Roslagen. But they were always a minority and gradually became integrated with the Slavic people of the area. The Rus nobility kept intermarrying with the Swedish nobility for centuries though. Early in the viking age the Rus were definitely Norse. Later on they were more of a Slavic people with partially Norse heritage.
You're breaking my heart here doc
Love the recent silly trend on the thumbnails
Informative video! Seeing the helm of awe way too many times on "viking" tattoos. If im getting one its gonna be runestone inspired serpents in nice colours!
Cheers!
I have to laugh, I love the way you piss people off with hard cold facts. You have presented here a very solid argument which no doubt will upset a lot of folk...and will no doubt be completely ignored by both consumers and vendors in the name of "cool".
Except he doesn't use absolute language, he says "may not have", and "they weren't common" not "they didn't exist".
@@maxdamagusbroski Crawford defense crowd is so wild at times. This videos title is clickbait, then he goes back on that claim to say "well they probably didnt have tattoos" while trying for some reason to debunk contemporary writing that mentions vikings have tattoos. Like what the hell is going on here? Is this some American thing I'm not understanding, it seems so bizarre.
Excellent video, for an "old, grumpy man." 😆🤣 I really appreciate watching you and reading your books, and getting a thoughtful, logical, reasoned commentary. Keep up the good work!
If you, are always swaddled in heavy clothing, why would you *ever*, even think, of marking your skin up with cool designs? Like, Scandinavia is cold. The sea is cold. When are you gonna be showing off your tattoos?
How cold do you think it is during the summer there? Unless you are up near the arctic circle it is not freezing year round. Parts of Norway can hit the high 70'sF (24+C) in modern times. The Viking Age also falls during the Medieval Warm Period which saw the European continent having comparable temperatures to the mid to late 1900's and early 2000's. Do southern Norwegians, Swedes, or Danish people wear cold weather clothes in July or August nowadays? The average North Atlantic temps were 1C warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than they were as measured in 1996. It may not be as long as a North American summer, but summer is summer and it gets warm.
The sauna, of course!
Until Professor Crawford tells us they were not a thing either, Berserkers fought in something between little and no clothing. If tattoos were a Scandinavian thing Berserkers in permanent war paint might have been a place to find them. But from the sound of it no descriptions of those either.
@@francesconicoletti2547 Hence, why they would be notable! Fighting in little to nothing marks them out as separate from what is considered the norm, meaning that most fought while clothed or semi-clothed. Fighting is also not something that one does most of the time. A brief period of less clothing, especially during high activity, wouldn't mean that they're wearing very little all the time.
Human practices of skin marking are wider spread the better the weather is, such as scarification in Africa and South America, or tattooing, in Polynesia.
@@dhuh6760 Out of all the arguements I have seen on this video, "It's cold so it would be illogical for them to take tattoos!" is literally the dumbest, most braindead american take I have read.
Regarding Ibn Fadlan, I find it just as valuable analyzing the contemporary and cultural context of the historian themself as much as the subject of their study. That too yields interesting historical insights.
I really don't get why Ibn Fadlan is concidered a liar when it comes to the Rus. Some things he says like their" method/lack" of bathing is confirmed from anglo-saxon texts so why are we doubtful of everything else he wrote?
Tattoos were in the English speaking world before the word tattoo entered English. There’s mention of Jerusalem crosses, or Jerusalem letters, referring to tattoos people would get in the holy land as part of their pilgrimage
And the druids, celts and picts before that.
There was not a standardized word for it, but the words "painting" and "pricking" were used to describe that practice. There's no such references in old Norse texts.
I think that the modern fantasy viking look is influenced by the Christian European identity.
Christianization was basically Europe culturally colonizing itself, that's why many conservative people think of Christianity as a Western European thing when it's actually a foreign and politically imposed religion that displaced the Indigenous beliefs of its new believers.
Therefore, the Christian Anglo-Saxons (whose grandparents were polytheists) are portrayed with stereotypically Medieval European clothes, ornaments and hairstyles, while the Norse, who are polytheists, are portrayed with aesthetics that don't usually give a European vibe such as braids, shaved mohawks, leather jackets, face war paints and some other bunch of Native-American inspired stuff.
This makes sense. you would have thought that if tattoos were a common thing amongst the Norseman, that we would have seen historical writers mentioning and or describing it. Especially since Christianized Anglo Saxons could have capitalized on key physical differences between them and their pagan invaders, in their writing.
Can we appreciated the nature in the background; I mean god damn that's some lovely forest and creek!
Some guys just want to pretend to be brutal Norse warriors, growing beard, making tattoos with symbols related to their "aesthetics" - this is their demands, so industry gives them depiction in pop-culture art to sell more products. Some just want a justification to their hidden regrets about tattoos, but it question of psychology, not history.
This is an interesting take on the subject. Especially the idea that it is from foreign influence. It makes me think of the Picts a bit since the Romans described them as being “painted”. I can’t help but wonder if tattooing in Europe was perhaps used more as a medicine for relieving arthritic pain(as believed was the case for Otzi the Iceman) as opposed to being for decoration.