Viking Burial Jewellery: What the Graves Tell Us

In August 1903, a farmer named Knut Rom, digging into a low mound on his family land near Tønsberg in southern Norway, struck oak six metres down. The oak was the prow of a ship. The ship was twenty-one metres long, carved from a single tree, and had been buried sometime around 834 AD with two women inside it. The mound above the ship was forty metres wide. The clay had preserved everything: the wood, the cloth, the food sacrificed to the women, the wagons, the sledges, the animal bones, the carved wooden poles, the household tools, and the jewellery. The bodies themselves had survived as bone and tooth and fragmentary tissue.

It was the most spectacular Viking burial ever found in Scandinavia, and it remains so a century and a quarter later. What was unusual about the Oseberg ship was not its size, which was modest by Viking longship standards, or its quantity of precious metal, which was actually rather restrained. What was unusual was the preservation. The mound had effectively sealed everything inside it in airless clay, and what came out, when the Norwegian archaeological team excavated the burial in 1904 and 1905, gave the most complete picture we will ever have of how a Viking-age burial actually worked.

What I find worth saying about Viking burial jewellery, and the reason it remains genuinely interesting territory rather than simply a museum-cabinet subject, is that the Vikings were unusually explicit about why they buried their dead with the things they did. The grave goods were not, primarily, decoration of the corpse, nor were they treasure intended to remain in the ground. They were a kind of provision for the next life — a portable wealth that the dead person was expected to use in the afterlife economy, to pay for passage to Hel or Valhalla, to maintain status in the company of the gods, and to remain identifiable as themselves after death. The jewellery, the silver arm rings, the bead strands, the brooches: these were what a person took with them, in the most practical sense the Vikings could think about. They were what the dead would have to spend on the other side.

This is the framework. The rest is what we have found.

Why the Vikings buried gold

The Viking belief structure regarding death is not as completely documented as later Christian theology, and the picture we have is reconstructed from sagas written down centuries after the actual practices ended. What is clear from the texts that survive (the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, and the various sagas) is that the Viking afterlife was understood as a continuation of social life. There were several possible destinations: Valhalla for warriors who died in battle, Folkvangr for warriors claimed by Freyja, Hel for those who died of illness or old age, and various other realms for specific causes of death. In none of these destinations was the dead person stripped of identity or possessions. They arrived as they had been in life, with what they had brought.

This is the practical theology behind the burial deposits. A high-status woman buried with her jewellery would arrive in the afterlife with that jewellery and the social standing it represented. A warrior buried with his weapons would arrive armed. The economic logic was that of moving house: you took your useful and your prestigious things with you. The afterlife was elsewhere, but not very far away. The jewellery you wore in death was the jewellery you wore in the next world.

This is one of the more interesting frameworks any culture has produced for thinking about why we put precious metals into the ground.

The materials

Viking-age jewellery, across the period from roughly 800 to 1100 AD, was overwhelmingly silver. Gold appears in particular high-status burials (Oseberg has some; the Hoen Hoard of 1834 is almost entirely gold) but the bulk of Viking wealth, day to day and at burial, moved in silver. The metal arrived in Scandinavia primarily through trade, with substantial quantities coming from the Islamic Caliphate (specifically from silver mines in modern Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, exchanged for Northern slaves and furs along the eastern trade routes through Russia).

Silver functioned as both jewellery and currency, and this dual nature is one of the most distinctive features of Viking material culture. A piece of silver was simultaneously an ornament and a unit of exchange, weighed against standard balance weights and cut up as needed for transactions. The technical term for this is hack silver: silver objects that have been chopped into fragments for use as currency. Most major Viking hoards contain a significant proportion of hack silver alongside intact pieces. The Galloway Hoard, excavated from a field in Dumfries and Galloway in 2014, contains both complete arm rings and substantial quantities of hack silver in the same deposit.

Beyond silver, Viking-age jewellery used amber from the Baltic coasts, glass beads (much of which was produced in Frisia or imported from further afield), garnets (often re-used from earlier Roman or Migration-period pieces), gold for the highest-status work, and various organic materials including bone, walrus ivory, and jet. Gemstones in the modern sense (faceted coloured stones) were rare. The Viking aesthetic favoured worked metal, particularly cast and engraved silver, over set stones.

The pieces

Viking-age burials, across the entire period and geography, contain a relatively standard set of jewellery types that recur with sufficient consistency to be recognised as a coherent visual culture.

The oval brooch (often called the "tortoise brooch" in older archaeological literature) is the single most diagnostic piece of Viking women's jewellery. These are large oval cast-bronze or silver brooches, worn in pairs at the shoulders to fasten the straps of the over-dress. The pairs were connected by strands of glass beads or silver pendants spanning the chest. A well-furnished woman's grave from the ninth or tenth century will almost always include a pair of oval brooches and at least one bead strand.

Arm rings in silver, of various weights and styles, were the most important Viking male and female ornament after the brooches. The rings were also currency: their weight was standardised to known units, and they were broken up into hack silver as needed for transactions. The largest hoards (Cuerdale, Hoen, Galloway) contain dozens of arm rings, often partially fragmented.

Thor's hammer pendants (Mjölnir) became increasingly common in the tenth century, particularly in the period when Christianity was beginning to expand into Scandinavia. The pendants are usually small, cast in silver, and worn on a chain or cord around the neck. The conventional reading is that they functioned as religious markers distinguishing pagan Norse identity from incoming Christianity, although the relationship is more complex than that simple opposition suggests, with Thor's hammer pendants appearing in graves that also contain Christian crosses.

Bead strands (typically glass, amber, carnelian, and rock crystal) appear in nearly every well-furnished female burial. The beads were imported across long distances, with individual strands sometimes including beads from Britain, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, and beyond. The bead strand was a portable record of trade contact, and its complexity was itself a form of status.

Penannular brooches, particularly the larger and more ornate examples, were primarily male jewellery, used to fasten cloaks. The largest examples (the Tara Brooch in Dublin, the Hunterston Brooch in Edinburgh) are Insular Celtic rather than strictly Viking but were appropriated, traded, and re-used within the Viking economy.

Bj 581, and the gender question

In 1878, the Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe excavated a tenth-century grave on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren, near modern Stockholm. The grave was catalogued as Bj 581. It contained the skeleton of a single individual, along with a remarkable quantity of military equipment: a sword, an axe, two spears, twenty-five arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and the remains of two horses. The grave was the most thoroughly equipped warrior burial then known at Birka, the major Viking-age trading centre on Björkö. The conventional assumption, supported by every authority on Viking archaeology for the next 140 years, was that the warrior was male.

In 2014, the skeleton was tested by morphological analysis by Anna Kjellström at Stockholm University. The skeleton's pelvic and mandibular morphology read as female. The result was sufficiently surprising that further testing was commissioned. In 2017, a team led by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and Maja Krzewińska published genetic analysis confirming the result: Bj 581 had two X chromosomes. The warrior in the most fully-equipped warrior grave at Birka had been a woman.

The finding produced a substantial reorganisation of the assumptions Viking scholars had been operating with for over a century. The Bj 581 individual was not buried with the kind of jewellery typically associated with high-status Viking women: no oval brooches, no extensive bead strands. She was buried with weapons, in the kind of grave assemblage that, until 2017, had been read as definitionally male. The implications for how Viking gender, identity, and burial practice should be understood are still being worked through.

What the Bj 581 reframing demonstrates is that the picture from grave goods, however carefully reconstructed, is always provisional. Each century brings new science to old material, and the assumptions that seemed safe in 1878 do not survive 2017.

The Galloway Hoard

The most important Viking-age archaeological find in Britain since the Cuerdale Hoard of 1840 was made on Church of Scotland land in Dumfries and Galloway on the afternoon of 1 September 2014. A metal detectorist named Derek McLennan, who had spent two years searching the area systematically, located the corner of a deposit that proved, on excavation, to be a hoard of over a hundred Viking-age objects. The material had been buried as a single coherent deposit, wrapped in textile, and sealed in clay. The preservation was extraordinary. Organic materials, which almost never survive Viking-age burials, came out of the Galloway Hoard intact: silk fragments, leather, the cord still attached to a pectoral cross.

The hoard's most striking object is a silver pectoral cross of Anglo-Saxon style, of a date and craftsmanship comparable to the great Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical metalwork of the eighth and ninth centuries. Around the cross, the hoard contained Viking arm rings, hack silver, gold ingots, a Carolingian silver vessel (probably looted from a Frankish church and used as a container for the rest of the hoard), and small personal objects, including beads from as far afield as Persia. The hoard, in other words, is an inventory of the trade and raiding networks of the Viking economy in roughly 900 AD.

The Galloway Hoard was acquired by National Museums Scotland in 2017 for £1.98 million, raised through public funds, lottery support, and a substantial public donation campaign. It is currently on permanent display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, with portions also held at the Kirkcudbright Galleries closer to where it was found. The conservation programme, which is still ongoing, has produced detailed publications on individual objects and continues to generate new findings about Viking-age trade as analysis advances.

What the buried things actually tell us

Across a thousand years of Viking-age burials, what survives in the ground is a remarkably consistent picture: a society in which jewellery functioned as wealth and as identity, in which status was carried into death along with the means of expressing it, in which trade networks reached from the Atlantic to the Caspian and produced objects that travelled four thousand miles to reach the burial mound, and in which the distinction between male and female social roles was less rigid than later European assumptions suggested.

The Vikings buried their dead with what they had been in life. The Oseberg ship burial held two high-status women with the trappings of a great household. The Bj 581 grave held a high-status woman with the trappings of a warrior. The Galloway Hoard preserves a chapel and a portfolio in the same hole. The jewellery is the most legible part of all of this because it survives. Most things buried in the ninth century have not.

Modern resonance

Contemporary jewellery design has, particularly in the last fifteen years, drawn substantially on Viking-age vocabulary. Scandinavian designers (Ole Lynggaard, Sophie Bille Brahe at moments, several Danish silversmiths) have produced collections explicitly referencing Viking arm rings, Thor's hammer pendants, and braided silver wire. The British designer Castro Smith has produced engraved signet work that draws on Anglo-Saxon and Viking ornament. The broader move toward heavier silver work, asymmetric forms, and what designers occasionally call "honest metal" (heavy, hand-finished, visibly worked) has its visual roots in the period.

The Vikings would, in some sense, have recognised the impulse. They were, like contemporary jewellery designers, a culture that placed substantial value on metal that had been worked by hand, that showed the evidence of being made, and that carried weight in both the literal and the social sense. They would also, perhaps, have appreciated that the work continues, eleven hundred years after they themselves stopped putting things in the ground.

Frequently asked questions

What jewellery did Vikings wear?

Viking-age jewellery, across the period from roughly 800 to 1100 AD, was primarily silver, with significant use of glass beads, amber, garnets, gold (in high-status pieces), and organic materials. The most common pieces were oval brooches (worn in pairs at the shoulders by women), silver arm rings (worn by both genders, also functioning as currency), bead strands (predominantly female), Thor's hammer pendants, and penannular brooches (predominantly male, used to fasten cloaks). Faceted gemstones in the modern sense were rare; the Viking aesthetic favoured worked metal over set stones.

Why did Vikings bury their dead with jewellery?

Viking burial practice reflected a belief that the dead carried their possessions and social status into the afterlife. Jewellery, alongside weapons, household goods, and animal sacrifices, was provided to ensure that the deceased arrived in the next world with appropriate identity, wealth, and status. The afterlife was understood as a continuation of social life rather than a transformation, which meant that what you had been in life determined what you would be in death.

What is the Oseberg ship burial?

The Oseberg ship burial is a Viking-age burial discovered in 1903 near Tønsberg, Norway, dating to approximately 834 AD. The burial contained two women interred in a 21-metre oak ship, beneath a 40-metre mound that preserved the contents in airless clay. The find is the most fully-preserved Viking-age burial known and is the primary source for our understanding of Viking material culture at the highest social levels. The contents are displayed at the Museum of the Viking Age in Oslo.

What was the Galloway Hoard?

The Galloway Hoard is a Viking-age hoard of over a hundred objects, discovered by metal detectorist Derek McLennan on 1 September 2014 in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The hoard contained silver arm rings, hack silver, gold ingots, an Anglo-Saxon pectoral cross, a Carolingian silver vessel, and substantial organic material including silk and leather. It is currently held by National Museums Scotland and displayed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

What was the Birka warrior grave?

The Birka warrior grave, catalogued as Bj 581, is a tenth-century Viking-age burial on the island of Björkö in Sweden. The grave contained an individual buried with extensive weaponry (sword, axe, two spears, twenty-five arrows, two horses). In 2014, morphological analysis indicated the skeleton was female; in 2017, genetic analysis confirmed the result. The finding produced a substantial reassessment of Viking gender roles and burial practice.

What were Thor's hammer pendants?

Thor's hammer pendants (Mjölnir) are small cast silver pendants in the shape of the god Thor's hammer, worn on cords or chains. They became increasingly common in the tenth century during the period of Christianisation, and are conventionally interpreted as religious markers of Norse pagan identity. The relationship to Christian iconography is more complex than simple opposition, with pendants and crosses occasionally appearing in the same grave.

What is hack silver?

Hack silver is the technical term for silver objects (typically arm rings, brooches, or vessels) that have been deliberately cut into fragments for use as currency. The Viking economy operated on weight-based silver value, with standard balance weights used to measure exchanges. Hack silver allowed precious-metal objects to be broken down for transactions of varying sizes. Most major Viking hoards contain substantial quantities of hack silver alongside intact pieces.