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  • Les Berserkir: Les guerriers-fauves dans la Scandinavie ancienne, de l’Âge de Vendel aux Vikings (VIe–XIe siècle) by Vincent Samson
  • Thomas DuBois
Vincent Samson. Les Berserkir: Les guerriers-fauves dans la Scandinavie ancienne, de l’Âge de Vendel aux Vikings (VIe–XIe siècle). Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011. Pp. 447

In his carefully researched and clearly argued doctoral dissertation from the Université Lille 3—Charles de Gaulle, Vincent Samson examines the varied evidence surrounding the concept of berserkir, “guerriers-fauves” or wild warriors, including skaldic and eddic poetry, runic inscriptions, saga accounts of varying styles and natures, and artistic representations. Samson argues that a distinct warrior/cultic class or status existed under the designation berserkir in Vendel and Viking Age Scandinavian cultures, with roots in earlier eras reaching back into the Indo-European past. It was a status that, Samson suggests, declined in the era following Christianization, a decline reflected by changes in the portrayal of berserkir in saga accounts.

As Samson outlines in his study’s opening chapter, scholarship on the ambiguous and often contentious topic of the berserkr has tended toward opposing extremes (p. 28). On the one hand are “excessively enthusiastic” scholars who readily combine evidence from differing eras, geographic contexts, and textual traditions to arrive at a unified, transcendent image of a persistent berserkr institution. At the other extreme are “hypercritical” scholars who emphasize the fragmentary nature of the evidence regarding the berserkir, and who regard figures like Snorri Sturluson or even skaldic poets like Þorbjörn Hornklofi as misguided and imaginative synthesizers, misled by their Christian or continental understandings of a remote pre-Christian past and influenced by images and ideas contained in continental Christian literature. Samson aims to situate his analyses between these extremes, distinguishing carefully between items of extant evidence, but with the ultimate goal of synthesizing a reasonable portrait of the cultural and religious institution(s) that the evidence seems to describe. As Samson notes, his intent is not to provide definitive answers, but rather to offer a considered middle ground between the scholarly extremes and their at times hyperbolic or vitriolic proponents.

Samson begins his examination by weighing the evidence for each of the two primary etymologies that exist for the term berserkr. Medieval Icelandic writers like Snorri, as well as early nineteenth-century philologists and later “hypercritical” analysts, read the root ber- as “bare,” linking it either to the image in Tacitus and other Classical sources of Germanic warriors entering battle naked, or to warriors bereft of weapons or dressed in only a tunic. Most twentieth-century scholars, in contrast, read the root as an obsolete term for the bear, seeing the term as a reference to the wearing of bear skins in battle, a parallel to the wearing of wolf skins signaled by [End Page 368] the somewhat less common, but occasionally co-occurring term úlfheðinn. Samson proposes a historical progression, in which the term berserkr, and the associated state of fury berserksgangr, would have referred in an era prior to the Viking Age to the ceremonial wearing of bear pelts, a cultic act apparently prominent only in Norway (p. 88) and modelled on an older pan-Germanic practice of donning wolf or other animal skins. Both terms would represent Norse adaptations of the concept of animal-costumed warriors attested more broadly in the Migration era and having ancient Indo-European antecedents. Samson sees the Migration era as the time in which an elite warrior class of this nature developed or expanded in Germanic societies, integrally linked to ideas of royal sovereignty and to the god Óðinn/Wotan. Archaeological evidence like the Torslunda plaques support this development and suggest a fused cultic and military function of berserkr figures in the sixth and seventh centuries.

By the time of the skaldic Haraldskvæði, and the court of King Harald Fairhair, this warrior class was still well ensconced, but the terms berserkr and úlfheðinn had come to be understood not as references to costume, but primarily as descriptions of the fierceness and beastlike qualities of the designated warrior group, men who were said to growl and...

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