[Kevin Coleman M.]

Hello, all. I was doing a bit of reading on a plate in an osprey book that depicted a 10th century Scandinavian mercenary who is idenified as most likely a Swede. He is shown wearing lamellar armor, and in explanation, the book sites a piece of antler found in Birka that depicts a warrior in a helmet and lamellar armor. I am wondering if anyone has a photo of this piece on file, as I cannot seem to find it.

[Dan Howard]

The lamellar at Birka is Central Asian in style - perhaps Khazar. It isn't possible to tell who wore it because it was found in what is thought to be a workshop rather than a grave. There were a lot of foreigners at Birka at the time so there is no reason to think that the armour was worn by a Scandinavian.

[Matthew Amt]

[Bram Verbeek]

There is reference to a "spangabrynja" which could be scale mail, but it was deemed inferior, and it's literary only. People also use the Varangian guard as a source, a bit more often than realistic in my opinion. Birka was very much a trade hub, even a Buddha was found there, so an isolated piece of armour should be watched a bit warily.

[Mart Shearer]

[Dan Howard]

[Bram Verbeek]

[Kristjan Runarsson]

A few things about the Birka Lamellar. There is no way of determining whether those plates all came from one cuirass or more of them. Since they found several types of plates it's highly likely the plates came form more than one cuirass but there is no proof of it that will satisfy hard line skeptics. People have offered several explanations of the Birka find. Firstly that it was a souvenir brought back by somebody from an eastern campaign, basically a wall hanger. A second explanation is that the people at Birka hired Khazar mercinaries to garrison Birka. That sounds mildly plausible until you take into account that the Khazars lived in an area between the Black and Caspian seas. Personally, I'm inclined to go with the third explanation based on Occam's Razor and claim that firstly, if you acquire an expensive suit of armour you are going to use it. Armour was expensive, four marks of silver for a mail coat, two marks for a helmet, one mark of silver for a bargain basement sword, four marks for a really good one, more for a top notch sword. If you had armour worth a kilogram or more of silver you used it, you did not hang it on a wall. Secondly, if you find lamellar armour in a town in the middle of Sweden the people using it were probably Swedes and not mercenaries from thousands of kilometres away.

http://www.blue-salamander.com/projects/armor.html


As for Spangabrynja there are also three theories that I am aware of to explain that. But before we dive into that it is worth diving into what the word 'spangabrynja' actually means. The word 'brynja' is the generic norse word for armour even though many people think it means chain mail or maille to appease the purists (curiously enough it is also a female name). The word 'spöng' basically means an elongated plate so 'spangabrynja' literally translates as 'armour made of elongated plates'. Interpret that as you wish.

The word 'spangabrynja' could thus be a reference to limb armour in the Vendel style. This kind of splint armour was used by the Byzanties during the Viking period and there is a strong possibility that it was still in use during the Viking period:



This set of greaves and arm protectors qualify as 'spangabrynja' since they are made of leather backed elongated plates.

The second explanation is that 'spangabrynja' means lamellar armour for obvious reasons and that is the only explanation that is backed up by a shred of evidence even if that evidence is restricted to Sweden. So why are spangabrynjur mentioned in the sagas? Well a lot of Iclanders seem to have been bumming around in the Baltic area trading and raiding (Egils saga for example). There are a number of swords that have been found in Iceland that are clearly of Swedish (Gotlandic) manufacture, same goes for sword chapes so if this was the case and Lamellar armour enjoyed a moderate degree of popularity in Sweden it is perfectly possible that a few cuirasses eventually made their way to Iceland and eventually Greenland (mentioned in Grænlendingasaga). Additionally we know that some Icelanders served in they Byzantine army where Lamellar was used and a few of these guys achieved a considerable rank. Finally Icelanders, Swedes and Norweginas are known to have spent time in the lands of the Kievan Rus and even a few Norwegians/Icelanders may have served in Rus armies where lamellar would have been in some use.

The third explanation for 'spangabrynja' is that these sagas were written up around the Sturlungaöld, the period of the Icelandic civil wars in the mid 13th century and what the chroniclers are describing is not 200-300 year old Viking age armour but rather armour and arms of the 13th century. One of the heroes of Laxdæla is for example described as wearing a kettle hat that was very popular in Iceland/Norway/Denmark/Sweden from the 13th and into the 16th century but did not exist during the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. So why is it unthinkable that 'spangabrynja' may refer to a coat of plates similar to those found at Visby and which were coming into fashion at that time? The only real problem with this theory is that such relatively new military technology could have made it's way to a backwater like Iceland so quickly but it is not by any means unreasonable. After all, even modern backwater conflicts pretty quickly draw arms merchants peddling relatively modern guided weapons in an attempt to secure business and I'm sure this was the same in the 13th century.



My take on Viking age armour (feel free to disagree) is that:

1. Armour was not very common among the Norse. Despite the absence of evidence I think that by far the most common armour among vikings was helmets. If you ever build a time machine and find that your first test flight landed you in the middle of a real Viking age battle you will quickly find out that, unlike modern re-enactments, the air is full of rocks, arrows, spears, hatchets, and anything else that can be throw. On top of that you are allowed to stab people in the face and brain them over the skull. If you have a good axe and enough shields your next priority is to protect your head.
   
2. The by far most common type of torso armour was chain mail. During the first half of the viking age I doubt more that 5-10% of warriors wore such armour and no no more than 10-15% wore helmets.
   
3. Lamellar armour was worn mostly in the Baltic but it may have appeared being worn by a few warriors who had served under Swedish kings, Byzantine Emperors, Kievan Rus kings or who had raided in the Baltic.
   
4. Armour became more common as the period of christianisation drew closer.
   
5. Do not take literally everything you read in the Sagas. The grand tradition of Norse storytelling not withstanding, and blasphemous as it may be, I have serious trouble believing that an oral tradition could have preserved details of people's exact equipment, the type and colour of their clothes and the construction details of the armour over two or three centuries.
   

If you are going to portray a group of, say, 20 Norwegian/Icelandic/Danish vikings of the period from 950 to 1050 you should have maybe 10 guys with helmets, 5 wearing mail and maybe one or two wearing Lamellar. The later the period the more armour would have been worn. Only towards the very end of this period, i.e. the decades leading up to 1066 would you would have had most people in Viking armies wearing some kind of amour.

[Mark Lewis]

[Kristjan Runarsson]

[Niels Just Rasmussen]

The whole discussion about armour (having them or not) in the viking world is really so speculative, because so very few fragments have been found.
The Iron Age Hedegaard bog find of a chain shirt where chemical composition shows likely a local Danish production and thus it is clear that mail armour was produced locally for a long time.
See this thread: http://myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=31490&highlight=

Bog Iron (Myremalm) is prevalent in all of Scandinavia (especially Denmark were some estimations points to 25% of the country being boglands in the very wet Iron Age). Myremalm production was used in Denmark from 500 BC to 1600 AD.
The cost and time of making armour makes it reasonable that only a few warriors wore them - the reason is in my opinion not only wealth but rather restriction of access to the elite craftsman.

It seems that elite craftsmen were tied to "central places" already from the Iron Age (Gudme & Himlingøje) and it probably continued into the Viking Age. The craftsmen at Hedeby were actually war booty from the sacking by Danish King Gudfred of the Scandinavian/Vendish town of Reric in 808; so it really supports the notion that elite craftsmen in the Scandinavian world were high-prestige thralls (having a patron and not supported by their own subsistence). They were probably restricted in their movements to the town or central place and provided the local (or major) ruler with weapons, armour and jewelry. These goods were then distributed to his hird or given as alliance gifts. It is not as strange at it first sounds as Venetian glass makers were not allowed to leave the Venetian republic.
A ruler's ability to keep elite warriors around him depended on his generosity with gifts. Not being able to provide that, he would immediately be known as a miser and lose all his prestige and honour and his men would leave him; so it would be reckless not so forcefully control his craftsmen.
The legend of the smith Völund being hamstrung could be seen as a reality, when rulers took more draconian measures to control the craftsmen. His revenge shows that going so far could backfire.

My point is that likely most armour and weapons in the Scandinavian viking age (at least until around 1000 AD) were gifts from rulers to their retainers. You didn't have an open marked for elite crafts and anyways hird retainers were given gifts, food and lodgings (and eventually land on retirement at least seen on Danish runestones) & not receiving any pay to "go shopping" with.
As some retainers travelled from service to service looking for a ruler of fame and "luck", they could over time have a quite eccentric mix of equipment culturally (probably the more exotic and the more unique and lavished the better). Chamber graves of elite warriors in Denmark during the Jelling dynasty before Harald Bluetooth changed to christianity seems to support that what you also find in Birka.
With Canute the Great we see a development towards paid soldiers in the retinue! From this pay they could buy their own equipment in towns with now free craftsmen (York for instance), though gift giving would likely still have been the norm among some of the "hird" soldiers. The transition is unclear.

So the armour mentioned from Birka could very likely be a gift to a warrior in service in the east at some point, that had attached himself to Birka.

Alternatively:
Whether this armour is a war booty is harder to say. It really seems that weapons - especially swords - was "souled". Meaning that parts of the soul of each owner went into the sword. "Killing" of blades is likely the explanation for the twisted blades we sometimes find in graves.
So was armour regarded as "souled"? It seems not really, since they are very rarely found in graves - probably regarded as clothing. So it was maybe just discarded when worn out (or remelted).
So it is much more possible that a warrior to steal armour as a trophy, than it would be with weapons..... Then again it would bring you much more prestige to wear an armour given as a gift from someone famous, then an armour you stole from some dead guy.

About the owner being Khazar. Highly unlikely unless you had a guy being able to communicate with Swedes; but Scandinavian kings has both finno-ugric, slavic, anglo-saxon and frisian elite warriors, so a lone Khazar is certainly not impossible. But that is for DNA to decide (if he excisted he might have carried "normal" viking weapons).

[Dan Howard]

[Matthew Bunker]

[Dan Howard]

[Niels Just Rasmussen]

[Niels Just Rasmussen]

[Dan Howard]

You only need one person who shares a common language.

[Niels Just Rasmussen]

[Matthew Bunker]

[Niels Just Rasmussen]