[Niels Just Rasmussen]

So as we have seen that Odin means "rage/fury" and that is connected to a sexual ecstatic way of fighting - something you can call orgastic; it is very interesting to look at other Indo-European people to see if there are traces of a similar kind of thinking before these people became "civilized".

In Greek "orgé" means "anger/wrath/passion". It comes from the verb oragō that means "to swell".
Guess where "òrgasmós" (Orgasm) comes from! From orgáō (sexually aroused) that interestingly comes from the verb oragō "to swell".
So clearly a linguistic link between wrath and sexual arousal in Greek.
Rage and sexual arousal are both linked as the same kind of "swelling". One wonders where such swelling occurred in both instances.........

Battle as orgasm is probably something that even modern Christian soldiers experience, but keep for themselves as something shameful as a very strong taboo. Its not really something you start to tell your family, friends and in bars and can expect to find praise and having the women swoon over you in a Christian society.
For the Vikings it was something to brag about - you had proven on the battlefield that you were a real man when you started to lust instead of feeling fear. It was a clearly very different world view from the modern one; but it made for really effective fighters.
If you as a Christian soldier felt "fucked" when being attacked by Vikings, it was really the whole "point" of it all. The vikings would have the psychological edge of lusting for it while causing fear in the enemy.

[Pieter B.]

[Niels Just Rasmussen]

[Pieter B.]

About the beserk thing, I actually made the last part bold to indicate some sort of fury was present. i.e. he feel strengthened, has no clue where he is and does not fear death.

One more unsettling thing about the vikings I can think of is that they effectively had naval supremacy for a while. A ship that could go pretty much everywhere and was neigh unstoppable. Coastal settlements have always been at risk of a sudden attack without any warning, but inland villages could receive warning of a marching army or at least detect smoke on the horizon. That is not the case when ships can go upriver and travel between two and five times the distance a terrestrial army can in a given day. For all intents and purposes they might as well have had Star Trek teleporter technology.

[Niels Just Rasmussen]

[Philip Dyer]

[Niels Just Rasmussen]

[Jeffrey Faulk]

I would not read too much into late sources like Tertullian, coloured as they would be with Christian prejudices against the 'heretical' pagan past.

That said, while gender dynamics of the ancient past could be a very interesting study, I'm not sure that this is quite the place to discuss that topic. I'll let Nathan or Chad determine that, though.

I'm also not sure that the ancient Greeks would have been aware that ants have a 'queen'. I could be wrong, though.

I would not be surprised at all if Achilles' Myrmidons wore feathers on their helmets as a crest; a pair of feathers could certainly resemble an ant's antennae. I would wager that the name was derived more from a certain physical similarity (black armour, black ants), or as a jest against relatively young warriors in the midst of an army of older career soldiers, than any actual perception of ant social behaviour.

[Philip Dyer]

[Nat Lamb]

Upon using google, the book is actually *Achilles* in Vietnam. Author is Jonathan Shay, and after a quick check I found that he gets a mention on the Beserker page on Wikipedia (for whatever that is worth).
If I understand his thesis correctly (psychology is not my field) I think he would argue that PTSD does not necessarily have to be grounded in fear. He seems to put forward that it is an adaption based on a stressful situation or incident which may well be helpful for that situation, but manipulative for others (to use an example from an Australian song, throwing yourself into the dirt when you hear a chopper might help you survive Vietnam, but is a maladaptive behavior if the only chopper in your area is the channel 9 traffic copter)
The beserks would seem to fit that description, flipping out into a bloodthirsty hulk-out in response to a perceived threat might be quite useful if you are the Jarl's shock troops, but would be pretty maladaptive behavior for day to day life.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

As was mentioned earlier, George Silver's system takes wounding dynamics into account. It emphasizes defense, finding the play from which you can strike your opponent without getting struck in return.

As far as fatalities in battle go, I think it's misleading to claim that few happened. It depended on the battle. In a hard-fought contest, many received mortal wounds; that's why close combat was so terrifying. Soldiers broke and ran for good reason: in individual terms, fleeing often increased odds of survival, even if reduced the odds of one's side winning the battle. I'll once again cite Yuval Harari's interpretation of Robert III de La Marck's account of Novara 1513. According to Robert III de La Marck (Florange), only six of the 300-400 soldiers in the first rank of the pike formation he commanded survived, and victorious Swiss losses were equally severe. Florange himself lived to tell the tale because his father and some other men-at-arms charged into the infantry melee in order to save him. Florange's father found him literally "amongst the dead," with forty-six wounds. The claim that Swiss losses were just as bad is probably an overstatement, but it's still likely lots of the pikers in the front rank fell in the struggle. Harari notes that Florange probably saw more soldiers killed in a few minutes than Philip Caputo say in an entire year in the Vietnam War.

Hard-fought battles in antiquity (since that's the context of the initial question) appear to have had similar casualty rates. The winning side might still lose 5-10% killed. Just ask Pyrrhus of Epirus!

[Dan Howard]

[Philip Dyer]

[Dan Howard]

[Nat Lamb]

[Philip Dyer]

As tactically combative function, death doesn't matter. But it can effective psychological weapon, to show to your enemies that you willing to go the extra mile, that facing you and your team could very much mean your ultimate demise. That the enemy doesn't even regard you as valuable enough as captives. That they willing to permanently put you down and walk over your corpses if necessary. Sorta like what the US message sent by dropping the A bomb on Japan, that they were willing to take the war to a new horrifying level.

[Ralph Grinly]

While I can't comment on the medieval period, in 20th C European armies, it was generally more efficient to wound an enemy. Given modern morals..much energy will be expended in saving a wounded soldier. First of all you have stretcher bearers/medics on the actual field of combat, trying to get the soldier back to first aid points. Then you have to transport them to field hospitals and then back to more major hospitals. All this ties up valuable manpower that can't be used in actual combat roles. If a soldier is killed outright..it takes maybe one or two men, after the battle to bury them. So..from an practical view..wound the enemy so he can't fight, then lots of other men have to look after them, draining enemy resources. Cynical and callous ?? Yes..but effective.

[Dan Howard]

Nobody has mentioned ransom either. It is a bit hard to ask someone about their family if they are dead.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

I of course agree that incapacitation was the immediate goal in combat and that killing was irrelevant, but the techniques that facilitated quick incapcitation could also lead to rapid death. Blood loss, whether from thrusts or cuts, was a basic and prominent way to incapacitate opposing soldiers, and it was frequently fatal as well as incapacitating. Raimond de Fourquevaux, for exampled, wanted his idealized pikers turned targetiers to only thrust with their swords, aiming at the face, legs, or any other unarmored part. Stabbing people in the face and legs will lead to lethal blood loss and/or brain injury a significant amount of time. Sir John Smythe wanted his pikers to cut and/or thrust at the head/face with their swords while closing distance and then attempting to stab their opposing counterparts in the belly under their armor. Thrusts to belly wouldn't necessarily incapacitate swiftly, but could lead to sufficient blood loss in some cases.

[Pieter B.]

I've been reading Comentarii De Bello Gallico now and it amazed me how often comments were made on how many people were wounded or exhausted from wounds. At one point Caesar moving into the fray bolstered the morale and made even those exhausted by wounds fight on and in another case it is remarked how less than one in ten men remained unwounded during a particular siege/attack on a camp. I suppose this is all confirmed by a few battlefield graves we found where a sizable minority had old combat wounds or descriptions of battle scarred soldiers, Henry V had a scar on his face and Charles the Bold had a large scar across his neck (and he missed a couple of teeth). What I am getting at is that it suddenly doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine half or even more than half of soldiers involved in melee combat received minor or major wounds.