Úlfheðnar

Úlfheðnar means, quite literally, «those in wolf pelts», from úlfr, wolf, and heðinn, pelt or coat of skin. The oldest witness is a stanza of Haraldskvæði, also known as Hrafnsmál, composed by Þorbjörn Hornklofi late in the ninth century about the war-band of King Harald Fairhair at the battle of Hafrsfjord: wolf-pelts they are called, those who bear bloodied shields and redden spears when they come to war. The stanza survives only because Snorri Sturluson quoted it in Heimskringla, inside Harald's saga, and that quotation is the reason the word reached us at all. Vatnsdæla saga supplies the decisive detail: those berserkir who were called úlfhéðnar had wolf pelts for mail-coats. The skin is neither a disguise nor a magical second body; it is the armour they do not have. Nor do the texts present them as a separate order, but as a kind of berserkr, told apart by the animal whose hide they wear.

The fury has an attested name, berserksgangr, and a canonical description in chapter six of Ynglinga saga: Odin's men went without mail, mad as dogs or wolves, bit the rim of their shields, were strong as bears and killed at a single blow, and neither fire nor iron would bite on them. The fury is always followed by the collapse. Egils saga tells it of Kveldúlfr, who after the fit was so drained of strength that he had to take to his bed. Of initiation rites, runic spells or invocation formulas no medieval source says anything at all, and the inscriptions sometimes credited to them appear in no runic corpus. The herbs came much later, and are worth dating: in 1784 the naturalist Samuel Ödman proposed fly agaric on no stronger footing than a Siberian analogy, and in 2019 Karsten Fatur proposed black henbane, a better symptomatic fit carrying its own author's warning that it is speculation. The only contemporary material trace is the Torslunda die from Öland, of the sixth or seventh century, where a warrior in a wolf mask and pelt strides beside a dancer in a horned helmet.

Berserksgangr did not end in exorcisms but in law. After the conversion of Iceland, the Grágás code punished with lesser outlawry both the man who went berserk and those who witnessed it without intervening, and Norwegian law followed the same road: what the Viking Age had admired, the Christian Middle Ages made an offence. It is worth separating, then, the attested from the added. The úlfheðnar do not choose the slain, which is the office of the valkyrjur, nor do they form the host that fights at Ragnarök, which is the einherjar. Neither do they change bodies: burning silver and the compelling moon are inventions of the cinema of the nineteen thirties and forties, not of the medieval north. A wolfish metamorphosis does exist in Old Norse literature, but it is another story about other people: in Vǫlsunga saga, Sigmundr and Sinfjǫtli find enchanted wolf skins and are trapped inside them for ten days. The conflation of that tale with Harald's war-band is what manufactured the Viking werewolf now in circulation. Of the original word one everyday trace survives: berserk still means to lose control entirely.