Vikings May Have Practiced Body Modification As 'Rite of Initiation'

Researchers have shed fascinating new light on the unusual practice of permanent body modification during the Viking Age, which in some cases, may have been practiced as a "rite of initiation".

It was long assumed that tattoos were the only form of permanent modification in Scandinavia during this period, although concrete archaeological examples have yet to be found of this practice.

But in recent years, researchers have documented evidence of two other forms of Viking Age body modification: filed teeth and artificially deformed skulls.

Intriguingly, most of these examples—including all of the skulls—originate from the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.

While both forms of body modification have received significant attention in other cultural contexts, the specific social implications of these practices in Viking Age society have not been comprehensively studied. It is this issue that researchers Matthias Toplak and Lukas Kerk—with the Viking Museum Haithabu and the University of Münster, both in Germany—wanted to explore in their latest study, published in the journal Current Swedish Archaeology.

"We decided to join forces and to conduct a case study to see if we can gain a better understanding of why these body modifications were performed and what they might have signaled in the society of Viking Age Gotland," the authors told Newsweek.

The Viking Age was a period in medieval history, between roughly the late 8th and 11th centuries, when the Vikings—a Scandinavian seafaring people—raided, colonized and traded widely across Europe and beyond.

In the latest study, the researchers described the currently known forms of permanent body modification from the Viking Age and discussed possible interpretations. They then considered in which ways humans can use their bodies to communicate certain messages—for example, affiliation to certain social, religious or cultural groups.

"A modern example would be the use of tattoos to signal how someone wants to be perceived: should my tattoos show everyone that I'm a tough guy you don't want to mess with? Or is there some hidden meaning in my tattoos that only the initiated should understand, such as prison tattoos?" Toplak and Kerk said.

In the study, the researchers identified two forms of body modification in Viking Age societies. The first practice is the filing of horizontal grooves into teeth. The second involves the artificial elongation of skulls.

"In an archaeological context, at least for the Viking Age, we are mostly dealing with permanent body modifications that somehow altered the bone structure (or the teeth). Body modifications such as tattoos, piercings, scarification, hair or beard style are almost impossible to reconstruct even if Vikings and tattoos seems to be the perfect match—at least according to popular depictions," the researchers said.

The first currently known cases of filed teeth in Northern Europe can be dated to the last decades before the Viking Age and this custom appears to cease with the late Viking Age. In the study, the researchers identified more than 130 individual remains, all male, featuring this modification. Examples of head deformation, on the other hand, are "rare", with only three cases known from Viking Age Scandinavia. These remains all date from around the same time, to the late Viking Age.

The researchers propose that the tooth filings could be regarded as a "rite of initiation" and as a clandestine sign of identification for a closed social group of men.

"Depending on their concentration on important trading hubs, we postulate that this (or these) social groups might have been closed groups of merchants, similar to later guilds," Toplak and Kerk said.

"Their members could identify themselves through their teeth filings and may thus have received commercial advantages, protection or other privileges. This theory also implies that larger, organized communities of merchants existed already in the Viking Age, before the existence of formalized guilds."

The skull deformations—all observed in female remains—are "much more difficult" to explain, according to the researchers. But based on the available evidence, Toplak and Kerk assume that the custom was not part of the culture of Viking Age Gotland and instead came to this region from Southeastern Europe.

"We do not know what this body modification signaled originally," the researchers said. "Maybe it was a token of social status, beauty or particular social groups. In Gotland, these signals had to be decoded as we assume that no one in Viking Age Gotland knew what these head forms meant."

At least two of these three individuals were buried with more jewelry than is typically seen in most burials of local females. (The third grave was destroyed in modern times so we do not know how this female was buried.)

"Even though these females were distinctively marked as foreign, they were integrated into the local community," the researchers said. "We assume that their exotic appearance was understood as reference to far-reaching trading networks, something which was very prestigious in a society focussed on trading as Gotland [was] in the Viking Age. And this implicates that the society of Viking Age Gotland was very open and exotic influences could be integrated."

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