This ought to be my last post in this series on swords. As you’ve doubtless noticed, it hasn’t been a sword series so much as a Viking sword series. This has doubtless been a disappointment to the shamshir and falcata fans out there, but it has the virtue of keeping me to material I know (or think I know). And I’ve found that in general I speak with more authority when I’m talking about things I actually know (or think I know).

The purpose of a sword, it goes without saying, is to severely injure or kill another man. For all the romance of the sword, its use actually works out in serious practice to mean severed muscle, spouting arterial blood, and unreeled intestines.

It’s nasty.

Nobody paints epic paintings of butcher shops. But they do paint battles, in spite of the strong resemblance between the two.

Although the literature on the subject is sparse, I have to assume that the average Viking, when preparing for battle, put on his oldest clothes, knowing he’d probably have to throw them away when he was done.

The most common wounds discovered by archaeologists, when examining skeletons in mass graves from Viking Age battlefields, are leg wounds. This was because most guys had some kind of armor for their torsos and heads. They might not be able to afford a mail shirt (worth the price of a farm) or an iron helmet, but they were able to cobble together something made of boiled leather (for body and head), or a leather shirt with iron plates sewn on, or even a padded shirt, perhaps with flat pieces of bone sewn in. Nothing was foolproof, but it all helped.

But the legs and arms were generally unprotected. Again and again in the sagas, we hear of men killed by having their legs lacerated or entirely severed. Usually these wounds resulted in death. If the attacker didn’t move in to finish the victim off, death would come from blood loss. Though we do know of one man from the sagas known as Olaf Treefoot. He’d lost a leg in battle and wore a wooden one.

Killing torso wounds were more likely to come from arrows or spears, since the Viking sword is designed for slashing, and less effective where there’s armor. There’s a passage in the Saga of St. Olaf that tells of a hut near the battlefield where wounded men go to be tended, or to die. A woman goes around with a bowl of leek porridge, giving a little to each man who has a stomach wound. This is not to build up his strength, but for purposes of diagnosis. If the intestine has been punctured, she’ll be able to smell the leeks through the wound entrance, and she knows the man will die.

For the luckier men, the ones with few wounds or none, there was usually little sleep the first night. Their blood would be up, their adrenaline at peak level. If they were the winners, they’d gather in the hall and drink to their victory, maul the serving girls, do a loud post mortem on the battle, and generally try to decompress. They also had to give immediate attention to their weapons and mail, to get all that blood scoured off, to prevent rust. If they owned thralls (slaves) and had them present, the thralls could do that.

For the losers, the long night probably involved a run through the forest or the mountains, looking behind them frequently, eager to get as far away as possible before holing up somewhere, shivering.

One item of protective equipment for which there is no archaeological evidence at all is an armored glove.

But all fighting reenactors use them. You’re only issued ten fingers. You don’t have to lose many of those to (literally) lose your grip. So we suspect the Vikings, who fought with actual sharp weapons, most likely had them too.