Although he acknowledged that they washed their hands, faces and heads every day, he was appalled that they did so “in the dirtiest and filthiest fashion possible” in a communal basin of water. Ibn Fadlan had harsh words for their hygiene: “They are the filthiest of God’s creatures,” he observed. They considered them with a combination of horror and fascination. To him they resembled the women’s neck rings of gold and silver.įurthermore, the description of tattoos may have been less an eye-witness account than a rhetorical device used by Arabs to depict the savagery of the Norsemen. While Ibn Fadlan describes the tattoos as trees, he could have see the Vikings trademark gripping beast or other knotwork patterns of which the Vikings were fond. It is likely, however, that the tattoos were probably dark blue, a color that comes from using wood ash to dye the skin. The tattoos were dark green figures of trees and symbols.
They use Frankish swords with broad, ridged blades.”Īt one point he mentioned that all the men were tattooed from the tips of their fingers to their necks. They carry axes, swords, dagers and balways have them to hand. Every man wears a cloak with which he covers half of his body, so that one arm is uncovered. As tall as palm trees, fair and reddish, they wear neither tunics nor kaftans. “I have never seen bodies as nearly perfect as theirs,” he wrote. He called them the “Rusiyyah,” now commonly known as the Vikings. Ibn Fadlan describes the Rus in his travel chronicler. Historical Descriptions of Viking Tattoos 921, he met a people called the Rus, Swedish Viking traders, who had brought slaves to sell at the markets. He first met the Norse warriors as he travelled across Russia’s vast steppes, meeting them as they sailed their longships down the Volga river and looking to trade with the Arab world - by far the wealthiest civilization in Western Eurasia, particularly as Europe struggled to consolidate in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Many come from Arab statesmen, who carried on extensive trade and cultural exchange with Norsemen in the ninth and tenth centuries.Īn Arab traveler, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a scholar of Baghdad, was sent by the Abbasid Caliph on a diplomatic mission to the Bulgars in the Middle Volga area of Russia. The Vikings themselves issued few literary works, so we are forced to rely on outside accounts. Did the Vikings have tattoos? One piece of historical evidence says yes, at least those Swedish Vikings who raided and traded through Russia probably.
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