What Was the Life of a Viking Warrior Like?

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There are few more iconic images than that of a mighty Viking warrior, a hulking berserker with a horned helmet cleaving foes in two with a mighty axe. But history actually paints a different picture of Vikings than what modern media has romanticized — for starters, no Viking ever wore a horned helmet. And instead of a big, muscle-bound warrior hardened by the frozen north, most Vikings were actually malnourished. What other misconceptions about Vikings exist? Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show. Today we're asking, “What was life like for a Viking warrior?”

Life in the Viking age was tough — really, really tough. For starters, Vikings inhabited Scandinavia and spread across northern Russia and Europe, land that was difficult to farm and produced little food. This meant that despite popular fiction, most of a Viking warrior's life was actually spent on the farm instead of chopping people's heads off. This is because if crops weren't planted and harvested, everybody would starve. It turns out that across much of the ancient world raiding and pillaging was more of a luxury. Very few villages could afford for their menfolk to leave for weeks or months on end instead of minding the farms. With most Viking villages numbering at their largest from between 15 to 50 households, Viking communities were tightly knit but maintained pretty low populations.