28 March 2025
We all have a solid idea of what a viking was, one of a band of a horned-helmeted, Old Norse warriors who ravaged northern Europe in the medieval period. And that idea is wrong. Not only did viking helmets not have horns, the Norse people who sailed about the northern world were more likely to be peaceful merchants and traders than plundering raiders and pirates. Viking was an occupation, and an occasional gig at that, not an ethnic identity. Furthermore, the word viking is really three different, albeit etymologically related, words. There is the Old English wicing, the Old Norse vikingr, and our Present-Day English word viking. Each of these has slightly different meanings and very different histories.
The Old English wicing is formed through normal derivation, wic (camp) + -ing (person). So a wicing is a person who establishes a camp, much like a pirate might on a shore they were raiding. Wicing appears in the Épinal and Erfurt glossaries, two Latin-Old English word lists. The entriy in the Épinal glossary, which dates to the first half of the eighth century, reads:
piraticum uuicingsceadan
And the Erfurt glossary, from the late eighth or early ninth century, reads:
piraticam uuicingsceadae
The Latin piraticum means piracy, and the Old English wicingsceada literally means viking-like. Note that the Épinal glossary predates the period of Norse raids on the English coastline that started toward the end of the eighth century. The late ninth century translation of Orosius’s history also uses wicing, but that use is in the context of Philip of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) raiding in the Mediterranean:
Philippuse geþuhte æfter þæm þæt he an land ne mihte þæm folce mid gifum gecweman þe him an simbel wæron mid winnende; ac he scipa gegaderode, & wicingas wurdon, & sona æt anum cirre an C & eahtatig ceapscipa gefengon.
(Philip realized that on land he could not satisfy with gifts the people who had continually been fighting alongside him, so he gathered ships and went viking, and soon captured one hundred eighty merchant ships in one engagement.)
Similarly, in the Old English poem Exodus, a poetic retelling of some chapters of that biblical book, the Israelites making the Red Sea crossing are referred to as sæwicingas, or sea-vikings:
Æfter þære fyrde flota modgade,
Rubenes sunu. Randas bæron
sæ-wicingas ofer sealtne mersc,
mana menio; micel an-getrum
eode unforht.
(After that army the sea-force, the sons of Reuben, proudly marched. The sea-vikings, many a man, bore shields across the salt marsh. The great host went unafraid.)
As is the case with most Old English poetry, we don’t know when it was composed. But note that the term sea-vikings is being used to describe a land army, presumably because they are crossing the Red Sea. Depending on when the poem was written, it could also be an allusion to Norse raiders, but that would be a strange association for an English poet to make about the Israelites.
Indeed, wicing was used more generally to mean any plunderer. For instance, Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Sermon of the Wolf to the English), written c. 1015, uses the word to refer to an enslaved person who has escaped and become an outlaw, in a passage condemning unjust laws:
Ðeah þræla hwilc hlaforde ætleape & of cristendome to wicinge wurþe, & hit æfter þam eft gewurþe þæt wæpengewrixl wurðe gemæne þegne & þræle, gif þræl þone þæne þegen fullice afylle, licge ægilde ealre his mægðe; and gif se þegen þone þræl þe he ær ahte fullice afylle, gilde þegengilde.
(Though a slave who escapes from their lord and from Christendom to become a viking, and afterward it happens that an exchange of weapons occurs between thane and slave, if the slave should outright kill that thane, [the thane] will lie without any compensation to his family; but if the thane kills outright that slave that he had once owned, he pays the price for killing a thane.)
Although here, unlike the Exodus poem, Wulfstan is undoubtedly also alluding to Norse raiders. Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is about how the decadent English society is being punished by God, and one of those punishments is viking raids.
In his grammar, written at the end of the tenth century, about two decades before Wulfstan’s sermon, Ælfric of Eynsham also deploys the word generally, but his use probably carries an allusion to Norse raiders as well. His gloss on the Latin pirata reads:
pirata wicing oððe scegðman
(pirate: viking or shipman)
Scegð being a type of fast sailing ship used by the Scandinavians.
There is an instance in Old English poetry where wicing is used as the name of a people, that is in the poem Widsith, which consists mainly of a long list of various peoples. One passage reads thusly:
Hroþwulf ond Hroðgar heoldon lengest
sibbe ætsomne suhtor-fædran,
siþþan hy forwræcon wicinga cynn
ond Ingeldes ord forbigdan,
forheowan æt Heorote Heaðobeardna þrym.
(Hrothwulf and Hrothgar, uncle and nephew, together held the peace the longest, since they drove away the nation of vikings and humiliated the vanguard of Ingeld, cut down the Heathobard host at Heorot.)
The people and events in the passage are also referred to in the poem Beowulf. Exactly who the wicinga cynn were is not known, but since Hrothwulf and Hrothgar were Danes, it is unlikely that they refer to a Norse people. They may be a distinct group, or the phrase may be another name for Ingeld’s people, the Heathobards. Again, we don’t know exactly who the Heathobards were either, but they perhaps came from Saxony, or perhaps they were entirely fictional.
And in the poem the Battle of Maldon, written sometime after 991 C.E., wicing is used to refer to a Norse army invading England:
Þa stod on stæðe, stiðlice clypode
wicinga ar, wordum mælde,
se on beot abead brimliþendra
ærænde to þam eorle, þær he on ofre stod.
(Then stood on the shore, a viking messenger, sternly calling out, delivering a speech, uttering a vow, the seafarers’ message to the earl, where he stood on the opposite [shore].)
So the Old English wicing was used generically to refer to raiders or pirates, people of the camps. In some of these instances, it alluded to or specifically referred to Norse raiders, but that wasn’t its primary sense. And in one instance, it was used as the name of a people, but which people is not known, although it doesn’t seem to refer to a Nordic one. So what we have is the fact that the Old English wicing originally meant simply a generic pirate.
The Old English wicing fell out of use following the Norman Conquest.
As for the Old Norse vikingr, that is only first recorded later, in the late tenth century. It is most likely a borrowing from either the English or Anglo-Frisian wicing. It could, however, have been plausibly formed within Old Norse from the root vikr, meaning bay or inlet. In that case, a vikingr would be someone who ventured forth from a coastal inlet.
As for our Present-Day English word viking, that word is a nineteenth-century borrowing from the Old Norse, or perhaps a resurrection of the Old English wicing. It appears in medievalesque literature of that century. We see it in George Chalmer’s 1807 history of Scotland, Caledonia, in a passage about Torfin, grandson of King Malcom II of Scotland:
<p style="margin-left: 50px;">At the age of fourteen, Torfin commenced his career as a vikingr. His sails often disquieted the coasts of Scotland during the reign of his grandfather.
Sources:
Ælfric. Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar. Julius Zupitza, ed. Berlin: Weidmannsche, 1880, 24. Archive.org.
Anlezark, Daniel, ed. Old Testament Narratives. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, lines 331–35a, 228.
“The Battle of Maldon.” In Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record 6. New York: Columbia UP, 1942, lines 25–28, 7.
Chalmers, George. Caledonia (1807), vol. 1 of 3. Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1887, 341. Archive.org.
Fell, Christine. “Old English Wicing: A Question of Semantics” (13 November 1986). Proceedings of the British Academy, 72, 1986 295–316. The British Academy.
Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 3.7, 172.
Oxford English Dicitionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. viking, n.
Pheifer, J. D. Old English Glosses in the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 39.
“Widsith.” In Robert E. Bjork, ed. Old English Shorter Poems; Vol. II: Wisdom and Lyric. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 32, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2014, lines 45–49, 46.
Wulfstan. “Sermo lupi ad Anglos.” In Dorothy Bethurum, ed. The Homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 261–66 at 263–64.
Photo credit: Adolph Edward Weidhaas, 1936. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress. Public domain image.