Here’s a word we’ve all used many times and I never knew its origin.
From History Extra: But there was a more sinister brotherhood of warriors in Scandinavia that could not find any place in the post-heathen world of Christianity. Instead it only survived in the realm of the sagas, the art and the folklore, often becoming shield-biting demons of war and symbols of evildoing. But behind the myth and the shroud of history, the sources reveal the existence of men thriving on the border between life and death, fuelled by war and distinguished by their ecstatic battle fury.
The description of ‘berserkers’ and ‘wolfskins’ in the sources is on the boundary between fantasy and reality, and it is difficult for us today to imagine that such people can have ever existed, possessed of incontrollable destructive power. But they did. The berserkers and the wolfskins (also known as ‘heathen wolves’) were a special group of very skilled and dangerous warriors associated with the god Odin.
. . . The Old Norse social order and religion were able to accommodate this type of behaviour, and it is understandable that the phenomenon disappeared after the introduction of Christianity. A Christian society considered such rituals and actions as demonic and thought that they must have resulted from supernatural influences. Read the whole article here.
