Vikings and slavery: archaeology reveals brutality of the thrall system

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Slavery has existed for thousands of years, permeating ancient and modern societies across the world. The Vikings were no different. Enslaved people were valuable commodities , being captured and then traded across the Vikings' vast networks. Legal texts and written sources show how enslaved people were sold at trading centers in the same vein as cattle.

In this excerpt from " The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age " (Basic Books, 2026), author and archaeologist Neil Price looks at the horrific lives of the "thralls" — the Viking term for the enslaved. In it, he highlights the inhumane treatment of enslaved people, from the raids to kidnap people into the slave trade to a woman who appears to have been killed as a tribute to a high-status man.

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The vast majority of the Norse population were farmers, but there is another group of people who were almost as numerous, though very hard to find in the archaeological record: the enslaved. They have only recently begun to be properly acknowledged in our histories, partly because of the long-standing neglect of the marginalized and vulnerable in many cultures, but in the Viking world also due to a particular coincidence of terminology. For the Norse, the unfree were þrælar, translated into English as "thralls," which is too mild a word to convey its true meaning.

Today, we can be enthralled by a work of art or even a person, but we do not say that we're enslaved by them. Norse thraldom took many forms, some less severe or permanent than others, but all involved the loss of liberty and rights, and the subjugation of one person to another through servitude. A chapter here, even with tangential references in a few others, is nowhere near enough to do justice to this side of the Norse experience (or rather, often the non-Norse experience, since many of them were kidnapped abroad during raids and other campaigns). Archaeological recognition can at least restore some measure of individual dignity, though more comforting to us than to them.

Slavery, as both a practice and an integrated economic system, was an indivisible part of Viking-Age Norse society and had probably already become established in Scandinavia centuries or even millennia earlier. People could be born into slavery, or be forced into it through kidnap or war, and then find themselves sold on, sometimes through many hands and over great distances. Some free people might even temporarily sell themselves in a form of indenture, as a means of paying off debts or other obligations.

Thralls on Norse settlements were ranked in a hierarchical and quite specific nomenclature of service categories and forced to undertake all the tasks of the farm and household. In a few, rare cases, thralls could take on senior responsibilities of estate management, with a special title — bryti — to match. One such man ran the royal estate at Hovgården opposite the island town of Birka, and was allowed to raise a runestone to himself and his wife, though one wonders who paid for it. Nonetheless, the vast majority of thralls endured lives of drudgery.

The grim reality is summarized with derogatory terminology in the poem Rígsþula, the "List of Rígr" (another name for the god Heimdall, or perhaps for Odin): "They fixed fences, dunged fields, worked at the pigs, watched over the goats, dug the peat." Even their names are shaming, mocking their appearance or hygiene: they translate as Badbreath, Stumpy, Fatty, Bedmate, Craneshanks, Dumpy, and many more. Thralls were extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The textual records of viking raids, coming from every culture that was attacked, emphasize that women were particularly targeted for kidnapping and enslavement.

In the ninth century, as the viking attacks escalated both in Western Europe and on the rivers of the east, the taking of captives came to be one of their prime objectives, feeding the lethal trinity of raiding, trading and slaving. In the words of Ibn Miskawayh, a Persian official who described a viking attack on the city of Bardha'a in what is now Azerbaijan in 943: "They kept the women and boys, whom they raped and enslaved [ . . . ] They dragged the women, boys and girls they wanted with them."

The repetition drives home the point, and little imagination is required to sense the undiluted horror. Some of these raids were informed by advance intelligence gathering and directed against high-profile targets for whom ransom could be demanded, but many were destined for sex trafficking, especially to the Arab world. Enslaved humans, particularly from the Baltic region, were among the main commodities exchanged eastwards along the Silk Roads.

Some of the scant archaeological evidence of thralls comes from the graves of high-status Vikings. (Image credit: Getty Images) In late ninth-century Scandinavia, the logistical needs of the escalating raids brought new demands on the workforce at an ever-larger scale, especially in all the many industries connected with shipbuilding (including textile production, timber management, tar manufacture, ironworking, and much more). This in turn drove the need for unfree labor to still greater levels.

As economic expansion enlarged the capacity for ship-borne aggression and released the agricultural workforce to crew these expeditions, the increased flow of human victims enabled its continuance in a vicious circle. Enslavement was one of the primary characteristics of the Viking Age: the raids were a key component of it and of the Norse diaspora that resulted.

To what degree these people are visible in the funerary record is hard to know. There were probably no diagnostic items that were used exclusively by thralls, so we cannot perceive them through specific objects in the graves. It also seems unlikely that those without rights and with few possessions, indeed with hardly any legal identity as individuals rather than chattel, would be accorded conventional burials. Ibn Faḍlān says that thralls who died while traveling were simply discarded, but this is unlikely to have been the case in settlements. When we do encounter them, it is often because they were killed as part of funerary rituals and their bodies deposited in burials. One example that we can explore here comes from an excavation at the site of Ballateare, in Jurby parish on the northwestern coast of the Isle of Man — the best preserved of all the Viking-Age graves on the island.

At Ballateare, it is instructive to see just how normal the initial funeral, and its circumstances, appear to have been, albeit for a high-status individual. By Viking-Age standards he was in his prime when he died in the early tenth century, somewhere between eighteen and thirty years old. He may have been among the early Norse settlers on Man. We have no reason to believe that the clothes he was buried in, and the things laid in the grave, are not reflections of his life and the international milieu he came from.

He had been interred in a wooden coffin, dug down quite deep into the ground. A sheathed knife was suspended on a lanyard round his neck and he wore a cloak held by an Irish ringed pin. Inside the coffin was a sword — probably from Norway, but with a belt from the British Isles — that had been cut into pieces before being sheathed in the scabbard; the hilt lay broken off beside it. A spearhead also lay in the coffin by the man's feet, snapped off because there was no room for the shaft. A shield, also deliberately damaged with two heavy blows to the boss, had been slid vertically down the outer side of the coffin; the shield board itself may have been smashed too. This was not battle damage; all his weapons were made unusable for reasons we can only guess. Fragments of the shield also revealed traces of paint: it had been decorated with white gesso, banded with black, with rows of red dots along the stripes. Two more spears had been laid across the top of the coffin.

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The burial pit was then filled with fine white sand, and a mound was built on top — about 3 metres [10 feet] high and 22 metres [72 feet] in diameter. It was made of thick-cut turfs, which had been brought to the mound from a wide area rather than simply dug up in the vicinity. The earth of the mound seems to be an offering of the land itself, a territorial tribute to the dead man.

I do not wish to relate what happened next in terms of dramatized reconstruction; archaeological description must suffice. On top of the mound lay the body of a woman aged between twenty and thirty, who had been deliberately killed: the back of her head had been removed by a single blow from a sharp blade, probably a sword. Rigor mortis had set in, and some twelve to seventy-two hours had elapsed between her death and the time when her body was covered. She had either lain exposed on the mound for some time after her death, or been killed elsewhere (perhaps more likely, as the missing part of her skull was not present with the body). The woman seems to have died while kneeling, and had fallen forwards with her hands raised. A post was raised on top of the mound beside her body, presumably a grave marker.

A paragraph is not enough to convey what actually occurred, let alone to extrapolate the life that the woman had led before her death — possibly decades of servitude and enslavement, with all that this implies. Her corpse was covered by a very thick layer of cremated animal bone, including considerable numbers of oxen, horses, sheep and dogs. (Somewhere nearby must have been a truly massive cremation pyre.) The mound was finally sealed with turf, covering her body and the ashes of the animals.

Excerpted from The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age by Neil Price. © 2026 by Neil Price. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age

Drawing on the latest archaeological research and scientific analysis, The Sea-King and the Sorceress brings us closer to understanding the lives and times of the Vikings. The era that bears their name will never seem so simple again.