50 of the Most Legendary Viking Names

Some groups of people from history benefit from a bit of selective commemoration. Vikings are a big one for this—if you ignore 40 percent or so of what they actually did, they were super cool. Braids, runes, exploration, longships, drinking halls? Awesome. Raping, pillaging, vandalizing monasteries, and some of the other stuff? Not so much.

Their name game was mostly tip-top, though: Vikings like Sweyn Forkbeard (the legendary king believed to have been “killed by a ghost”), Harald Bluetooth (whom the wireless technology was indeed named after), and Edmund Ironside sported extremely rad monikers. (Admittedly, Gorm the Old might have been less than stoked with his sobriquet, and the less said about Cnut, the better.)

Within Viking culture, it was popular to name children after Norse gods. Many boys’ names like Thorsten and Toke were derived from Thor, the god of thunder and lightning, while others—such as Óðinn (pronounced like “o-DIN”)—come from Odin, the god of war and battle, and the deity who presided over Valhalla, the great hall in Asgard where fallen warriors could feast, drink, fight for fun, and be merry in the afterlife.

Many Viking names for boys also come from those gods’ foes (Bjørn and Ulf, meaning “bear” and “wolf,” referenced creatures the gods had to beat). Not only that, but many were thought to bestow certain attributes onto people, hence the widespread use of forenames like Hilda (meaning “maid of battle” or “fighter”), Astrid (meaning one who is “divinely beautiful”), and Freya (a “noble woman,” but also a throwback to Freyja, the Norse goddess of love, sex, war, and witchcraft, who rides a chariot pulled by cats). A baby boy with a butt-chin might be dubbed Skarde after this trait, and one with curly hair might come to be known as Kåre.

They must be doing something right: the Global Happiness Index is perpetually topped by Scandinavian countries, meaning many of the most joyful people in the world sport Viking names. Below are 50 of the most widely known for boys and girls. After all, if these kinds of monikers are good enough for all of ABBA, it means they’re probably good enough for the rest of us.

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