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Today Hooch and I (Mary Valante) thought we'd look at some of the evidence for Viking-Age dogs from Scandinavian sources. Hooch is very interested in Viking dogs.

The best known sources are sagas, but these were written down after the Viking Age, and most are set in Iceland. Hooch wonders if they reflect the 13th century more than the Viking Age? Is Iceland representative of Scandinavia? Will the dogs be realistic or literary creations?

There are again supposed to be four different types of dogs: small pets, working herding and hunting dogs, and large guard dogs. I haven’t found lapdogs in any saga yet, but I’m just getting started. Or perhaps Icelanders had no use for animals that didn’t work for a living?

There were certainly dogs that herded and hunted, but there aren’t clear distinctions drawn between the two. Egils Saga mentions sheep dogs, guarding their charges against bears. In Heimskringla, an Irish gift to king Olaf Tryggvason was a trained cattle dog named Vigi.

In Hrolfs saga kraka, Hrolf’s guard dog Gram kills a troll in boar-shape.

Hunting dogs are either missing from Icelandic sources or conflated with other dogs. We expect them to be mostly associated with elite members of the community.

Like we see on the Böksta memorial runestone from Sweden. A man on horseback is hunting with a spear. His dogs run ahead, while a bird of prey in flight is at the top, flying over even the runes.

The best contemporary evidence comes from burials, so next up will be a thread on Viking-Age burials containing the remains of dogs, where I’ll focus specifically on urban burials.
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