Introducing The Berserkers

excerpted from the post at Europa Soberana and originally translated into English by Kolarov

The berserkers are associated with Germanity, that is, the group of Germanic tribes. These include Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons, Dutch and Germans. We are talking about a time when the Vikings, still pagans back then, had seriously terrified a Europe castrated by Christianity, and in which the Roman Empire had disappeared for centuries. Generally, the Viking despised the Christian and the Christians feared the Viking. On one occasion, Vikings kidnapped a bishop. When they failed to get a ransom for him, they killed him by hitting him with animal skulls. They were souls still wild and uncontaminated, possessed by that brutal and forceful mentality so typical of Nature.

Among all these barbarians, the most faithful guardians of the sacred fury were the berserkers. This word survived in the vocabulary of the nations that knew these men: in England, berserker still designates a person of wild or untamed character, or a state of irrational anger. Berserkr can be translated as “bear shirt”, or “shirtless” (bare shirt). It comes from the fact that the berserkers fought dressed in bearskins, and sometimes half-naked or naked.

Among the ancients, every man was a warrior. However, he was not during all his life, but was called to it on turbulent times, while in peace he dedicated himself to his field work or domain. So it was throughout the ancient world – except Egypt, Sparta, Rome, the Byzantine Empire and some other exceptions, which had “professional” armies. In Germanity, however, there was a curious caste aside, the artists of war, considered touched by the Divine.

Selected warriors lived in small communities, isolated from population centers and led by a priest of the cult of Odin / Woden / Wotan according to the region, a skald (bard), a gothi (druid), a vikti (master of the runes) or some other type of shaman, wizard or tribal mage. They formed authentic sects in the Germanic world, as part of the tradition of the männerbunden, the unions of men, alliances of warriors, military brotherhoods or, as the Romanian Mircea Eliade called them, “secret societies of men”.

In the families of the Germanic aristocracy, there was a tradition similar to that of the oracles in Greece: at a child’s birth, a priest would perform a ritual through which the child’s fate could be seen. We can assume that some parents of the most promising babies were offered to raise them in a “military” community of this type. This would not take place right away, but at a slightly later age. At that age, the corresponding shaman would appear to take the child to his new life in the woods, where he would learn to acquire the instincts of the predator.

From an early age, the future berserkers were fitted an iron ring in the neck that is related to the Celtic torques and that could not be removed until they killed their first victim. The type of instruction given to them is not completely known, but basically it would be a kind of military and ascetic camp in the Spartan style, in which they were taught how to handle themselves with weapons, in close combat and in life in Nature, in addition to acquiring hardness and resistance against all kinds of deprivation, within the framework of a hunter-gatherer life. They also learned tribal techniques and dances designed to generate large amounts of adrenaline. Over the years, they were building the body of a warrior, accustomed to fatigue, deprivation and suffering.

And all this combined with some unknown form of yoga: one of the skills they achieved through their mysterious asceticism was, while sitting in the snow during a snowstorm or blizzard, they were able to melt the snow that fell on them with their own inner heat. This advanced test takes place, even today, among some Tibetan lamas (the respiratory exercise they use to generate heat is called tumo or “fire in the belly”), and in the Celtic legends, one of the qualities that was attributed to the great heroes was to melt snow a hundred feet away (30 m) with their own body heat. An interesting case, dating from Ireland in 700 BCE, is that of the folk hero Cú Chulainn. Legend has it that, after a battle, Cú Chulainn returned to his village still in a frenzy of combat. His compatriots, fearing that he would kill the whole town, threw themselves on him and put him in a barrel of cold water. Due to the hero’s ardor, the water broke the wooden plates and the metal straps, and exploded the barrel into a thousand pieces, “like a nut breaks”. In the second barrel of cold water, Cú Chulainn produced large bubbles the size of fists. And in the third, he produced a boil in which some men could bear to dip their hands and others could not. This inevitably reminds us of the Greek hero Heracles, who had to rush to the waters of Thermopylae to quench an attack of internal fire, turning the waters of the place into thermal springs.

Berserker puppies received initiation in a cult that could be called mysteries of Odin, the patron of these warriors. Bersekers were often called “men of Odin” or “wolves of Odin” for their predominant cult of this deity, called “father of all” or “the strong one above”. The berserkers could therefore be described as sects of elite warriors, severely trained from childhood in the arts of struggle and inner alchemy, and initiated into a cult of Odin by some kind of extremely violent ritual. Mircea Eliade explains:

One did not get to be “berserkr” only by bravery, by physical strength or by hardness, but also after a magico-religious experience that radically modified the young warrior’s way of being. He had to transmute his humanity through an access of aggressive and terrifying fury, which he assimilated to the enraged butchers. “He warmed up” to such an extreme degree, driven by a mysterious, inhuman and irresistible force, that his combative impulse seemed to emerge from the depths of his being.

In combat, berserkers presented a terrifying aspect to their enemies. Dressed in bear or wolf skins (in which case they were called ulfhednar or ulfsark, “wolfskin”), naked or painted black, they threw themselves into the battle always in groups of twelve, shouting as if possessed, foaming at the mouth and being immune to the most terrible wounds.

They are mentioned in the Ynglinga Saga (Chapter VI):

Odin’s men marched without chainmail, enraged as dogs or wolves. They bit their shields, strong as bears or wild bulls. They killed their enemies in one strike, but neither iron nor fire harmed them. Such is what is called the furor of the bersekers.

In the Hrafnsmal, the skald Thorbjörn Hornklofi describes them in combat:

There the berserkers shouted – the battle was unleashed – wolf skins howled wildly, spears whistled … wolf skins, they were called. You see them act, the shields bloodied. The swords roared when they reached combat. The wise king in combat is protected by tough heroes who raise their shields.