Berserker
From Freepedia
- This article is about the Norse warriors who are referred to by this name. For other uses, see Berserker (disambiguation).
Berserkers (or Berserks) were Norse warriors who had sworn allegiance to the sky god Odin and worked themselves into a frenzy before a battle.
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Etymology
The term berserker comes from Norse "berserkr", meaning literally "bear shirt" or "bare shirt", alluding either to wearing the "clothes" of a bear, i.e. to be bear-like in rage and strength, usually in battle, or to the habit of berserkers going into battle unarmored. Some berserks also took names with björn or biorn in them in reference to a bear. This is likely to be the source of names such as Beowulf and Bödvar Bjarki.
Bear worship was not unusual in northern Germanic areas. Berserkers are reported to have worn bearskins in battle serving as armor or a symbol of their proclivity for worshipping the spirit of the bear. "Possessed" by the spirit of the bear, they might have believed that they had its strength and ferociousness and could even take on the animal's shape and force. In that respect, they are the basis of fantasy characters like Beorn in The Hobbit. Warriors of the Varangian Guard (Norse warriors working for Byzantine Empire) also followed bear rituals.
Literary references
The earliest surviving reference to the term berserker is in Haraldskvaedi, a skaldic poem written by Thorbjorn Hornklofi in the late ninth century out of honour for King Harald Fair-Hair, the infamous ruler of Norway. The poem was preserved by Snorri Sturluson. In this poem, Harald's army includes a warrior gang of berserkers fighting under his name at the battle of Hafrsfjord. In it, they are described as Ulfhednar = "men clad in wolf skins". This grounds a connection between bears and wolves in Norse warrior culture and the common assumption that the word "berserker" itself originates from men wearing the skin of the bear. Snorri Sturluson goes on to mention berserkers in the Ynglinga saga: "his [Odin's] men rushed forward without armor, were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were as strong as bears or wild bulls, and killed people at a blow, but neither fire nor iron told upon themselves" (Ch. 6). Berserkers appear prominently in a multitude of other sagas and poems including The Saga of Hrólf Kraki, many of which describe berserkers as ravenous barbarians who loot, plunder, and kill indiscriminately.
Much can be derived about berserkers from Egil's Saga. Egil's grandfather was named Kveld-Ulf meaning "evening wolf". Kveld-Ulf's son refered to as Skalla-Grimm was a berserker. Kveld-Ulf and Skalla-Grimm are both depicted as irascible and violent throughout. One commits suicide and the latter kills his offspring. Violence and gruesome tragedies permeate the berserker ethos described in Icelandic sagas such as this one.
Berserkers fought with crazed or drugged strength, heedless of danger. They worked themselves up into a bloodlust – berserker rage – before battles, banging their helmets with their weapons, biting their shields, and howling. They were said to be immune to pain (or even immune to weapons) in battle. In their fury they would attack their enemies but also everything else in their path, sometimes even their own people and allies.
Allies to the raging Norsemen were wary of berserkers. Fearing that their own homesteads and families might be targeted by the berserkers' violent instability, friendly Norsemen kept women and children at bay.
In 1015 King Eirik Bloodaxe (Eric I) of Norway outlawed berserkers. Gragas, the medieval Icelandic law-code sentences berserker warriors to outlawry. By the 1100s organized berserker warbands had disappeared.
King Harald Fair-Hair's use of berserker "shock troops" became a sphere of influence. Other Scandinavian kings used berserkers as part of their army of hirthmen and sometimes ranked them as equivalent to a royal bodyguard. It may be that at least some of those warriors just adopted the organization or rituals of berserk warbands or used the name as a deterrent or claim of their ferocity. It is doubtful any king would have accepted a band of maniacs as his closest men.
Still, some scholars consider the frenzied and indomitable berserker and his bear-skin coat to stand right alongside horned Viking helmets as a "feature of later literary [works] rather than contemporary historical ones", placing the legitimacy of Norse sagas as historical records into question.
The Modern Berserker
In south western Pennsylvania the Berserker is the equivalent of murphy's law. What can go wrong, will go wrong and that "wrong" is caused by the berserker. The berserker is most commonly blamed for bigger misfortunes such as the destruction of property or mild to severe personal injury. A common sighting of the berserker involves it sitting up from the bed of a passing pickup truck on the highway, throwing a brick through the windshield of your vehicle or a stick into the spokes of a front motorcycle wheel. The Local folklore also claims that the berserker keeps the Bigfoot population low in order to keep it from being discovered. There is no known way of stopping the berserker or detecting his presence before any such event may occur. If the berserker is sighted in an a area of close proximity it is highly recommended that you promptly leave the area to avoid a confrontation.
Theories to explain berserker behavior
One explanation behind beserker rage, suggested by botanists, is that in Scandinavia, one of the main spices in alcoholic beverages was the plant bog myrtle (Myrica gale syn: Gale palustris). The drawback is that it increases the hangover headache afterwards. Drinking alcoholic beverages spiced with bog myrtle the night before going to battle might have resulted in unusually aggressive behavior.
Those who believe in the existence of spirit possession favor a theory that the berserk rage was brought on by possession by an animal spirit of either a bear or a wolf. According to this theory, berserkers were those who had cultivated an ability to allow the spirit of a bear or wolf to take over their body during a fight. This is seen as a somewhat peculiar application of animal totemism.
Proponents of the drug theory favor ergotism or the use of the fly agaric mushroom. Drunken rage would do as well. It is also possible that berserkers worked themselves into their frenzy through purely psychological processes, i.e., frenzied rituals and dances. According to Saxo Grammaticus they also drank bear or wolf blood.
A UK television programme in 2004 tested the possible use of fly agaric and alcohol by training a healthy volunteer in the use of Viking weapons, then evaluating his performance under the influence of fly agaric or alcohol compared to no influence. It was obvious that use of fly agaric or alcohol severely reduced his fighting ability, and the tentative conclusion drawn was that berserk state was achieved psychologically; otherwise berserkers would have been too easy to kill. However, one must consider the fact that norse warriors would have spent all their lives becoming proficient in the use of weapons and their skills would have been embedded. This means that the adverse effects of drugs on their use of weapons would probably have been less than those experienced by the volunteer. The Zulu impi are said to have made use of snuff containing cannabis and (or) mushroom-derived psychoactives to enhance their performance in battle.
Going berserk — berserksgangr or berserkergang — could also happen in the middle of daily work. It began with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and a chill in the body. The face swelled and changed its color. Next came great rage, howling, and indiscriminate brawling. When the rage quelled, the berserker was exhausted and dull of mind for up to several days. According to sagas, many enemies of berserkers exploited this stage to get rid of them.
U.S. professor Jesse L. Byock claims (in Scientific American, 1995) that berserker rage could have been a symptom of Paget's disease. Uncontrolled skull bone growth could have caused painful pressure in the head. He mentions the unattractive and large head of Egill Skallagrímsson in Egilssaga. Other possibilities are mild epilepsy, rabies, and hysteria.
There are fictional characters in the popular game Warhammer 40,000 called Berserkers. They are "fearless" (as a rule described within the game's manual)chaos space marines who worship the greater Demon of Khorne. Players who use berserkers in their armies typically keep record of the number of kills or "skulls for the daemon of Khorne" in a notebook. Scores of well over a thousand in a year are fairly common. Often times the berserkers fight in medium sized squads carrying close combat weapons such as bolt pistols and chainswords. More information can be found in warhammer internet groups, local hobby shops that hae games held within the store and multiple "chaos" codex rulebooks published by games workshop.
Today the word "berserker" applies to anyone who fights with reckless abandon and disregard to even his own life, i.e., "goes berserk"; a concept used ad nauseum in the Vietnam War and in contemporary literature (Michael Herr's Dispatches) and film (Oliver Stone's Platoon) about or inspired by it. "Going berserk" in this context refers to an overdose of adrenaline induced opiods in the human body and brain leading a soldier to fight with raging fearlessness and indifference. A state strikingly similar to that of the Viking berserkers observed in this article.
Berserkers in popular culture
- Berserker Vikings appear in the movie The 13th Warrior based on the book The Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
- The Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual gave statistics to battle Bersekers in the game and later manuals added the Barbarian as a player class.
- In the game Final Fantasy X-2, there is a Berserker dress sphere
- A couple of Berserkers exist in the Norse mythology parody, Erik The Viking
- Berseks feature strongly in the 1999 Microsoft game Age of Empires 2.
- Berserker was the title of an album by Gary Numan in 1984. The title track was also a Top 30 UK hit single.
- Berserker is a hidden character for the Playstation 2 game Soul Calibur 2.
- In the anime Record of Lodoss War, the character Orson is a berserker.
- In the MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot, one of the playable classes for the Midgard realm is a Berserker, Berserkers have the ability to shapeshift into a bear form while fighting and have increased critical chance to hit by 100%, while having a increase in damage taken.
- The Warrior Class in the MMORPG World of Warcraft has access to a "Berserker Stance" that increases chance to get a critical strike and damage taken by the player character.
- The anime/manga series Berserk features a berserker named Guts as its protagonist.
- The video game series Fire Emblem features a Berserker character class in some installments.
- The Total War series features berserkers in Viking Invasion as trainable units of the Vikings; in Rome: Total War, they are powerful units of the Germans who can only recruit them by building a sscred grove to Wotan. In Barbarian Invasion, Lombards, Burgundians and Alemanni are all able to produce Lombard berserkers, while the Celts have Hounds of Culann (see Cuchulainn).
- The Berzerker is the name of an Australian death metal band. It is most likely that the name, 'The Berzerker' is used to reflect the intensity, speed and sheer aggression of their music.
