Going Berserk





























17 Responses to Going Berserk

  1. Dan says:

    The people who produce documentaries for outlets like the History Channel do not believe that they are making history. They are making entertainment.

    I know because I quit a feature-length documentary that was being produced by two well established production companies, companies with hundreds upon hundreds of PBS, History Channel and Discovery “documentaries” under their belt. I quit because of the lack of intellectual rigor, the way facts were being ignored in favor of “the story”, and really just the profound grossness of it all.

    But I can tell you this. Any time you hear a narrator in a documentary, ask yourself, “is this narrator David Attenborough or Werner Herzog?’ If the answer is no, I recommend being extremely skeptical about the veracity of the narrator’s claims.

  2. Pacal says:

    Well once again instead of offering history we get “HISTORY” from the History Channel. Why give people the real thing when you can give them sensationalistic pap. Instead of analyzing what could likely induce a homicidal frenzy in battle, it could be entirely psychological with no phamacology involved, we get magic mushroom speculation. As your examples and later discussion suggest it appears that alcohol and magic mushroom don’t seem to be indicated causing the berserkers frenzy.

    In terms of explaining the phenomena of berserker frenzy I would think a bit of research in what we know about how people work themselves into a frenzy and the sometimes homicidal frenzy that ossurs on the battlefield might have been in order rather than speculation about magic mushrooms. Also what seems to b e missing is any understanding of the context of such behavior.

    In the book Men of Blood, by Elliot Leyton he argues that over the last 700 years there has occurred in large parts of the world a “great pacification”, in which “honour” based cultural norms in which insults to “honour” were frequently avenged with violence. In fact violence was considered a perfectly acceptable way of avenging slights. THe result was a society in which people were very likely, (more so than ours), to “fly off the handle”. In fact what evidence we have would seem to indicate that murder rates in Medieval England (c. 1200 C.E.), were astronomical by toaday standards and interpersonal violence a lot more common than today. In the context of Norse culture, (Which if anything was more “honour” based, if anything than the Christian west during Pagan times) the off the wall behavior of berserkers was probably not quite so striking as it appears to us. I wonder did the show at least allude to if not discuss the religious aspects, (Its my understanding there were some), of being a Berserker and the whole phenomena.

    The literary aspects of the Icelandic Sagas is intriguing there is ussually very little if any description of peoples motives, actions and statements are descriped, quoted instead. Further the sagas are full of some the most laconic understatements I have ever read.

    Thanks for discussing the Sagas I think I will reread a few.

    • Eve says:

      No, the History Channel didn’t mention the religious aspects, and yes, there are some. The bereserker rage was a gift from Odin, the main god of war.

      Honor was certainly important in medieval Scandinavia. Insults had to be recompensed or avenged. If they weren’t, the insulted man lost standing. Icelandic law attempted to control violence through a system of payment for injury/insult (as well as through punishments such as banishment and lesser and full outlawry, which physically separated feuding parties). Jesse L. Byock discusses violence and conflict resolution in Feud in Icelandic Saga. Egil and Grettir are two saga heroes who are likely to choose violence rather than payment for injuries and slights (although Grettir is an outlaw for most of his saga and therefore has no legal standing, and Egil doesn’t get involved in feuds in Iceland). Others, like Njal (from Njal’s Saga) and Olaf the Peacock (from Laxdaela Saga) are more likely to seek peaceful means.

      Litotes or understatement for effect is used in old Germanic literature generally, but it is a particular favorite in the sagas. One of my favorite phrases is “as was to be expected.” In one saga (don’t remember which one), there is a passage that goes something like this: “The sword cut through the neck so that the head came off and he fell down dead, as was to be expected.” Well, yes, I guess that is what I would expect in the circumstances.

  3. Pacal says:

    Great example. I remember one which after describing a man I will call X (Can’t remember the name) being chopped to pieces said “X had just had a bad day”, no kidding!

  4. Eve says:

    Famous last words in sagas: in Njal’s Saga, a group of men have come to attack and kill Gunnar of Hlidarendi in his home. One guy is told to see if Gunnar is home. Gunnar impales the guy with his halberd. Attackers: “Is Gunnar home?” Guy: “I don’t know, but his halberd is.”

    In Grettir’s Saga, Grettir’s brother answers a knock on the door and gets run through with a spear: “I see the fashion is for broad-bladed spears.”

  5. […] Going Berserk Who hasn’t at one time or another gone berserk? And by “gone berserk,” of course I mean become enraged, howled like an […] […]

  6. john templeton says:

    I’d just like to point out that Wesley Clark was valedictorian of his class at West Point and attended Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. He has degrees in politics, economics, philosophy and military history. I think he might reasonably expected to answer a question or two about the Trojan War.

  7. john templeton says:

    re: my previous comment:

    My mistake – I read the article as saying he was in the segment on the Trojan war. I don’t know if Norse history is a staple of a military education, but his credentials are still considerable.

    • Eve says:

      I believe that he was in the Trojan War segment as well as the berserk segment. He may well have appeared throughout the program. To be fair, he appeared only briefly in the berserk segment and didn’t say anything absurd. It’s just that he obviously doesn’t have the same sort of specifically appropriate credentials in Norse history, literature and language that the other experts have.


  9. There could be a potential for some form of mild schizophrenia involved in the berserkr’s rage?

    From what I have read schizophrenia like a lot of “disorders” occurs across a spectrum. Full blown schizophrenics are not functional wheras some of their close relatives with less of an expression of it can be functional (i.e. schizotypal personality disorder or a variant).


    – stanford prof talking about schizotypal link to shamanism…and why the genes were potentially not wiped out.

    I bring this up because my mom has some form of undiagnosed schizophrenia (or variant…def. has capgras delusion).

    Without any outside influence or understanding of what hysteria could do for my strength…I would work myself into a “rage/hysteria” before competing in track and field…this is not some form of mild psyche up… I would typically do it for around 20 minutes or so…it would allow me to run approx. 1-2 seconds faster in the 400 Meters…because of this i won high school states and ran collegiately…most people thought I was just weird…but I cannot help but see a pattern for certain genetic predispositions towards a “rage” state.


    • Eve says:

      I suppose it’s possible that some berserks may have had schizophrenia or a related disorder. There are a number of saga characters (not just berserks) who seem psychologically odd, to put it mildly. But I don’t think any one disorder (or class of disorders) can really account for the whole phenomenon. The ability to work one’s self up into a state of rage would certainly be beneficial for a berserk warrior, but I suspect that it was more a matter of general personality type (rather than a psychological disorder) along with training and practice that allowed the berserks to achieve the frenzy.

  10. woodrite says:

    Some may try to describe it as a mental illness, but I think the answer lies closer to self determined evolution involving self-hypnosis mixed with adrenaline and other ‘botanicals’. Living in a society that encourages confrontation and bloodshed will quickly weed out the weak of heart. And it sounds like the Berserks had a lot of breeding on their minds. So a genetic predisposition to self-hyponosis and mind altering drugs and adrenaline evolved. As far as religious aspects and shape shifting, i have no comments, except to say the mind is a very powerful thing.

  11. Russian Skeptic says:

    I would like to correct you on Kveldulf and Egil. It is widely assumed that they are berserkers; in fact, they are not. Nowhere in the saga they are referred to as such. What Kveldulf is called is a hammrammr – a shape-shifter, but not in a single saga berserkers are classified as shape-shifters (the latter is a modern notion derived from the epithet ‘ulfheðnar’ understood as ‘werewolves’; while the only actual case of shape-shifting among berserkers is found in a very late Hrolfssaga Kraki, and this involves only one berserker out of 24 acting in the story).
    What Egilssaga actually says is that hammramm’s were somewhat alike berserkers in the way they felt weak after the fit:
    Svá er sagt, at þeim mönnum væri farit, er hamrammir eru, eða þeim, er berserksgangr var á, at meðan þat var framit, þá váru þeir svá sterkir, at ekki helzt við þeim, en fyrst, er af var gengit, þá váru þeir ómáttkari en at vanða. Kveld-Úlfr var ok svá…

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  14. anon says:

    “berserk” is a primitive instinctual state of survival where the the body optimizes it’s adrenaline functions by limiting awareness that is unneeded for combat.

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