Viking halberd a drooping "beard". The name is from Old Norse "skegg", "beard" and "øx", "axe". The term "Viking halberd" was used to describe a find in North America in the 1995 book "Early Vikings of the New World", but it was later demonstrated to be a tobacco cutter. There has currently been, in fact, no clearly identified Viking halberd or bill found. Spears are the only type of polearms found in Viking graves. It is possible that halberds and bills were not part of Viking funerary customs, as opposed to other weapons that have been found in graves. Bills have been
Bill (weapon) a spear head, and also a hook or spike mounted on the reverse side of the blade. There were many types of bill. English bills tended to be relatively short, with broad chopping heads, while Italian bills (ronche) often had very long thrusting points. The English distinguished between several varieties of bill, including the black, brown and forest bills, but the differences between them are currently not fully understood. George Silver, writing in 1599, stated that the black bill should be long, while the forest bill should be long. One advantage that it had over other polearms was that while