How Tall Were the Vikings? The Answer from Skeletons, Backed by Data

Sources: Richard Steckel, "New Light on the Dark Ages," Social Science History, 2004 · Jón Steffensen, "Stature as a Criterion of the Nutritional Level of Viking Age Icelanders," 1958 · Galofré-Vilà et al., University of Oxford, 2017 · Per Holck, "The Skeleton from the Gokstad Ship," 2009 · Raili Allmäe, "The Salme I Ship Burial," 2011 · PLOS One, Medieval Norway, 2022 · Antiquity, Birka Grave Bj 581, 2019 · NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, current heights · Ibn Fadlan, Risala (922) · Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla. Actor heights are those published by specialized websites, within one centimeter.

The answer in figures: 1.72 m (5'8") for men, 1.58 m (5'2") for women

Forget the two-meter-tall colossi on video game covers. The skeletons are clear: a Viking Age man stood 1.72 m (5'8") on average, a woman 1.58 m (5'2"). Depending on the cemetery, the male average fluctuates between 1.71 m and 1.76 m, and one can find men of 1.60 m and others of 1.85 m in the same necropolis. In other words, an average Viking would today be six centimeters shorter than an average Frenchman, and eight shorter than a Norwegian.

However, this figure only makes sense when placed in the context of the era. Around the year 900, 1.72 m was a respectable height: an inch or two taller than an Anglo-Saxon, two inches taller than a Roman, and, most importantly, two to two-and-a-half inches taller than what Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries would be. Men of the North in the year 1000 were, in reality, as tall as Europeans in the 1950s. Here is where these figures come from, what they hide, and what they do not say.

How do we measure a Viking dead for a thousand years?

No one has ever measured a living Viking with a tape measure. Everything relies on long bones, primarily the femur: its length represents a relatively constant proportion of an adult's height, and regression formulas—the most widely used being those of Trotter and Gleser—are used to calculate stature. The margin of error is around three to four centimeters for an individual, which explains why studies provide ranges rather than round numbers. Osteologists also use the tibia and humerus, and correct the result based on sex, determined by the pelvis and skull.

Three biases are worth noting before reading a table. First, the sample: at the beginning of the Viking Age, a large proportion of the dead were cremated, and a funeral pyre leaves no femur to measure; well-preserved skeletons become more common with Christianization, starting from the 10th century. Second, social selection: the most studied graves are those of the powerful, who ate better. In Norway, between the 11th and 16th centuries, elite women were 3.5 cm taller than women in ordinary parishes. Finally, age: only adults are measured, and a man loses one or two centimeters after the age of fifty. When a study announces 1.72 m, it should be read as "about 1.72 m, for the adults we have found, in this region." That is already quite a lot.

The figures, region by region

A real shield wall: men from 1.60 m to 1.85 m side by side, as in the Fjälkinge cemetery.

The oldest source is also one of the most robust: in 1958, the Icelandic physician Jón Steffensen compiled measurements of 86 skeletons from the 10th century found in cemeteries in Iceland, the island colonized by Norwegians starting in 870. He arrived at 1.71 to 1.75 m for men and 1.57 to 1.61 m for women, and noted a detail that says it all: these Icelanders of 950 AD were the same height as Icelanders of the early 20th century. It took until the 1950s for the island to surpass its founders.

The most extensive compilation is that of the American economist Richard Steckel, in 2004: thirty studies, bones from Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain, and Denmark, and an average of 1.73 m for men in Northern Europe between the 9th and 11th centuries, the highest in the entire millennium until the 20th century. The seven warriors from the Salme ship in Estonia, buried around 750 with their swords after an expedition from Sweden, are even taller, from 1.75 m to 1.82 m; but these are handpicked men-at-arms, not an entire village. Conversely, the Fjälkinge cemetery in Scania, used before, during, and after the Viking Age, shows men from 1.60 m to 1.85 m and even suggests a slight decrease in average height during the Viking Age, a sign of harder years. The Vikings were not a people of giants: they were well-fed peasant-sailors, with the same differences between individuals as we have today.

What about Viking women?

Birka grave Bj 581: a 1.70 m woman buried with a sword, axe, arrows, and two horses.

Viking Age women measured 1.57 m to 1.61 m in Iceland, around 1.58 m in Denmark, and from 1.51 m to 1.71 m in the Fjälkinge cemetery. The difference with men, thirteen to fourteen centimeters, is the same as it is today. The two women from the Oseberg ship, the richest burial in the entire Viking world, were about 1.53 m each, which did not stop one of them from being buried with a 22-meter ship, sleds, a carved cart, and about fifteen horses.

At the other end of the scale, Birka grave Bj 581 in Sweden provided one of the surprises of recent archaeology in 2017: the occupant of this warrior's grave, buried with a sword, an axe, arrows, a shield, and two horses, was a woman in her thirties, 1.70 m tall—twelve centimeters above the average for her sex and two centimeters above the average man of her time. If you were looking for a Lagertha of flesh and blood, she is the closest the earth has yielded.

Taller than the English, the Franks, the Romans?

Yes, but only just. The following table puts side-by-side the same methods applied to other cemeteries, especially in England, where an Oxford study tracked men's height over two thousand years.

Compared to their contemporaries, the Viking had a slight advantage: one or two centimeters over the Anglo-Saxon they faced in the Danelaw, about five over a Roman legionary five centuries earlier. Nothing to make a giant in a shield wall. What is striking is the rest of the table: the height of Europeans fell by six centimeters between the year 1000 and the 18th century, and Napoleon's conscripts were eight centimeters shorter than the men of Gokstad or Birka. A Viking transported to Paris in 1800 would have loomed over the crowd; transported to Paris in 2026, he would go unnoticed. The myth of the giant Viking has a kernel of truth: it dates back to the centuries when Europe had shrunk.

Why they were so tall for their time: climate, diet, space

Fish, milk, meat, and barley: the diet that made the Vikings tall.

A population's stature is a thermometer for its childhood nutrition. Three factors explain that of the Scandinavians in the year 1000, and Richard Steckel summarized them in his study. The first is the climate: the Medieval Warm Period, from the 9th to the 13th century, gave Northern Europe temperatures two to three degrees higher than those of the following centuries and a growing season extended by three to four weeks. Barley was cultivated as far north as Norway, and cattle were grazed in Greenland.

The second is the diet. Isotopic bone analyses reveal a protein-rich regimen: sea and freshwater fish, dried herring and cod, cow, sheep, and goat milk, butter, and skyr, pork, mutton, and beef, seabird eggs, bread and porridge of barley and oats, cabbage, onions, berries, and hazelnuts—all without ever depending on a single harvest. When the barley froze, the sea provided food. It is this diversity, more than the quantity, that protects children's growth; we detail these habits in our article on the daily life of the Vikings.

The third is space. The Scandinavia of the year 1000 was a land of dispersed farms, with no large cities: Birka, Hedeby, or Kaupang had only a few thousand inhabitants at most. Yet childhood epidemics, which hinder growth, need density to spread. Steckel shows that the decline that followed, down to the 1.67 m of the 18th century, is due precisely to the opposite: the Little Ice Age starting in the 14th century, the rise of cities and their diseases, the plague, wars, and increasing inequality, which made bread more expensive for the poorest. The Vikings did not have bodies different from ours; they had a world more favorable than that of their descendants in the following centuries.

Proven giants: Gokstad, Salme, Harald, Rollo, Egill

Gokstad, c. 901: the tallest Viking measured, 1.81 m, rests in a 23-meter ship.

The tallest Viking ever measured rests in the Oslo Museum: the Gokstad chieftain, buried around 901 in a 23-meter ship under a mound in Vestfold. Anatomist Per Holck re-examined him in 2009: a man of about forty, approximately 1.81 m tall, with an exceptional build, who died in battle from several blade wounds. Holck also noted, at the base of the skull, traces of a pituitary tumor: the chieftain likely suffered from acromegaly, the disease that causes bones in the hands, feet, and face to grow in adulthood. The giant of Gokstad was therefore, in part, a giant due to illness. You will find the story of his burial in our guide to Viking funeral rites.

The sagas, written two to three centuries after the facts, loved great men and made them even greater. Snorri Sturluson attributes to Harald Hardrada, killed at Stamford Bridge in 1066, a height of five ells, which is over two meters twenty according to conversions; it is the same source that has the English King Harold say, before the battle, that he will offer his rival "seven feet of English earth, or a little more, since he is taller than other men." Thorkell the Tall, a Jomsviking leader and conqueror of England alongside Cnut, owes his nickname, inn hávi, to his stature. And Rollo, the founder of Normandy, is called Göngu-Hrólfr, "Hrólfr the Walker," because no horse could carry him: we explain the value of this legend in our article on Rollo.

The case of Egill Skallagrímsson, the Icelandic poet-warrior, is the most curious. His saga describes him as enormous, with a bulging forehead and a skull so thick that, when unearthed a hundred and fifty years after his death, it supposedly withstood an axe blow. In 1995, historian Jesse Byock proposed a diagnosis: Paget's disease, which thickens and deforms bones. The hideous giant of the saga was likely a sick man described with precision. Between the Gokstad chieftain and Egill, the two best-documented "giants" of the Viking world owe their extreme stature to pathology, not to a race of colossi.

Sturdy rather than tall: build, weight, strength

What the bones show with certainty is sturdiness. The muscle attachments on the humeri and clavicles of Viking Age men are pronounced, a sign of heavily used shoulders and arms; rowing eight hours a day on a Gokstad ship, wielding a carpenter's axe and a scythe, carrying water and wood—all these shaped a body that few office jobs produce. Women were not left out: milling grain with hand stones, milking, weaving standing at an upright loom, carrying loads. Our berserkers owed nothing to magic.

Weight, however, cannot be read in a grave: a skeleton cannot be weighed. Osteologists estimate it based on the diameter of the femoral head, which bears body mass, and these estimates give a 1.72 m man with a solid frame a weight order of magnitude of about 70 kg, meaning a lean and dense man, not a wrestler. Objects confirm the human scale of these warriors: a Viking sword is 90 cm in total, half the height of its bearer; a shield is 80 to 90 cm in diameter, from chin to knees of a 1.72 m man; the chainmail found fits average-sized torsos. You will find their dimensions in our articles on Viking armor and the Viking shield.

What contemporaries of the time said about them

Volga, 922: Ibn Fadlan finds the Rus to be "as tall as date palms." He came from Baghdad, where people were shorter.

The most famous testimony comes from an Arab diplomat. In 922, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, an envoy from the Caliph of Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars, encountered Rus merchants—those Scandinavians of the East—and wrote: "I have never seen people with more perfect bodies than theirs: they are as tall as date palms, blond and ruddy." The sentence has gone around the world, and people forget where it was written. Ibn Fadlan came from Baghdad, where 10th-century men were significantly shorter than in Scandinavia; in the same passage, he also describes men who do not wash their hands after eating and share the same basin of water to blow their noses. His admiration for their height is sincere, but it is relative.

Frankish and Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, for their part, are almost silent on the height of the invaders: the monks who wrote the annals described fleets, fires, and ransoms, not physical builds. When a giant appears in the texts, it is in the Icelandic sagas, composed between 1200 and 1350, where great height is considered a quality of heroes and kings, just like strength or generosity. What literature retains is the heroic standard, not the village average: nobody writes a saga about a 1.68m farmer.

The Vikings series versus the skeletons

The series has done more for the image of the giant Viking than ten centuries of sagas. Compare the actors to the 1.72m average measured from bones.

All of the male cast members exceed the average Viking by eight to nineteen centimeters, and Floki, portrayed as a slight craftsman, is the tallest of them all. Only Lagertha is accurate, within three centimeters, and she remains nine centimeters below the Birka warrior. The series is no more untruthful than Snorri: it chooses heroes. We have examined the other discrepancies in detail in Vikings, the series compared to true history. The only Norwegian who truly fits the giant mold is a footballer: Erling Haaland stands at 1.95m, fourteen centimeters taller than the Gokstad chieftain.

And how do they compare to us? Modern heights

The final comparison is the one that puts everything back into perspective. The descendants of the Vikings are now among the tallest people in the world, and the French are not far behind. Figures from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, which compiles over two thousand studies, for adults aged 18 to 25.

A man of the Viking Age would therefore be shorter than the average today in every country in Western Europe, including his own: the Danes and Icelanders have gained nine to ten centimeters over their ancestors, and the French six. This growth spurt is recent; it dates back to the 1950s and is due to the same causes as the tall stature of the Vikings in their time: an abundant and varied diet from childhood, and the conquest of childhood diseases. The Scandinavians of the year 1000 had already found the recipe; it took Europe a thousand years to rediscover it.

Frequently asked questions about Viking height

May the Aesir guide you on the path of honor.