What's in a Viking name? Wolves, thunder, and very unflattering nicknames

Spend enough time writing in the Viking age and you start paying attention to names. Ours aren’t chosen at random, and neither were theirs. Viking naming traditions are actually fascinating, and quite different from what we’re used to today.

You were your father’s child

The most common system was patronymics. You didn’t have a fixed family surname the way we do now. Instead, your last name was simply your father’s first name with “son” or “dóttir” (Icelandic) or “datter” (Norwegian) added. So the son of Ragnar was Ragnarsson, and his daughter was Ragnarsdóttir.

This is still how Icelandic names work today, which makes Iceland one of the last places in the world to preserve a genuinely Viking-age naming tradition. A modern Icelander’s “surname” tells you their father’s first name and nothing about their wider family. The phone book is organised by first name, because that’s the part that actually belongs to the person.

First names carried meaning

First names were chosen carefully and often carried meaning. Many were compound names built from two elements, each with their own significance.

“Bjørn” meant bear. “Ulv” meant wolf. “Gunnar” combined “battle” and “warrior”. “Astrid” meant “divinely beautiful”. Names were chosen to reflect qualities the parents hoped the child would carry: strength, courage, divine favour, or a connection to the natural world. You didn’t just name a child. You made a small wish for the kind of person they might become.

Some names were passed down within families, often skipping a generation, as a way of honouring ancestors and keeping their memory alive. Naming a child after a recently deceased relative was considered a way of carrying something of that person forward.

And then there were the nicknames

Nicknames were also extremely common, and the Vikings were not always flattering about them. Harald Fairhair. Ivar the Boneless. Sigurd the Stout. Eirik Bloodaxe.

These weren’t ceremonial titles. They were often what people actually called you, based on a physical trait, a deed, or something you’d rather forget. Some people acquired several nicknames over a lifetime, and you didn’t get much say in which one stuck.

In our books

We’ve tried to honour these traditions. The names our characters carry aren’t random. Ulv is a wolf. Tora carries thunder in her name. These things matter in the world we’re writing, and once you know what a name means, you start reading the characters a little differently.

If you want to meet the wolf, that’s Viking, where it all begins. And if you’d rather follow the thunder, Tora takes up her sword in Shieldmaiden.