In this excerpt from "The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age" (Basic Books, 2026), author and archaeologist Neil Price looks at the horrific lives of the "thralls" — the Viking term for the enslaved. In it, he highlights the inhumane treatment of enslaved people, from the raids to kidnap people into the slave trade to a woman who appears to have been killed as a tribute to a high-status man.
The vast majority of the Norse population were farmers, but there is another group of people who were almost as numerous, though very hard to find in the archaeological record: the enslaved. They have only recently begun to be properly acknowledged in our histories, partly because of the long-standing neglect of the marginalized and vulnerable in many cultures, but in the Viking world also due to a particular coincidence of terminology. For the Norse, the unfree were þrælar, translated into English as "thralls," which is too mild a word to convey its true meaning.
Slavery, as both a practice and an integrated economic system, was an indivisible part of Viking-Age Norse society and had probably already become established in Scandinavia centuries or even millennia earlier. People could be born into slavery, or be forced into it through kidnap or war, and then find themselves sold on, sometimes through many hands and over great distances. Some free people might even temporarily sell themselves in a form of indenture, as a means of paying off debts or other obligations.
The grim reality is summarized with derogatory terminology in the poem Rígsþula, the "List of Rígr" (another name for the god Heimdall, or perhaps for Odin): "They fixed fences, dunged fields, worked at the pigs, watched over the goats, dug the peat." Even their names are shaming, mocking their appearance or hygiene: they translate as Badbreath, Stumpy, Fatty, Bedmate, Craneshanks, Dumpy, and many more. Thralls were extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The textual records of viking raids, coming from every culture that was attacked, emphasize that women were particularly targeted for kidnapping and enslavement.
The repetition drives home the point, and little imagination is required to sense the undiluted horror. Some of these raids were informed by advance intelligence gathering and directed against high-profile targets for whom ransom could be demanded, but many were destined for sex trafficking, especially to the Arab world. Enslaved humans, particularly from the Baltic region, were among the main commodities exchanged eastwards along the Silk Roads.
Some of the scant archaeological evidence of thralls comes from the graves of high-status Vikings. (Image credit: Getty Images)As economic expansion enlarged the capacity for ship-borne aggression and released the agricultural workforce to crew these expeditions, the increased flow of human victims enabled its continuance in a vicious circle. Enslavement was one of the primary characteristics of the Viking Age: the raids were a key component of it and of the Norse diaspora that resulted.
At Ballateare, it is instructive to see just how normal the initial funeral, and its circumstances, appear to have been, albeit for a high-status individual. By Viking-Age standards he was in his prime when he died in the early tenth century, somewhere between eighteen and thirty years old. He may have been among the early Norse settlers on Man. We have no reason to believe that the clothes he was buried in, and the things laid in the grave, are not reflections of his life and the international milieu he came from.
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I do not wish to relate what happened next in terms of dramatized reconstruction; archaeological description must suffice. On top of the mound lay the body of a woman aged between twenty and thirty, who had been deliberately killed: the back of her head had been removed by a single blow from a sharp blade, probably a sword. Rigor mortis had set in, and some twelve to seventy-two hours had elapsed between her death and the time when her body was covered. She had either lain exposed on the mound for some time after her death, or been killed elsewhere (perhaps more likely, as the missing part of her skull was not present with the body). The woman seems to have died while kneeling, and had fallen forwards with her hands raised. A post was raised on top of the mound beside her body, presumably a grave marker.
Excerpted from The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age by Neil Price. © 2026 by Neil Price. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Penguin The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age
Drawing on the latest archaeological research and scientific analysis, The Sea-King and the Sorceress brings us closer to understanding the lives and times of the Vikings. The era that bears their name will never seem so simple again.
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