When you watch a historical drama, one of the things your brain is quietly doing in the background is asking: is this real? Not the plot — the objects. The cup in his hand, the cloak on her shoulders, the ring around his arm. The physical world of the show is either grounded in something true or it isn't, and somewhere underneath the entertainment, you want to know which.
So here is what we actually know about the material world of Erik Bloodaxe, his queen Gunnhild, and the Norse aristocratic household of the mid-10th century. Not what the show depicts. What the archaeology, the sagas, and the grave finds say.
Clothing: What a Norse King Actually Wore
Norse dress of the Viking Age was sophisticated. The popular image of Vikings in furs and rough-woven sacks is wrong. The Norse elite wore layered, tailored clothing made from wool and linen, with silk imported from Byzantium and the Islamic world used as trim and accent fabric. Finds from high-status graves show evidence of tablet-woven borders in complex geometric patterns, embroidery along necklines and cuffs, and imported silk ribbons worked into the construction of garments.
The basic male outfit was a linen undershirt (serk), wool trousers that varied by region from tight-fitting to more baggy leg wraps, and a woollen overtunic. Cloaks were the main outer garment — large rectangular pieces of wool, fastened at the right shoulder with a brooch so the right arm stayed free. The brooch was not decorative: it was structural, and it was often the most expensive thing a person wore. High-status brooches were silver or gold, sometimes set with niello or amber.
For a king like Erik, the outer garments would have been dyed. Red and blue were the prestige colours — expensive to achieve, visible at distance, unmistakably announcing wealth. The dyes came from plant and insect sources that had to be traded for. You could read a man's rank from his clothing before he was close enough to speak.
Gunnhild, as queen, would have worn the apron-dress characteristic of Norse women — two loops of fabric hanging from shoulder-brooches over an undertunic, sometimes with a shawl or additional overgarment. The shoulder-brooches that held the apron-dress were the female equivalent of the cloak-pin: often beautiful, always functional, and a direct signal of status. A queen's brooches would have been gilded or solid silver, with intricate knotwork or animal-style decoration. The keys hanging from her belt — literal keys to the storerooms — were also status symbols, the visible emblem of her authority over the household.
Weapons and Equipment
The sword of the Viking Age was not a crude hack-and-slash instrument. It was expensive, technically demanding to make, and imbued with cultural meaning that went well beyond its function. Pattern-welded blades — made by twisting and forge-welding different iron alloys together — gave blades visual texture that was understood as almost magical, the metal itself appearing to shift and move in the light. Named swords appear throughout the sagas: Bloodaxe (the weapon Erik was named for), Leg-Biter, Gold-Hilt. Naming a sword was not whimsy. It acknowledged that the weapon had a kind of personhood, a history.
An axe like the one Erik's epithet refers to was actually the more common elite weapon of the period — large, single-handed or two-handed depending on the design, with a broad cutting edge. The axe was a working weapon and a war weapon simultaneously, more egalitarian in association than the sword but no less deadly in skilled hands. The Mammen axe, found in a Danish grave from roughly Erik's era, is the clearest archaeological example of what a high-status Viking axe looked like: inlaid with silver wire in intricate animal and foliage patterns, more art object than tool, yet made to function.
Shields were round, wooden, painted. Spears were the most common weapon across all classes. Helmets were iron, rounded, sometimes with a nasal guard — they were not horned. This bears repeating: Norse helmets were not horned. That image comes from 19th-century Romantic painting and has nothing to do with what warriors actually wore.
Feasting: The Cup in His Hand
The Norse feast was not simply dinner. It was political ritual. The mead-hall was the space where loyalty was performed, where the king distributed rings and gifts to his followers, where the poets recited the deeds of the dynasty. The physical objects of the feast were loaded with meaning.
Drinking vessels in high-status Norse contexts included wood, horn, and metal. Imported glass vessels — some Roman, some Byzantine — appear in elite grave finds and represent the outer reach of the trade networks that connected Scandinavia to the wider world. Drinking from an imported glass cup in the 10th century was roughly the equivalent of serving wine in something that had no business being this far north: it announced connection, wealth, and access.
The mead was brewed from honey and water, sometimes spiced. Ale was the everyday drink. Wine was imported, expensive, and largely a luxury of the Christian south — though Norse traders who worked the eastern and western routes would have encountered it regularly. The sagas describe feasting in detail: the order of seating mattered, the position of the high-seat mattered, who was offered which drink mattered. A king who managed the feast well was managing politics.
Meat at a Norse feast would have been roasted, boiled, or both — large communal cooking methods rather than individual portions. Cattle, pigs, sheep, game. Fish, dried or preserved, as a staple rather than a feast food. Bread. Dairy products. The feast was abundance made visible, the king demonstrating that his household could feed all comers.
Jewellery and the Arm-Ring
The arm-ring is one of the most persistent symbols in Norse aristocratic culture, and it was not merely decorative. Silver arm-rings were the primary form of currency and gift in the Norse economy. When a king gave a follower an arm-ring, he was doing several things simultaneously: paying him, binding him, and publicly marking him as a man who had earned the king's favour. The follower who wore the ring was visibly in the king's debt and loyalty network. Rings were also used as a store of value — they could be cut into pieces (hack silver) and weighed when actual payment was needed.
Both men and women wore jewellery. Neck-rings, finger-rings, pendants, and brooches appear in the archaeological record in large numbers. Thor's hammer pendants (Mjölnir amulets) were worn as religious symbols, particularly as Christianity was spreading and the hammer became a specifically pagan counter-symbol to the cross. The period when Erik and Gunnhild were active was precisely the transition period — some Norse people were Christian, some were not, and the objects they wore announced their position.
The Ship
No account of Viking material culture is complete without the ship. A longship of the 10th century was the highest-technology object in the Norse world, the product of generations of shipbuilding knowledge and a level of craft that was not surpassed in northern European seafaring for centuries. The Oseberg ship (early 9th century) and the Gokstad ship (late 9th century) give the clearest picture of what these vessels looked like: clinker-built hulls of overlapping oak planks, riveted together, shallow enough to beach directly on shore, capable of sailing in open ocean and navigating rivers.
A king without ships was not a king. Erik's ability to move between Norway, Orkney, and Northumbria depended entirely on ship access. His exile was never truly exile while he had a fleet. The longship was freedom, threat, and political asset simultaneously.
Why Any of This Matters
Material culture matters because it is the part of history that was real without being written down. The sword existed. The brooch existed. The arm-ring was worn. These were not invented by saga authors with agendas — they were made by craftspeople whose work has survived a thousand years in the ground.
When you look at a piece of Norse-inspired design today — the knotwork, the animal motifs, the runic lettering — you are looking at something that was genuinely present in Erik and Gunnhild's world, worked into the objects they used every day. That continuity is not nostalgia. It is the actual thread connecting then to now.
👉 Eric Bloodaxe T-Shirt – Viking King of Norway & Northumbria
👉 Gunnhild T-Shirt – Norse Queen, Mother of Kings
👉 Norse Queen Energy Embroidered Crewneck
Further reading: Erik Bloodaxe: The Real History — Gunnhild: The Most Dangerous Woman in the Viking Age — Jorvik: What It Was Actually Like to Live in Viking York