History & saga
Wolf-Coats and Bear-Shirts: the Truth About Berserkers
The warriors who bit their shields
Wolf's Blood is named for a real and unsettling figure of the Viking world: the warrior who fought in a frenzy beyond fear or pain. The Old Norse words tell the story — berserkr, 'bear-shirt,' and úlfheðinn, 'wolf-coat.' What the sources actually say is stranger than the legend.
What the sagas record
Snorri Sturluson, writing of Odin's warriors in the Ynglinga saga, describes men who 'went without mail-coats, and were mad as hounds or wolves; they bit their shields and were strong as bears — they slew men, but neither fire nor iron could touch them.' The skaldic poem Haraldskvæði, on King Harald Fairhair, sets berserkir and úlfheðnar howling and shaking their weapons at the sea-battle of Hafrsfjord. These were warriors marked out as Odin's own — terror given human shape.
Frenzy, not magic
How did the fury come? Honest answer: we don't fully know. Scholars point to ritual, psychology, self-worked rage, and the surge of adrenaline before a fight. The popular idea that berserkers ate a hallucinogenic mushroom or henbane is a guess first floated in the 1780s — colourful, but unsupported by the sources. Nor were berserkers a tidy regiment; in later, Christian sagas they often appear as champions, bullies, or villains to be cut down.
The music it inspired
Wolf's Blood
Wolfskin warriors and the howl of Ragnarök. Fifteen tracks of pure primal fury.
The wolf-warriors run all through the record: “Wolfskin Warriors,” “Wolf God,” “Unleash the Beast,” and “With the Howl of Ragnarök.”