Anthropology

Explainer
Who Were the Tripped-Out, Nearly Naked Berserkers?
And can we have what they were taking?
By Madison Margolin
March 4, 2024


Who were the Berserker warriors featured in Vikings: Valhalla? Madison Margolin, editorial director and co-founder of the psychedelics and mental health publication DoubleBlind, dives into the wild world of the bearskin-clad battlers.

Like ferocious, feral animals, a wild pack of Viking warriors would work themselves into crazed, rabid states before battle, wearing bearskin coverings and little else over their nearly naked bodies. Meet the Berserkers, the legendary warriors of the Viking era.

The etymology of the word berserk comes from the Old Norse berserkr, which means “raging warrior of superhuman strength.” The term is a combination of the words for ‘bear’ or ‘bare’ (which of these it is specifically is up for debate), and ‘shirt’ or ‘coat’ (serkr), and in the words of 9th-century poet Þorbjörn Hornklofi, “The Berserkers howled [and] gods were in their minds.”

Leo Suter as Harald Sigurdsson in Vikings: Valhalla
Bernard Walsh/Netflix
Indeed, some historians speculate that the frenzied, trancelike states that characterized the Berserkers’ savage behavior and consciousness were endowed to them by psychoactive plants native to the region.

While some theories posit that magic mushrooms in the form of Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, were responsible for these “warrior shamans” going berserk, academics of today have dispelled this as myth, despite the region having damp, fertile ground where fungi can sprout. According to the Viking Museum in Stockholm, “If anything, fly agaric would have made them particularly worthless warriors, since the side-effects include drowsiness, vomiting, muscle spasms and numbness in arms and legs.”

Rather, it’s more likely that the Berserkers were getting high off henbane or alcohol, although there’s also evidence that cannabis (especially in the form of hemp) was present in the region. Belonging to a group of plants in the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family, black henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) was an important herb for Viking and Druid rituals and has been connected to witchcraft. It produces effects that are consistent with what’s been described in Old Norse literature about the Berserkers, according to ethnobotanist Karsten Fatur from the University of New Brunswick. Henbane has been used for medications and are known to cause psychoactive effects, not to mention delirious states, dissociation from reality, or dark and realistic hallucinations, according to Fatur. “I've heard many stories of people who take [black henbane] and wake up days later, not knowing what happened to them,” he says. “People tend to behave in strange ways, aggressively imitating animals.” Other physiological effects include swelling and reddening of the skin, widening of the pupils, teeth chattering, body chills or fever, lowered blood pressure, and pain relief, which could have been what enabled the Berserkers to continue brutally battling in the face of injury. "

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/vikings-valhalla-who-are-berserkers-psychedelic-drugs