Of all the peoples of the Middle Ages, it was the Norse who had the best nicknames. You can now explore a list of hundreds of interesting and strange nicknames from the Viking Age.

The sagas and histories of the Norse peoples are filled with names – the Family Sagas alone include over 7,000 named individuals. Most of those people also had nicknames. They needed to have them, for Norse society did not use proper surnames, but used patronyms like x’s son or x’s daughter. Without nicknames it would have been very difficult to differentiate people.

One could get their nickname from their age, appearance, clothing, where one came from, their occupation, or some interesting quality about the person. These nicknames could just as easily be an insult as they could be a compliment. We even have nicknames that were sexually explicit – for example, Kolbeinn Butter Penis – or as Peterson describes “potty humor nicknames,” such as Eystein Foul-Fart.

There are cases where people had multiple nicknames – a man named Hroi had five: ‘The Wealthy’, ‘The Foolish’, ‘The Elegant’, ‘The Wise’, and ‘Mishap’. They could also be changed during their lifetime.