The Norse bladed arsenal is famously thin. Vikings did not have the range of sword types that Roman or Chinese arsenals carried. They had two weapons: the prestige two-edged sword that the chieftain owned and named, and the single-edged seax that everyone else carried. The sword was scarce, expensive, and inherited. The seax was ubiquitous, cheap, and discarded. Between them, they cover everything a Norseman carried with an edge on it.
Viking Sword
The double-edged straight sword of the Norse elite. Roughly 80 to 100 centimetres in total length, with a 70 to 85 centimetre blade and a shallow central fuller, the viking sword descends directly from the late Roman spatha through the Germanic peoples of the Migration period. The Vikings did not invent the form. They inherited it, refined the hilt and pommel through the Petersen typology of 26 variations, and made it the elite weapon of an entire region of Europe for three centuries.
What set the best Viking swords apart was the steel. From the 9th century onward, Frankish workshops along the Rhine produced blades from crucible steel imported via the Volga trade route from Central Asia. The most famous of these were marked with the inscription +VLFBERH+T or close variants. A genuine Ulfberht was metallurgically superior to nearly every other sword being made in Europe at the time, and the Vikings, who could afford them, bought them in quantity. Counterfeits with misspelled inscriptions appeared within decades.
Seax
The single-edged knife or short sword of the Germanic world, carried by Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, and Frisian peoples across six centuries of the early Middle Ages. The seax ranged from a small belt knife of 15 to 20 centimetres for utility use, up to the langseax of 60 to 80 centimetres — a short sword in all but name. The defining features are the single edge, the straight or slightly curved blunt spine, and the absence of a substantial crossguard.
A late Viking-Age variant, particularly common in England and the Danelaw, had a distinctive "broken-back" profile, with the spine angling sharply downward near the tip to produce a strong clipped point. The Beagnoth Seax, recovered from the Thames, carries the only complete Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic inscription known on a weapon. For most Vikings, the seax was the working knife they used every day and the sidearm they kept for a fight.