Viking Hygiene: They Had a Whole Day of the Week for Bathing

The surprising truth about Viking hygiene — and why two contemporary witnesses couldn't agree on it. An English chronicle complained that Danish men were winning over English women not by force, but by being too clean: they combed their hair, bathed every Saturday and changed their clothes. Yet Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveller who met the Norse on the Volga in 922, called them the filthiest of God's creatures. Both can't be entirely right. This episode separates the saga from the history: the chronicle attributed to John of Wallingford, Ibn Fadlan's eyewitness account, the Old Norse name for Saturday — laugardagr, "washing day", still surviving in Scandinavian languages today — and what archaeology actually finds. Bone combs, tweezers, ear spoons, bathhouses and Iceland's geothermal pools, alongside the parasite eggs in the latrines of York that complicate the clean image. Clean by the standards of their time is not the same as clean by ours.