Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

“That’s because alcohol and drunkenness didn’t need to find their place within Viking society, they were Viking society. Alcohol was authority, alcohol was family, alcohol was wisdom, alcohol was poetry, alcohol was military service, and alcohol was fate.”80 This had its downsides as a cultural strategy. Medieval Vikings would make modern frat boys look like herbal tea-sipping grannies. As Iain Gately notes, binge drinking played such a central role in their culture that “a striking number of their heroes and kings died from alcohol-related accidents,”81 ranging from drowning in enormous vats of ale to being slaughtered by rivals while rolling about in a drunken stupor. Perpetually drunken and heavily armed warriors also posed a threat to those around them. The highest praise accorded to the legendary Viking/Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf was that “he never killed his friends when he was drunk.”