Choosing a name for your child, or someone you love can undoubtedly be a difficult task. If you are looking …
Choosing a name for your child, or someone you love can undoubtedly be a difficult task. If you are looking for female Viking Age names, this list will hopefully help you on your journey.
When working on this list I started with almost fifteen hundred names. Through a highly subjective and non-scientific process I weaned out most of them. To not make it all subjective, I recruited the help of my daughter Oda (her name is remarkably in the top twelve). Together we have looked at more female Viking Age names than I had ever thought I would. Not to be outdone by his little sister, my son Brage and I have made a list of Viking Age names for boys as well.
Our goal has been to create a list with names that we actually liked, while not being too restrictive. We have eliminated names that today are seen more male than female, some that have taken on some unintended meaning in our time, and lastly we cut some (many) that we in good conscience didn’t want to help someone name their daughter.
Many of these are popular female names today across Scandinavia. Based on our own taste we also came up with a list of top twelve female names with strong roots in the Norse myths or Viking Age. Adding the meaning for each name is proving to be a time-consuming task. As such, this post will be updated frequently when I have added the meaning for more of the names.
Top Twelve Female Names from the Viking Age
When choosing the top twelve female names from Norse myths and history, we had a bit of a challenge. It was supposed to be a top ten list, but we really ended with fifteen or sixteen names, and finally managed to get down to twelve. Obviously, choosing a name is highly personal so our top picks aren’t necessarily the same as yours will be.
We hope you find this list helpful and would love to hear from you if you decide to use one of them yourself.
Top Twelve List
Andora
“Thor’s Eagle” – Female version of the male Andor. An- is derived from Old Norse Árn (meaning eagle), -dor is from the Old Norse Þórr for Thor.
Dagny
“New Day”(More poetically it could be understood as New Beginning). Derived from the Old Norse Dágr, the god of the day, and -ny, meaning new.
Norse mythology enthusiast, Norwegian and living in Oslo next to a series of old Viking age burial mounds.I am also able to navigate and understand quite a lot of the old Norse texts and I often lean on original texts when researching an article. Through this blog I hope more people, young and old will get to know Norse mythology and the world of the Vikings a bit better.
