Check out these Viking-era teeth, dating between 972 and 1025 CE. Discovered in 2009 in Dorset, England, they came from a burial pit of Scandinavian men who had all been decapitated after suffering violent deaths, as in, a mass execution (51 skulls were in the grave, and many of their accompanying bones were adjacent). These years were marked by conflict among the Danish Vikings and the English, and the executions probably are connected to this. Despite the grizzly nature of this grave, the teeth here point to an interesting custom among some Scandinavian men of the time: dental filing.
For the teeth featured here are not the only examples of Viking-era dental modification: over 130 cases have been found. Most are like what you see here: horizontal grooves, with the front teeth displaying the significant carvings. To get this look, it is likely that someone else had to file the teeth down, and the process would have been incredibly painful. No patterns of social class have been noted with such teeth: the common denominators seem to be men, starting in youth and going up, with the heaviest concentration of dental modifications (80%) coming from Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea. Scientists have noticed that deposits on the teeth show that the filing was done in life and not after death, so the practice seems to have been deliberate.
In order for other people to have observed the teeth filing, a person would have had to smile broadly , which would have been quite unnerving. So, Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets, but some of them at any rate did cultivate a certain look of terror with their dental modifications.
Sources: “The Vikings and their filed teeth,” Medievalists.net, Jan 2020, featuring research by Caroline Ahlstom Arcini. “Death on the Dorset Ridgeway: a Viking Murder Mystery,” Medievalists.net, 2012, report of conference paper by Angela Boyle, report by Peter Konieczny. _British Dental Journal_ “Viking teeth offer insight into cultural status,” 25 April 2014, 216, 445 (2014), Laura Pacey.
