Viking Nit-Comb

Here’s a nit-comb from Viking-era Denmark (late 700s). Today I am reading through arguments why we shouldn’t think of the Vikings as a filthy and unhygienic culture. On the plus side, we may observe the following:

1. Vikings combed lice from their hair (whoopie so do baboons).
2. Vikings had “ear-spoons” to remove the wax from their ears (this is pretty niche and makes me ask whether there was somehow more of a wax problem in Scandinavia than other places)
3. Vikings did laundry (one of their ingredients was cow urine)

And so I am not in fact persuaded that the Vikings were clean. And I understand that other Medieval Europeans were likely to have been just as unhygienic, but since this is a post about Vikings, I thought it worth a gander to go over some of their living arrangements:

1. Like other Europeans, Vikings lived and slept in the same building as their domesticated animals.
2. We sadly have lots of evidence that they routinely carried parasites.
3. I am going to just leave here a quote by the Arab merchant traveller Ibn Fadlān, who described some of the eastern “Rus” branch of Vikings with horror:

“They are the filthiest of God’s creatures. They do not clean themselves after urinating or defecating, nor do they wash after having sex. . . Every day they wash their faces and their heads with the dirtiest water there could be . . . [One Viking used a basin to wash his hair and then in the same bowl] he blows his nose and spits . . .”
The next Viking in the queue used the same water.

Even if Ibn Fadlān was exaggerating, his writing reminds me that I have much to be thankful for on this New Year’s Eve for 2022, and I wish the same for us all in 2023!