Female Viking names

Viking women's names are every bit as fierce as the men's. Many are built from the same Old Norse words for battle, victory and the gods, and it was perfectly normal to name a daughter after war itself. The thirty names below were used for women in the Viking age or belong to the goddesses and heroines of Norse myth, and most are still in use in Scandinavia now.

Thirty female Viking names

The building blocks

Like men's names, most women's names were made from two parts. Common endings include hild and gunn, which both mean battle, frid or rid for beautiful, run for secret knowledge, dis for a goddess or noble lady and borg for protection. The first part often named a god, such as Thor, Ing or Frey, or used as, the general word for a god, which survives in Astrid and Aslaug.

That is why so many of these names read like a description of a valkyrie. A girl named Gunnhild or Ragnhild was carrying a name that her brothers would have been proud of.

Real women behind the names

• Aud the Deep Minded sailed from Scotland to Iceland in the late ninth century with her own ship and followers, claimed a large area of land and shared it out among them. She is remembered as one of the founders of Iceland.
• Freydis Eiriksdottir was the daughter of Erik the Red and took part in the voyages to North America described in the Vinland sagas.
• Thyra was a tenth century queen of Denmark. Her husband, Gorm the Old, raised a runestone at Jelling that calls her the pride of Denmark.
• Gunnhild, known as the Mother of Kings, was a queen of Norway and later of Viking York, and the sagas treat her as a formidable political operator.
• Estrid was the sister of Cnut, king of England, and the mother of a Danish king who took her name and not his father's, calling himself Sweyn Estridsson.
• Gyda, or Gytha, was a Danish noblewoman who married Earl Godwin of Wessex. Her son Harold was the king of England killed at Hastings in 1066.

Goddesses and legends

Several names on the list come from myth. Freya was the goddess of love and also took half of those who died in battle. Sif was the golden haired wife of Thor, Idun kept the apples that kept the gods young, Eir was a goddess of healing and Saga drank with Odin each day in her hall. Embla was the first woman, shaped by the gods from a tree.

Brynhild, Gudrun, Signy and Sigrun are heroines of the old poems and sagas about the hero Sigurd and his family. Aslaug appears in legend as a wife of Ragnar Lothbrok, as does Lagertha, the shieldmaiden whose name comes down to us only in a Latin history written around 1200.

Women's names and women's lives

A Viking woman kept her own name when she married and was known as her father's daughter, with dottir on the end. By the standards of the time she had real standing. She ran the farm when her husband was away, could own property and in Iceland could divorce. A high status grave at Birka in Sweden, long assumed to be a man's because it held weapons and two horses, was shown by DNA testing in 2017 to be that of a woman, and historians are still debating exactly what that tells us.

More names

See our list of male Viking names for the other side of the family, or Viking names for dogs if the new arrival has four legs.

Last reviewed 12 November 2026