If you’ve read A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm, or been a part of the ARC team for Child of Ash Heir of Fire, you’ve noticed a pattern. Midwinter arrives, the fire gets built, and at some point a horse bites the dust.
When someone asks about this, they typically have the look of pure horror on their face.
So, I want to explain why I’ve included, and will continue to include, a horse sacrifice in almost every one of my books. (Sorry horse girls)
The history behind Horse Sacrifice extraordinary, and getting it right matters to me in a way that shapes every ritual scene I write.
Horse sacrifice in the Viking Age was not an edgy set decoration. It was one of the most documented, archaeologically supported, and significant practices in all of Norse paganism. Which is why the more I researched it, the more I understood that leaving it out of a series rooted in authentic Viking Age religion would be the same as leaving out the gods themselves.
The Horse Was Not Just an Animal
To understand why horses appear in Viking graves, Viking blóts, and Viking domestic ritual, you have to start with what the horse meant in Norse cosmology, and that starts, inevitably, with Sleipnir.
Odin’s eight-legged horse is the most famous equine in Norse mythology, and he exists for a specific reason: Sleipnir can traverse every realm. He travels between the world of the living, the realm of the dead, and the divine planes of the gods without restriction. He is, in the language of scholars, a psycho pomp—a creature whose function is to carry souls across the boundary between life and death.
This is not incidental. The horse’s role as a psycho pomp in Norse mythology is the ideological foundation for everything the archaeological record shows us about equine sacrifice. Some scholars believe that when a Viking Age warrior was buried with his horse, the horse wasn’t just a status symbol or a practical gift for the afterlife. Many archaeologists, such as Neil Price, believe the horse was literally a vehicle for the soul’s journey across the boundary between the living world and whatever came next.
The Vanir god Freyr deepens this further. As a god of sacral kingship, agricultural abundance, and the generative forces of the earth, Freyr had a specific and well-documented connection to horses. His cult kept sacred horses (Freyfaxi is the most famous example, appearing in the sagas), and horse sacrifice was central to the worship of Freyr in a way that directly connects to my books, where Freyr is the central divine figure around whom the entire series turns.
What the Archaeology Actually Shows about Horse Sacrifice
This is the part that keeps me up at night in the best possible way, because the bioarchaeological evidence for horse sacrifice is staggering in its detail.
In Iceland alone, archaeologists have cataloged 148 pagan graves from the settlement era (roughly the late 9th to early 11th century) containing the remains of over 175 individual horses. Horses were the single most common grave good in settlement-era Iceland. Not weapons. Not jewelry. Horses!
And then researchers applied ancient DNA shotgun sequencing to those remains and found something that tells us exactly how deliberate the selection was: in burial contexts, eighteen of the nineteen analyzed horses were male. However, the horses found in non-burial domestic refuse sites, which would be the ones that were slaughtered for food or practical purposes, were predominantly female.
This was not random. The people performing these burials were choosing stallions and geldings specifically for the funerary rite, while mares were kept for the farm.
The ship burials take this further. At Oseberg, dated to around 834 CE, researchers found between ten and fifteen horses, all ritually decapitated before placement around the vessel. At Gokstad, twelve to thirteen horses. At Ladby in Denmark, eleven horses were interred with their bits, stirrups, and harness equipment. As if equipped for a literal journey.
These were not the burials of ordinary people. These were theatrical, economically devastating performances of elite mortuary ritual, converting enormous agricultural wealth into spiritual statement.
One of the most remarkable findings comes from Heath Wood in Derbyshire, the only known Viking cremation cemetery in Britain, associated with the Great Army that campaigned across England in the 860s and 870s. Strontium isotope analysis on the cremated remains from one of the mounds confirmed that a horse and a dog had been transported across the North Sea to Britain, then sacrificed and cremated alongside their human companion on English soil.
The Detail That Ended Up in My Books: Decapitation and the Severed Head
Studies revealed something specific about the ritual treatment of horses in Icelandic burials that lodged itself in my brain early in the research process and never left.
At multiple sites, horse skulls were found severed from the cervical vertebrae and deliberately repositioned within the grave. Sometimes placed facing the human body. Sometimes laid beside the animal’s flank. The decapitation frequently happened after the initial kill. Meaning this wasn’t the slaughter method.
The severed head held distinct symbolic power. Heads isolated from bodies could be mounted on stakes, placed at grave peripheries, or used as apotropaic wards as protection against malevolent forces. In a world where the boundary between the living and the dead was understood as genuinely permeable, the horse’s head marked that boundary in a way the whole body could not.
This is why, when I write a horse sacrifice scene, the specificity matters to me. The manner of death, the role of the völva performing it, the blood used to mark the living aren’t just my own sick inventions. They’re what the sources describe, translated into fiction.
The Private Ritual: Völsa þáttr and the most hilarious ritual we know about
The archaeological record gives us the public face of horse sacrifice. The literary sources give us something just as interesting: what happened in private.
Völsa þáttr, preserved in a 14th-century Icelandic manuscript, is one of the stranger texts in Old Norse literature. Set in a remote farmstead in northern Norway around 1029 CE, it recounts what happens when a thrall slaughters a horse and a household member salvages the phallus rather than discarding it.
The mistress of the household preserves the organ by drying it and wrapping it in linen cloth with leeks and aromatic herbs. She stores it in her personal chest. Each autumn night, it is brought out and passed hand-to-hand among family members and thralls, each of whom must recite a ritual strophe invoking the sacred phrase: “May Mǫrnir accept this holy object.”
The linguistic pairing of leeks (laukr) and linen (lín) in this ritual connects directly to the broader Eddic tradition. In the Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál, the valkyrie instructs Sigurd to use leeks as protection against enchantment, and runic inscriptions across Scandinavia pair laukr (symbolizing growth, vitality, and preservation) with alu (ale/magic).
Scholars believe this wasn’t merely folk tradition; this was a coherent fertility cult, operating at the household level, tied to the same cosmological framework as the grand ship burial sacrifices.
We know that while the account of this story is mostly told with humor, the private rituals of the home were tied to greater spiritual beliefs.
How This Lives in the Leifthasir Books
Freyr is the central god of the Leifthasir series. His sword, Sumarbrander, is the spine of the entire saga. His relic, the blade he traded away for love, — shapes the political reality of a kingdom for seven hundred years after he departed from the mortal world. Worship of him is woven into how the world of Leifthasir understands fertility, prosperity, kingship, and sacred duty.
It would be impossible to write that world authentically without writing about a blót , and it would be impossible to write the blót scenes authentically without the horse.
In A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm, Gunvald’s horse is sacrificed to Freyr in exchange for wisdom and guidance in his new role as a leader.
In the upcoming novel Prophecy of Ash, the horse sacrifice at an important burial is perhaps the most deliberately researched scene in the book. The white horse. The curved blade. The blood used to mark the survivors. The völva’s role as the ritual specialist performing the rite.
Why I Don’t Sanitize It
I’m occasionally asked why I don’t soften the ritual scenes, fade to black on the animal death, imply the blood rather than show it.
The honest answer is that sanitizing it would be a lie.
The Viking Age was not a world that looked away from the cost of its own theology. The killing of a horse was an enormous economic sacrifice; these were working animals, valuable and difficult to replace. A Horse was converted into spiritual currency through public performance. The community witnessed it. The blood was used. The meat, in many contexts, was eaten at the feast that followed. Nothing was wasted. Nothing was hidden.
When I write these scenes, I’m trying to honor the people who developed this practice, not to shock, not to perform grit, but to tell the truth about what they believed and how seriously they took it. The horse carried the dead across the boundary between worlds. The blood sealed the oath that could not otherwise be witnessed by a god. The sacrifice was the point of contact between the mortal world and the divine.
That is worth rendering honestly.
Where to Learn More
If you want to go deeper on the archaeological record, the bio archaeological literature on Viking Age equine burial is genuinely remarkable: ancient DNA studies, strontium isotope analysis, taphonomic profiles. It is the kind of science that makes mythology feel immediately, viscerally real.
For the literary sources, Völsa þáttr is short and widely available in translation. The saga accounts of blót ceremonies, particularly in the Saga of Haakon the Good and the Ynglinga saga, give strong textual support to the archaeological picture.
And if you want to see how two decades of that research translate into fiction, the Leifthasir’s Saga series is available starting with A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm.