"Viking art" gets used as a catch-all, one look, one aesthetic, as though the people who carved these designs into stone, bone and gilded bronze over four centuries were all working from the same handbook. They weren't. Norse art is actually a sequence of distinct styles, each with its own name, its own dating, and its own visual grammar, evolving one into the next as fashions, rulers and beliefs shifted underneath them.
Knowing the difference matters. It's the difference between a design that's genuinely rooted in a specific time and place, and one that's just vaguely "Nordic-looking." What follows is a short walk through Viking art history in the order it actually developed, style by style, and what sets each one apart.
Salin's Style III (c. 650–800 AD)
Before there was "Viking art," there was Style III, a broad, chaotic body of work spanning three sub-categories and used right across Europe, on jewellery, ornament and sword-hilts alike. It shows up as far afield as the British Isles and Ireland, where it likely helped lay the groundwork for the ornamental manuscripts that followed.
Style III is built from ribbon-like animals held together by framework, often mirrored or arranged in threes and fours. It's less a single style than a shared visual language that the true Viking Age styles would grow out of, and the later phases of it already start overlapping with the Viking Age proper.
Broa Style (c. 750–830 AD)
Named after a set of gilded harness mounts found at Broa, Gotland, this style sits right at the boundary between Style III and what comes next. The mounts themselves carry unrecognisable beasts, animal heads in profile, and faces worked into the framework itself.
Broa is a transitional style in the truest sense, part of Style III on one side, feeding directly into the Oseberg style on the other. It's also where knotwork properly embeds itself into Nordic art, a thread that runs through every style that follows.
Oseberg Style (c. 800–880 AD)
The Oseberg style takes its name from the Oseberg ship burial in Norway, a mound that held an extraordinary collection of artefacts. Because so much of what's found there resembles Broa work, it's often treated as simply the bridge between Broa and Borre. That undersells it. The sheer volume and quality of Oseberg material, clearly the work of several highly skilled artisans each with their own hand, makes it worth understanding as its own moment, not just a stepping stone.
Borre Style (c. 850–950 AD)
Borre is named after a mound grave in Norway where a set of harness mounts turned up, and the style spread widely across Viking territory and trade routes. You'll find it as far as the Isle of Man, on grave-markers like Gaut's Cross, and even in Slavic regions such as the Gnezdovo hoard.
Unlike the styles either side of it, Borre largely drops the ribbon-animal look in favour of symmetric designs, either full beasts in reasonably accurate anatomical form, or isolated elements like a head and neck. This is also where the exquisite "gripping beast" motif comes from, tightly woven knotwork paired with symmetry, and it plants the seed for the Great Beasts that dominate the Mammen and Ringerike styles later on.
Jelling Style (c. 900–975 AD)
Jelling feels, in some ways, like a step backwards. It revives the ribbon-beast forms that dominated the pre-Viking Age styles, more open and simpler than Borre, and probably developing alongside it rather than after it. Designs often pair two mirrored animals woven together, but where Borre beasts share a body, Jelling beasts each keep their own head.
It's named after a small silver cup found at the Jelling monument, decorated in the style, though the famous Jelling stones themselves are actually carved in the Mammen style that follows. History doesn't always name things tidily.
Mammen Style (c. 950–1025 AD)
Mammen takes its name from a grave in Jutland, Denmark, containing a stunning axe decorated on both faces, a bird on one side, a tree on the other, with knots and godmasks worked into the back end. The style rose to prominence during the period of Christian rulership in Scandinavia, and it's on Mammen-style stones that Christian and pagan iconography start appearing side by side.
This is also where the Great Beast enters Viking art properly: massive, mythic creatures used on monuments commemorating rulers and conquerors. The Jelling stone itself, despite its name, is carved in the Mammen style, showing a griffon-like beast locked in combat with a serpent, widely read as an allegory for the clash between Christianity and the old beliefs. Mammen designs read clearly to the eye, logically proportioned even at their most dense.
Ringerike Style (c. 1000–1075 AD)
Named after the Norwegian region whose sandstone was used for the era's large carvings, Ringerike takes the Great Beasts of Mammen and runs with them. Tendrils and foliage sprawl across the design, sometimes framing the beast, sometimes threatening to overtake it entirely. Acanthus-leaf motifs, borrowed from further south, cover nearly every surface.
Some Ringerike pieces stay relatively restrained, a single elegant beast with light decoration. Others go all in. The style also pushes into three-dimensional carving, seen in stave fragments from Lund, Sweden, and Dublin, Ireland, both echoing the dragon-headed prows and bedposts found at Oseberg.
Urnes Style (c. 1050–1125 AD)
The last of the great Viking Age styles takes its name from the Urnes stave church in Vestland, Norway, whose carved gate still carries some of the finest surviving examples. Urnes creatures are almost alien: elongated, sinuous forms that read like a deer fused with a seahorse, limbs and necks stretched out, tendrils that seem to run on forever, most ending in a fleur-de-lys.
Where earlier styles typically showed one front and one hind limb, Urnes animals are usually drawn with paired legs, though often only the front pair appears, giving the creatures an odd, elegant, almost wyvern-like quality. Urnes overlaps briefly with Ringerike before overtaking it in popularity, and it's found in enormous quantities across Northern Europe, evidence of genuine mass production. It closes out the Viking Age proper, both on portable objects and in monumental stone carving.
Where Norse Mythology Art Fits In
Not every piece of Norse art depicts an animal or an abstract knot. Godmasks run alongside these styles from the early Iron Age right through to the end of the Viking Age, and they're where Norse mythology art properly enters the picture, faces of gods, trolls and other beings, usually rendered to intimidate or awe whoever encountered them. What they meant to the people who carved them is largely lost, though theories aren't in short supply.
Godmasks weren't confined to one style. A mask carved in Mammen's dense, readable lines suits a wilder deity, a Thor or a Jotunn, while the same figure rendered in Ringerike's sprawling tendrils reads completely differently, more otherworldly, less grounded. The head of Mimir, keeper of Odin's counsel, is a good example of how style shapes meaning as much as subject does: carved in the flowing, foliage-heavy Ringerike style, it reads as ancient wisdom given form rather than simple menace.
That's the real link between these styles and Norse mythology. The animals, knots and beasts carry meaning on their own, but godmasks show that the same figure from the same myths could be built in radically different visual languages depending on which century, region and style the artisan was working in.
Why the Distinction Matters
Every one of these styles has its own dating, its own defining features, and its own reasons for looking the way it does, shaped by trade routes, rulers, religion and the artisans' own hands. Treating "Viking art" as one undifferentiated look flattens all of that. Knowing which style you're looking at, and why it developed the way it did, changes how you see the artefact, and it changes what you're actually putting on your skin if you're getting one of these designs as a tattoo.
Going Deeper
This is the short version. The Viking Art Tome walks through Style III, Broa, Oseberg, Borre, Jelling, Mammen, Ringerike and Urnes in full, alongside named godmasks and other designs built in each style and the historical artefacts behind them, for anyone who wants the real depth behind the aesthetics rather than a surface-level summary.
If you already know which style speaks to you and want motifs ready to take into the tattoo studio, or to use as reference for your own work, the Viking Art Volumes organise flash and reference designs by motif rather than by academic style, built for exactly that purpose. Between the two, you've got the history and the artwork covered, whichever direction you're coming at it from.
