What Does Skol Mean? Bowl. The Skull Cups Were Horns

One page of Ole Worm’s 17th-century book on runes shows where the story of Vikings drinking from skulls began. In the 1651 edition, stanza 25 of Krakumal, the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok’s death song, is printed in runes under lines of Latin, and on page 203 the two disagree about what the dying king will drink his beer from in Odin’s hall.

The Latin says “Ex concavis crateribus craniorum”, from the hollow bowls of skulls. The runes beneath it say or bjugvidum hausa, “from curved branches of skulls”, which to a Norse poet meant drinking horns. The story tying skol to skulls starts in the top line.

What does skol mean?

Skol is the Scandinavian word for cheers, and it literally means bowl. It is the English spelling of skal, the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian toast, from Old Norse skal, “bowl, drinking vessel”. The story that it comes from skull is a myth, born of a 17th-century mistranslation of a Norse phrase for drinking horns.

The Minnesota Vikings, named partly to reflect Minnesota’s Scandinavian American culture, have used Skol, Vikings as their fight song since around their first season in 1961. The Skol Chant they added in 2016 copies the “Viking war chant” that Iceland’s soccer fans made famous at Euro 2016. Soccer is itself British slang, built from the Assoc. in association football, and Americans took it up to tell that game apart from the football the Vikings play.

The toast is named after a shared bowl

Etymonline traces skoal, “also skol”, to Danish skaal, “a toast,” literally “bowl, cup”, and, citing the OED, says it “might have been popularized or introduced by the visit of James VI of Scotland to Denmark in 1589.” The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue quotes a Scots poem of about 1590, “we drink such scoles”, and marks the word as Scottish only until the 19th century.

“It means bowl,” Gregg White, who teaches Swedish at the American Swedish Institute, told CBS Minnesota, describing the custom behind it: the first person picked up the bowl, took a sip, said the word and passed it to the next.

Cleasby and Vigfusson’s Icelandic-English Dictionary of 1874 defines skal as “a bowl”, with a bowl full of mead among its examples. The Swedish Academy’s dictionary first cites skal as an exclamation urging someone to drink in 1614, centuries after the Viking Age.

The skull story is a 17th-century mistranslation

The popular version says skol comes from Vikings drinking beer out of their enemies’ skulls. It is a folk etymology, like the New Orleans egg cup said to have named the cocktail. White’s verdict to CBS: “That’s a really wonderful myth, but it’s not fact.”

Worm first published Runir seu Danica literatura antiquissima in Copenhagen in 1636, with Krakumal among its texts and a Latin translation by Magnus Olafsson. In An Introduction to Old Norse, E.V. Gordon says the book “supplied a conception of the viking” who was “eager to enter Valhalla and drink beer from the skulls of his enemies”, and calls Olafsson “the originator of the absurdity”.

Gordon calls or bjugvidum hausa a kenning, a poet’s stand-in name, for drinking horns. Cleasby and Vigfusson’s dictionary agrees, glossing it as “the crooked branches of the head, i.e. the horns”.

Worm’s note under the stanza goes further than the Latin line, glossing hausa as crania, skulls, and adding: “Sperabant Heroes se in aula Othini bibituros ex craniis eorum qvos occiderant.” The heroes hoped to drink in Odin’s hall from the skulls of those they had killed.

Read as a Norse poet meant it, nobody in the stanza drinks from a skull: the curved branches are horns, and the skulls are the heads they grew on.

Percy put the enemies into Ragnar’s mouth

The skull cups reached English long before Percy. In 1676 Aylett Sammes printed stanza 25 in runes with an English verse version ending “Of Nappy-Ale in full-brim’d Skull”, and wrote that Woden’s worshippers expected to drink ale in his hall “in the Skulls of their Enemies”. In 1690 Sir William Temple pictured Odin’s guests “Carowsing every Man in Bowls made of the Sculls of their Enemies they had slain” and cited the 25th and 29th stanzas of Ragnar’s song.

For a long time, Gordon writes, “few writers could mention a viking without telling the strange fashion of his drinking.” Retelling fixed the skull cups to the viking the way it fixed a sales pitch to Erik the Red.

Thomas Percy’s Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, printed in London in 1763, gave the stanza the prose version that stuck. On page 40 the king says: “Soon, in the splendid hall of Odin, we shall drink Beer out of the sculls of our enemies.” Sculls is an older spelling of skulls.

Version	Date	The drinking line
Krakumal, in Old Norse	12th century	or bjugvidum hausa: from curved branches of skulls, meaning drinking horns
Olafsson’s Latin, in Worm’s Runir	1636, quoted from the 1651 edition	ex concavis crateribus craniorum: from the hollow bowls of skulls
Note on the stanza, same page	1651 edition	ex craniis eorum qvos occiderant: from the skulls of those they had killed
Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata	1676	”in the Skulls of their Enemies” (prose); “full-brim’d Skull” (verse)
Percy, Five Pieces of Runic Poetry	1763	”out of the sculls of our enemies”

The Norse and Latin lines name no enemies, Sammes and Temple mention them only in their own narration, and Percy has Ragnar name them himself. Gordon says Percy “knew very little Norse; he translated the translations of Worm, Bartholin, and others, reproducing their errors.”

Olafsson’s Latin also missed a negative

Elsewhere in Krakumal, Ragnar says the pleasure of one battle was not like kissing a young widow, and the Norse carries that “not” in a suffix. Olafsson, Gordon writes, “did not know that -at was a negative”, and Percy followed him. Percy’s page 34 reads: “The pleasure of that day was like kissing a young widow at the highest seat of the table.”

Skal means bowl, even when the bowl is a skull

Skal and skull may still be distant cousins. Etymonline says skal, originally a cup made from a shell, comes from a root meaning “to cut”, and that skull probably comes from Old Norse skalli, “a bald head, skull”, probably related to the Old English word for a husk and so to shell, from the same root.

Cleasby and Vigfusson list skal as a bowl, a hollow and a pair of scales, never as a skull, though the word meets skulls in two Eddic poems. In Volundarkvida the smith Volund sets the skulls of King Nidud’s sons in silver as skalar, bowls, and in Atlamal Gudrun tells Atli that their sons’ skulls were his ale bowls. Both are revenge stories about legendary kings, and neither describes a drinking custom.

Say skol over a drink and you name the bowl White describes going from hand to hand. The skol story’s skull cups came from a translator, and even the Latin word he used for skull, cranium, comes from a Greek word for skull that Etymonline ties to a root meaning “horn; head”. Strictly FYI.