from Old NorseThis word originated in Norway
In the early Middle Ages, the Vikings of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were famous for going berserk--not because they were simply crazy, but because they were as crazy as a bear when they overran and terrorized England and northern Europe. In Old Norse, the Viking language, berserk meant "bear shirt." Instead of wearing body armor, berserkers would put on bearskins, which would transform them mentally, if not physically, into bears. By some accounts, they would also prep themselves by eating psychedelic mushrooms. They would then enter battle in a fearless rage, and if they won they would pillage afterwards with the same fury. The earliest king of Norway, Harald Fairhair (850-933), had berserkers as his household guard.
Not until nearly a thousand years later, when the berserkers were a safely distant memory, did their name appear in English. One of the first modern writers to describe them was Sir Walter Scott in his 1822 novel The Pirate. "Aye--aye," says an old woman, "the Berserkars were champions who lived before the blessed days of St. Olave [died 1030], and who used to run like madmen on swords, and spears, and harpoons, and muskets, and snap them all into pieces, as a finner [a whale] would go through a herring-net, and then, when the fury went off, they were as weak and unstable as water."
Since Scott's revival of the word, even though the original berserkers are long gone, there has often been occasion to speak of someone "going berserk." In 1940, for example, the Chicago Tribune wrote of "the recent addition of the word 'berserk," as a synonym for crackpot behavior, to the slang of the young and untutored." In the 1990s, things got so wild that to the expressions go berserk and run amok we added a third, go postal.
Old Norse is the ancestor of modern Norwegian and Icelandic. Thanks to the uninvited presence of Vikings in England, hundreds of Old Norse words entered the English vocabulary much earlier than berserk. The very pronouns they and their are from Old Norse, as are basic verbs like cast, crawl, hit, stagger, and take; adjectives like loose, low, odd, ugly, and weak; and numerous nouns like anger, bag, dirt, egg, gift, skill, skirt, skin, sky, thrift, and window. All these Norse words became English during the Middle Ages, some as early as the 800s and none later than the fourteenth century.
