Viking City Name Generator

Viking Age cities were rare, and the few that existed had names built from a small, consistent toolkit of Old Norse elements. Hedeby (Heiðabýr, heath settlement), Birka (Birca, from birch or trading), Kaupang (kaupangr, market place), and Jorvik (Jórvík, the Norse form of York) were the great trading towns, and their names show the pattern: a descriptive first element plus a suffix that says what kind of place it is. The most common suffixes are -vik (bay or inlet), -heim (home or homestead), -borg (fortified place), -stad or -staðir (dwelling place), -by (farm or town), -holm (island), -nes (headland), -sund (strait), -fjord, and -kaupang (market). First elements are usually geography (berg for mountain, foss for waterfall, sand, strand, dal for valley), animals (ulf for wolf, bjorn for bear, hrafn or ravn for raven, orm for serpent), or a founder's name in the possessive, as in Ragnarsborg or Haraldsvik.

The Vikings also renamed the places they conquered or settled. Dublin was Dyflin, Waterford was Vedrarfjord, Constantinople was Miklagarðr (great city), Novgorod was Holmgarðr, and Kyiv was Könugarðr. Iceland and Greenland gave us Reykjavik (smoky bay), Þingvellir (assembly plains), and Brattahlíð (steep slope). Names of the mythic realms like Asgard or Valhalla are not city names and are omitted here.

This list combines real Viking Age towns, Norse names for foreign cities, and original names assembled from authentic elements, so a saga-inspired novel, a Crusader Kings campaign, or a Norse fantasy map gets names that would not look out of place on a runestone.