Berserk

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˈbɜːsɜːk/

Definitions

1. Wildly out of control with violent or destructive behavior, often due to rage or frenzy
2. Characterized by uncontrollable violent fury or frenzied destruction resulting from overwhelming rage
3. Affected by a state of wild, destructive madness in which one acts with intense aggression and loss of rational control

Etymology: Some time in the sixth or seventh century, a craftsman in what is now Sweden cut a set of bronze dies for hammering patterns into thin decorative foil. One of these Torslunda plates, found on the island of Öland, shows a figure wrapped in a wolfskin, the animal's head over his own, striding beside a spearman. He is usually read as one of the frenzied warriors the Norse called "berserkr," pictured centuries before anyone wrote the name down. When Icelanders did write it down, in the sagas, these men had become a fixture of the Viking imagination: fighters who worked themselves into a violent, trance-like rage before battle. Snorri Sturluson, writing in the thirteenth century, describes Odin's warriors going into battle without mail, mad as dogs or wolves, biting their shields, strong as bears or bulls, while neither fire nor iron could touch them. Elsewhere in the sagas they appear as champions, bullies and troublemakers, men whose fury was as dangerous to their hosts as to their enemies. The name is a compound. Its second half, "serkr," means a shirt or coat. It goes back through Proto-Germanic "*sarkiz" to a root meaning "to bind" or "thread," and it has a cousin in Scots "sark," a shirt, the word behind the witch's short shift, the "cutty sark," in Burns's "Tam o' Shanter." The first half is most probably "bjǫrn," "bear." That makes the warrior a "bear-shirt," a man who wore the animal's hide or fought as though he had become the beast inside it, much as the "úlfheðnar," the "wolf-coats," took on the wolf. "Bjǫrn" itself may descend from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "brown," so the bear may have been known, cautiously, as "the brown one." A rival reading takes the first element as "berr," "bare," and makes these fighters men who went into battle without armour. Snorri's armourless warriors lend it some surface appeal, and it still circulates as the claim that the word simply means "naked" or "shirtless." But a bare man is not a "bare-shirt," and most scholars now consider the bear far more likely. English took the word not from the battlefield but from a novel. Sir Walter Scott, steeped in Norse lore, used "berserker" in "The Pirate" in 1822, a romance set in Shetland, where Scandinavian memory ran deep. Scott's form kept a trace of the Old Norse ending "-r," which to English ears sounded like the "-er" of "baker" or "fighter." Perhaps for that reason, the shorter "berserk" was soon standing on its own; it is attested by 1835. Later verb uses may owe something to the same misreading, with the longer form taken as a verb plus "-er." At first the English word named a Norse warrior and nothing else. Only gradually did it shed the Viking and keep the fury, turning into an adjective for anyone or anything in a frenzy of rage. A modern crowd, a toddler or a malfunctioning machine can now go berserk, with no bear in sight.

Synonyms: frantic, frenzied, wild, crazy, insane

Antonyms: calm, sane, rational, peaceful, collected