The Berserker Rune is intended to help you unleash your inner warrior. In history, the Viking Berserkers were warriors. They fought ruthlessly and fearlessly. In the Old Norse written legends, berserkers were said to have fought in a trance-like state, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word berserk (meaning "furiously violent or out of control"). Berserkers are attested to in numerous Old Norse sources. Berserkers appear prominently in a multitude of other sagas and poems. Many earlier sagas portrayed berserkers as bodyguards, elite soldiers, and champions of kings. Within the sagas, Berserkers can be narrowed down to four different types. The King's Berserkr, the Hall-Challenging Berserkr, the Hólmgangumaðr, and the Viking Berserkr. Later, by Christian interpreters, the berserker was viewed as a "heathen devil". King Harald Fairhair's used berserkers as "shock troops" to broaden his sphere of influence. Other Scandinavian kings used berserkers as part of their army of hirdmen and sometimes ranked them as equivalent to a royal bodyguard. In modern tiomes, the berserker is often used in different forms of media as an archetype, such as in video games, others feature an enemy with the females named berserkers. The Old Norse form of the word was berserkr, which literally meant "bear-shirt", "someone who wears a coat made out of a bear's skin". Today the Danish guard wears bearskin hats as a symbol of the original berserkers.