When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I played a game with my friends where we pretended we lived in a fantasy world called “Clod.” Most of my friends pretended to be rulers of various fictional countries within this world. One of my friends pretended that he was the king of the elves. Whenever there was a battle, he always made a big deal about how his elven archers shot flaming arrows, which he always said were so much more deadly than regular arrows.
As it turns out, though, flaming arrows were rarely ever used in open combat by pre-modern peoples and the idea of using flaming arrows in open combat is actually kind of stupid. Flaming arrows were a real thing, but they weren’t often used and, when they were used, they weren’t used the way they are normally portrayed in movies and books.
Use of flaming arrows in modern popular culture
It is easy to see where my friend got the impression that flaming arrows are “extra deadly” from. My friend was an avid reader of high fantasy novels, in which flaming arrows are frequent trope. They are used, for instance, in George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996 – present) and in Christopher Paolini’s series The Inheritance Cycle (2001 – 2011), the latter of which I know my friend was an avid fan of.
Flaming arrows are also used all over the place in movies and television shows set in pre-modern societies. They appear in films such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Braveheart (1995), Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), and in popular television shows like Game of Thrones (2011 – 2019).
ABOVE: Poster for the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) showing Robin Hood with a flaming arrow
ABOVE: Shot from the opening scene of the movie Gladiator (2000), showing the whole forest burning because of the flaming arrows shot by the Roman archers
The ineffectiveness of flaming arrows
As it turns out, though, my childhood friend’s notions about the supposed extraordinary lethalness of flaming arrows were incorrect. Flaming arrows are actually much less effective than regular arrows and they were rarely ever used in pre-modern warfare.
The popular YouTuber Nikolas Lloyd (a.k.a. “Lindybeige”) already has an excellent video explaining why fire arrows are a bad idea and, in this article, I’m going to probably echo a lot of what he says in that video, but I’m also going to add some important points of my own and talk about some issues he doesn’t talk about in his video (especially the sub-misconception of the so-called “Viking funeral”).
It’s worth noting here that Lindybeige isn’t always reliable, since he has fallen for popular misconceptions before. For instance, in this article from September 2019, I criticize his claim that elite Romans living in Italy during the early part of Roman history normally spoke in Greek among themselves, which is completely false. In the particular case of flaming arrows, however, I think he’s probably mostly right.
Why flaming arrows are not effective in open combat
To start off, in general, there were four main things that pre-modern peoples looked for in a good arrow:
- It needed to have good range. You had to be able to fire the arrow from a long way off and still be able to hit your target.
- It needed to have good accuracy. You had to be able to actually hit your target most of the time.
- It needed to be able to be fired quickly. The more arrows you could fire in a minute, the more enemies you could kill in a minute. Consequently, the number of arrows you could fire in a minute was pretty important.
- It needed to be able to penetrate its victims. If the arrow could not penetrate its victim, then, obviously, it would not be very effective at killing him.
Flaming arrows are worse than non-flaming arrows by every single one of these measures. If you want a flaming arrow, you cannot just take a regular arrow and set it on fire, for several reasons. First of all, the arrow will not stay lit. Think of what happens when you blow on a candle. It blows out, right? Well, an arrow has the wind continuously blowing on it as it is traveling through the air and, if you just take a normal arrow, set the end of it on fire, and shoot it, the fire will go out almost as soon as the arrow is fired.
Therefore, if you want a flaming arrow, you have to put a really big fire on the end of it. There are several ways you can do this. One way to do this is using a special arrow with a really big tip with a special cage-shaped arrowhead that is designed to hold a huge wad of cloth dipped in pitch that can be set on fire. Another way is by attaching the cloth directly to the end of the arrow in a big clump that can be easily set on fire.
If you do either of these things, though, then you are going to have to make the shaft of the arrow much bigger and thicker also so that it does not break when you try to fire it. You are also going to have to make the shaft longer so that, when you pull back your bow, the arrow does not catch your hand or your bow on fire. Altogether, this is all going to make your arrow extremely heavy and give it both terrible range and terrible accuracy.
Furthermore, the time it takes for your archers to light their arrows on fire before they shoot them is going to really slow down your rate of fire. That means, not only will your arrows have worse range and worse accuracy, but there is also going to have to be a lot more time between rounds of arrows.
Finally, even if one of your flaming arrows does manage to hit its target, it will probably be much less fatal than a normal, non-flaming arrow because, as a result of all the modifications you have to make to the arrow to make it stay on fire, flaming arrows have terrible penetration ability.
Flaming arrows can never pierce armor and they cannot go as deep as a normal unmodified, non-flaming arrow into just about anything. If one of your flaming arrows hits an enemy combatant, it is most likely just going to bounce off his armor and land on the ground, where he can promptly stamp out whatever is left of the fire.
ABOVE: Modern reconstruction of an arrow specially designed to be set on fire. Notice the “cage-shaped” arrowhead, which is designed to hold a huge wad of cloth dipping in pitch that could be set on fire. These kinds of arrowheads are not very effective for penetrating enemies.
But FIRE!!!
Now, you are probably thinking, “Ok, so what if your arrows have terrible range, terrible accuracy, a terrible rate of fire, and terrible penetration ability. They’re on fire! That means they’ll set anything they come into contact with on fire, right!” Well… no. First of all, most of those flaming arrows are just going to end up landing on the ground and going out without even coming into contact with any enemies. Second of all, most of the fire will be gone by the time the arrow hits whatever it is it ends up hitting and it will probably not end up setting anything on fire at all.
Even if one of your arrows does hit an enemy warrior and start to burn him, he will not instantly burst into a pillar of flames like the people getting hit by flaming arrows in Hollywood movies. Most of the fire will be gone by the time it hits him and he will probably be wearing armor. As I noted before, flaming arrows are truly terrible at penetrating armor.
In other words, flaming arrows may look cool in movies, but they are objectively a pretty stupid idea in open combat. Ironically, flaming arrows are far more likely to catch the archers trying to shoot them on fire than they are to actually catch their intended target on fire.
The false notion that flaming arrows are highly effective weapons of war is largely a misconception that has been promoted by modern television and Hollywood films. Hollywood films are annoyingly obsessed with the idea of archers shooting flaming arrows because they look cool and not because they are actually more deadly.
ABOVE: Photograph of real-life archers about to shoot actual flaming arrows
Rare instances in which flaming arrows really were used in pre-modern warfare
Now, there were a few very specific and relatively rare circumstances under which flaming arrows really were sometimes used in pre-modern warfare. In other words, flaming arrows really did exist, but they were only used in a few specific kinds of situations. Most of the time, when you see flaming arrows being used in movies or on television or read about them being used in books, they are not being used under these kinds of circumstances.
Flaming arrows were virtually never used in open combat because, as I have just explained, they are actually extremely ineffective in open combat and it is much more effective just to use ordinary, non-flaming arrows. Nonetheless, flaming arrows were occasionally used during sieges by besieging armies to set fire to things inside the city under siege. The purpose here was not to kill enemy combatants, but rather to keep the enemy forces distracted putting out fires so they would have fewer men available to defend the walls.
Even here, though, flaming arrows were still not very effective. Researchers have conducted experiments and found that, even when a flaming arrow hits something flammable, it only manages to successfully set it on fire about 2% of the time. Roughly 98% of the time, the flaming arrows simply went out without really catching anything on fire. This means that, in order for your flaming arrows to be of any use at all, you needed to fire a whole awful lot of them.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of two fifteenth-century German crossbow bolts with pieces of cloth covered in saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur attached to the shafts
The “Viking funeral” sub-misconception
Flaming arrows are also closely connected to another popular misconception, which is the idea that the Vikings held funerals by laying the deceased person in a boat, setting it out to sea, and then setting the boat on fire with a flaming arrow. This idea of a so-called “Viking funeral” has particularly strong resonance with modern audiences and it appears in nearly every depiction of Vikings produced within the past sixty years or so.
Unfortunately for all the fans of “Viking funerals” out there, there are absolutely no surviving contemporary historical sources that ever claim that the Vikings actually did this. Furthermore, it is highly improbable that such a funeral procedure would even work, since, as I have noted above, flaming arrows have notoriously bad range, notoriously bad accuracy, and a notoriously bad success rate for actually setting things on fire.
The whole notion of a Viking ship funeral ultimately originates from a single passage in a single surviving historical account written by an Islamic writer named Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān (lived c. 877 – c. 960 AD). Aḥmad claims to have lived among a people whom he calls the “Rūsiyyah” in the region of the Volga River in what is now Russia. The Rūsiyyah described by Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān are usually identified as members of the Scandinavian Rus’, but there is still some debate as far as their exact identity is concerned.
In his account, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān claims to have witnessed a funeral for a very rich and powerful chieftain of the Rūsiyyah. He claims that the Rūsiyyah brought the dead man’s boat on land, placed the dead man in a bed on the boat, sacrificed a slave girl to service the man in the afterlife, and then burned the boat on land with the deceased still in the bed on top of it. Aḥmad’s description never mentions anything about anyone setting the boat out to sea and then setting it on fire with a flaming arrow.
Here is Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān’s description of how the boat was set up, as translated by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone:
“When the day came that the man was to be burned and the girl with him, I went to the river where his boat was anchored. I saw that they had drawn his boat up on to the shore and that four posts of khadank or other wood had been driven into the ground and round these posts a framework of wood had been erected. Next they drew up the boat until it rested on this wooden construction.”
After this, his account goes on to describe how the Rūsiyyah set up a bed for the chieftain on top of the ship and laid him on the bed to be cremated.
There is considerable debate among scholars about how closely the customs described by Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān resemble the customs that were actually practiced in Scandinavia at the time, since these customs may have been peculiar to the particular group of Scandinavian Rus’ Aḥmad was observing.
ABOVE: Funeral of a Rus’ Nobleman, painted in 1884 by the Polish Academic painter Henryk Siemiradzki, based on Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān’s account
The development of the modern misconception of the “Viking funeral”
In any case, Aḥmad’s account of a Scandinavian Rus’ chieftain being cremated on a boat on land seems to have inspired later depictions of Vikings cremating their leaders in ships set out to sea. Most notably, the 1958 epic Hollywood film The Vikings, written by Richard Fleischer and starring Kirk Douglas, ends with a depiction of Douglas’s character’s corpse being set out to sea in a boat, which is set aflame by archers with flaming arrows.
More than any other depiction, The Vikings has had the most influence in shaping the modern idea of the “Viking funeral.” It was only a matter of time before the idea made its way into fantasy literature. One of the more famous depictions of a “Viking funeral” in contemporary fantasy literature occurs in the fantasy novel A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin, originally published in the year 2000 as the third book in Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire.
In the book, the nobleman Hoster Tully is given a funeral much like the one portrayed in the final scene of The Vikings—only, in this version, the person firing the flaming arrows (Hoster Tully’s son Edmure) is so in grief at his father’s death that he keeps missing, leading Hoster’s brother Brynden to take the bow from his hands and shoot the flaming arrow at the boat himself, striking it the first time.
This same scene appears in the HBO television series Game of Thrones, which is based on the Song of Ice and Fire series. In the television show, however, it is not made clear that the reason why Edmure keeps missing is because he is so in grief and instead it looks as though he is just a terrible archer.
ABOVE: Scene of the funeral of Hoster Tully from Game of Thrones, in which he is given a so-called “Viking funeral“
Conclusion
Contrary to what modern books, movies, and television shows would lead you to believe, flaming arrows are actually highly ineffective in open combat. Although they were sometimes used in pre-modern warfare, they were only used under specific circumstances and mainly as a means of keeping enemy forces occupied putting out fires.
Furthermore, the idea that the Vikings held funerals in which they set the deceased person out to sea in a boat and then set the boat on fire with a flaming arrow is also a misconception created by modern Hollywood films, fantasy novels, and television shows. There is no reliable record of anyone in medieval Scandinavia having ever conducted any funeral in this manner.
The fact that popular culture isn’t very accurate when it comes to its portrayal of flaming arrows shouldn’t be surprising to anyone here, since I’ve extensively criticized popular culture before for its sometimes rather bizarre misportrayals of various aspects of pre-modern warfare.
There seems to be a misconception about flaming arrows (still being shot by the way at archery clubs as a special event). People seem to think they were anti-personnel weapons, which of course they were not. They are used in movies because they are showy, especially at night and used in ways that are unrealistic. In Britain, thatched roofs were often damp from fog and drizzle. A flaming arrow landing in a thatched roof would just burn out, causing to damage. Fire arrows were used to some effect in naval warfare, however, the idea was to set sheets (often tarred to make them more weatherproof) and sails which would result in a ship losing propulsion (but if the sails were damp from a recent fog/storm, fugedaboutit).
There was a certain amount of terror created by such arrows but only in a civilian population. Fire arrows used against a stone castle is being slightly ridiculous (there were things that would burn but none were particularly structural).