Hello, what did people usually carry in their belt pouches during the viking or earlier and medieval times?
Archaeologist here! I think this question is best be answered by looking into the finds rather than trusting the few written sources. To get a glimpse of what would have been in a belt pouch of a scandinavian person in the time between the 8th and 11th century (I am just limiting the area and period to have a more focussed database) the easiest approach is to see what people were burried with. As scandinavians in the viking period buried their dead with burial objects we have quite a few sources we can build our hypothesis on. For the sake of keeping my answer short I will just concentrate on the graves of the famous viking age settlement of Birka. Those graves have been thoroughly researched and the publications are easily available(1).
Belt pouches and bags are found in 6,9% of the burials with coffins, 2,7% of the ones without further coffins or additional construction and 19,3% of the ones with elaborate constructions (e.g. wooden chambers for the deceased and all the burial objects). The pouches/bags have been distributed to 18 maskulin, 15 feminine, 2 infants and 8 individuals not identified by gender(2). The pouches found there are being seperated in different groups according to their assumed function. The ones that were propably worn as belt pouches had a variety of different objects in them: some of them carried coins, but the main content in all of the pouches were tools for making fire (flint, tinder and firesteels). To a lesser extent some pouches carried objects that are interpreted as religious/cultic objects.
adding to these quick information, we can add finds from other sites that carried tweezers, earscoops and other toiletries.
Sources:
2)Anne-Sofie Gräslund, 16. Beutel und Taschen in 1) Bd. II:1, p.141-154.
for a quick view on those things looked like: http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/fire.shtml (not scientific, just nice pictures)