We have at least two contemporary full length illustration of their rulers in their lifetime in illuminated manuscripts (that is a part of their own donation to the church):
Otherwise, we generally have to rely on:
- Carving of a few runic stones as well as picture stones especially erected in Gotland, though with possible problems in dating and identification of the depicted figures, as well as details of their dressing. What I (not so specialized in iconography) can say from these carvings is that many of the male figures have pointed beard and wear a sword on, though:
- Tjängvide (Gotland, 10th century?)
- Ardre VIII (Gotland, 8-9th centuries?)
- A few small object (statue) has also been discovered from the site in Viking Age Scandinavia. Some of them are certainly enough detailed, but the identification of the figure as well as the details - even in the following case a gender of the figure! is sometimes not so clear, as is the case with the dispute on so-called "Odin from Lejre (10th century, Denmark)" (sorry for not linking here due to the possibly problematic file name on wikicommons)
- A few stone carvings across the British Isles (from the Isle of Man to northern England), such as Gosforth Cross, has also apparently dealt with the figures of Old Norse mythology, but, compared with Gotlandic picture stones, the details of the dress in these carvings are generally even more difficult to discern.
- This illustration of the Vikings (Danes) inserted in the manuscript of the hagiography of St. Edmund (MS M. 736 fol. 9v.) at least dates back to the 12th century.
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On the other hand, my knowledge on early Anglo-Saxon iconograpiic sources on the dress is really limited so that this mounted figure (king?) carved on the Repton Stone (8th century) is almost all I can cite here as a contemporary evidence prior to the 9th century.
References:
- BIDDLE, MARTIN, and BIRTHE KJØLBYE-BIDDLE. “The Repton Stone.” Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985): 233–92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44509869.
- Graham-Campbell, James. Viking Art. The New Edition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2021.
- Staecker, Jörn. "Heroes, Kings and Gods: Discovering sagas on Gotlandic Picture-Stones." In: Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions, ed. Anders Andrén et al., pp. 363-68. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006.
