thumb|Sketch of the Svinfylking. The Svinfylking (Old Norse for "swine array" or "boar snout") was a formation used in battle. Related to the wedge formation, it was used in Iron Age Scandinavia and later by the Vikings. It was also used by Germanic peoples during the Germanic Iron Age and was known as the Schweinskopf or "swine's head". Its invention was attributed to the god Odin.
thumb|Sketch of the Svinfylking. The Svinfylking (Old Norse for "swine array" or "boar snout") was a formation used in battle. Related to the wedge formation, it was used in Iron Age Scandinavia and later by the Vikings. It was also used by Germanic peoples during the Germanic Iron Age and was known as the Schweinskopf or "swine's head". Its invention was attributed to the god Odin.
The apex was composed of a single file. The number of warriors then increases by a constant in each rank back to its base. Families and tribesmen were ranked side by side, which added morale cohesion. The tactic was admirable for an advance against a line or even a column, but it was poor in the event of a retreat.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).