Viking Armor on the Lindisfarne Stone

This carving on the "Lindisfarne Stone", called such because of its discovery on the Isle of Lindisfarne in Great Britain, is thought to depict the very first Viking raid.  The Vikings raided the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 A.D.,  and it is thought that the monks carved this stone to document the attack.  If this is the case, the Stone is as close we can come to an eyewitness account, and I like to draw as much detail from the carving as I can

One thing is interesting to note, that the "Vikings" have three swords and two axes, which would indicate that the sword was not so rare a weapon as we might think.

Also, the horizontal banding on the warriors leads me to think that they were wearing some kind of armor. It could either represent mail, but this seems unlikely due to its expense at the time and not many warriors would have owned armor.

The bands could be strips of leather sewn together into a kind of brigandine armor.  It seems to me that leather would be easy enough to make into armor, and even if it did not offer much protection against a direct hit, it would still be better than nothing against a glancing strike or wayward blade in the thick of battle.