Here is a thing you can do at a costume shop in any country in the world: ask for a Viking outfit. You will be handed a fur vest, a plastic axe and a helmet with two curved horns. Archaeologists have been trying to correct this for more than a century with very little effect, but the facts are solid. There is no evidence that Viking Age warriors wore helmets with horns in battle, and a great deal of evidence that most of them did not wear helmets at all.
The one helmet we have
That is not an exaggeration. In the whole of the Viking Age, roughly 800 to 1050 CE, only one reasonably complete helmet has ever been found in Scandinavia. It came out of a grave at Gjermundbu in Norway, dug up in 1943, and dates to about the 970s. It is a rounded cap of iron, made from four plates riveted together, with a guard around the eyes and nose that looks a little like spectacles. It was clearly expensive, which suggests that the man in the grave was wealthy and important. There are no horns.
Fragments of other helmets turn up in the archaeological record, and pictures from the period show warriors in simple conical or rounded caps. But most ordinary warriors seem to have had a hat of leather or cloth, or nothing at all. Iron was expensive.
Horns, but much earlier
Horned helmets are not a pure invention. They existed in Scandinavia, in the Bronze Age. In 1942, workers cutting peat in a bog at Veksø in Denmark found a pair of bronze helmets with long curved horns, dated to about 900 BCE. The people who made them lived almost two thousand years before the first Viking raid. The helmets were almost certainly for ceremony, not combat, and were probably deposited in the bog as an offering.
Some Roman writers describe Celtic and Germanic warriors with horned or winged helmets, too. The idea of a horned barbarian is old, though it was never particularly Scandinavian.
Why you would not want them
There are practical objections. In hand-to-hand combat, a horn gives an opponent something to grab, or to hit. A glancing blow against a rounded helmet slides off, whereas one against a horn can twist the head, or break the neck. Horns would make it hard to move in a shield wall. Anyone who fought for a living would find them ridiculous.
The nineteenth-century makeover
So who put the horns on the Vikings? It was a gradual process, as artists and writers in the nineteenth century became interested in medieval Scandinavia. The Romantic movement was fascinated by the idea of a heroic northern past. In 1820s Sweden, the poet Esaias Tegnér published Frithiof’s Saga, an epic that became an international bestseller. Illustrators of its popular editions, among them Gustav Malmström, gave the warriors winged helmets, which evoked the Bronze Age finds. Danish and German painters followed.
The key moment came in 1876. At the opening of the Bayreuth Festival, the composer Richard Wagner staged the first complete performance of his four-opera Ring of the Nibelung cycle, which draws on Norse and Germanic legend. The costume designer, Carl Emil Doepler, dressed the heroes in horned and winged helmets, furs and leather. Audiences saw it, painters copied it, and from then on the Viking was a figure with horns. Hollywood, comic books and eventually cartoons carried it into the twentieth century.
Why it lasts
A horned helmet is a very good piece of design. It is instantly recognizable, it makes a silhouette, and it signals the wild and heroic. Real Viking warriors were skilled sailors, traders, raiders and settlers who reached Constantinople, Baghdad, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. They did not need horns for that.
What they did wear
If not horns, then what? Most Viking warriors fought in ordinary clothing, wool tunics and trousers, perhaps a leather cap, with a round wooden shield as the main protection. Mail shirts were expensive and probably worn only by wealthy fighters. The thing that distinguished a good warrior was not the helmet but the sword. Some of the finest swords of the period carry an inscription on the blade, +VLFBERHT+, and more than a hundred of them have been found across Europe. Analysis has shown that many were made of an unusually pure, high-carbon steel, possibly imported from as far away as Central Asia, and were far superior to most weapons of the time. The Ulfberht swords were the Viking Age’s equivalent of a luxury brand, and some of them are counterfeits, made with lower quality steel but with the same stamp.
More than raiders
The Vikings were also traders, farmers and explorers. Their ships, the longships, were marvels of design, fast and shallow enough to sail up rivers, and several have survived, notably in burials at Oseberg and Gokstad in Norway. They settled Iceland in the ninth century, Greenland around 985 and, around the year 1000, reached North America: at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, archaeologists have found the remains of a Norse settlement, 500 years before Columbus. There is no evidence that anyone wore horns on that trip either.
An enduring logo
The horned helmet has been taken up so enthusiastically that it has become a mark of identity. The football team the Minnesota Vikings, founded in 1961, have a logo of a blond man with a horned helmet, and fans wear plastic horns to games.
The sad part is that the accurate image, a bearded man in a plain iron cap on a longship, is hard to compete with. The horns will probably outlive us all. But next time you see a costume, you will know that the Vikings did not wear it, and that a stage designer in 1876 has been getting the credit ever since.
