Did Vikings Really Wear Horned Helmets?

Draw a Viking and you will probably give him a horned helmet. It has become a universal sign for raiders, from cartoons to football crowds. Yet no Viking warrior is known to have worn one. The picture comes from the stage, not the battlefield.

What the ground has given up

Viking helmets are extremely rare. The most complete example, found in a grave at Gjermundbu in Norway and dated to the tenth century, is an iron cap with a rounded top and a guard around the eyes. It has no horns. Written sources and carvings of the period show no horned helmets in battle, and horns would have been a gift to an enemy’s axe.

An older tradition

Horned headgear does exist in Scandinavia, but it is about two thousand years older. The Veksø helmets from Denmark, from around 900 BCE, are Bronze Age ceremonial pieces. Classical writers also described Celtic and Germanic peoples with horned ornaments. Over time these images blurred together into a general picture of the “barbarian north.”

How the image was built

The modern version took shape in the nineteenth century, when Romantic artists and nationalists were rediscovering the Norse past. Swedish illustrators gave their heroes winged and horned helmets. The decisive moment came in 1876, when Carl Emil Doepler designed costumes for the first complete staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth. His horned and winged helmets were seen by thousands and copied everywhere.

Editorial assessment

The myth matters because it tells us something about how we imagine violence. The horned helmet makes the Vikings theatrical and slightly ridiculous, which may be why it is comfortable. The reality, skilled traders, settlers and warriors who travelled from Newfoundland to Constantinople, is harder to summarise. Correcting the helmet is a small matter. Taking the Vikings seriously is a bigger one.