Hollywood’s Vikings wear horns. Real Vikings almost certainly didn’t. The horned helmet is a 19th-century invention: the Swedish painter August Malmstrรถm gave Vikings horns in his illustrations of the mid-1800s, and costume designer Carl Emil Doepler cemented the look when he put horns on the warriors of Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen at its 1876 premiere.
Depictions of Horned Helmets
Horned helmets did exist in Scandinavia, about 1,700 years before the Vikings. The bronze-age Veksรธ helmets, found in a Danish bog in 1942 and dated to around 900 BC, were almost certainly ceremonial. Horned figures also appear in bronze-age Scandinavian rock carvings and on figurines from Denmark and Sardinia. They were found too late to have inspired Malmstrรถm or Doepler.
The Oseberg Tapestry
The Oseberg ship burial, found by a farmer in Norway in 1903, held not just a ship but a wealth of textiles, including fragments of a woven tapestry. One figure on it wears what look like horns and leads what may be a religious procession; some think it represents Odin. But others in the same scene wear boar skins or dress as birds of prey. This was ritual costume, not battle gear.
Horns on the Helmet?
So yes, horns appear in Viking-age art on ritual figures. But the only reasonably complete Viking-age helmet ever found, from Gjermundbu in Norway, is a plain, practical iron cap with a spectacle-like guard around the eyes, and no horns. (Fragments of a few others survive.) Horns would have been a liability in a fight: something for an enemy’s blade to catch.
At Asgard Alaska we’ll leave the horns to the opera. We’re working toward a living village where you can try on a historically grounded helmet and learn why it looked the way it did. Help us get there with a gift to our Land Fund or by volunteering your skills, and join our newsletter to follow along.
Sources: https://www.popsci.com/science/viking-horns-truth/
https://www.history.com/news/did-vikings-really-wear-horned-helmets
https://bavipower.com/blogs/bavipower-viking-blog/the-misleading-root-of-the-viking-horned-helmet
