Viking Helmets: Did They Have Horns?

Hollywood’s Vikings wear horns. Real Vikings almost certainly didn’t. Viking horned helmets are a 19th-century invention. In the mid-1800s the Swedish painter August Malmström gave Vikings horns in his illustrations. Costume designer Carl Emil Doepler cemented the look in 1876, when he put horns on the warriors of Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen at its premiere.

Horned Helmets Before the Viking Age

Horned helmets did exist in Scandinavia, about 1,700 years before the Vikings. The bronze-age Veksø 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 Malmström 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.

Real Viking Helmets Were Not Horned

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, and a Viking shield was a far better defense than any decoration.

Keep reading: another myth tested in Did Viking Berserkers Exist?, and a real weapon of war in Viking Axes.

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. The museum is not open yet. We are raising the Land Fund to buy the site, Phase 1 of our Roadmap. Join our newsletter to follow along.

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