Is it true that Vikings wore helmets with horns?

In popular culture it is customary to depict Vikings wearing helmets with horns. This is how they appear in comics, on posters and in the symbols of football teams. We checked whether the Vikings really wore such helmets.

If you enter “Viking helmet” into the search bar and go to images, predictably there will be helmets with horns. This is such a popular image of Vikings that they are depicted with horned helmets and emblems football teams, and covers influential economic publications. And the man who recently took part in the storming of the Capitol wearing a horned helmet is on the Internet nicknamed Viking.

The depiction of Vikings in horned helmets began around the 19th century. Such helmets appeared in the paintings of some Scandinavian artists when they depicted scenes from mythology - for example, such works were painted by the Swede August Malmström. However, the image was not universally accepted. It only became popular in the 1870s, when Richard Wagner staged his famous opera tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung”.

The costumes for this opera were designed and designed by costume designer Karl Emil Doppler. Apparently, he was inspired by the work of Malström, because in his sketches The Vikings had gilded horned helmets. It was they, according to historians, who became the reason why the image of a Viking in a horned helmet gained such popularity.

Roberta Frank, professor Yale University, devoted an entire study to the question of why horned helmets became the generally accepted version of what the Vikings looked like. According to her words, the helmets that Doppler depicted are the result of a mixture of historical fact and imagination. As Frank explains, the Germans were then delighted with the myths about the Scandinavian Vikings - this allowed the Germanic peoples to create their own national idea, which had independent roots that differed from the Greco-Latin ones. At the same time, the motive of searching for a national idea in German culture was one of the central ones in the 19th century. That's why, Frank believes, the stereotypical horned helmets that are sometimes wore German knights in the Middle Ages ended up on the heads of the Vikings: German and Scandinavian legends were intertwined.

There is actually no evidence that the Vikings wore horned helmets. Moreover, archaeologists have found very few Viking helmets: more or less intact - only two, as well as a few more fragments. None of them had horns. And it has not yet been proven whether these were combat helmets or ritual ones.

“It’s hard to say whether the Vikings wore helmets in battle or whether it was an indicator of the status of its owner,” explains Professor Andrew Jennings, a Scottish Viking specialist from the University of the Highlands and Islands. “None of them were found.” Therefore, it is possible that the Vikings did not wear helmets at all in battles.

But it is clear that there is no reason to believe in horned helmets among the Vikings.

Most likely not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Vikings never wore horned helmets. Here's why people thought they did.
2. Roberta Frank. The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet
3. Did Vikings really wear horned helmets?