Is it true that the Vikings wore helmets with horns?

In mass culture, it is customary to portray Vikings In helmets with horns. Such 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 a “viking helmet” into the search line and go to Images, predictably there will meet helmets with horns. This is such a popular image of the Vikings that they are depicted in horned helmets and on emblems football teams, and on covers influential economic publications. And a man who recently participated in the assault on the Capitol in a horned helmet on the Internet They called Viking.

To depict the Vikings in horned helmets began around the 19th century. Such helmets appeared In the paintings of some Scandinavian artists, when they portrayed scenes from mythology - for example, such works were written by Swede August Malmstrem. However, the image was not generally accepted. He became popular only in the 1870s, when Richard Wagner set his famous opera tetralogy “Nibelung Ring”.

The costumes for this opera were invented and created by CARL CARL Emil Dopler. Apparently, he was inspired by the works of Malstra, because in his sketches The Vikings had gilded horned helmets. It was they, according to historians, that became the reason why the image of the Viking in a horned helmet gained such popularity.

Robert Frank, professor Yale University, devoted a whole study to the question of why the horned helmets became the generally accepted version of how the Vikings looked. On her words, the helmets that the Doppler portrayed is the result of a mixture of historical facts and imagination. As Frank explains, the Germans were then delighted with the myths of the Scandinavian Vikings-this made it possible to create their own national idea, which has independent, differing from the Greco-Latin roots. At the same time, the motive for the search for a national idea in German culture was one of the central in the 19th century. Therefore, Frank believes, stereotypical horned helmets, which sometimes Wore German knights in the Middle Ages were on the heads of the Vikings: German and Scandinavian legends were intertwined.

In fact, there is no evidence that the Vikings wore horned helmets. Moreover, archaeologists have found very few Viking helmets: more or less whole-total twoas well as a few more fragments. There were no horns on any of them. And it is still not proved whether it was combat helmets or ritual.

“It's hard to say whether the Vikings of the helmet in battle were worn or it was an indicator of the status of its owner, - Explains Professor Andrew Jennings, Scottish Vikings specialist from Highlands and Islands University. “None of them were discovered.” Therefore, perhaps in the battles of the Vikings of the helmets were not worn at all.

But absolutely certain that there is no reason to believe in the horned helmets of 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 THUGHT THEY DID.
2. Roberta Frank. The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet
3. DID Vikings Really Wear Horned Helmets?