Did the Vikings really wear horned helmets? And other myths

As I’m writing the last book of our Viking Ventures series, it got me thinking about the beginning, and about everything we had to learn before we started writing about Vikings. So here are a few hotly debated “facts” about the Vikings, and whether they hold up.

The Vikings have a bit of an image problem. Centuries of paintings, novels, Hollywood films, and one very popular TV show have layered so much myth onto the historical reality that it can be hard to know what’s true anymore. Here are a few of the big ones.

Horned helmets — the big one

They didn’t wear them. Or at least, not in battle. This is probably the most repeated misconception about the Viking age, and it is almost entirely the fault of a 19th-century costume designer.

The only well-preserved Viking-age helmet we have found is the Gjermundbu helmet, discovered in Norway in 1943. It is a rounded iron cap with a nose guard. No horns. Very practical. Not great for a movie poster.

Horned helmets did exist in Scandinavia, but they predate the Viking age by about a thousand years and were almost certainly ceremonial. The Vikings inherited the image, not the headgear.

Leather armour

This one is more complicated, and it cuts the other way. For a long time, historians were sceptical that Viking warriors wore much leather armour at all, partly because it doesn’t survive well in the archaeological record. The cinematic image of a warrior in a beautifully tooled leather jerkin was dismissed as fantasy.

The current thinking is more nuanced. Chainmail, or ringmail, was the prestige armour of the period, worn by those who could afford it. But leather and padded textile armour — a thick quilted garment sometimes called a gambeson — was almost certainly worn by ordinary warriors. It was cheaper, easier to make, and more available. It also offered reasonable protection against cuts and glancing blows.

So the leather armour isn’t entirely wrong. It’s just not the whole picture either.

Braids and elaborate grooming

Actually, yes. This one turns out to be largely true, and it surprises a lot of people.

Contemporary accounts, including one rather startled English chronicler, describe Viking men as disturbingly well-groomed. They bathed regularly, combed their hair, and were considered by some of their European neighbours to be almost worryingly attractive as a result. Archaeological finds back this up. Combs are among the most common personal items found at Viking-age sites, many of them beautifully made from antler or bone.

The braids and elaborate hairstyles you see in modern depictions are speculative, but the general idea of a culture that cared about appearance is well grounded.

Unwashed, brutal savages

The grooming point above already dents this one, but it goes further. The Viking age produced poets, lawyers, traders, and explorers. The Thing, the Icelandic assembly established around 930 AD, is one of the oldest parliaments in the world. Viking traders reached Constantinople, Baghdad, and possibly North America. They had complex legal systems, rich oral traditions, and a sophisticated material culture.

They could also be extraordinarily violent, and the raids on monasteries and coastal settlements were real and terrifying. But reducing the entire Viking age to raiding is a bit like summing up the Roman Empire as “the people who crucified people”. Technically accurate in places, wildly incomplete as a picture.

Did the Vikings call themselves Vikings?

Probably not, or at least not in the way we use the word. “Viking” in Old Norse referred to the act of going raiding; to go “a-viking” was to go on a raid. It was a verb before it was a noun. The people we call Vikings would have identified primarily by their region, their clan, or their tribe. A Norseman. A Dane. A man of Vestfold.

The umbrella term “Viking” as a catch-all for Scandinavian people of the period is largely a modern convenience. A useful one, but a convenience nonetheless.

So what does this mean for our books?

We try to get it right. That doesn’t mean every detail is perfectly reconstructed — storytelling always involves choices — but we care about the world we’re writing in. When our characters wear armour, fight battles, or sit around a fire arguing about honour and loyalty, we want that world to feel real rather than just cinematic.

Sometimes the history is stranger and richer than the myth anyway. You don’t need horned helmets when the reality is already this good.