Pilots: Vikings Never Wore Horned Helmets

Vikings never wore horned helmets.

Not one Viking helmet with horns has ever been found. The famous one, from a grave at Gjermundbu in Norway (about AD 970), is an iron cap with a guard for the eyes, and the old stories mention helmets all the time and horns never. The horns caught on in 1876, when Carl Emil Doepler designed the costumes for Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth and gave its warriors horns, and posters and picture books took it from there. Horned helmets are real, though: a bronze pair from a bog at Veksø in Denmark, made around 900 BC, about seventeen hundred years before the first Viking. The beard, he would like you to know, is real.

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