The Viking Myth: How 19th Century Romantics Invented the Horned Helmet and Everything Else

There are no horned Viking helmets. There is one horned helmet from Scandinavia that gets cited when this subject comes up the Veksoe helmet, found in a Danish bog in 1942 but it dates to approximately 900 BCE, two thousand years before the Viking Age, and was almost certainly ceremonial rather than military. No Viking Age combat helmet with horns has ever been found anywhere. Not one.

The horned helmet is a 19th century invention, most directly traceable to the Swedish artist Gustav Malmstrom, who illustrated a Viking mythology book in 1820 with horned warriors, and to the costume designer Carl Emil Doepler, who created horned helmets for the first professional staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 1876. These images spread widely and rapidly in the romantically charged atmosphere of 19th century European nationalism. By 1900, the horned Viking had become canonical.

This is a small example of a large phenomenon. The Viking identity that most people carry in their heads warriors in horned helmets, berserkers and longships, fierce pagans rampaging across a timid Christian Europe is substantially a 19th century construction, assembled from selective readings of medieval sources, nationalist mythology, and the specific cultural anxieties of Scandinavian countries trying to establish strong historical identities in an era of European nation building.

The actual Norse and Viking Age cultures were more complex, more varied, and in several ways more interesting than the myth. Understanding how the myth was built is, I would argue, as historically valuable as understanding the reality it replaced.