I recently learnt that Viking helmets didn’t have horns.
https://www.history.com/news/did-vikings-really-wear-horned-helmets
Does anyone know the reason behind why it’s commonly believed that the helmets did have horns?
To crib from an earlier answer of mine
Ok so, depictions of warriors with some sort of attachment on their helmets are pretty damn ubiquitous. Vikings and the fictitious horns are perhaps the most well known example.
However as has now entered popular consciousness, the Vikings did not actually attach horns to their helmets.
So where did this representation come from? Medieval depictions of the Rus, Varangians, Vikings, and any other Scandinavia based group of raiders and conquerors are conspicuously missing them.
Archaeological evidence clearly shows no evidence of horns in helmets from the Norse or other closely related groups such as the Anglo-Saxons. Though literary and archeological sources do show boar crests were certainly sported. Their prevalence in Beowulf is also fairly well known.
I hope the mods will forgive me for the link to wikipedia, but its a pretty good picture....
It has been proposed that the empty slots in there were filled by horn sheets that have since decayed, which I suppose would make this a "horn" helmet, if not a horned helmet in the more traditional sense.
It is of note though, that despite the common cultural connections, this is not a Viking or Norse helmet, it is definitively Anglo-Saxon.
So if contemporary depictions do not depict the vikings with horns on their helmets, when does this particular trope start to become prevalent?
As in most things historically related, it is all the 19th century's fault. Specifically the confluence of opera, nationalism, and artistic license, as well as the conflation of continental history and Scandinavian.
A quick googling of vikings and horns on their helmets will eventually point you in the direction of 19th century opera as the locale where this was entered popular imagination. One of the first results to pop up will lead you to the Economist's article, and the author that they are citing has this to say on the topic.
For it was not until 1875 that humanist scholarship, misunderstood archae-ological finds, heraldic origin fantasies, and the Great God Wish (whom JacobGrimm was first to name) had worked their magic. A small herd of "viking"helmets was now on the move, led by an innocent-looking cow-horn modelcreated that year by Wagner's costume designer, Professor Carl Emil Doepler,for the first Bayreuth production (1876) of the full Ring des Nibelungen. Putting cow-horns on Nibelungenlied heads was a departure from tradition:until 1878 not a single illustrated version of that courtly south-German poem had depicted such headgear. Wagner's Ring commingled Old Norse and Middle High German motifs, creating an impression, which has endured, that valkyries and norns, Valhalla and the twilight of the gods, were timelessly German. When Doepler supplied Gunther's youthful retinue, Siegfried's funeral cortege, and Hunding himself with horned helmets, a piece of armour long attached to continental "barbarians" became part of this heady stew.
The article that I'm using can be found at https://www.scribd.com/doc/51267328/Frank-Invention-of-Horned-Helmet, and the quotation I used is from the free trial, but the rest of the article is behind a paywall.
