A few days ago, I was volunteering at an outreach demo my reenactment group put on at a local renaissance festival. While there, a somewhat inebriated patron dressed as a “Viking” described to me a practice by which Viking males would shave off the hair at their temples on one particular side of their head when one parent died, and the other side when the other parent died. At that point they would “earn their braid” and plait the remaining ponytail, resulting in the undercut “Ragnar” haircut popular in modern Viking-themed TV shows.

I’d never heard this before, but it sounds fishy to me. It doesn’t match anything I know about early medieval Norse fashion, nor anything I’ve been able to dig up since. It sounds like an ad-hoc attempt to justify a modern “reenactorism”.

Is there some evidence I’m unaware of? Where did this idea come from?