The Horned Helmets of “History”

In a previous post, I discussed the written versus the realistic histories of Empress Theodora, as well as those of Athens and Sparta. This week, I thought I’d focus on the Vikings and how they are remembered. When most people think of the Vikings, they think of the same few things: horned helmets, violence, and paganism. They probably also think of them as ancient, preceding the Romans and Western civilization as a whole. These ideas are ingrained in society; many of my friends and I grew up watching the “How to Train Your Dragon” films that portrayed the Vikings exactly like this. In reality, the Vikings were farmers. In fact, the endonym for the Vikings was “Ashmani;” they were the people of the ash, and they worshipped their sacred ash tree. The World Tree, Yggdrasil, of Viking mythology, was believed to have roots that encompassed and supported the entire universe. That isn’t to say that the Vikings were all pagans; many of them were Christianized. Contrary to popular belief, the Viking age began several centuries after the fall of Rome, allowing ample time for them to adopt the growing religion. The Vikings were also a clean people. They showered once a week which, compared to the Dark Ages’ norm of showering once a year, is an impressive feat. In fact, they were said to have been so clean that the women of the villages they pillaged were attracted to the Viking men, purely because of their clean aroma. Their cleanliness even persisted in death: most Vikings were buried with combs and nail clippers. The Vikings were also buried with their favorite board game: Hnefatafl, a game twice as complex as modern-day chess. Unfortunately for the Vikings, their history was not written contemporaneously. Their history is made clear to us in the form of two types of sources: chronicles, written by Germanic peoples in the 9^th-10^th centuries, and sagas, written a century after the end of the age of Vikings. Over time, history and myth mixed together, and the “Vikings” that we know today were created. Horned helmets arose from a Wagner opera; uncleanliness and sailing came about from asynchronous source material; dragons made an appearance in children’s movies.