Vikings used to wear leather helmets without any horn. The legend that tells about the vinking helmets with the horns is just an iconography of the popular immagination. The Wagner’s Opera “Götterdämmerung” helped the legend to carry on trought the centuries, and it was the first opera located in the nordic mythology.
The imaginery shown on the movies is not reproducing the reality. For example, the people think that the vikings were wearing metallic helmets with horns, but the metal was very expansive. Vikings were wearing simples leather helmets with metal supports, if they could buy it. They used to fight using bows, knives, lances and axes, tools that they were daily using to hunt, eat, collect wood and useful also for the battle.
Others, say that the image of the vikings with the horned helmet it’s because they used to bury their brothers wearing the helmet and with some drinking horns to make him drink while passing away. When the firsts viking’ skeletons were found in the Victorian Age, the scientists thought that the horns were part of the helmet, broken from it because of the ground movements throught the years, and soon the romantic artists spread this legend with their paints, images and poems.
Viking horns were a symbol of this population, and it was used to drink and to make sounds, and this sounds were useful to comunicate between them.
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