There is no evidence they wore anything other than unadorned conical headgear, straight up-and-down, and distinguished by nothing more than a vertical metal guard for the nose.īut, as for everything else we tend to assume about those rampaging warriors - the blood-letting, massacre, rape and plunder - that’s totally accurate, as King Aelle discovered. Those supposedly horned helmets of theirs - so beloved by cartoonists, costumiers for Wagnerian operas and Scandinavian winter sports spectators at Sochi - are a complete fabrication. In some ways, history has got it wrong about the Vikings. The message was clear: you mess with the Norseman at your peril.
In a macabre ritual killing known as the ‘blood-eagle’, Aelle’s chest was cut open, his ribs split and his lungs pulled out from inside the ribcage and then pinned back to his chest like the wings of an eagle. In 876, having crossed the North Sea, they took York, captured King Aelle and demonstrated that no one could out-do the Vikings for sheer violence and horror. It fell to his sons, Ivar and Halfdan, to carry out that threat. Members of the Viking Jarl Squad surround a burning viking galley ship during the annual Up Helly Aa Festival, Lerwick, Shetland Islands in 2010
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