Written by Michaela Hamman

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For centuries, Vikings have captured public attention and formed national identities. The term “Vikings” is often used to describe all people living in modern-day Scandinavia roughly between the years AD 800 and AD 1050. This is, however, inaccurate.  

“Viking” is more a job description than a population’s identity. The root word viking appears in Old Norse describing either troop’s ferocity, raiders and local nuisances, or pirates depending on the source. Those remaining in present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden will be more accurately referred to as “Scandinavians” since loyalty was to a leader rather than a nationality.  

Advertisements for Danish beers, video games, and statues have all depicted male Vikings wearing a horned helmet over disheveled hair. Vikings are shown in popular culture as dirty pagans who arrived in the Atlantic Archipelago to pillage and destroy through raids. While Vikings certainly raided across the Atlantic Archipelago, France, the Netherlands, and even reaching the Mediterranean, documentary sources of these events are propagandized and predominantly written by biased Christian monks. Three aspects of the Viking stereotype – horned helmets, male fighters, and only participating in violence – will be critiqued below. 

Popular media is filled with “Viking” horned helmets which are based on no contemporary archaeological evidence. Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is often credited with popularizing the Scandinavian association with these peculiar helmets through his opera, Der Ring des Nibelungen. The image of Vikings wearing horned helmets is a nineteenth-century creation spread through twentieth-century artistic romanticism. Horned helmets have existed, though made completely of metal. Twin helmets with curved horns were excavated in Viksø, Denmark and have been radiocarbon dated to between 857-907 BCE. This means they pre-date Vikings by over two thousand years. 

In Scandinavia, the repertoire of horned helmets in art dates to 1000-750 BCE. It is represented by two helmets, a horn detached from a helmet, three sets of twin figurines, a pair of figures on a razor, and approximately forty rock images. Horned helmets in the Bronze Age were not confined to Scandinavia and appeared alongside similar artistic representations in Iberia and Sardinia. The best representation of a Viking helmet is a conical helmet called the Gjermundbu helmet found in Norway and dated to the late tenth century. While horned helmets have existed in the region, their association with Vikings was a later creation and is archaeologically disproven.  

Wearing a horned helmet, the stereotypical Viking you see as sports mascots and in children’s movies is often male. The presence of weapons in a burial site often leads to the individual being interpreted as a masculine figure. The assumption that males are buried with weapons while female graves will contain jewelry and domestic objects, such as weaving equipment, has been long-standing in archaeology. Furthermore, gendered identity is conflated with biological sex. This is now, rightly, being challenged.  

Warriorhood, not just in Scandinavia, was considered to be exclusive to biological males. Increasingly, archaeological re-investigations and testing have proven that the exclusive idea of male warriors is incorrect. While females in Scandinavian warrior burials are not common, two examples demonstrate that grave goods cannot be indicative of biological sex or gender identity. Discovered in Nordre Kjølen, Solør, Norway, the remains of an individual from the Viking Age were buried with multiple weapons, including a sword and an axe-head. Through studying the bones, it was determined during excavation in 1900 that the individual was biologically female. She is the sole woman buried with weapons in Norway during this period. It cannot be determined whether she was a warrior or symbolically buried. Contrarily, the individual in Birka’s chamber grave number Bj. 581, excavated in 1878, had been interpreted as a high-status male warrior for over a century. Birka became the first urban center in modern-day Sweden on Björkö island, Uppland, when founded in AD 750. The settlement is known to include a “garrison” building, a long hall filled with weaponry. Chamber grave Bj. 581 is placed in an area thought to be for elite burials. Buried with two horses, one of which is prepared for riding, a large number of weapons, gaming pieces and board, the individual is considered a warrior. The weapons in the burial include a sword, an axe, two shields, armour-piercing arrows, and more. This has led to the long-held belief that the individual was biologically male. Full iron-bound boards are rare in Viking Age burials and occur in higher concentrations with possible military leaders. The placement of everything needed to play hnefatafl, a strategy game likened to chess, with the wealth of weaponry near the individual’s body suggests they held a command role. The individual’s clothing was also analyzed and confirmed to belong to a cavalry commander, answering to a royal war leader. In 2017, archaeologists confirmed that the individual was biologically female.  

Biological sex does not equate to gender, and the individual could have maintained an identity other than male. Buried with functional battle equipment and little else, near a building filled with weapons and in proximity to other burials containing weapons, Bj. 581 is associated with combat. It is possible the Birka individual was buried with none of her own possessions, or as a symbolic warrior, like what has been argued for the individual from Nordre Kjølen. There might have been Scandinavian female warriors during the Viking Age. What these two individuals can tell us for certain is that archaeology cannot be analyzed through assumptions and categories. 

While Vikings did participate in raiding, they and other Scandinavians were also connected to a much wider exchange network. Viking Age societies from the Atlantic Archipelago to modern-day Russia and Ukraine participated in long-distance trade through interconnected networks. We see this trade in archaeological excavations with silver coins, called dirhams, from Baghdad that were found in Scandinavia and abroad. In fact, between circa AD 800 to 950, 99 per cent of coins imported to Scandinavia were dirhams, numbering up to potentially tens of millions of coins.  

Scandinavia was connected to the wider world by a network of hubs and peripheral sites. A small fraction of sites were hubs or places that were intensively connected. Beside these hubs would be peripheral sites comprising local markets and other small-scale sites. The peripheral sites would have had little connections between them. Those who traveled, including Vikings and traders, formed the backbone of this network. The connections between these hubs could be effective but were vulnerable to time and crises. While participating in raids, Vikings also established settlements like Dublin throughout the Atlantic Archipelago and participated in local economies. It is probable that when invading Anglo-Saxon England with intent to conquer, the Great Army built winter camps. This allowed the Vikings to restock provisions by distributing a portion of the stolen wealth back into the community they took it from. Such groups are moving places of commerce, proven by the distribution of coins and other artifacts, even if they were previously thought to only participate in violence. Through the construction of permanent settlements like Dublin, Vikings recreated the Southern Scandinavian exchange network with which they were familiar, namely urban hubs with long-distance imports of exotic commodities. Inside Scandinavia and out, these individuals participated in more than violent raids, and attention should be given to their role in long-distance communication and trade. 

Vikings and Scandinavians have long been reduced to unflattering stereotypes. The term “Viking” has been broadly applied in the past yet would describe only one part of the population. Vikings wearing horned helmets, being only biological male warriors, and exclusively raiding other territories are three major stereotypes that have been proven archaeologically false. The only horned helmets from Scandinavia to exist, of which there are two intact, date to two thousand years before the Viking Age. Individuals from Nordre Kjølen and Birka demonstrate that weapon assemblies could be buried with people biologically female. Groups of Vikings participated in local trade and, through outside settlements, participated in a larger network along with Scandinavia. Our understanding of the Viking Age is only limited by what material is preserved and through reading biased Christian sources. Modern-day media perpetuates and encourages an incorrect image of Viking life. However, if you look past such depictions, you will find a culture and society still full of mysteries. 

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Bibliography 

Ellis, Caitlin (2021) “Remembering the Vikings: Violence, Institutional Memory and the Instruments of History”, History Compass, 19(1), e12644. 

Horne, Tom (2023) A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain. London: Routledge. 

Museum of Cultural History (2019) Female Warriors in the Viking Age Available at: https://www.khm.uio.no/english/news/female-warriors-in-the-viking-age.html (Accessed: 27 October 2024) 

O’Connor, Sacha (2020) “Why do Horned Helmets still Matter?”, in H. Williams and P. Clarke (eds.) Digging into the Dark Ages: Early Medieval Public Archaeologies. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing, pp. 53-58. 

Price, Neil, Hedenstierna-Jonson, Charlotte, Zachrisson, Torun, Kjellström, Anna, Storå, Jan, Krzewinska, Maja, Günther, Torsten, Sobrado, Verónica, Jakobsson, Mattias, and Götherström, Anders (2019) “Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581”, Antiquity, 93(367), pp. 181-198. 

Richards, Julian (2005). “Vikings Then and Now” in The Vikings: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-7. 

Søren Michael Sindbæk (2007) “The Small World of the Vikings: Networks in Early Medieval Communication and Exchange”, Norwegian Archaeological Review, 40(1), pp. 59-74. 

Vandkilde, Helle, Matta, Valentina, Ahlqvist, Laural, and Nørgaard, Heide W. (2022) “Anthropomorphised warlike beings with horned helmets: Bronze Age Scandinavia, Sardinia, and Iberia compared”, Praehistorische Zeitschrift, 97(1), pp. 130–158. 

Walsh, Madeline (2020) “Dressing for Ragnarök? Commodifying, Appropriating and Fetishising the Vikings”, in H. Williams and P. Clarke (eds.) Digging into the Dark Ages: Early Medieval Public Archaeologies. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing, pp. 65-73. 

Ward, Elisabeth (2001) “Viking Pop Culture on Display: The Case of the Horned Helmets”, Material Culture Review, 54(1), pp. 6-20. 

Ziackova, Barbora (2019) “Imagining the (Modern) Viking”, ReNEW Conference 2019. ReNEW. 

“vikings!” by hans s is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.