![]() Vikings were “only” interested in plunder, while the monks spoke of a war of faith as a way of enlisting support from their coreligionists. Nor is there any truth to the idea that the heathen Vikings waged a religious war against Christianity, even if it may have seemed that way to the Christian monks they brutally attacked. ![]() However, in fact, measurements of Viking remains show that the men stood on average 5 feet 7 inches and the women 5 feet 2 inches tall. Movies about these people tend to depict them as almost superhuman figures. “As Danish women researchers stress these days, the clothing at least of the elite was more colorful than we had previously imagined, with colored woven ribbons and fur trims.” “They had goatees, mustaches, and full beards, but little braids are nowhere to be seen! Also, the floor-length hair of Viking women is likely to be wishful thinking, but they certainly had long hair - the longer the nobler - and Irish ribbon knots which would have needed hair needles or nets to stabilize them,” Simek says. Rudolf Simek, professor of ancient German and Nordic studies at the University of Bonn, Germany, points out that we have only the flimsiest evidence of how men and women of Viking times might have looked: “There is no indication whatsoever that they had tattoos or piercings, except horizontally scratched teeth painted in black, the meaning of which is unclear.” As can be gleaned from pictorial representations and carvings, Viking men sported all kinds of haircuts, from pot cuts to half-long wavy hair. More recently, our understanding of this legendary warrior people has become far more nuanced, and many a myth has been dispelled. Most likely they just had caps made of leather or metal. And there is no evidence that the Vikings, those mythic explorers, and conquerors, wore them. As we know today, the classic “Viking” bronze horned helmets, found in Denmark, date back to 1000 BCE - or around two thousand years before the Viking age. Mostly likely inspired by the presumed garb of the Celts or Gaul, the costume designer for Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen outfitted the performers with horned helmets. Stories about such a rough-hewn warrior people just fired the imagination. It didn’t take long until Old Nordic motifs made their way into popular culture. A notion even circulated that Queen Victoria was related to Odin. Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were perceived as a large single cultural unit vaguely connected by Viking history. The craze also caught on with Victorians who traveled to Norway to discover their roots. Many people at the time were sick of the South. He felt he was entering new territory: Old Norse mythology as an alternative to a stale classicism that venerated Greco-Roman legends and myths. For him, the stories created a sense of belonging to an imagined homeland in the North. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder read Mallet’s book with great enthusiasm. It is not known what the originals were used by a certain Snorri Sturluson, Saxo Grammaticus, and others who were part of this effort.Īfter Mallet’s History of Denmark had been translated into several languages, European writers took an immediate interest. Although the Old Norse tales feature the sort of wild adventure more often associated with heathens than Christians, they were written down in the 13th century in Christianized Iceland and influenced by that faith. When Geneva historian Paul Henri Mallet began to publish Old Norse tales in 1655, he could probably not imagine the persisting wave of interest in all things “nordic” more than 250 years later. Adapted from Brunner’s new book, Extreme North – A Cultural History
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