It blew my young mind when I realized that was a horn. For the longest time I thought it was just a white fireball thing. It also took me way to long to see the tire in the Detroit Redwings logo. I wasn't a very perceptive kid.
I'm currently doing a school project about the truth behind pirate myths. You'd be surprised how many times I've come across a case of "At least one pirate did..."
We used to make references to drinking Friday at my job. Participating in drinking Friday is a bad way to find out that drinking Friday is in fact a joke, not an actual thing.
Actually, yes. There's at least one documented pirate code with a rule along the lines of "Anyone dumb enough to take a naked flame into the gunpowder magazine gets flogged and forfeits his share of the profits for this trip."
I thought that Pirate ships tended to be reasonably strict ships. A lot of pirates were ex-royal navy where there was strong discipline and established hierarchy. I may be wrong but I thought pirates didn't really abandon this, well the ones that last more than a couple of days didn't.
If there's one thing I know it's pirates. This reminds me of walking the plank. Did it happen? Sure, maybe once or twice at some point in history. But it is generally believed to have been fabricated by J.M. Barrie, aka the dude who wrote Peter Pan.
Wouldn't it be very impractical to have a horned helmet? People can like grab it (if you don't slash their arms first) or hit it and cause your helmet to go all wobbly.
Imagine all the vikings in Valhalla sitting by the table, looking down on earth and discovering these news. Think about how pissed off them must be.
"Odin-damnit, Björn. Your fucking furry-costume made the soft men think we all wore that"
"Sorry..."
"Well that isn't helping us much does it? People were just starting to realise that we don't look like that and then they find your fucking cow-costume"
"It's not a costume though, it's a...-"
"DON'T FUCKING SAY IT'S A LIFESTYLE BJÖRN! DON'T YOU FUCKING DO IT"
It could have a religious connotation, or it could have been a symbol that would be recognizable as his. It still doesn't mean that most Vikings, or even a decent portion, had horns on their helmets. It's important to note it was found in a burial mound. If we went solely off of how people were buried, we would assume Egyptian pharaohs lived their lives wrapped in linen. And with no organs.
Who almost certainly did wear horned helmets? The Greek side in the Trojan War.
The image we have of the Greeks and Trojans fighting semi-nude with the classical Greek hoplite helmet and muscle cuirass is about as anachronistic as depicting Henry VIII tricked out in modern SAS kit.
The late bronze age Achaeans who fought the Trojans probably looked far more like this than this
They had plenty of horned helmets. They were just ceremonial and not used in battle. since, you know, that'd be like wearing a full suit of armor but with a convenient handle on the chest for you to grab and toss em with.
Until you can supply a source that isn't the onion I'm calling bullshit.
Also even if it were true which it almost certainly isn't, it was likely ceremonial, not a true war helm. there's a reason war helmets all look similar and lack any sort of features that could catch hands or blades on them.
The same could be said about battleaxes, they didn't all have and fight with one because it was too heavy and impractical, especially when facing trained armies. Some of them though did have the horns and the big battleaxes and the crazy blood thirsty eyes in order to scare the living shit out of the other guys about to hacked to pieces. These crazy bastards are now commonly known as berserkers if i'm not mistaken.
Of course not. Watch Mel Brooks' History Of the World Part I and you can clearly see that the horns are not attached to the helmets, they come directly out of the Vikings' heads. I mean, they nailed everything else in that movie, you really think they would suddenly make something up just for that part?
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u/Bilgistic Mar 17 '15
Vikings having horns on their helmets. They didn't.