Were Vikings really dirty savages who wore horned helmets, or did they look like we do today? Here’s what the experts say

Let me tell you one thing.
All the movies and films about history, huge battles, massive armies and strong big barbarians...... forget it.

People used to be small. All houses, doorways, beds and bedrooms and stuff from the old days are always very small. Many inches smaller than we are now.

So it was a dwarf fight of little human peeps.

You Dutch are the tallest people in the world now.

I once saw the metal armor of the Spanish conquistadors in a museum and they were tiny. People were scaled down then but they still had to be very strong.

Great post and link.

It's interesting that Scandinavians are some of the most peaceful, mellow, laid back people on earth. now days. Very different from the conventional wisdom about what Vikings were like a thousand years ago.

It seems to me that the victims of Scandinavian (Viking) aggression from between 800 and 1100 A.D. characterized them as the most gruesome, fearsome, savage people ever for two reasons: 1) they were their victims, and 2) they were literate and able to depict their aggressors any way they deemed fit. Very few people were literate back then, but monks in the British Isles, particularly in Ireland, WERE literate, and thus able to write of these raids.

Now having said that, it's also interesting to note that Swedish Vikings who went east and down the big Russian rivers -- Dneiper and Volga, founding Kiev (capital of modern day Ukraine) on the Dneiper River -- got all the way down to the Black Sea, and some of them became bodyguards for the Christian rulers of Constantinople. They were known as the Varangian Guard. There are even some runic inscriptions etched in the walls of the Hagia Sophia (built in the 5th century in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey) which are thought to be done by these Swedish Vikings of the Varangian Guard. So apparently, there were some big, bad, burly dudes among them.

Also, if you've ever watched the "World's Strongest Man Competition", INEVITABLY there'll be several Scandinavians in the Top 5. Norway, Iceland, Sweden, etc. Magnus Magnusson was one guy, I think.

The word "rus", from where "Russia" is derived, is a Viking word.

And yes, it'd take some hearty dudes to set sail into the north Atlantic to shores unknown.

And Normandy, the western area of France that juts out into the Atlantic, was named after the Normans -- Danish Vikings who sailed around the North Sea to the French Atlantic coast in their longboats, sailed up the Seine River, and threatened Paris. The king bought them off by giving them a large quantity of land far to the west -- Normandy.

"”The Anglo-English king Cnut the Great is portrayed on an English drawing from the 1030s as an erect, well-groomed and elegantly dressed man with pointy shoes, socks with ribbons, trousers and a knee-length tunic and a cloak slung over one shoulder,” says Henriksen."

CNUT WAS ERECT!!!!

...historians totally got the Mayan screwed up so there's a good chance they got the vikings history screwed up and the Egyptians and the other cultures without seeing the scientific metaphors below the surface of all the ancient cultures carvings,paintings and artifacts....

Hilga sounds pretty ugly...

It's actually more difficult to determine the gender of a skeleton from the Viking era,” says Harvig. “The men’s skulls were a little more feminine and the women’s skulls a little more masculine than what we’re seeing today. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all skeletons from the Viking period, but generally it’s quite difficult to determine the gender of a Viking Age skeleton.”

She explains that Viking women often had pronounced jawbones and eyebrows, whereas in the men, these features were more feminine than what archaeologists are accustomed to when trying to determine the gender of ancient skeletons.

That science nordic site in the OP is great, thanks.