Did Vikings Wear Horned Helmets? 7 History Myths, Debunked

Some of the most familiar facts about the past aren’t facts at all. They started as jokes, propaganda, stage costumes or careless retellings, and they stuck. Here are seven, where each came from, and what the evidence says.

1. Vikings wore horned helmets

There’s no evidence that Viking warriors wore horns. The only near-complete Viking-age helmet ever found, the Gjermundbu helmet from Norway, is a plain rounded cap. Horns would have been impractical in a fight.

The image comes largely from the 19th century, when Romantic painters and the costume designer for Wagner’s opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung (first staged in full in 1876) gave Norse characters horned helmets. It became the standard look.

2. Medieval people thought the Earth was flat

Educated Europeans in the Middle Ages knew perfectly well the Earth was round. Ancient Greek scholars had shown it, and around 240 BC Eratosthenes estimated its size surprisingly well. Medieval scholars wrote about the spherical Earth routinely.

The myth was spread largely in the 19th century, including by Washington Irving’s popular 1828 biography of Columbus. The real argument about Columbus’s voyage was about how big the Earth was, and his critics were right: he’d badly underestimated it.

3. Napoleon was very short

Napoleon was about 1.69 m tall (5 foot 7), roughly average or a little above for a Frenchman of his time. His height was recorded as 5 foot 2 in French units, which were longer than English ones, so it was misread. British cartoonists, especially James Gillray, loved drawing him tiny, and his nickname “le petit caporal” was affectionate rather than about height.

4. Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake”

There’s no good evidence she ever said it. The line, about brioche rather than cake, appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, attributed to an unnamed “great princess”, in a passage written when Marie Antoinette was still a child in Austria. It was later pinned on her as a symbol of royal indifference.

5. The Salem witches were burned

In the Salem witch trials of 1692, nineteen people were hanged, one man was pressed to death with stones, and several more died in jail. Nobody was burned. English law, which applied in the colony, punished witchcraft by hanging; burning was more common in parts of continental Europe.

6. Slaves built the pyramids

Excavations near Giza have uncovered the town where pyramid workers lived, with bakeries, breweries and evidence they were fed well. Workers were buried in tombs near the pyramids with goods for the afterlife, an honour unlikely to be given to slaves. The evidence points to organised, paid crews, many working in rotating shifts.

7. Columbus was the first European in the Americas

Norse explorers reached North America around the year 1000, nearly five centuries earlier. The Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, excavated in the 1960s, confirmed the voyages described in the Icelandic sagas. And, of course, the Americas had been inhabited for thousands of years.

Why myths like these spread

• They make a good story, often better than the truth.
• They were useful to someone: propaganda, a political point, a flattering national history.
• Art and costume fix an image in people’s minds.
• Repetition: once a myth is in enough books, it gets copied into more.

Try it

Step through the timeline above to see what was really happening at each point.

The free history myths test covers these and three more.