Did Vikings Wear Horned Helmets? 9 History Myths, Debunked

History is full of facts that everybody knows and nobody checked. Some are harmless, some are slanders on real people, and nearly all of them were started by someone with a reason: a costume designer, a cartoonist, a novelist, a propagandist. Here are nine of the most famous, where they came from, and what the evidence actually says. Step through the timeline at the top to see when each piece really happened.

1. Vikings wore horned helmets

There’s no evidence that Viking warriors ever wore horned helmets in battle. Horns would have been a liability in a fight: something for an enemy’s weapon to catch, and something to get tangled in. The only nearly complete helmet ever found from the Viking age, dug up at Gjermundbu in Norway in 1943, is a plain rounded iron cap with a guard around the eyes. Most Viking warriors probably had no metal helmet at all.

The horned image is surprisingly recent. When Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung was first staged in full in 1876, the costume designer Carl Emil Doepler gave the Germanic heroes horned and winged helmets. The look caught on in paintings, illustrations and eventually cartoons, and it’s stayed ever since.

There’s a grain of something real underneath. Horned helmets have been found in Scandinavia, such as the bronze pair from Veksø in Denmark. They date to about 900 BC, some 1,700 years before the Vikings, and were almost certainly for ceremony, not combat.

2. Napoleon was very short

Napoleon Bonaparte was about 1.69 m tall, average or slightly above for a Frenchman of his time.

The confusion has several sources. After his death in 1821, his height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches, but in French units: the French inch, the pouce, was longer than the English one, and in English measure he was about 5 feet 7. British cartoonists like James Gillray drew him as “Little Boney”, a tiny man in an enormous hat throwing tantrums, and the image did its job as propaganda. And he was often seen surrounded by the soldiers of his Imperial Guard, who were chosen partly for their height. Next to them, anyone would look small.

3. Medieval people thought the Earth was flat

Educated Europeans had known the Earth was round since ancient Greece, and medieval textbooks taught it as standard. Columbus’s critics argued about the size of the Earth, not its shape, and they were right. The myth was popularised in the 19th century, partly by a romanticised biography of Columbus. There’s a whole article on this one: did medieval people think the Earth was flat?

4. Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake”

There’s no evidence she ever said it, and good evidence she couldn’t have been the original. The line appears in the Confessions of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, written in the mid-1760s, about “a great princess” who, told the peasants had no bread, said “let them eat brioche”. At that time Marie Antoinette was about ten years old and living in Austria. She didn’t arrive in France until 1770.

Similar stories had been told about other royals long before. The phrase became attached to Marie Antoinette because it fitted the revolutionary picture of her as a heartless spendthrift. Her biographer Antonia Fraser argues she was, if anything, unusually concerned about the poor, and gave generously to charity. The myth tells you more about how revolutions make villains than about her.

5. The Salem witches were burned

No one convicted in the Salem witch trials of 1692 was burned. Nineteen people were hanged, one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea, and several more died in jail while waiting for trial.

In England and its American colonies, witchcraft was a felony, and the punishment for felony was hanging. Burning at the stake was more common in parts of continental Europe and in Scotland, where convicted witches were usually strangled first. The image of Salem fires comes from merging a very real American tragedy with a European one.

6. Slaves built the pyramids

The image of thousands of slaves dragging stones under the whip owes much to the Greek historian Herodotus, writing two thousand years after the Great Pyramid was built, and later to Hollywood.

Archaeology tells a different story. In 1990, the archaeologists Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass began excavating the tombs of pyramid workers right next to the pyramids at Giza. Slaves wouldn’t have been honoured with burial beside the king’s tomb. The skeletons show hard labour, but also healed broken bones, a sign of medical care. Nearby were bakeries and breweries that fed thousands. The workforce seems to have been skilled craftsmen supported by rotating crews of labourers drafted from villages across Egypt.

It wasn’t a holiday. The work was compulsory, hard and dangerous. But it was organised state labour, paid in food, beer and status, rather than slavery in the sense the myth suggests.

7. Columbus was the first European in the Americas

Norse explorers led by Leif Erikson reached North America around the year 1000, nearly 500 years before Columbus. The sagas said so, but they were long treated as legend. Then in 1960, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad found the remains of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, with turf houses, a forge and iron rivets.

In 2021, scientists dated wood found at the site that had been cut with metal blades, which local people didn’t use at the time. A burst of radiation from a solar storm in 993 left a marker in tree rings, and counting from it showed the trees were felled in 1021, the earliest precise date for Europeans in the Americas. The settlement was small and short-lived. Columbus’s voyages mattered far more for history. But he wasn’t first.

8. The iron maiden was a medieval torture device

The iron maiden, a human-shaped cabinet lined with spikes, is a favourite of torture museums. There’s no evidence it was ever used in the Middle Ages.

The first account comes from a German writer, Johann Philipp Siebenkees, in 1793, describing an execution supposedly carried out in Nuremberg in 1515. No earlier record has ever turned up. The famous examples on display, including the “Iron Maiden of Nuremberg”, were put together in the 19th century, sometimes from older parts, to satisfy a public taste for the gothic.

9. Nero fiddled while Rome burned

The fire of Rome in AD 64 destroyed much of the city. The Roman historian Tacitus, the best source, says Nero was at his villa in Antium, about 50 km away, when it began, and that he returned to organise relief, opening public buildings to the homeless. Tacitus also reports rumours that Nero sang about the fall of Troy while watching the city burn, but presents them as rumours.

The fiddle is the giveaway. Violins didn’t exist for another 1,500 years. The story grew from hostile ancient accounts and centuries of retelling, and it now stands for any leader who ignores a disaster. Nero did plenty that deserved condemnation, including the persecution of Christians he blamed for the fire. The fiddle isn’t one of them.

Why myths like these spread

Look at the list and the same features keep turning up.

• They’re vivid. Horns, cake, a tiny emperor. A striking image beats a careful qualification every time.
• They had a sponsor. A costume designer, a cartoonist, a revolutionary, a novelist. Someone had a reason to tell it that way.
• They flatter us. The superstitious Middle Ages, the decadent queen, the cruel pharaoh: the past looks worse, and so we look better.
• They’re repeated until they feel true. Once a fact is in enough books, nobody goes back to check where it came from.

The defence is a historian’s question, and it’s worth asking of any striking fact about the past: how do we know? What’s the earliest source, how close was it to the events, and did its author have a reason to tell it that way? Most myths fall apart at the first step.

Try it

The free history myths test has twenty questions on these and more, from Einstein’s school reports to who invented the light bulb. For two myths with articles of their own, see whether people in the Middle Ages died at 30 and whether Einstein failed maths.