We Have A Couple Of Films,

about Vikings, 

and for no particular reason started looking at the headdress they are so famous for, a horned helmet, but it appears that there is no proof that such a thing ever existed, so the joke about one of the Viking kings who made a mistake when ordering 5,000 battle helmets with the horns on the inside is redundant, back to facts, above is the one and only Viking helmet to have been found, in Haugsbygd in Ringerike, Eastern Norway, so where do we get the horned helmeted idea from? for me the headdress code was started back in the 1840s, costume designer Carl Emil Doepler created stage outfits for Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848), an epic music drama loosely based on Norse and German sagas, He designed helmets with horns, and guess what? a new stereotype was born, well that's the theory I like so I am sticking with that one!