Viking fans are known to dress up in " Helga hats ", or purple hats with white horns and blonde braids, mimicking the helmets popularly believed to have been worn by Viking warriors.

Apart from two or three representations of ( ritual ) helmets – with protrusions that may be either stylised ravens, snakes or horns – no depiction of Viking Age warriors ' helmets, and no preserved helmet, has horns.

In fact, the formal close-quarters style of Viking combat ( either in shield walls or aboard " ship islands ") would have made horned helmets cumbersome and hazardous to the warrior's own side.

Therefore historians believe that Viking warriors did not use horned helmets, but whether or not such helmets were used in Scandinavian culture for other, ritual purposes remains unproven.

The general misconception that Viking warriors wore horned helmets was partly promulgated by the 19th century enthusiasts of Götiska Förbundet, founded in 1811 in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Viking funeral scene involves Vikings taking off their stereotypical horned helmets-only to show that the horns were on the Vikings ' heads, rather than on their helmets.

There is, nevertheless, some evidence for a continuation of the tradition of horned helmets in cultic use into the Viking Age: an illustration on a tapestry found in the Viking Age Oseberg ship burial, and a depiction on an amulet found in Uppland, Sweden.

Ceremonial use of horned helmets during the Germanic Iron Age persisted until the 7th century and can thus be argued to possibly have overlapped with the early Viking Age.

However, there is no evidence that horned helmets were ever worn in battle at any point during the Viking Age.

Nevertheless, popular culture came to associate horned helmets strongly with Viking warriors.

Viking helmets have been excavated from only three sites: Gjermundbu, Norway, Tjele Municipality in Denmark and Lokrume parish on Gotland Island, Sweden.

It is possible that many of the Viking helmets were made from hardened leather and ironstrips, since many Icelandic stories and Scandinavian picture stones tell and show warriors with helmets.

Many premiums were offered by sponsors of the show, including space helmets, secret code guns, flying saucer rings, decoder badges, photo-printing rings, and Viking rockets complete with launchers.

Vultare's henchmen wear headgear strongly resembling ( stereotypical ) Viking helmets.

Alfred's burh system posed such a formidable challenge against Viking attack that when the Vikings returned in 892 and successfully stormed a half-made, poorly garrisoned fortress up the Lympne estuary in Kent, the Anglo-Saxons were able to limit their penetration to the outer frontiers of Wessex and Mercia.

he ordered the construction of a small fleet, perhaps a dozen or so longships, that, at 60 oars, were twice the size of Viking warships.

The Viking lenses effectively concentrate sunlight enough to ignite fires ; however it is not known whether they were used for this purpose.

Viking armies were led by a small group of men who may have been kinsmen.

While the kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria were under attack, other Viking armies were active in the far north.

The dominance of Fortriu came to an end in 839 with a defeat by Viking armies reported by the Annals of Ulster in which King Uen of Fortriu and his brother Bran, Constantín's nephews, together with the king of Dál Riata, Áed mac Boanta, " and others almost innumerable " were killed.

Whether there were Viking or Norse-Gael kingdoms in the Western Isles or the Northern Isles at this time is debated.

The term Edda ( Old Norse Edda, plural Eddur ) applies to the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, both of which were written down in Iceland during the 13th century in Icelandic, although they contain material from earlier traditional sources, reaching into the Viking Age.

According to George Macaulay Trevelyan in A Shortened History of England, during the Viking occupation: “ The Scandinavians, when not on the Viking warpath, were a litigious people and loved to get together in the ‘ thing ’ to hear legal argument.

The Viking program, that visited Mars in the late 1970s, was motivated in part to determine whether Mars supported life, and many of the sensors and experiments that were ultimately deployed aimed to resolve this issue.

However, when they were finally launched to Mars, the Viking probes still searched ( unsuccessfully ) for extant life there.

Longships were sea vessels made and used by the Vikings from the Nordic countries for trade, commerce, exploration, and warfare during the Viking Age although scientific analysis of the oak timber shows at least one well known ship was built in Dublin, Ireland.

Analysis of timber samples from Viking long boats shows that a variety of timbers were used, but there was strong preference for oak which was associated with Odin ( Wodin ) in Viking mythology.

Almgren, an earlier Viking, told of another method: " All the measurements of angles were made with what was called a ' half wheel ' ( a kind of half sun-diameter which corresponds to about sixteen minutes of arc ).

The chests were made the same size and were the perfect height for a Viking to sit on and row.

The planned Mariner 11 and Mariner 12 vehicles evolved into Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 of the Voyager program, while the Viking 1 and Viking 2 Mars orbiters were enlarged versions of the Mariner 9 spacecraft.

Beginning in 1965, the Mariner and Viking space probes revealed that the canals were an illusion, and that the Martian environment is extremely hostile to life.

Viking longships were swift and easily manoeuvred, they could navigate deep seas or shallow rivers, and could carry warriors that could be rapidly deployed directly onto land due to the longships being able land directly.

The fully armoured Viking raider would wear an iron helmet and a maille hauberk, and fight with a combination of axe, sword, shield, spear or great " Danish " two-handed axe, although the typical raider would be unarmoured, carrying only a shield and spear ; swords and axes were much less common.

Viking, Arab, Greek and Jewish merchants ( known as Radhanites ) were all involved in the slave trade during the Early Middle Ages.

Bishop Asser claimed that the ' pagans ' agreed to vacate the realm and made good their promise ; and, indeed, the Viking army did withdraw from Reading in the autumn of 871 to take up winter quarters in Mercian London.

There is speculation that Viking explorers discovered and settled in the Vinland region around 1000 AD, which is when the L ' Anse aux Meadows settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador has been dated, and it is possible that further exploration was made into the present-day Maritimes and northeastern United States.

* The Sea Stallion, the largest Viking ship replica ever made, is a new replica of the Skuldelev 2, and sailed from Roskilde, Denmark to Dublin in summer 2007 to commemorate the voyage of the original.

This raid marks the beginning of the " Viking Age of Invasion ", made possible by the Viking longship.

From Iceland, Greenland was also colonized, and voyages were even made to North America, where remains of Viking dwellings have been found in Newfoundland.

On October 2, 1813, August made his first stage appearance in a small part as the son of a Viking king in Galeotti's Lagertha, the first ballet on a Nordic theme.

During the Viking raids on Lindisfarne, however, this cover was lost, and a replacement was made in 1852.

In 911 Charles defeated the Viking leader Rollo, had him sign the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte that made Rollo his vassal and converted him to Christianity.

According to Adémar de Chabannes, just before his death in 932 or 933 Rollo ( founder and first ruler of the Viking principality of Normandy ) practised human sacrifices to appease the pagan gods, and at the same time made gifts to the churches in Normandy.

While obviously meant to take place in the mid-Fifth century, Foster incorporated anachronistic elements: Viking Longships, Muslims, alchemists and technological advances not made before the Renaissance.

English navigators Martin Frobisher and Henry Hudson were the first Europeans known to have visited the area ( although Viking sailors, coming from Greenland, may have made occasional landings and hunting treks on Baffin Island in the 11th and 12th centuries ).

The 11th century Ricemarch Psalter ( now in Dublin ) is certainly Welsh, made in St David's, and shows a late Insular style with unusual Viking influence.

Longships were naval vessels made and used by the Vikings from Scandinavia and Iceland for trade, commerce, exploration, and warfare during the Viking Age.

While Durrell only made £ 50 from British rights ( Faber and Faber ), he obtained £ 500 from the United States rights ( Viking Press ) for the book, and thus managed to raise money for a fourth expedition to South America in 1954.

English payment, of 10, 000 Roman pounds ( 3, 300 kg ) of silver, was first made in 991 following the Viking victory at the Battle of Maldon in Essex, when King Aethelred " The Unready " was advised by Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury and the aldermen of the south-western provinces to buy off the Vikings rather than continue the armed struggle.

That these various Viking impositions were paid by the taxation of the Frisians is made evident in a record of events in 873.

The 1990s was also the era of player exports in Norwegian football, and Viking made substantial earnings from the sales of striker Egil Østenstad to Southampton for £ 900, 000 in 1996 and goalkeeper Thomas Myhre to Everton for £ 800, 000 in 1997, among others.

He made his professional wrestling debut for Herb Abrams's Universal Wrestling Federation ( UWF ) on October 29, 1990 as The Viking.

These coins moved north through trade between Rus merchants and the Abbasid Caliphate, along the Silver-Fur Road, and the money made by Scandinavian merchants would help northern Europe, especially Viking Scandinavia and the Carolingian Empire, as major commercial centers for the next several centuries.