bad-mojo:

lokisflyting:

Björn M. Buttler Jakobsen, the Viking king.
Fun fact: Björn means “bear” in Swedish.

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How accurate is the image we have of Vikings compared with what they actually looked like?
It’s the same as with our perception of cowboys. Everyone thinks they know what a cowboy looked like, that they carried Colt .45s and wore jeans with checkered shirts and a hat. But look at any old American photo and you’ll see that they wore long riding coats and carried regular shotguns. They had much more primitive weapons and simpler clothes than what we assume. It’s the same with Vikings. The imagery of Vikings depicted in the films and images of modern times is not at all representative of what they actually looked like. For example, the most common assumption is that they wore metal helmets with horns. But metal was very expensive. A sword was worth as much as an estate, so it was something only the richest men had. Regular Vikings wore leather helmets with metal reinforcements, if they could afford it. They had bows, knives, spears and sometimes axes—tools they used in their everyday life for hunting, eating, or chopping wood—that could also be useful for smashing someone’s head in when going to war.

Then why do we have this idea that they wore metal helmets with horns?
That’s a myth originating in the late-19th-century Wagner opera Twilight of the Gods, which is about Ragnarök, the end of the world in Norse mythology. They mixed all kinds of tools and symbols for the costumes in that opera because it was typical for the Romantic era to enhance everything and give it a twist.

http://www.vice.com/read/todays-vikings-378-v17n3

best clothing reference ever.