Vikings Drank From the Skulls of Their Enemies

It comes down to a translation slip. An Old Norse poem describes fallen warriors feasting in the afterlife and drinking from 'the curved branches of skulls', a poetic kenning that simply means drinking horns, the curved animal horns that grew from a skull. When the text was translated into Latin in the 17th century, a scholar rendered it as drinking from the skulls themselves, and the gruesome image took off and never left. There is no archaeological or reliable historical evidence that Vikings drank from human skulls. They drank from horns and wooden and metal cups like everyone else in the period. The skull-cup, like the horned helmet, is a later embellishment that fits our cartoon of the savage Viking. The real Norse were raiders, traders, and farmers. Their drinkware was disappointingly ordinary.