Cassida sine cornibus

A distinguished professor from Durham has written an interesting article on a helmet.

Long time ago I stayed, without my horns, for two term as a visiting scholar in Durham, when the author, Professor Chris Caple, started working at the institute in Durham. I remember him only vaguely. Now he has come to the conclusion that a helmet from Yarn, which is on display in the Preston Park Museum in Great Britain is nothing less than "Viking" - see here.

It seems to me that the the Brits might suffer from some kind of aggression towards the good old Scandinavian horned helmet.

I (in irony) hew the following runes on the FB-wall of the Preston Park Museum with my axe, because i find a lot of confusion with regards to the origin of the helmet in the presentation of the Preston Park museum of the helmet.

O thou less horny one. Thee must knowest the the the answers to all your questions can bee found by reading between the lines of the honourable Icelandic Sagas and the less honourable Book of Settlement. That combined with the fine arte of interpretation DNA- sequencing of Modern Icelanders gives the clue. Like most of you know, the early Icelanders (specially those before the Landnam) where Norwegian men, who brought their favourite ewes with them to their newfound Island. In those olden days, the horne was well screwed into the all Icelandic shepherds. Eventually few of the shepherds missed the odd Norwegian girl for fun and for making more ga..happy shepherds. Since the shepherds were big shoppers they knew that the price for a lass in the Orkneys, Shetlands, Hebrides and Ireland was much lower than for original Norwegian blondes. However the Insular babes didn´t fancy them ´uge ´orns on the Icelandic boys. Due to the fancy of the British islanders the horn disappeared among the Viking Icelanders. The helmet you see before thou is the result of such an early cultural iconoclasm. Social outcast in Viking-land soon became known as "hornkerlingar" (horn-ladies).

The de-horned helmet of Yarm, on exhibit in the Preston Park Museum, is probably the second "Viking helmet" which can be verified as "most likely Viking" by valid arguments rather than hard-core dating. The other one is the world famous Norwegian motor-bike con goggle helmet from Gjermundbu, which is a bad Norwegian spelling of Geirmundsbú. But is the Gjermundbu-helmet in an Anglo-Scandinavian fashion from the Viking-Age, or is it a 9th-11th century Anglo-Scandinavian helmet without accessories? It is really difficult to come to any conclusion by reading Caple´s article. The helmet is loose on the head

The Gjermundbu-helmet is also a classic Viking, or Anglo-Scandinavian - or is it as Saxon-tradition biker helmets with goggles? The article in Medieval Archaeology by Chris Caple does unfortunately doesn´t clarify essential aspects.

The next "Viking"-helmet we work on must be found on a skull, which can be radicarbon dated and DNA-sequensed as Viking, before we draw any conclusions about the helmet.

Archaeology is not fiction.

  Here one can view the helmet from different angles and below a modern Viking-weapon expert, archaeologist Philipp Roskoschinski, (Altertumswissenschaftler, Prähistorischer Archäologe) gives his assessment: