Vikings, after killing their enemies, used their skulls as drinking vessels.
The Vikings were quite a bunch of fellas. Their name is a Scandinavian term for warriors of Norse origin who plagued the coastal areas of Britain, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, from the 8th-11th centuries. But they had some honor, or else a sense of preservation. Because they had a gentleman’s agreement with the Varangians, another group of Nordic bad boys. The Vikings would take the west, and the Varangians would plunder anything east. It was an arrangement that worked well for both of them.
Tales of Viking raids are lurid, and colored with retellings of their traditions, including sending the dead to sea in flaming boats. But while they wielded some pretty mean swords, axes, and other weapons, they didn’t do all the bad things attributed to them. Almost, but not all.
One of the most popular misconceptions is that Vikings used the skulls of their conquered enemies as wine cups. This, in part, may have been fostered by stories of other warrior tribes, who did, in fact, practice such things. However, for the Vikings, this bloodthirsty image was the result of a slip of the pen.
One Magnus Olafsson, in attempting to translate into Latin the Krakumal, an Icelandic poem, inadvertently re-phrased a “kenning,” which was a poetic way of “expressing a thing in terms of another.” The actual phrase in the Icelandic language indicated that warriors drank from the curved branch of skulls, or the horns, which meant they drank from animal horn containers. What Olafsson rendered it as in Latin, turned out to be “drinking from the skulls of those whom they had slain.”
Drinking from human skulls is likely one of the few things the Vikings did not do.
