Interesting post about costume here.
This paragraph in particular caught my attention...
What we think of as “peasant garb” is actually the product of a game of telephone that travels back from Romantic Revival art, and many of those (urban) artists got their idea of what rural peasants wore from opera costumes. The costumers working at the opera were not going out to the country side to take notes on what farmers actually wore, nor did they want to. Opera is show biz, you want it to be evocative, but not ordinary. Their costumes would have been based on what urban folks were wearing, with extra little touches like a shepherds crook to make it look “rural”.
... because it was Wagner's Ring Cycle that gave us horned helmets.
They didn't originate with the Vikings. They originated with the 1876 costume designs for a bunch of operas, and those designs by Carl Emil Doepler still exist.
For reference, all the horny characters are mortals.
Those helmets were probably based on archaeological finds, even though all Northern European examples are, AFAIK and depending on context, either religious headgear equivalent to a bishop's mitre, or ceremonial headgear equivalent to a crown.
In addition, every single one predates the Viking Age by a period ranging from a couple of centuries to a couple of millennia so - makes vague handwave gesture - they're more appropriate for the sorta-kinda mythic Migration Era setting of the Ring than any Vik who ever inged..
Doepler's designs also feature WINGED helmets, worn by immortals like Wotan...
... and the Valkyries.
Something else I encountered when looking for pics to illustrate this was that other clichéd armour error, the boob-plate.
Here's dramatic soprano Karin Branzell wearing one...
...while here's heroic tenor Fritz Vogelstrom also wearing one.
He's singing the role of Siegfried but wearing the costume of Brunnhilde, at least that's how it looks to an operatic Philistine like me.
Anyway...
Winged helmets are even more historically dodgy - no archaeological evidence at all - yet are actually more feasible as working combat helmets.
The difference is that horns, being heavy, need sturdy mountings so a horned helmet both provides catch-points for incoming blows and handles for an enemy to grapple, while a winged helmet does neither. The wings, being light, wouldn't need solid fixtures so would just shear off under a weapon or come off in an enemy's hands.
I'm well aware that other times, places and cultures - Indo-Persia, Poland, Japan etc. - had helmets with wings, horns and all sorts of other stuff, but this is about how the popular image of Vikings that headgear came from opera.
And went all over the place... :->
