had horns. The depiction of these horned helmets as historical is a fallacy that began in the 1870s. It was part of the construction of great Norse myths to be adopted by Germans, who wanted their own ancestral myths. The depiction of Vikings in horned helmets was an invention of the 19th-century Romanticist Viking revival. In 1876, Carl Emil Doepler created horned helmets for the first Bayreuth Festival production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, which has been credited with inspiring this, even though the opera was set in Germany, not Scandinavia. There were also a few earlier, lesser known depictions that inspired Doepler. A 20th-century example is the Minnesota Vikings American football team, whose logo carries a horn on each side of the helmet. The comic strip character Hägar the Horrible and all male Vikings in the animated TV series Vicky the Viking are always depicted wearing horned helmets, as are numerous characters in the DreamWorks How to Train Your Dragon franchise and in The Lost Vikings video game series. Another popular culture depiction is the riff on Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen by Merrie Melodies in the Chuck Jones-directed cartoon What's Opera, Doc?, which depicts Elmer Fudd wearing a magical horned Viking helmet as he chases Bugs Bunny. See also Winged helmet Horned God Golden hat Pointed hat Pickelhaube Footnotes References External links Archaeological artefact types Nordic Bronze Age Iron Age Europe Medieval helmets Indo-European archaeological artifacts Indo-European warfare