#Total war age of vikings skin

Blinded eyes probably meant a long fringe. The second source is an anonymous Old English letter in which a man admonishes his brother to follow the Anglo-Saxon practice and not give in to ‘Danish fashion with a shaved neck and blinded eyes’. The man’s hair is well groomed and he has an elegant long moustache and a chin beard that reaches up to his moustache, but apparently not out to the cheeks. One is a three-dimensional carved male head on a wagon in the Oseberg ship burial mound in Norway.

#Total war age of vikings skin

Further down on the neck, the skin was shaved. The men had long fringes and short hair on the back of the head,' she says, adding that the beard could be short or long, but it was always well-groomed. “From picture sources we know that the Vikings had well-groomed beards and hair. (Picture of King Harald from the 14th century Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbók / public domain.) Vikings with neat beards and reverse mullets But there are also examples of upper class Vikings who lived longer – for instance Harald Fairhair, who was King of Norway for more than 60 years. The Vikings typically lived to be around 40-50 years old. “But the Arabs were Muslims and came from a culture where people were supposed to bathe before each of their five daily prayers, whereas the Vikings may only have bathed once a week.” “The Arab ambassador IBN Fadlan, who met a group of Vikings on the Volga, described them as the filthiest of Allah’s creatures,” says Henriksen. There are, however, sources that paint a contrasting picture:

In this way, they sieged the married women’s virtue and persuaded the daughters of even noble men to become their mistresses,” wrote Wallingford. ”They had also conquered, or planned to conquer, all the country’s best cities and caused many hardships for the country’s original citizens, for they were – according to their country’s customs – in the habit of combing their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their clothes frequently and to draw attention to themselves by means of many such frivolous whims. In his chronicle from 1220 – a couple of centuries after the Vikings had ravaged England – John of Wallingford described the Vikings as well-groomed heartbreakers: Written sources from medieval England also back up this view.

The finds suggest that cleanliness meant a lot to the Vikings. “Several archaeological finds have revealed tweezers, combs, nail cleaners, ear cleaners and toothpicks from the Viking Age,' says Louise Kæmpe Henriksen, a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. Popular culture portrays the Viking as a somewhat filthy person. Unwashed, rough warriors with froth hanging out of the corners of the mouth. Vikings’ appearance was marked by battle wounds.Vikings’ clothing style was admired throughout the world.We have picked out five myths from the resulting debate and asked researchers to help us confirm or bust these myths.Īrmed with this information, our graphic designer then took a shot at drawing some examples of our infamous forefathers, which you can see in our picture gallery. To find out more about these myths, ScienceNordic’s Danish partner site, videnskab.dk, asked its Facebook readers to list their favourite myths about what the Vikings looked like. There’s no shortage of myths about the appearance of our notorious Viking ancestors.