There aren’t many people in the world who wouldn’t recognize a drinking horn. They have become a modern icon of a bygone era and no matter who you are or where you come from, the drinking horn is easily recognized as the symbol the Vikings and of their unique culture. It has been quite a few centuries since the world was graced by the armor clad, axe-wielding, sea fairing raider tribes that we now almost romantically call “the Vikings,” but that has not tarnished their reputation or the memory of their deeds.
From the end of the 7th century to the beginning for the 12th century AD, the Norse used their skills in navigation to travel all over the world, from Scandinavia, central Asia, and yes, even as far west as North America. When they would find a new land, well… let’s just say they weren’t the most gracious of guests and they left many to live the rest of their lives in terror, fearing the day the men from the north might one day return. This was one way that the legacy of the Norse as vicious warriors was preserved through the ages, but it wasn’t the only way the Vikings left their mark on history.
The Norse were not just pillagers as much of modern media like the popular television show “Vikings” might like to romanticize about. The Vikings were also skilled traders, and it was their culture as well as their goods that were spread to every land where they set foot. As we’ve already said, their skills as sailors allowed them to travel far beyond the limits of the known world, but even in Terra Incognita (unknown lands), the best way to make new friends back then was the same as it is today. Getting drunk!!
Let’s be honest, alcohol has been no stranger to any people of any age. At some point everyone either discovered fermentation by accident, maybe by letting their gain barrels get filled with rainwater, or alcohol was introduced to them by an outside culture. Either way, we have been finding unique ways to brew alcohol since long before anyone can even remember. The earliest written recipe for beer has been credited to the Sumerians. It was found embedded in a poem written nearly 3,900 years ago. But while countries like China may have archeological evidence to prove that they had been brewing beer for at least the last 5,000 years, it is the Norse who are credited with one of the most innovative methods of fermentation; the fermentation of honey.
Honey wine, or mead as it is best known belongs to the Vikings. It is their drink and it is likely that at that point in history no other culture had realized that such a beverage was even possible to brew. Mead was a drink that the Norse would share with travelers and traders, warriors, family and friends, and enemies alike. In the great mead halls, the magic of this their secret drink was wrapped in myths and tangled with legends. Mead was said to be a gift from the gods, and it could only be brewed by magic, or so they thought (check out our original Norse Tradesman mead recipe - we're real magicians). In reality, it was just that they didn’t quite grasp the concept of yeast yet, and to them it seemed that certain paddles used to stir the great pots of honey and water would magically produce better meads than others. But this was simply due to the quality of the yeast nesting the grain of the wooden paddles, which would get carried over from one batch to the next. But enough of the microbiology lesson. Let’s get back to the topic.
For anyone who experienced it, mead was as unique and mysterious as the tall warriors who brought it with them. And if you have ever tried a new type of alcohol that you have never had before, you know it can have pretty dramatic impact on your sobriety. So, when a gigantic warrior who was like on average at least a foot taller than any many you have ever seen hands you a horn with no base and tells you to drink it down, you are likely in for interesting night.
If you have never seen a drinking horn, or in the case of the Norse, a mead horn, or if you have and you’ve just never really thought about it, an interesting feature is its base. Or, I should say the interesting feature is the horn’s lack of a base. How did you use it? How did you set it down? Well, according to some beliefs, you didn’t. If your horn was filled, you didn’t set it down until it was empty. It didn’t matter if it was full of water, beer, wine or mead, the purpose of the drinking horn was not to keep it full, but to keep it empty.
And because of the nearly global level of contact these sea faring people had with other cultures, whether it was through the fermentation of grains or of grapes, or even of honey, there is little doubt that somewhere in the world it has been poured, sipped, or guzzled from a drinking horn.
At this point, you might be asking yourself “Why..?” “Why a horn?” Sure, it sounds fun for parties, and you had better know that even a thousand years before proper table etiquette was invented, people were certainly having drinking contests, so draining your glass in one go was a pretty common occurrence, especially among the worshipers of Dionysus. But, really… why a baseless horn of all things? Well, the history of the topic in general is actually pretty interesting if you really settle in and do your research. But don’t worry, I got the curiosity bug and went ahead and did that for you.
Back beyond the days of written history, the world was a very difficult place and people did what they had to do. And when it involved food, they did everything they could do. It’s been widely popularized that certain indigenous peoples in the Americas believed in making good use of every part of and animal, in order to honor the animal, and in doing so, honoring nature itself. Well, this tradition is actually a very old one that, like alcohol, stems back much further than anyone can even remember and well into the archeological records of many countries.
When food was scarce and game was hard to come by, every part of the animal had to be put to good use for fear of not knowing when the next hunt would net a kill. Meat was for eating and was dried and preserved as best it could be. Hides were used to make and repair tents and clothing and to make blankets, bags, and water pouches and bones were used for everything from making tools and weapons to making combs, jewelry and fortifying walls. Yeah, that is a weird one, but people really did build walls with bones, and in the case of some ancient Siberian tribes, mammoth bones and tusks were used to build entire houses. As you can see, long before we as humans had gained the ability to work with metals and certainly before we could work glass into a usable vessel, we were pretty adept at using the bones of animals to make our lives easier. This of course included the horns of animals as well.
Using an animal horn, specifically those of a bovid (a cud chewing animal with split hooves - this is where our drinking horns come from) became one of the single greatest innovations in drinking culture that had ever been, and it remained that for thousands of years to come. Drinking horns were still popular even at the tables of kings all the way up through the Middle Ages. One scene depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, which was crafted in the year 1070 shows the characters from an epic tale sitting and drinking from horns. And we really can’t deny that they really are still quite popular today.
Despite all this great history, in all honesty, no one is really certain who was the first to adopt drinking from a horn as a part of their culture. But, we do know that around 2,500 to 2,600 years ago, people all over the world were drinking from horns. Even as early as 450 BCE, Greek pottery shows images of the goddess Dionysus drinking from a horn. And as the goddess of a lot of things, including drunken revelry and madness, you know those parties got a little crazy!
The Scythians were another big user of drinking horns. They were a nomadic people who lived and hunted in what is now Siberia in around 900 BCE and the culture that they created around their drinking horns was a pretty rich one. While the Greeks would use drinking horns made from bone and sometimes from wood (don’t ask me why anyone would go to the trouble of carving a wooden horn when they could just use a real one), the Scythians drinking horns were used by their elite classes and were sometimes fashioned entirely from precious metals, like gold and silver. These beautifully ornamented horns have been found buried with their warriors and its believed that having been buried with a drinking horn reflected their posthumous status (status after death).
The relationship between the drinking horn and the afterlife is a less know connection, but it brings us to what is likely the most popular version of the drinking horn as we know it today. The drinking horn of the Vikings! And somehow, despite not being made of gold, or garnished with jewels, or crafted with legs and caps like some of the adaptations made by the early Christian church during that time (yes, even Christians enjoyed drinking horns), the Viking drinking horns are the ones we all imagine when the image is called to mind.
In Viking culture, drinking horns were a popular vessel for beer, wine, and of course mead, but unlike other cultures, like I mentioned before, they were not the gilded trophies of kings and they weren’t used in the symbolic burial of great warriors either. For the living, drinking horns were just cups, but as the traditions of the Norse people grew more vivid, possibly due to their interactions with the Greeks and Iron Celts, or possibly due to their isolation, the mysticism around mead and the horns that held it grew stronger as well.
Along with their other trade skills and traditions, families would pass down drinking horns from one generation to the next. Each generation would sometimes add their own decorations and carvings as the horns were passed on, further enriching the mystique and value of the horn itself. But while this was the tradition for the living, for the dead the drinking horn was altogether different.
We said before that drinking horns were not used in the symbolic burial of great warriors, and that is true. As a historical fact, most of the ancient drinking horns that have been unearthed from Norse burials were actually found in the clutches of women, not men. It’s believed that this is because the women were the bearers of mead, and though it seems a bit subservient from our modern perspective, women were the ones who held them mead horns, because they were the ones who served the mead.
Back to the topic though. Drinking horns are always associated with those tall, long haired, well-muscled Vikings we see in Hollywood, and possibly for good reason, though it had nothing to do with them being buried with a horn, like the warriors of the Scythians. More to the point, it was because they were resurrected with one! That’s right, drinking horns were a token given by the Valkyrie to welcome fallen warriors into Valhalla. This means that only the greatest, the bravest, the truest warriors who had fallen in valiant combat received a drinking horn to bring with them into Odin’s hall, where they would feast and fight, and die, and be resurrected to feast again every night, for all eternity. As I’m sure you can guess, it is likely this connection in Norse myth that ties the warriors to their drinking horns so strongly.
As time passed, as it does with all things, the connection shared between drinking horns and the afterlife became stronger and stronger, and as legends were passed down from generation to generation and as each warrior sought to earn their own drinking horn as a reward from the Valkyrie, drinking horns became just as popular with the gods as they once were at the dinner table. Even Thor himself is fabled to have tried to drain the magic horn of the mountain giant Utgarda-Loki in one gulp, but of course that’s a tale for another time…
There aren’t many people in the world who wouldn’t recognize a drinking horn. They have become a modern icon of a bygone era and no matter who you are or where you come from, the drinking horn is easily recognized as the symbol the Vikings and of their unique culture. It has been quite a few centuries since the world was graced by the armor clad, axe-wielding, sea fairing raider tribes that we now almost romantically call “the Vikings,” but that has not tarnished their reputation or the memory of their deeds.
From the end of the 7th century to the beginning for the 12th century AD, the Norse used their skills in navigation to travel all over the world, from Scandinavia, central Asia, and yes, even as far west as North America. When they would find a new land, well… let’s just say they weren’t the most gracious of guests and they left many to live the rest of their lives in terror, fearing the day the men from the north might one day return. This was one way that the legacy of the Norse as vicious warriors was preserved through the ages, but it wasn’t the only way the Vikings left their mark on history.
The Norse were not just pillagers as much of modern media like the popular television show “Vikings” might like to romanticize about. The Vikings were also skilled traders, and it was their culture as well as their goods that were spread to every land where they set foot. As we’ve already said, their skills as sailors allowed them to travel far beyond the limits of the known world, but even in Terra Incognita (unknown lands), the best way to make new friends back then was the same as it is today. Getting drunk!!
Let’s be honest, alcohol has been no stranger to any people of any age. At some point everyone either discovered fermentation by accident, maybe by letting their gain barrels get filled with rainwater, or alcohol was introduced to them by an outside culture. Either way, we have been finding unique ways to brew alcohol since long before anyone can even remember. The earliest written recipe for beer has been credited to the Sumerians. It was found embedded in a poem written nearly 3,900 years ago. But while countries like China may have archeological evidence to prove that they had been brewing beer for at least the last 5,000 years, it is the Norse who are credited with one of the most innovative methods of fermentation; the fermentation of honey.
Honey wine, or mead as it is best known belongs to the Vikings. It is their drink and it is likely that at that point in history no other culture had realized that such a beverage was even possible to brew. Mead was a drink that the Norse would share with travelers and traders, warriors, family and friends, and enemies alike. In the great mead halls, the magic of this their secret drink was wrapped in myths and tangled with legends. Mead was said to be a gift from the gods, and it could only be brewed by magic, or so they thought (check out our original Norse Tradesman mead recipe - we're real magicians). In reality, it was just that they didn’t quite grasp the concept of yeast yet, and to them it seemed that certain paddles used to stir the great pots of honey and water would magically produce better meads than others. But this was simply due to the quality of the yeast nesting the grain of the wooden paddles, which would get carried over from one batch to the next. But enough of the microbiology lesson. Let’s get back to the topic.
For anyone who experienced it, mead was as unique and mysterious as the tall warriors who brought it with them. And if you have ever tried a new type of alcohol that you have never had before, you know it can have pretty dramatic impact on your sobriety. So, when a gigantic warrior who was like on average at least a foot taller than any many you have ever seen hands you a horn with no base and tells you to drink it down, you are likely in for interesting night.
If you have never seen a drinking horn, or in the case of the Norse, a mead horn, or if you have and you’ve just never really thought about it, an interesting feature is its base. Or, I should say the interesting feature is the horn’s lack of a base. How did you use it? How did you set it down? Well, according to some beliefs, you didn’t. If your horn was filled, you didn’t set it down until it was empty. It didn’t matter if it was full of water, beer, wine or mead, the purpose of the drinking horn was not to keep it full, but to keep it empty.
And because of the nearly global level of contact these sea faring people had with other cultures, whether it was through the fermentation of grains or of grapes, or even of honey, there is little doubt that somewhere in the world it has been poured, sipped, or guzzled from a drinking horn.
At this point, you might be asking yourself “Why..?” “Why a horn?” Sure, it sounds fun for parties, and you had better know that even a thousand years before proper table etiquette was invented, people were certainly having drinking contests, so draining your glass in one go was a pretty common occurrence, especially among the worshipers of Dionysus. But, really… why a baseless horn of all things? Well, the history of the topic in general is actually pretty interesting if you really settle in and do your research. But don’t worry, I got the curiosity bug and went ahead and did that for you.
Back beyond the days of written history, the world was a very difficult place and people did what they had to do. And when it involved food, they did everything they could do. It’s been widely popularized that certain indigenous peoples in the Americas believed in making good use of every part of and animal, in order to honor the animal, and in doing so, honoring nature itself. Well, this tradition is actually a very old one that, like alcohol, stems back much further than anyone can even remember and well into the archeological records of many countries.
When food was scarce and game was hard to come by, every part of the animal had to be put to good use for fear of not knowing when the next hunt would net a kill. Meat was for eating and was dried and preserved as best it could be. Hides were used to make and repair tents and clothing and to make blankets, bags, and water pouches and bones were used for everything from making tools and weapons to making combs, jewelry and fortifying walls. Yeah, that is a weird one, but people really did build walls with bones, and in the case of some ancient Siberian tribes, mammoth bones and tusks were used to build entire houses. As you can see, long before we as humans had gained the ability to work with metals and certainly before we could work glass into a usable vessel, we were pretty adept at using the bones of animals to make our lives easier. This of course included the horns of animals as well.
Using an animal horn, specifically those of a bovid (a cud chewing animal with split hooves - this is where our drinking horns come from) became one of the single greatest innovations in drinking culture that had ever been, and it remained that for thousands of years to come. Drinking horns were still popular even at the tables of kings all the way up through the Middle Ages. One scene depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, which was crafted in the year 1070 shows the characters from an epic tale sitting and drinking from horns. And we really can’t deny that they really are still quite popular today.
Despite all this great history, in all honesty, no one is really certain who was the first to adopt drinking from a horn as a part of their culture. But, we do know that around 2,500 to 2,600 years ago, people all over the world were drinking from horns. Even as early as 450 BCE, Greek pottery shows images of the goddess Dionysus drinking from a horn. And as the goddess of a lot of things, including drunken revelry and madness, you know those parties got a little crazy!
The Scythians were another big user of drinking horns. They were a nomadic people who lived and hunted in what is now Siberia in around 900 BCE and the culture that they created around their drinking horns was a pretty rich one. While the Greeks would use drinking horns made from bone and sometimes from wood (don’t ask me why anyone would go to the trouble of carving a wooden horn when they could just use a real one), the Scythians drinking horns were used by their elite classes and were sometimes fashioned entirely from precious metals, like gold and silver. These beautifully ornamented horns have been found buried with their warriors and its believed that having been buried with a drinking horn reflected their posthumous status (status after death).
The relationship between the drinking horn and the afterlife is a less know connection, but it brings us to what is likely the most popular version of the drinking horn as we know it today. The drinking horn of the Vikings! And somehow, despite not being made of gold, or garnished with jewels, or crafted with legs and caps like some of the adaptations made by the early Christian church during that time (yes, even Christians enjoyed drinking horns), the Viking drinking horns are the ones we all imagine when the image is called to mind.
In Viking culture, drinking horns were a popular vessel for beer, wine, and of course mead, but unlike other cultures, like I mentioned before, they were not the gilded trophies of kings and they weren’t used in the symbolic burial of great warriors either. For the living, drinking horns were just cups, but as the traditions of the Norse people grew more vivid, possibly due to their interactions with the Greeks and Iron Celts, or possibly due to their isolation, the mysticism around mead and the horns that held it grew stronger as well.
Along with their other trade skills and traditions, families would pass down drinking horns from one generation to the next. Each generation would sometimes add their own decorations and carvings as the horns were passed on, further enriching the mystique and value of the horn itself. But while this was the tradition for the living, for the dead the drinking horn was altogether different.
We said before that drinking horns were not used in the symbolic burial of great warriors, and that is true. As a historical fact, most of the ancient drinking horns that have been unearthed from Norse burials were actually found in the clutches of women, not men. It’s believed that this is because the women were the bearers of mead, and though it seems a bit subservient from our modern perspective, women were the ones who held them mead horns, because they were the ones who served the mead.
Back to the topic though. Drinking horns are always associated with those tall, long haired, well-muscled Vikings we see in Hollywood, and possibly for good reason, though it had nothing to do with them being buried with a horn, like the warriors of the Scythians. More to the point, it was because they were resurrected with one! That’s right, drinking horns were a token given by the Valkyrie to welcome fallen warriors into Valhalla. This means that only the greatest, the bravest, the truest warriors who had fallen in valiant combat received a drinking horn to bring with them into Odin’s hall, where they would feast and fight, and die, and be resurrected to feast again every night, for all eternity. As I’m sure you can guess, it is likely this connection in Norse myth that ties the warriors to their drinking horns so strongly.
As time passed, as it does with all things, the connection shared between drinking horns and the afterlife became stronger and stronger, and as legends were passed down from generation to generation and as each warrior sought to earn their own drinking horn as a reward from the Valkyrie, drinking horns became just as popular with the gods as they once were at the dinner table. Even Thor himself is fabled to have tried to drain the magic horn of the mountain giant Utgarda-Loki in one gulp, but of course that’s a tale for another time…
