It is one of the most persistent pictures of the "wild Viking": the bearded warrior slurping mead from the hollowed skull of a slain enemy. You find it in films, on beer mugs and in countless stories. Yet this myth has a surprisingly exact birthday, and it was born not in the North but at a scholar's desk in seventeenth-century Copenhagen. We follow the trail to a single misread phrase, look at genuine skull cups of other peoples and check what the Norse actually drank from.
Ask for the most famous Viking habit and the skull cup comes up almost at once. The image is too good to be true: raw, triumphant, deliciously gruesome. That is exactly why a second look pays off. Go through the finds – graves, settlements, trading places from Hedeby to Iceland – and you meet plenty of things the Norse drank from. What you do not meet is one single piece of human skull from the Viking Age that was made into a drinking vessel. No grave, no hoard, no workshop offers proof. A custom so drastic would have left traces: saw marks, metal mounts, vessel feet. There are none.
That does not make skull cups a modern invention. They are well attested in cultural history, but among other peoples and in other centuries. So the question is not whether such things ever existed, but whether they belong to the Vikings. To answer it we have to find the source that started the myth and read it closely.
The trail leads to the Krákumál, the "Lay of Kráka", also called the death song of Ragnar Lodbrok. It has 29 stanzas, mostly of ten lines, in a free metre not tied to a strict syllable count. The legendary hero lies in the snake pit of King Ælla of Northumbria and looks back on his battles. Most stanzas open with the refrain "We struck with the sword" and describe one deed each; at the end Ragnar looks forward to the feast in Odin's hall, where he will "soon" drink.
The date matters. Scholars place the poem in the twelfth century, probably in the Scottish isles, and not in Ragnar's own time, which is set in the ninth century – assuming the historical figure existed in that form at all. The Krákumál is thus a late, learned look back at a figure who was already legend. For that reason alone it is no source for drinking customs of the ninth century. At best it shows the images twelfth-century poets had of a hero's death. For more on the figure and his sons see our articles on Ragnar's sons and on the Icelandic sagas.
Old Norse loves paraphrase, the kenning. Instead of "ship" the skald says "steeds of the sea", instead of "sword" "fire of wounds". In one of the closing stanzas Ragnar says, in effect, that soon they will drink beer "from the curved branches of skulls" – Old Norse bjúgviðir hausa. The first element is bjúgr, "curved", the second viðr, "tree, wood, branch", the base word of the kenning. What grows as a curved branch from a skull? The horn of a bovine. A drinking horn is meant.
"Soon we shall drink beer from the curved branches of heads, in Fjölnir's hall."Krákumál, stanza 25 (own rendering, close to the sense; Fjölnir is a byname of Odin)
To judge the passage you have to know how Norse poets worked. Skaldic verse compresses its statements into paraphrases that the listener had to unravel like a riddle. A ship is a "steed of the sea", poetry is "Odin's mead" or "Kvasir's blood" (see the background in Kvasir and Gunnlöð). Snorri explained the technique in the thirteenth century in his Skáldskaparmál precisely because even then people no longer understood it without a handbook. A kenning usually consists of a base word and a determinant; the base word supplies a picture, the determinant points to the object meant. In bjúgviðir hausa the "branch" is the picture and the "skull" the pointer: what is a branch of the skull? A horn.
That such figures must not be taken literally is easy to show. Nobody would think a "steed of the sea" is a live horse trotting across the waves. With the skull branches, Worm's translation suspended that rule. There is also the distance in time: the poem addressed an audience that knew horns from the hall; a scholar of the seventeenth century knew them from museum cabinets. Perhaps that is exactly why the skull version seemed so plausible: it offered a picture one could visualise.
The horn reading is the usual one today. It fits the rest of the passage: a warrior awaited in Odin's hall drinks there as the hall's custom demands – from a horn. That haus also simply means "skull" is not in dispute, and the bare word meaning cannot prove what the poet intended. But "branches of skulls" would be an odd paraphrase for a skull bowl and a familiar one for a horn. To be frank, certainty about what the twelfth-century poet had in mind is out of reach. The horn reading is simply the more convincing one, on language and on subject matter.
The man who launched the slip meant well. Ole Worm (1588–1654), Danish physician, scholar and passionate collector of antiquities, published Runir seu Danica literatura antiquissima in 1636, a collection on runes and old Danish poetry, and included the Krákumál in a Latin version. At the passage with the "curved branches of skulls" the imagery got tangled. In his version it reads as though Ragnar means to drink from the brain-pans of the slain. The drinking horn had become a skull cup.
It is hard to blame Worm. He worked without critical editions or modern dictionaries on a text full of paraphrases, at a time when only a handful of scholars could read Old Norse. His mistake is human, and it fell on fertile ground. Classical literature knew gruesome drinking customs of foreign peoples, and seventeenth-century scholars had grown up with those stories. A misunderstanding that fitted the pattern was easily believed.
The book was influential. In 1763 Thomas Percy, later Bishop of Dromore, included the Krákumál in his Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, English renderings from Old Norse that suited the taste of the day. In Percy the heroes drink from the skulls of their enemies, and the passage was quoted, reprinted and handed on to the next generation of Northern enthusiasm. The Romanticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries loved the dark, the wild, the heathen. The skull-drinking Norseman fitted exactly.
Later writers embroidered the scene, illustrators drew it, and in the twentieth century adventure novels, comics, films and beer advertising took the picture over. The error was thus passed on not once but many times, and each repetition felt like confirmation. That the original meant something harmless was lost in the noise. The pattern recurs throughout Viking reception, with the horned helmet as much as with the blood eagle.
That skull cups are not plucked from thin air shows in the historical record. They are attested, but elsewhere. A selection in chronological order makes the point.
What stands out in this list: almost all the reports are by outsiders about outsiders, and almost all are victory stories about a famous opponent – a general, a king, an emperor. A skull cup was less an everyday utensil than a sign of triumph, a tale of victory and humiliation. Even for the sources we have, the truth content cannot always be tested. The story of Krum and Nikephoros appears in several chronicles, but those too were written by the khan's opponents. The pattern is plain: whoever wanted to paint an enemy as a barbarian told of skull cups.
The skull cup is not entirely absent from Norse tradition, but it sits in a different place than the myth supposes. In the Völundarkviða, the lay of the smith Völund (Wayland) in the Poetic Edda, the captive master smith takes a terrible revenge on King Níðuðr. He kills the king's two sons and makes silver-mounted drinking bowls from their skulls, which he sends to the unsuspecting king's table. From the eyes he makes gems for the queen, from the teeth a brooch for the king's daughter.
This is the only "skull cup" in the Eddic corpus, and it says the opposite of the cliché. It is no drinking custom and no mark of warrior pride but the work of an avenger, an image of horror meant to make listeners shudder. Precisely because it was so monstrous it served as a literary shock, not as a description of daily life. That the scene belongs to the smith's poem is no accident: Völund is the craftsman who carries out his revenge with his skill. The poet was concerned with betrayal, humiliation and the revenge of a tortured man. Whoever drank from a skull in the North did so in a horror story, not at a feast.
If Vikings collected skulls, archaeology ought to show it. There is in fact one find that documents violent practice in the Viking Age: during the building of a bypass near Weymouth in Dorset, a pit on Ridgeway Hill was uncovered in 2009 holding the skeletons of 51 young men. All had been beheaded, and the skulls lay apart from the bodies in a heap of their own. Radiocarbon dates put the deed between about 970 and 1025, and isotope values in the teeth point to a Scandinavian origin (Loe and colleagues 2014). The most likely reading is the execution of a group of captured Norsemen by Anglo-Saxons.
The find is instructive precisely because it reverses the cliché: here Vikings were beheaded, not their enemies by them. The skulls show cut marks from the decapitation but no sign of being reworked into vessels. Nor does any large cemetery such as Birka, nor the settlement layers of Hedeby, famous for their finds, yield a skull turned into a cup. Visit the places of trade and the hall instead and vessels turn up in abundance – more in the next section. For settlement and finds see our articles on Hedeby and Birka.
The most important drinking vessel of the Germanic peoples was the cattle horn, and it was so long before the Vikings. In the sixth book of the Gallic War (ch. 28) Julius Caesar describes the horns of the aurochs in Germania.
"They rim the horns with silver and use them as cups at their greatest banquets."Caesar, De bello Gallico VI, 28 (own translation)
Archaeology agrees. The princely burial at Taplow in Buckinghamshire (sixth or seventh century) held two drinking horns of aurochs horn with silver-gilt mounts, now in the British Museum. The ship burial at Sutton Hoo yielded the remains of an aurochs horn with a silver rim and further horn fittings. For the Viking Age itself most horns were probably from domestic cattle and held less than half a litre. Horn survives badly; what remains are metal rims and tips. They show nonetheless how widespread horns were, far more than the surviving pieces suggest. Even women's graves contain elaborate drinking equipment, from the Roman Iron Age into the Viking Age.
In literature the horn is everywhere. In Beowulf mead is served from carved horns. In Snorri's Gylfaginning Útgarða-Loki gives Thor a horn to drain whose tip secretly reaches into the sea; Thor drinks the tide down. The gold horns of Gallehus (early fifth century, found in 1639 and 1734, stolen and melted down in 1802) were long seen as drinking horns too, though some specialists think they were rather blowing horns. More on that in our piece on the Gallehus golden horns. Because a horn cannot be set down, it is emptied in one go or passed on – which turns shared drinking into ritual.
Beside the horn there was a wide range of vessels. In daily life people drank from turned wooden cups, which have survived in the damp soil of trading places. From clay came cups and jugs from potteries along the Rhine: Pingsdorf-type ware, made in the Vorgebirge between Cologne and Bonn, reached Hedeby as a trade good. Those who could afford it drank from glass. Frankish glass beakers, funnel-shaped or conical, were made in the Rhineland and the Frankish lands and travelled north along the trade routes. Predecessors of these forms already exist from the fifth century in the shape of Frankish glass drinking horns, for instance the olive-green piece from Bingerbrück in the British Museum. How much the North owed to the Rhine can be read from the finds; the article on Dorestad, the great port of exchange, fits here.
The vessels were filled with beer, mead and imported wine. Farms brewed their own beer, mead was a drink of the upper class and of feasts, and wine came by way of the Rhine and the North Sea. For both drinks see Mead, the drink of the gods and Viking beer; what reached the table is covered in Viking diet.
The feast was the core of Norse drinking culture, and its rules are known from texts. Tacitus already noted in the Germania (ch. 22) that the Germanic peoples discussed quarrels, alliances and even questions of war and peace over their drinks, and that spending a day and a night drinking disgraced nobody. The hall was a place of decision, of loyalty and of hospitality. Toasting, the vow on the cup and the greeting "Skål" belong here, as does the ritual drinking that is re-enacted in the heathen sumbel today; more in Blót and sumbel today and in Skål – the meaning.
An outside view comes from the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan, who described the Rus on the Volga in 922. He shows them as traders who drank large quantities of an intoxicating drink, in an account that sounds partly admiring and partly disgusted. He says nothing of skull cups. More about this witness is in the article on Ibn Fadlan. The feasting scenes known from the Edda, the sagas and Beowulf likewise lack skull cups. Had the custom existed, it would have to appear in these sources.
The explanation is simple: the picture is stronger than the evidence. A Viking with a horn is a person at table; a Viking with a skull cup is a film scene. On top of that the Viking Age really was violent: raids, captives, slavery and executions are documented, as Ridgeway Hill shows. That makes the cliché easy to believe, because it fits a familiar pattern. Knowing the sources can change that. Whoever knows the story is a misunderstanding of 1636 also sees how little the imagery of modern Viking portrayals has to do with the finds. Many motifs sold as "Nordic" today are similar; an overview is in Nordic symbols: genuine or invented?.
We prefer the real story: the Vikings needed no shock effect to impress. Their drinking culture was rich, sociable and full of craft – from the silver-mounted horn to imported glass from the Frankish lands. A horn, a wooden cup, a glass: these were the things people took in hand to honour guests, seal oaths and drink to the dead.
To the facts. Certain: the Latin version of the Krákumál of 1636 carried the skull idea into the modern age, the poem itself dates only from the twelfth century, and from the Viking Age neither a skull cup nor a report of one survives. Well documented: drinking horns and vessels of wood, clay and glass. Probable but not finally proved: the reading of the kenning bjúgviðir hausa as horn; those who read it otherwise can appeal to the word meaning of haus. Open: whether individual warriors ever treated a skull as a trophy. That it is attested nowhere does not mean it was impossible. It means only that no find and no contemporary witness reports it, and that no custom can be built on it.
Where medieval writers speak, as with Herodotus, Paul the Deacon or the Primary Chronicle, caution is needed besides. The reports come from outsiders, often opponents, and serve the image of the enemy. That holds for the steppe as for the North. Keeping that in mind, you read the Viking tradition more critically too – and end up with a sharper picture.
Did the Vikings drink from skulls? There is no evidence for it. Neither graves, nor settlements, nor contemporary reports show a skull cup from the Viking Age.
Where does the myth come from? From Ole Worm's Latin version of the Krákumál in 1636. The Old Norse kenning "curved branches of skulls" means drinking horns on the usual reading but was understood as skull bowls.
What is the Krákumál? A poem in 29 stanzas, probably composed in the Scottish isles in the twelfth century, in which Ragnar Lodbrok looks back on his life in the snake pit.
Did skull cups exist at all? Yes, among other peoples: Scythians, Boii, Lombards, Bulgars, Pechenegs and in Tibetan tantric ritual. Some are known only from hostile sources.
What about the Völundarkviða? There the smith Völund makes drinking bowls from the skulls of the king's sons. That is an act of revenge in a poem, not a custom.
What did the Vikings drink from? From cattle drinking horns, turned wooden cups, clay vessels and imported glass. They drank beer, mead and wine.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Mead – the drink of gods · Vegvísir & Ægishjálmr · Ragnar Lodbrok · Berserkers · Hedeby.
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