Viking Warriors ... or Aliens?

I've decided that young boys don't much care if armor looks authentic, as long as their weapons are whackable.

Case in point ...

This is a picture of the only helmet ever found that is known to have come from the Viking age, unearthed from a burial mound. (Note the lack of Wagner-style horns.)

The world's only existing Viking Age helmet, from Gjermundbu in Ringerike

(from Kulturhistorisk Museum, Universitetet I Oslo)

From that, I attempted to make a helmet out of aluminum foil, duct tape, and copious amounts of red wine (hey, it was the middle of the night - cut me some slack).

Hand-to-hand combat.

You can see that, ahem, the kids' helmets didn't come out quite the way I envisioned them. They ended up looking more like alien heads than Viking helmets. But did the boys care? Not a whit.

Circling in for the kill.

They cared much more about their Viking axes - which, I must add, were based on actual axes - not some idea that came out of my kitchen drawer. After all, they were able to swing, smack, hit, and chop with them. Fortunately, the axe part was made out of posterboard (the kids got to decide if they wanted to have a "bronze" axe or "steel" one - the posterboard was silver on one side and gold on the other), so there were no decapitations or dismemberments. There was a little hot-glue repair required, however.

Which one will fall? Which one will succumb?

In my defense, I did actually present some educational information: English words from Old Norse, location of Scandinavia, examples of artwork, longboats, Greenland, blah, blah, blah.

Close combat.

In the end, all they cared about was the weapons. After all, the class is called Arms and Armor, right?

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If you enjoyed this post, you might like Maces, Chain Mail, and 4-Year-Old Knights.