Category Kids Queries

Don’t believe everything you see in movies and at Halloween parties. Although Vikings are shown as fearsome horn-helmeted raiders in popular culture, archaeological evidence paints a more clearheaded picture. The Norse warriors wore simple iron helmets or no helmets at all.

The bowl of a Viking helmet was made from several pieces of iron joined together with rivets. A band of iron circled the bowl and two other bands crossed at the top of the helmet, and the four openings created were filled with iron plates, creating the bowl shape. Some Vikings helmets had chain mail curtains to provide greater protection to the neck. Other helmets had cheek protectors made from iron plates.

It is estimated that Viking helmets weighed between 2kg and 4kg. Viking warriors often wore their helmets all day long. It is thought that Viking warriors marked their helmets in some way before battles to indicate who they were fighting for.

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Leif Eriksson was the fearless explorer who expanded the boundaries of the world in A.D. 1000 in America. Christopher Columbus sailed into the history books when he “discovered” the New World (the America) in 1492, but archaeologists now think the history books got it wrong. Five hundred years before Columbus set sail, the Viking explorer named Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland to “Vinland,” now believed to be the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada (archaeologists in 1960 found evidence of Eriksson’s settlement). Eriksson spent just one winter in Vinland before sailing home.

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They floated instead of sank when dunked: One test for a suspected sorcerer was to tie him or her to a chair and toss it into a river. Genuine witches – supposedly immune to the holy power of baptism in water – would bob to the surface. Thus proven guilty, they were usually executed. Those innocent of witchcraft would sink instead of float. They often drowned, making this test a lose-lose proposition.

They were left-handed: In the age of witch hunts, southpaws lived under constant suspicion. Left-handedness was seen as an insult to the natural order of things and a sign of evil. In fact, the term “sinister” comes from the Latin word for “left.”

They bore the witch’s mark: Witches were thought to soar on broomsticks to “Sabbaths,” rowdy sorcery conventions held deep in the forest. At these sinister shindigs, the devil would initiate novice spell casters by scarring them with his horns. His “witch’s mark” could take the shape of animals – perhaps a cat or toad – or look like a birthmark. Accused witches underwent head-to-toe inspections for such markings.

They were at least 40 years old: Folks in their 40s are considered middle-aged today, but few people reached such a ripe old age in the 14th and 15th centuries. Those who did were suspected of cozying up with evil forces to achieve a freakishly long life.

They had a falling-out: At the height of the witch panics, people were encouraged to report suspected witches to religious officials and witch hunters. That gave anyone with a grievance the opportunity to get even. They could accuse enemies of witchcraft!

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Centuries before they were portrayed as heroes in the Harry Potter books, witches were considered public enemy number one. Church officials in 16th-century Europe linked the practice of witchcraft to the devil, claiming that all witches drew their power from evil. According to folklore and books written at the time, witches could ruin crops, curdle the milk of livestock, blot out the stars, control the weather, and curse their neighbors. Anyone suffering a run of rotten luck could blame it on a witch. Suspected witches were rounded up, tortured into confessing any number of crimes, and then burned alive at the stake. By the 1700s, as many as 60,000 suspected witches had been tried and executed in Europe.

Fear of witches spread across northern Europe and even to the new colonies in North America. One of the most famous witch trials took place in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts, U.S.A.) in the 1690s. It started when a group of young girls began suffering from bizarre fits. They blamed a West Indian slave named Tituba for teaching them witchcraft, and soon the list of suspected witches grew to include other villagers, including men and a six-year-old child. The panic that followed cost the lives of 20 people. Scholars suspect the girls who started the ordeal were simply looking for attention. Another possibility: A fungus in the town’s food supply may have caused hallucinations of bewitchment.

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Today, anyone with a beef might hire a lawyer to settle a disagreement in court or simply argue in online message boards and let public opinion decide the victor. But from the Middle Ages up to the early 20th century, men from the upper crust of European and American society relied on one-on-one combat to seek “satisfaction” for even minor slights to their reputations. And so went the “duel,” a deadly deal struck between two men (duelists were nearly always men) to resolve a dispute by calmly standing face-to-face, drawing pistols (or swords), and attacking each other.

Although not all duels were to the death, thousands of men – including famous politicians and military commanders – perished from injuries received in these ghastly grudge matches. Abraham Lincoln escaped a sword duel by apologizing to a local politician he had offended in a newspaper story. Even after duels were outlawed, deaths were still common and victors were often pardoned – as long as they followed the rules. Duelists adhered to a strict code of conduct (known as the code duello, a document typically kept inside every gentleman’s pistol case). To break the rules meant bringing shame on your name, which many considered a fate worse than death.

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Peruse photos from the late 19th century and you’ll notice that every person portrayed – from Civil War generals to Wild West cowboys – looks extremely serious, or even downright mad. It’s as if early photographers never asked their subjects to say “cheese.” You might chalk up all the frowning faces to bad teeth or the inconveniences of early camera technology (long exposure times meant subjects had to sit still for up to a minute), but the truth is more complicated: Smiling was considered bad form. From the days of portrait painting, it was thought that only rude, poor, stupid, or silly people exposed their teeth in formal settings. The tradition continued with portrait photography, which is why everyone in old photos looks like they just got bad news. “A photograph is a most important document,” said American author Mark Twain, “and there is nothing [worse] to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”

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