Though it's most often associated with the Vikings, the drinking horn has a long history that actually started more than 1,000 years before the vicious warriors ever left Scandinavia. Through their advanced navigation skills, they built extensive trade routes and networks spanning all of modern-day Europe, the Middle East, Russia, Northern India, and even China. In the Prose Edda, Thor drank from a horn that unbeknown to him contained all the seas, and in the process he scared Útgarða-Loki and his kin by managing to drink a conspicuous part of its content. Five figures are depicted as sitting at a table in the upper story of a building, three of them holding drinking horns. The high frequency of such depictions in Crimea is contingent on the "Renaissance" of such stelae in general during the 5th and 4th centuries.

Viking Drinking Horn - Norse Tradesman The Real History of the Viking Drinking Horn - Norse Tradesman

The Vikings have gone into the annals of history as a society that significantly shaped the Middle Ages. These horns are the most spectacular known specimens of Germanic Iron Age drinking horns, but they were lost in 1802 and are now only known from 17th to 18th century drawings. Wikimedia Commons A 19th-century illustration of a Viking couple from Hans Christian Andersen’s Stories for the Household. 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.

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. A notable example is the 5th century BC gold-and-silver rhython in the shape of a Pegasus which was found in 1982 in Ulyap, Adygea, now at the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow. 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).

Viking Drinking Horn Tankards and Mead Horns AleHorn - Viking Drinking Horn Tankards and Mead Horns

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. 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.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.