The Not-Quite-Healing Powers of Onion Soup

When you have a cold, there’s nothing quite like a bowl of soup to help you along the way. The warm, typically umami-heavy broth may not have actual healing effects, but the combination of hydration, warmth, and more can help alleviate some of the symptoms, temporarily, of your particular ailment. And in any event, it can’t hurt. taken together, soup has become a staple of flu and cold season.

And, if you were a Viking, it can also be used to save other people’s lives — at your expense.

From, roughly, the year 800 to 1050, Viking from Scandinavia raided and colonized areas of Europe and into North America. The Viking Age, as the period became known, is now mythologized by tales of epic battles featuring men wearing horned hats, stabbing each other with swords.

While the horned helmets aren’t based in history, the swords definitely are. Vikings conquests — like any other warfare — were often bloody. Many of those conquests are detailed in Icelandic and Norse sagas, and while the accuracy of those records are debatable — the sagas were often written generations after the events — there are many details generally believed to be true. For example, these texts, per a paper in the Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, outline how Vikings used herbal remedies to help injured warriors stave off infection and similar illnesses.

But like any other medication, those herbs weren’t in infinite supply. Viking healers needed to dole them out with efficiency. Giving a treatment to someone who was beyond hope was, while humane, a waste of such resources. So, per the sagas, they came up with a way to triage the injured to determine who could benefit from the herbs — and who couldn’t. Their method: a broth made of onions, leeks, and other smelly vegetables. We Are The Mighty explains:

If a Viking warrior was wounded in the stomach during a battle, they were fed a strong, pungent onion soup. Afterward, the Vikings tending to the wounded would smell the belly wounds to look for the signature onion smell. If they could smell the onions through the man’s wound, then they knew the stomach wall was cut, and the man would not survive his wounds. It would be pointless to try to save the man and another with a better chance of survival would be treated.

As a result, a lot of Viking warriors had a last meal of onion soup — especially if they, literally, couldn’t stomach it.

Bonus fact: As noted above, Vikings didn’t actually wear horned helmets. The iconic horned headwear is almost entirely a 19th-century invention. It became popular after costume designer Carl Emil Doepler outfitted performers in horned helmets for an 1876 production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, per Yale historian Roberta Frank, and the image has stuck ever since. The ones found in archeology efforts, per Smithsonian, date back around 3,000 years — well before the Viking Age.

From the Archives: The Great Minnesota Goose Scandal of 2017: Vikings, yes. Horns on helmets, yet. Onion soup and bloody conquests? Not so much.