In 2011, Bethesda Game Studios released the action role-playing videogame Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.The game environment, a lovingly rendered open world, is based on the history, mythology, and geography of medieval Scandinavia. The packaging and a major proportion of the marketing material for the game feature the figure of a muscular man wearing medieval armor, with horns on his helmet that point downwards over his ears. This Dovahkiin or “dragon-born” avatar that players hope to emulate is a Viking, and the downward turn of his horns is more significant than might appear at first glance. I open with the example of the Dovahkiin because it is emblematic of a distinct moment in the representation of Vikings, in a distinct medium. This essay seeks to understand the moments and media of such representations through the lens of adaptation theory, extending it via the metaphor of evolution. Any medievalist will tell you, with varying shades of outrage, that no historical evidence supports Vikings wearing horns on their helmets. Such adornments would have made armor cumbersome and, more importantly, vulnerable: one angled knock would have removed the helmet. At all three major Viking-themed museums in the UK and Eire – Jorvik in York, England; Vikingar in Largs, Scotland; and Dublinia in Dublin, Ireland – interpretation boards and tour guides emphatically dispel the myth of Viking horns. It is an absence that has to be made repeatedly present. Louise D’Arcens tells of the tour guides in Jorvik wearing full Viking regalia with “alien bobbles” on their heads, “a very telling reflection of the necessity of evoking yet also avoiding the discredited horned helmet image of the Viking.”The recent turn towards representing a gritty, so-called realistic version of the Middle Ages for adult consumption in popular media has seen a waning in the use of horned helmets, for example in Michael Hirst’s television series Vikings (2013) or Brian Wood’s graphic-novel series Northlanders (2012), but horns still predominate. For example, they are comically ostentatious in Dreamworks’s 2010 film How to Train your Dragon, a menacing feature of Loki’s Aesir costume in Marvel’s Mighty Thor comic series, and an indispensable and highly recognizable aspect of the logo for the Minnesota Vikings football team.