Dark Souls' Unusual Real-Life Armor Inspirations

May. 13, 2016

Dark Souls’ Unusual Real-Life Armor Inspirations

Aside of  many great original armor designs and some dark fantasy references, many of Dark Soulsarmorsare naturally based on real-life medieval armors. Some of them are quite easy to recognize, so I’m not talking about the “pot” or “bucket” great helms, sallets or Anglo-Saxon helms in this article, but the more unusual types.

However some of the rather unusual designs are in fact based on real-life helms too. One good example of using interesting medieval armor designs are theWinged Knightsof the latest Soul series game –Dark Souls III, and since they also have some interesting lore in addition to their cool look and historical gear, I made a detailed video about them.

The first peculiar part of their armor suit are, of course, their wings.

These little wings are in fact based on the real-life wings of famous winged hussars of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, only are several times smaller.

The winged hussars were one of the main types of the cavalry in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the 16th and 18th centuries. First introduced by the Serbian and Hungarian mercenary horsemen at the beginning of the 16th century, they served as light cavalry banners in the Polish army, however by the second half of the 16th century hussars had been transformed into heavily armored shock cavalry, eventually they became the elite of the Polish cavalry.

They were famous for their “wings”, a wooden frame carrying eagle, ostrich, swan or goose feathers. The most common theory is that the hussars wore the wings because they made a loud, clattering noise which made it seem like the cavalry was much larger than in reality and frightened the enemy’s horses. Other possibilities included the wings being made to defend the backs of the men against swords and lassos, or that they were worn to make their own horses deaf to the wooden noise-makers used by the Ottoman and the Crimean Tatars.

However, let’s return from the winged hussars to the winged knights of Dark Souls III. Another interesting part of their equipment are their helmets, which are based on the “Maximilian-style” helms with masked visors, popular in Germany in early 16th century.

This armor style is associated with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I who had several sets of rather unique armors with grotesque mask-visors and helms, and, according to one of the theories, the first armor of this fashion was built for him.

And talking about armors of Maximilian I, I guess it’s time to mention one of the most unusual armor designs of Dark Souls I –Helm of the Wise, however, I guess its origins are already well known.

This helm is based on the Horned helm by Konrad Seusenhofer, who was an armour smith working for Maximilian I. The Horned helmet was presented by Maximilian to English king Henry VIII.

Another grotesque-looking helm isMorne’s helmet, which looks more like a stone gargoyle head from a Gothic cathedral.

However, it looks like this helm has a real life prototype – a ceremonial/parade helm by a member of famous German helmsmith dynasty – Desiderius Helmschmied.

For now we’ve been discussingDark Souls Iand III helmets, however,Dark Souls IIalso features quite unordinary looking armors. One of them isRuin Sentinelarmor design, with their distinct helmets.

This type of helmet is called “Frog-mouth” helms or Stechhelms, they were used as parts of mounted-knights tournament armor sets.

Speaking about tournament armors, Dark Souls III features a rather elegant armor design – a “Drakeblood set“. While it’s not that grotesque and weird as previous ones, but is still worth to be mentioned among other armor sets inspired by unique real-life armors.

This armor seems to be based on the armor set by Anton Peffenhauser, the leading Augsburg armorer during the second half of the sixteenth century, which belonged to Christian I of Saxony.

However it’s not really easy to tell, since this armor features the Greenwich armor style –  a distinctive style produced by the Royal Almain Armoury founded by king Henry VIII, it was formed from imported master armourers hired by Henry VIII, initially including some from Italy and Flanders, as well as the Germans.

Notice any other armors that have a historical basis? What are your thoughts on these presented here? Share your ideas in the comments!

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OswaldFromCarim

I enjoy playing Dark Souls and researching its lore, especially from the etymological approach, and thus I developed a hobby of making videos discussing various interesting things related to it (also, once I even came up with some fan-fic lore story, lol). Being a Souls fan it’s no wonder that I also love mangas by Kentaro Miura and works of JRR Tolkien. Generally I enjoy history, architecture and historical linguistics.

That is some high quality research here. Videogame and movie armor doesnt look so ridiculous and weird now knowing that real life people were also very creative with their armor.

You left out a lot of Negroli

I assume this was originally posted before TRC dropped, because the real life inspiration for Ruin Knight helm is actually Lapp’s Helm. Very fitting that is was called a “Frog-Mouth Helm” since Lapp/Patches squats like a frog. Props to

This came up today on the Discord – it really is an awesome article

Would upvote if I could!Great post!

That is great!

Good job!

Awesome article!

Such cool armours!