Mama_Lovis gave me an interesting article where five myths about Vikings are discussed. I`ll come back to the other four myths but will deal with the one about what Vikings looked like first.
Tall, muscular and blond or redheads
I`m sure it`s no surprise that Vikings were tall (though not entirely as tall as the Scandinavians of today), muscular due to their physical everyday life and that they had blond and/or red hair. At least most of them. Apparently the hair color was different from area to area. In the north of Scandinavia they were more blond and in Denmark, which is to the south of Scandinavia, they had more red hair. Since the Vikings traveled quite a bit and brought people home with them (slaves, wives, husbands etc) there were also quite a few Vikings with darker hair. On Iceland they`ve found that at least one woman of Native-American origin had children in the Viking age.
The Vikings ate well even if they didn`t have as different kinds of foods as we do today and because of their good diet they grew taller than people a couple of hundred years later. But they worked hard and many of them had osteoarthritis.
Feminine men and masculine women?
The most surprising part is probably how difficult it is to determine if it`s a male or a female grave archaeologists have found. The male and female sculls were much more alike back then than what they are today. The sculls from Viking women had more pronounced jaws and eyebrows than what they have today and the sculls from men had less pronounced jaws and eyebrows. I`m sure it`s a surprise to many that Viking men may have looked more feminine than what men do today but the fact that men and women looked more alike in the Viking age may explain how shieldmaidens did well on the battle field.
The article about what Vikings looked like (in Danish)
