When you’ve worked on a book for four years—as I have on The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, coming to bookstores on August 31—those are really nice adjectives to see in the book's first official review. And from the notoriously hard-to-please Kirkus Reviews, no less.
You can read the full review here.
"If Nancy had told me in advance what she intended to do I would have been skeptical," an early reader told my editor, "but she has pulled it off wonderfully.
"The Real Valkyrie is magnificent," she continued. "It captured me from the very first page. Brown manages to take the limited but startling information that one of richest graves of any Viking warrior ever discovered was that of a woman and paints a stunning tapestry of what life must have been like for a bold, brave woman in medieval times. Drawing upon her deep knowledge of Viking history, she creates an unforgettable character."
Wow! This reader, Pat Shipman, a friend and fellow author, might be my perfect reader.
Like me, she writes about ancient history, anthropology, and spunky women. One of my favorite Shipman titles is To the Heart of the Nile, about a young woman who escaped slavery and set off to explore Central Africa, searching for the source of the Nile. Pat has also written about archaeopteryx, the Missing Link, Mata Hari, and, in The Invaders, how humans and their dogs drove the Neanderthals to extinction--a topic she returns to in her current project, Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs.
Pat was right to be skeptical. I was skeptical too. The first draft of The Real Valkyrie was much less bold. The "valkyrie" of the title, the woman warrior buried in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden in the mid-900s, was (as my editor rightly pointed out at the time) only a shadowy character when I turned in my manuscript, on deadline, in late 2019.
Then the pandemic hit. My publishing timetable got set back more than a year, and my editor at St. Martin's Press turned crisis into opportunity by giving me three precious gifts: time, space, and support. Take as much time as you want, and add as many more words as you need, she said. And don't be afraid to break conventions.
Like unraveling a sweater and reknitting it in a different pattern and size, I took apart Draft #1. I completely restructured the book, adding an entirely new thread to the story.
First, I gave the woman whose bones were buried in Birka grave Bj581 a name: Hervor, after the warrior woman in a classic Old Norse poem.
Then--following the style of Snorri Sturluson, writing hundreds of years after the events he described in his sagas of the kings of Norway--I wove together poems and sagas and things experts told me to imagine her life.
It was the only way. The events that shaped the warrior woman buried in Bj581 will always be hidden. All we have are her bones and the things buried with her.
So to bring Hervor’s story to life, I began each chapter as historical fiction, then stepped back and explained my sources, being particularly careful to make clear what was historical fact and what was my own speculation.
The result, I realized when I had nearly finished the draft, was like the documentary film I was interviewed for in 2018 about another exceptional Viking woman, the subject of two of my previous books, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman and its fictional spin-off, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler. The filmmaker, Anna Dís Ólafsdóttir of Profilm in Iceland, combined interviews with experts and dramatic stagings of scenes from Gudrid's life, taking care to make the settings and costumes as historically accurate as modernly possible.
Pat Shipman's comments were not the only ones that convinced me (and my editor) that this new approach worked.
One of the scholars whose work I relied on while writing The Real Valkyrie was Marianne Moen. When I first began researching the roles of powerful women in the Viking Age, I was particularly influenced by her 2010 master's thesis from the University of Oslo, The Gendered Landscape: A discussion on gender, status, and power expressed in the Viking Age mortuary landscape.
I was lucky that Marianne's doctoral thesis, Challenging Gender: A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape (also from the University of Oslo), came out in 2019--in time for my second draft.
You can find Marianne's work on her academia.edu page, here.
Marianne, too, was generous enough to read The Real Valkyrie in manuscript. She summarized it this way: "In this forceful, engaging, and much needed book, Brown is telling a different story from what we're used to hearing. It rests on assumptions and educated guesses, but so do all stories of the past, and hers is no less valid than the classic ones we're so used to hearing: that's why it's such an excellent counterpoint, because it shows how a shifting of the gaze can reveal a completely different outcome. It’s a compelling read. I enjoyed it immensely."
I hope you will too. And please let me know what you think by leaving a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you like.
The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women will be available from your favorite bookseller on August 31. If you want to give a little extra support to the author, buy it from my Bookshop.
(Disclosure: As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.)
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