I'm always attracted to the historical questions that don't seem to have answers.
In Chapter Three of my 2015 book Ivory Vikings, I mused about why the chess queen caught on so much more quickly than the bishop, though both pieces were introduced to the game in 10th century Europe. Medieval queens, I learned, were expected to wage war, at least by proxy. Empress Theophanu, who ruled the Holy Roman Empire from 983-990, for example, accompanied her men to the battlefield and once rescued her husband when he was captured.
In the Viking North—at least in poetry and sagas—women actually fought. These awesome women warriors, the valkyries, were battle goddesses, sometimes beautiful, sometimes troll-like. They were sent by Odin, the supreme Norse god, to fetch slain heroes to Valhalla—or they drizzled troughs of blood over the battlefield and whipped men's heads off with bloody rags. Norse legends also tell of shield-maids: Sometimes they ride flying horses and cast storms of spears. Sometimes they are real Viking women who dress and fight like men. Today, the word valkyrie is often used for all three: the mythological, the legendary, and the historical.
When I completed Ivory Vikings, the question of the valkyries stayed with me. Were they real, or only myths? Were there real warrior women in the Viking Age, real valkyries?
My discussion of valkyries in Ivory Vikings had been influenced by the work of Neil Price, a professor of archaeology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. As I wrote in an earlier post [here], I arranged to meet him at the Society of American Archaeologists conference in 2016, where he hinted that a study he couldn't yet talk about would "completely change the conversation" around valkyries.
The September 2017 study he co-authored in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology—a DNA study of the bones in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden—did, as Price warned, change the conversation, though not in the way he had imagined.
There was a fierce backlash, with many Viking scholars (even female ones) insisting that the researchers must have made some simple mistake when they concluded that the warrior buried in Bj581 was female, because "we know warriors were men." The popular backlash was perhaps even fiercer, and it continued even after Price's team published their more comprehensive article in 2019, providing more data and detail to support their conclusion that, yes, the warrior in this classic Viking grave was female.
The more I looked into it, the more I realized that we didn't, in fact, "know" warriors were men. We knew some Viking men were warriors, but we also had countless hints that some Viking women were warriors, too. It was only our assumptions about what was appropriate behavior for women—assumptions held over from the Victorian Age, when elite women were confined to the home—that kept us from seeing what the data really said. The idea that the Viking Age was an age of hypermasculinity is a myth.
As I researched and wrote The Real Valkyrie, I was inspired by Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown, 2010). Writes Schiff, "The holes in the record present one hazard, what we have constructed around them another." She sees it as the biographer's job, and I agree, to "peel away the encrusted myth and the hoary propaganda."
Yet myths die hard, as Ulrich Raulff notes in Farewell to the Horse (Liveright, 2018), another book that inspired me. Writes Raulff, "History is written in the indicative mood, but lived and remembered in the optative—the grammatical mood of wishful thinking. This is why historical myths are so tenacious. It's as though the truth, even when it's there for everyone to see, is powerless—it can't lay a finger on the all-powerful myth."
The Real Valkyrie is my attempt to lay a powerful myth to rest: The myth that Viking women stayed at home, keys on their belts, while Viking men, carrying swords, raided and traded from North America to Baghdad and beyond.
As Price and his coauthors wrote in 2019, "Birka grave Bj581 suggests to us that at least one Viking Age woman adopted a professional warrior lifestyle and may well have been present on the battlefield. We would be very surprised if she was alone in the Viking world."
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