Of Bones and Bias

I begin The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women with this sentence: "All I have are her bones."

And I thought, when I began writing it, that this was going to be a book about bones. I was surprised when it turned out to be a book about bias.

In the summer of 2015, I spent a day watching my friend Guðný Zöega excavate a Viking Age graveyard in Iceland. Bones, Guðný told me, were eloquent. They speak of battle wounds and disease. They tell how tall a person was, what she ate, where she came from. Listening to Guðný, I was inspired to write a book about bones and what archaeologists can learn from them.

But, in retrospect, I noticed that a lot of what Guðný did that day was sit and think. She took photos, and made notes. Because once she took the bones from a grave and placed them in a box, no one else would ever see exactly how the skeleton had sat in the soil. Unlike the work of other scientists, hers is not reproducible. That's the problem with archaeology as a science.

Nobody can repeat the experiment. What's left after an archaeologist finishes digging up a Viking burial are boxes of bones and artifact--and interpretations.

The gender of a burial is one of those interpretations. Archaeologists are taught that a woman's skull is smoother and more rounded. Her long bones are more slender. Her pelvis is shaped differently than a man's. But there’s no absolute scientific scale for "smoother, rounder, and more slender"--or even for pelvic structure, I learned.

Plus, few Viking skeletons are in good shape. After 1000 years in the soil, the bones are degraded, or missing. In cremation burials, the bones were first burned and then crushed before being buried in a pot. Yet archaeologists still sex these graves. How?

DNA sexing is now available. But it's difficult and expensive and, so, still rare.

The standard method, I learned, is "sexing by metal": Jewelry for women (especially the oval brooches that hold up the straps of an apron dress). And weapons for men.

It sounds logical. Surely it's based on statistics, right?

It's not. The practice began in 1837, before archaeology as a science even existed. It reflects the values of Victorian society, when women were confined to the home and told to concern themselves only with their children, the church, and the kitchen.

When our image of the Viking world took shape, a warrior woman was as fabulous as a dragon. All weapons-graves were classified as male--and most of them still are.

By accepting the Victorian stereotypes, we legitimize the idea that women should stay at home. We reduce the role models for every modern girl who visits a museum or reads a history book. We make it hard to even imagine a warrior woman like the one buried in grave Bj581 in the Viking town of Birka, Sweden.

Bj581 is the burial at the heart of my book The Real Valkyrie. It was excavated in 1878. Other than one faded drawing and a few notes, all we have are boxes of bones and artifacts with the number "581" inked on them. Most of those artifacts are weapons.

Because of the plethora of weapons in the grave, Bj581 has long been held up as the classic Viking warrior's grave.

In September 2017, a DNA study by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Price and her colleagues confirmed what some specialists had always thought: The bones were female. Interpreting Bj581 as a warrior woman, the researchers list a dozen scholars since 1966 who have labeled Bj581 a warrior's grave. "As far as we are aware, this warrior interpretation has never been challenged," they state, adding, "We strongly followed the same military reading as has been proposed for Bj581 by a long series of archaeological authorities, and for the same sensible reasons that are far from arbitrary. In doing so, we find no problem in adjusting for the new sex determination."

Their critics, however, did have a problem adjusting. They suggest that originally there must have been two people in the grave, a male warrior and his female wife or slave—and that the man has disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only his weapons. Or that the woman was sacrificed and buried in place of a man who died elsewhere. Or that, because she wielded weapons, Bj581 wasn't socially female.

What does the Viking world look like if we abandon the stereotypes? What does it look like if roles are assigned, not according to Victorian concepts of male versus female, but based on ambition, ability, family ties, and wealth? In The Real Valkyrie, I reread texts and reexamine archaeological finds with these questions in mind. I use what my research uncovers to re-create the world of one warrior woman in the Viking Age: the woman buried in Bj581.

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

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