In my new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, I reread medieval 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.
As I've written earlier on this blog (click here to read "The Story Behind the Real Valkyrie"), The Real Valkyrie, is inspired by "A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics," published in 2017 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Neil Price, and their colleagues, and by their follow-up paper in Antiquity in 2019.
The warrior whose bones they analyze was taken in 1878 from grave Bj581 in the town of Birka, Sweden, a rich weapons-grave long thought to be the ultimate Viking warrior burial.
We don’t know the name of this valkyrie, so I’ve given her one: I call her Hervor, after the warrior woman in a classic Old Norse poem. Her means “battle.” Vör means “aware.” Hervor, then, means Aware of Battle, or Warrior Woman.
The chemistry of her teeth tell us that she was not a native of Birka, where she was buried, but came from somewhere in southern Sweden or Norway. She sailed from there, before she was eight, but did not arrive in Birka until she was over 16.
What was she like? Where did she travel? If all I had were her bones, I could only wonder. But I can also study what was buried with her.
Her two-edged sword is a type rare in Norway and Sweden, but more often found along the Vikings' East Way, the trade route through what is now Russia and Ukraine to Byzantium and beyond.
Her long, thin-bladed scramasax, in its elaborate bronze-and-silver ornamented sheath, is also eastern, inspired by the equipment of the Magyar horse archers who harassed the Vikings along the East Way.
Hervor was an archer too, and may have shot from horseback. Only 18 graves at Birka contain a horse—and she has two, both with bridles. Her iron stirrups are all that remain of her saddle.
By her side were 25 armor-piercing arrows. Between the arrows and her scramasax was a bare spot the right shape for a bow, which had disintegrated. It may have been a Magyar bow—the distinctive metal rings and fittings of Magyar bow cases and quivers were recovered from other Birka graves. Magyar bows were composites of wood, sinew, and horn, bent into a reflex shape. Small and handy on horseback, they shot twice as far as an ordinary wooden bow.
But Hervor was not solely a mounted archer. She was buried with almost every Viking weapon known: sword, scramasax, arrows and bow, axe, two spears, and two shields.
She was buried with more weapons than any other warrior in Birka—more than almost every Viking in the world. Of those Vikings found buried with any weapons at all, 61% have one weapon; only 15% have three or more.
A final touch elevates her rank from warrior to war leader: the full set of pieces for the board game hnefatafl, or Viking chess, that was placed in her lap. From the Roman Iron Age through the high medieval era, from Iceland to Africa to Japan, the combination of game pieces, weapons, and horses in a grave has indicated a war leader. Game pieces symbolize authority and a "flair for strategic thinking," experts say. They express the idea that success in warfare does not depend on strength alone, but also on tactical skill and good luck.
Under a classic Viking cloak, clasped with a ring-shaped iron pin at one shoulder, Hervor wore a nomad's kaftan. It might have been made of Byzantine silk: In her grave was a scrap of fabric woven from silk and silver threads. It might have been decorated with mirrored sequins, a scattering of which were also found in her grave.
On her head she wore a silk cap, topped by a filigreed silver cone. Only the cone and a scrap of silk remain of Hervor's cap, but an exact match for her cap's cone was buried with another Birka warrior. A third matching cone was buried with a warrior near Kyiv.
Who was this valkyrie buried in grave Bj581? To tell Hervor's story, I had to make assumptions. I had to connect the dots.
Her bones say she lived to be 30 or 40. Archaeologists can rarely date their finds within a span of 30 years. The items in her grave suggest she died when Birka was at its height and its connections to the East Way were strongest.
The location of her grave implies she was buried after the Warrior's Hall was built for Birka's garrison, between 930 and 950, but before it burned down, between 965 and 985. To tell the best story, I've guessed Hervor was buried a little after 960 and born around 930.
Where was she born? Science tells me only that she came from southern Sweden or Norway. Looking at the Viking world from a warrior woman's point of view, I've opted for Vestfold. Here, a hundred years before Hervor's birth, two powerful women were buried in the most lavish Viking grave ever uncovered, the Oseberg ship mound.
Here, when Hervor was a child, the great hall guarding the cosmopolitan town of Kaupang was destroyed—perhaps by Eirik Bloodaxe and Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, who conquered Vestfold around that time.
Where would a small girl, born in Kaupang to a rich family, if not royal, end up? Science suggests she went west, possibly to the British Isles—as did Eirik and Gunnhild sometime between 935 and 946, having lost Norway's throne. From their base in the Orkney islands, the royal pair meddled in the politics of Dublin and York.
I don't know how or when Hervor arrived in Birka. But she did arrive sometime in the mid-900s and was buried there as a war leader. Before her death, I imagine she traveled on the East Way from Birka to Kyiv and back, assuming Kyiv is where she got the silver cone for her silk cap.
In Kyiv, Hervor may have met Queen Olga, who ruled the Vikings, or Rus, from 945 until 957. Her story, once labeled “picturesque” and “legendary,” has been proved by archaeologists to “contain a core of historical truth.”
What I learned researching The Real Valkyrie leads me to believe there is also a core of truth in the account of a battle between the Rus and the Byzantine (or Roman) army in 971. As the victors were "robbing the corpses," wrote John Skylitzes in his Synopsis of Byzantine History a hundred years later, “they found women lying among the fallen, equipped like men; women who had fought against the Romans together with the men.”
Our Hervor was not among them. She had already been buried, surrounded by weapons, in Birka grave Bj581. But as Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and her colleagues write, Bj581 “suggests to us that at least one Viking Age woman adopted a professional warrior lifestyle. We would be very surprised if she was alone in the Viking world.” So would I.
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