Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World

In the classic "raiders vs. traders" approach to Viking history, women hardly got a mention. They stayed home and looked after the farm (with all that entails) while the men went off on adventures. In the 1990s, three books by Judith Jesch and Jenny Jochens brought the lives of these women out of the shadows, showing how vital their role was, both economically (as weavers of cloth) and socially (as keepers of traditions).

In Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World, published in 2020, Jóhanna Kristín Friðriksdóttir brings these early studies up to date, incorporating the recent archaeological studies that have shifted, or reinforced, our understanding of Viking women’s lives.

Jóhanna is an excellent storyteller, and she knows her material. She wants to introduce us, she says, “to the diverse and fascinating texts recorded in medieval Iceland, a culture able to imagine women in all kinds of roles carrying power, not just in this world but … as pulling the strings in the otherworld, too.”

With her mastery of details from the Icelandic sagas, Friðriksdóttir follows ordinary Viking women through the life cycle, from birth to death. She tells stories of women who are bold and successful, but also of those who are battered and victimized.

She tells stories of some of my favorite saga women, such as Gudríðr Þorbjarnardóttir, whom Jóhanna describes as "wife, leader, traveller, mother, Christian ... the Viking woman embodied." Gudríðr, who explored North America 500 years before Columbus, is the subject of my book The Far Traveler and its fictional spin-off The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler.

She tells about Hallgerðr, who "was beautiful and tall, with hair as fine as silk" and "the eyes of a thief." Her "strong sense of self-worth" and turbulent marriage result in one of the most memorable scenes in the sagas, when her husband breaks his bowstring and she refuses him a lock of hair to fashion into a new one. His enemies kill him while she stands by, and "the episode leaves us wondering whether things could have been different," Jóhanna writes. "The saga offers no answers, but it does tell us that the Icelanders kept alive the debate ... about how to balance the conflicting demands created by marriage and close male friendship."

Jóhanna also grapples with the woman at the heart of my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Woman, and supplies a contradictory--and balancing--approach to mine. Discussing the DNA analysis that found the skeleton buried in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden--long considered to be the ultimate Viking warrior burial--to be female, Jóhanna asks, "Now that the person who once lay in the Birka grave has been proven to have been biologically female, what do we do with this information?"

She answers that question one way, I choose another, but both deserve to be heard. It's time for Viking scholars and enthusiasts to accept that there would be no Vikings (or any other people) without women and to begin to investigate women’s lives as thoroughly as those of men.

To understand the lives of women in the Viking Age, Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World by Jóhanna Kristín Friðriksdóttir (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) is an excellent place to start.

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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