That paper, "A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics," published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, reported on the analysis of the bones and teeth in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden. Using DNA and isotope testing, along with osteological examination of the bones, the 10-member research team concluded that the skeleton in this grave--long held up as the ultimate Viking warrior burial, due to the great number of weapons it contained--was female. They learned how tall she was (5'7"), how rich she was (she never suffered periods of starvation or malnutrition), and that she was not a native of Birka, where she was buried at the age of 30-40, but came from away. She likely was born in what is now southern Sweden or Norway, and moved twice as a child, likely farther west. She didn't reach Birka until she was older than 16.
There must be some mistake, they said.
"Usually when you do research and you publish an article," Charlotte told me, "the job is done. But this time, no. It's been months of work that we didn't anticipate." When we spoke, the team's second paper on Bj581 was in peer review; it was published in Antiquity in 2019. "It gives a fuller archaeological picture of the find," Charlotte explained. "It is also a response to some of the criticism about if it's the right bones, for example."
Each and every bone was marked "581"--even the toe bones, she pointed out. "Apart from the skull, all the bones that are in Stolpe's documentation are actually in the archive."
But some people still were not convinced. The woman in Bj581 must have been the wife, or slave, of a male warrior who had died somewhere else, so she was buried in his place. She--the skeleton--could not be the warrior itself.
"Why was it never an issue as long as we thought it was a male skeleton? It’s very interesting," Charlotte said. "The results from our study have been controversial in a way I didn’t expect, with researchers saying it cannot be true. And it’s more their feeling that it cannot be true than that we have the wrong bones—and we know we don’t. We’re very confident we have the right bones and that in this grave there is actually a woman. That we are certain of. How we ought to interpret that is, of course, something else. But her grave looks like the other Birka warrior graves, and if there’s something special about her grave in comparison to the other ones, I would like someone to explain what it is. If we want to interpret her grave as one that represented someone else, then we must ask ourselves if that’s the case with all the other warrior graves as well."
If anyone should know what a Birka warrior looks like, it would be Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonsson. Her Ph.D. thesis in archaeological science, The Birka Warrior: The Material Culture of a Martial Society (Stockholm University, 2006), is based on her first 10 years of research at Birka.
After Stolpe left, Swedish archaeologists returned to the island in the 1930s, the 1970s, and the 1990s, when Charlotte joined them. Birka, they learned, not only held over 3,000 Viking graves, it was the site of a well-protected market town with a hilltop fortress and a permanent garrison of warriors. "My first summer was in 1996," Charlotte said. "I was becoming a Ph.D. student, and the project was on the defensive structures of Birka. We excavated in the hillfort and its rampart and also the town rampart. Partly it was a rescue excavation. There were so many tourists coming to Birka that things were starting to pop up out of the soil."
The team stayed for almost 10 years, doing a full excavation of the garrison, including its Warriors' Hall (a 2,000-square-foot building). They found weapons, armor, and items of clothing that linked the Birka warriors to the Vikings' East Way, the trade route that led from Sweden east to Ladoga, Kiev, and Constantinople. They learned that the Warriors' Hall was burned to the ground--and never rebuilt--shortly before pagan Birka was replaced by Christian Sigtuna as the biggest market town in the area.
Compared to the other Birka warrior graves, Bj581 is the grave of a war leader. Besides the large quantity of weapons in the grave--more than for almost any other Birka warrior--there are two horses, a stallion and a mare. "That’s definitely a sign of high status," Charlotte explained. There is also a complete set of pieces for the strategic boardgame known as hnefatafl, sometimes called Viking chess. The pieces seem to have been in a bag placed in the woman's lap. Some bits of iron by her side may have been parts of a game board.
Weapons, horses, and game pieces have always been diagnostic of a war leader. "Up until it was known as a woman, nobody even questioned that this was the skeleton not only of a warrior but also a military leader," Charlotte told me. "This is how it’s been described. That’s the most common interpretation, actually. And we didn’t see any reason to change it, since nothing in the grave has actually changed. We just found out something that we didn’t know."
Why is it so hard for people to accept that the ultimate Birka warrior was a woman?
"I think we are so far from war in the Western world," Charlotte said, "that we believe that warriors look a certain way. I also think we are obsessed with individuals and the individual identity in a way that I am not so sure that they were in the Viking Age. Actually, I think they were rather more interested in the role. You filled a role. You had to have the qualities to fill that role, and the more of those qualities you had, the better you would fill the role. And maybe the requirements were even higher for Bj581 because she was a woman. Maybe that’s why they put everything into the grave--why it was important that she have the full set of weapons, because they wanted to emphasize her role."
The people who buried the woman in grave Bj581 had something to say. Something we should listen to. They thought it was important.
"When you look at the high-status graves at Birka," Charlotte said, "they are all different from each other. They all tell different stories. Each and every grave has its own narrative. In the end, if we look at Bj581, we can say that they wanted to show something: They wanted to show that this woman in the grave, she is a warrior."
To learn more about the research of Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonsson on the Birka warrior, see the many books and papers she has made available through academia.edu at https://shmm.academia.edu/CharlotteHedenstiernaJonson.
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