Archaeologist Marianne Moen asked that question in 2016 on a blog called "The Dangerous Women Project."
She wrote, "How much of a threat can a dead and decayed body of a nameless woman really pose? Judging from the academic treatment of the Viking Age female double burial found at Oseberg in Norway, the answer seems to be quite a substantial one. Enough, at least, that in the 100 years since the burial was excavated, academic debate regarding it has centred on finding explanations and interpretations that nearly all share a common purpose of removing the two women from any position of politcal power..."
When I went to Norway in 2018 to complete the research for my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, meeting Marianne was tops on my list. We managed to connect over lunch soon after I had visited the Oseberg and Gokstad mounds. What follows are some highlights of our chat which, of course, began with a discussion of the Oseberg grave.
"Every time I give a presentation," Marianne said, "I end up talking about Oseberg. It's fascinating if you look at how it's been treated academically--and then you look at Gokstad. Basically, they are identical mounds. They're placed in comparable locations. They've got very comparable grave goods. They're buried within 70 years of each other. Everything pretty much checks out: It's like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. The only difference is that Oseberg is the burial of two women and Gokstad has one man.
Her comic portrayal of the baffled academics made me laugh--but it wasn't truly funny. Working on my history of warrior women in the Viking Age, I saw too many instances of such gender bias in Viking Studies. The "invisible man" theory came up again and again.
As Marianne explained, "A lot of researchers have problems with something that doesn't fit with what we think we know. We think we know the Viking Age so well. In Norway it's a sort of cultural ancestor to our own times. We talk about the Vikings as if we know how they lived--and we don't really.
"There is so much that we've just assumed. Two hundred years ago, a bunch of researchers read the old texts and said, 'Aha, it’s like this.' You look at the gender roles they assigned to the Viking Age--and they are the gender roles of the Victorian Age." They mimic the values of the 19th century, when elite women were confined to church, children, and kitchen. When wife, mother, and housewife were women's only proper roles.
"We don't know it was like that in the Viking Age," Marianne continued. "But somebody said so 200 years ago, and we've referred to them for years and years."
Between the time Marianne wrote about the two Oseberg queens as "dangerous women" in 2016 and we met in 2018, the ultimate Viking warrior burial--the weapon-filled grave known as Bj581 in the town of Birka--was reanalyzed. Ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the bones and--to the shock of many scholars--this ultimate Viking was proved to be a woman.
"What's been so interesting about the Birka Warrior," Marianne said to me, "is that it's really just made this very obvious. If you read between the lines of so many of the blogs and the statements that came out in response to the Birka Warrior, what the critics are saying is: This can't be right because it doesn't fit with what we think we know. Accepting that what we think we know is potentially not correct seems to be pretty difficult."
One approach by the naysayers is to argue that having weapons in her grave is not enough to prove that Bj581 actually fought. They point out that there are no marks of battle trauma on her bones, for instance.
I asked Marianne how she would respond to that criticism.
"There’s this big argument in archaeology today," she explained, "that, obviously, just because you're buried with weapons it doesn't make you a warrior. Fair enough. There's this famous study of Anglo-Saxon graves, where they demonstrated that a lot of the so-called warrior graves were actually young boys or the skeleton had severe physical impairments. So I’m not saying that every weapons grave is necessarily a warrior grave.
"What I am saying," she continued, "is that, just because the grave happens to contain a woman doesn’t mean we should treat it any differently. So if a weapons grave isn't a warrior grave, that means we need to go through 200 years of scholarship and reassess how we talk about all the male graves with weapons. That’s all I'm asking. You can't talk about weapons graves differently just because of the gender of the person buried in one. Because then what we think we know is not based on the actual evidence."
Even scholars who accept that Bj581 was indeed a warrior woman argue that she was very unusual for her time. Finding a single warrior woman doesn't change the conversation about women's roles in the Viking Age.
Again, Marianne disagrees.
"I'm not arguing for the number of female warriors being on the same level as men," Marianne replied, "because we know from the burial evidence that we do have that it's not that often you find women with weapons. But it's often enough."
But Viking men are not often found buried with weapons either, I pointed out. Not every man was a warrior.
"Exactly," said Marianne. "It was only really exceptional men."
When I first began talking about writing my book The Real Valkyrie, I heard that complaint from some of my scholarly friends: But you’re only talking about exceptional women, they said.
I thought about that, and I realized that if I had said I was going to write a book about a Viking king, like Olaf Tryggvason or Eirik Bloodaxe, he would be an exceptional man, and it would be perfectly acceptible to write a book about him. No one would complain about that. Why is it not equally acceptible to write about an exceptional warrior woman?
"This is the problem," said Marianne. "All of the archaeology and all of the history of the Vikings is written about the exceptions. That's the people we write about. We write about the 15-20% who were the elite. We don't know anything about the rest. They leave no trace in the archaeological record. We need to accept that. Yes, the Birka Warrior was probably an exceptional women, but all the stories we tell are about the exceptional people."
And even among these exceptional, elite Vikings, our 200-year-old assumptions about gender roles do not hold true, as Marianne's 2019 Ph.D. thesis from the University of Oslo proves. When we spoke, she was hard at work writing Challenging Gender: A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape.
I asked her to tell me a little about it.
"My central proposition is that we shouldn't apply our understanding of gender to the past. I'm basically going back to Carol Clover's 1993 article [“Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe.”]. I think we should stop thinking about the two-sex model, with binary men and women as complete opposites."
Instead, we should think of Viking people inhabiting a spectrum of gender roles, she argues, based on her reanalysis of several Viking Age graveyards in Norway.
"What I've done," she explained, "is to analyze grave assemblages and also the position of the grave in the landscape, in some selected cemeteries in Vestfold, to try and see if there's any grounds from the burial evidence to assume that men and women fulfilled such different categories.
"What I found in the assemblages of grave goods, is that they share more traits than they actually differentiate. Interestingly, about a third of the graves I analyzed aren't gender-specific at all. They have horses, cooking vessels, common tools, less common tools like trading equipment, things like knives and combs, etc. Nothing particularly spectacular, usually, but a few of them are very wealthy indeed.
"That's where I think it becomes particularly problematic that we talk about the Vikings as if they had this very clearcut binary gender pattern, when actually so many graves are not able to be gendered at all," Marianne concluded.
"So here's my question: If so many of these graves are not communicating gender, then should we not perhaps reconsider our thought that gender was an either/or in the Viking Age? And that there were different ways of living that were accepted?"
I look forward to learning more from Marianne Moen's research in the future, and wish her the best of luck in her scholarly career. You can read more about her work on her Academia.edu page and at Science Norway.
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