The Myth of the Viking Keys

The Viking Age, I was taught, was an era of strict gender roles. The woman ruled the household: Her domain was innanstokks, "inside the threshold." She held considerable power, for she controlled clothing and food. In lands where winter lasts ten months and the growing season only two, the housewife decided who froze or starved. The larger the household, the more complex her job. Managing the household of a chieftain who kept 80 retainers, as well as family and servants, was like running a small business.

But for all that, the man held the "dominant role in all walks of life," I was taught. His duties began at the threshold and expanded outwards. His was the world of public affairs, of "decisions affecting the community at large." He was the trader, the traveler, the warrior. His symbol was the sword.

The woman's role, in turn, was symbolized by the keys she carried at her belt.

Except she didn't.

There are 140 Icelandic sagas; only one, recounting a feud from 1242, refers to a housewife's keys. A Danish marriage law from 1241 says that a bride is given to her husband "for honor and as wife, sharing his bed, for lock and keys, and for right of inheritance of a third of the property." A bawdy poem, in an Icelandic manuscript dated after 1270, describes the hyper-masculine Thunder god, Thor, dressed up as a bride with a ring of keys at his belt.

Caption: Illustration of Thor as a bride by Elmer Boyd Smith, from "In the Days of Giants: A Book of Norse Tales" (1902).

These texts might reflect a pagan Norse truth. They might equally reflect the values of medieval Christian world in which they were written. We can't tell.

What the keys do reflect are the values of 19th-century Victorian society, when upperclass women were confined to the home and told to concern themselves only with children, church, and kitchen. In Swedish history books in the 1860s, the myth of the Viking housewife replaced an earlier historical portrait of Viking women who were strikingly equal to Viking men. This Victorian version of Viking history has been presented since then as truth, but it is only one interpretation.

Surely archaeology backs up the well-known image of the Viking housewife with her keys, you insist.

It does not. Keys have been found in some women's graves. But they are not common, nowhere near as common as housewives. Against the 3,000 Viking Age swords that have been found in Norway, archaeologist Heidi Berg in 2015 sets only 143 keys, half of which were found in men's graves. In Denmark, Pernille Pantmann reported in 2011 that only nine out of 102 female graves she studied contained keys, and none of these "key graves" otherwise fit the model of "housewife."

Calling keys the symbol of a Viking woman's status, these and other researchers now say, is "an archaeological misinterpretation," "a mistake," "a myth"—and a dangerous one.

Caption: For a new look at the meaning of keys, see "Women in the Viking Age" on the website of the Danish National Museum, where this image comes from.

By accepting the 19th-century stereotype of men with swords and women with keys, 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 easy to dismiss as unrealistic the warrior women found in every kind of medieval text that depicts Viking society—history, law, saga, poetry, and myth—and which have been attested to archaeologically since 2017, when the famous warrior grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden was DNA tested.

How would I re-interpret the role of women in Viking society? I try to answer that question in my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women. To learn more, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

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