tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39732053935023759702024-03-18T13:44:45.335-04:00God of Wednesday Wanderer, storyteller, wise, half-blind, with a wonderful horse.<br>
By Nancy Marie BrownNancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.comBlogger197125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-57920854842124108642022-10-05T11:19:00.007-04:002022-10-05T11:19:00.170-04:00The (Not) Ok GlacierIn 2014 a small glacier in the center of Iceland was found to be dead.
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It was not the glacier I write about in my new book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk</i></a>, whose looming presence inspired wild thoughts in me, and might have lured me to my death if I were more naïve about Icelandic nature. That was Hofsjökull.
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It was not my favorite glacier, the beauty who appears, unpredictably, across 75 miles of bay from Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik, the glacier Icelandic author Halldor Laxness called “a soul clad in air.” That glacier, Snæfellsjökull, occupies several chapters in <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk</i></a>.
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The dead glacier, Ok, meaning “yoke” or “burden,” was their little brother. A white tooth on a medium-tall mountain, Ok was a landmark on an ancient road, but exceptional in Iceland only for his small size.
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At his greatest, Ok’s ice covered six square miles.
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Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, covers more than 3,000 square miles.
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A glacier is made when snow falls faster than it melts. At 65 feet deep, the snow starts turning to ice. At a hundred feet deep, the ice begins to creep. It flows at a rate of three feet a day downhill. Its melting edge is called its mouth. When ice breaks off into the meltwater lake, the glacier is said to calve.
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A glacier that does not creep or calve is dead.
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<a href="https://news2.rice.edu/2019/07/18/lost-glacier-to-be-honored-with-memorial-monument/" target="_blank">Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer</a> heard of the death of Ok in 2016. “As cultural anthropologists”--the two work at Rice University in Houston--“we could see that people were implicated in the loss of glaciers in at least two ways,” they wrote. One: Humans were hurting the planet. Two: Humans were hurting themselves, “especially in a country like Iceland whose identity is so bound up with glaciers.”
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So they made a <a href="https://www.notokmovie.com" target="_blank">film</a>. Then they planned a funeral.
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They asked Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason to design a memorial plaque. “How do you write a eulogy,” he asked, “for a symbol of eternity?”
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On August 18, 2019 a few dozen people climbed Ok. There was no path. They passed from moss to lichens to “jagged stones,” they slipped on ice and sank into icy puddles. It was a harder climb than many had expected. The wind bit. It took three hours.
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They were asked to hike in silence, not looking back, as if they were hiking up Helgafell, a small hill I frequently climb in West Iceland whose name means Holy Mountain and whose legend says surmounting it silently, without looking back, will grant you three wishes.
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At the top of Ok, the hikers read out the glacier’s death certificate. Cause of death? “Excessive heat” and “humans.” They affixed the bronze plaque to a rock; addressed to the future, it says, “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
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Then they began to sing.
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The funeral, Howe and Boyer wrote in <i>Anthropology News</i>, “was a media event covered in nearly every country in the world.” The story of Ok “seems to have humanized climate change for a lot of people. It put a face and a name to an abstract problem.”
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In 1992 I attended a lecture by Gillian Overing, then an English professor at Wake Forest University, during the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In Iceland, Overing noted, the center is the margin. Geography is inside-out. People settle on the temperate edges of the island, while its interior is a glacial desert, cold, inhospitable, and not even crossable most of the year. “What kind of self,” she mused, “might these places reflect?” What kind of self has wilderness at its heart?
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That question, that concept, in large part, inspired my book <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth</i></a>.
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But now, with the death of Ok, a new question arises: What happens to the self when the wilderness in its heart is dead?
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“Help us,” wrote Iceland’s prime minister, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/opinion/iceland-glacier-climate-change.html" target="_blank">Katrín Jakobsdóttir</a>, in <i>The New York Times</i>, “keep the ice in Iceland.”
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We no longer even know how to talk about nature, writes <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/09/forget-the-environment-new-words-lifes-wonders-language?CMP=share_btn_fb" target="_blank">George Monbiot</a> in <i>The Guardian</i>. We use terms that are “cold and alienating,” like <i>reserve</i>. “Think of what we mean when we use that word about a person,” he says. The word <i>environment</i> “creates no pictures in the mind.” Calling plants or animals “resources” or “stocks” implies “they belong to us and their role is to serve us.” Language has power, Monbiot reminds us. “Those who name it own it,” he argues, concluding: “We need new words.”
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Or, perhaps, a new look at some very old ones, like elf.
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<a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth</i></a> was published October 4 by Pegasus Books. Order it at your favorite bookshop, through <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Looking-for-the-Hidden-Folk/Nancy-Marie-Brown/9781639362288" target="_blank">Simon & Schuster distributors</a>, or through my shop on <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>. <i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thanks!</i>
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For another artist's response to the funeral for Ok glacier, see <a href="https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/rice-anthropologists-available-discuss-ongoing-impact-worlds-first-memorial-lost-glacier" target="_blank">this news release from Rice University</a>.
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-17183422180367672822022-09-21T11:00:00.005-04:002022-09-21T11:00:00.236-04:00Writing for IcelandInterviewing me about my new book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</i></a>, a reporter asked, Did you write it for an Icelandic audience, or for an American one?
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Um ... yes.
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Of course, my main audience is the much larger American one. I fell in love with Iceland (population 365,000) on my first visit, in 1986, and much of my writing since then has been aimed at sharing my love for Iceland's landscape and culture with people who haven't (yet) visited this amazing island in the north Atlantic. (In 1986, Iceland was not on everyone's bucket list, as it seems to be today.)
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But it is also very important to me that the Icelanders I am writing about like my books--or at least see them as being fair.
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It makes me very happy, for instance, to know that the families featured in my first book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781490525310" target="_blank"><i>A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse</i></a>, are always glad to have me visit. This summer, 25 years after I bought a horse from them, I spent a week with Fjóla and Elvar of the farm Syðra-Skörðugil in north Iceland; we laughed at how naive I'd been about horses then, and reminisced over how well things had turned out.
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So when my book about Iceland's elves, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk</i></a>, was sent to a group of Icelandic writers and scholars for review, pre-publication, I was anxious that they would also think I was being fair to their ancient culture.
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I needn't have worried.
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Wrote Egill Bjarnason, author of <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780143135883" target="_blank"><i>How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island</i></a>: "Nancy Marie Brown reveals to us skeptics how rocks and hills are the mansions of elves, or at least what it takes to believe so. <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk</i></a> evocatively animates the Icelandic landscape through Brown's past and present travels and busts some prevalent clichés and myths along the way--this book is my reply to the next foreign reporter asking about that Elf Lobby."
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Terry Gunnell, a professor of folkloristics at the University of Iceland, whose work on elf-lore is heavily cited in the book, called it "A love song to the living landscape of Iceland and the cultural history in which it is clothed, inspired by the author's numerous encounters with the country and its people over the last decades."
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Ármann Jakobsson, a professor in the department of Icelandic at the University of Iceland, and author of the fascinating book <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781947447004" target="_blank"><i>The Troll Inside You</i></a>, also understood what I was trying to say. He wrote: "<a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk</i></a> is an elegantly written and wonderfully individualistic exploration of Icelandic culture through the ages, combining a shrewd appraisal of traditions with an acute interest in the modern world and all its intellectual quirks."
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Gísli Sigurðsson, a research professor at The Árni Magnússon Institute of the University of Iceland, agreed. He wrote: "Using ideas and stories about the hidden folk in Iceland as a stepping stone into the human perception of our homes in the world where stories and memories breathe life into places, be it through the vocabulary of quantum physics or folklore, Nancy Marie Brown makes us realize that there is always more to the world than meets the eye. And that world is not there for us to conquer and exploit but to walk into and sense the dew with our bare feet on the soft moss, beside breathing horses and mighty glaciers in the drifting fog that often blocks our view."
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And finally, my friend Gísli Pálsson, professor of anthropology at the university of Iceland, seems to always know how to sum up my books just so. He wrote: "This is a sweeping and moving journey across time and space—through myth and theory, language, and literature—into the world of wonder and enchantment. Beautifully written, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank"><i>Looking for the Hidden Folk</i></a> offers a compelling and surprising case for the recognition of forces and beings not necessarily 'seen' in everyday life but nevertheless somehow sensed, exploring their complexity and why they matter."
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<i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</i> will be published on October 4 by Pegasus Books. It is now available for pre-order through <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Looking-for-the-Hidden-Folk/Nancy-Marie-Brown/9781639362288" target="_blank">Simon & Schuster distributors</a> or through my shop on <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>. <i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-49041227209089269842022-09-14T11:00:00.006-04:002022-09-14T11:00:00.172-04:00What Does It Mean to Believe in Elves?Icelanders believe in elves. There are many ways you could take issue with that sentence, but let's start with that shapeshifting verb, “to believe.”
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We believe in elves, we believe in gravity, we believe in science, we believe in God. Does anyone really know what it means to believe?
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As I note in my book <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank">Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</a>, anthropologists like himself, Rodney Needham wrote in 1972, “appear to take it for granted that ‘belief’ is a word of as little ambiguity as ‘spear’ or ‘cow’” when they write about the beliefs of this culture or that.
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Yet “belief” is kaleidoscopic. It translates a “bewildering variety” of foreign terms. Its root means to love or desire. Translators of the Bible used it to translate trust or obey. It means to follow a religion, to accept a statement as true, or to hold an opinion. You can say, “I believe I’ll have fish for dinner” as easily as “I believe in elves” or “I believe in God.”
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Philosopher David Hume in 1739 defined belief as “something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.”
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Stuart Hampshire in 1959 defined a man’s beliefs as “the generally unchanging background to his active thought,” those things he “never had occasion to question” or to state.
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Jonathan Lanman in 2008 defined belief as “the state of a cognitive system holding information (not necessarily in the propositional or explicit form) as true in the generation of further thought and behavior.” Using this definition, Lanman asserted, we can “pursue a cross-cultural science of belief,” as everyone has such beliefs. “All have cognitive systems that represent the world in some way and act according to what they believe to be true about that world.”
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Your beliefs define you. As fuzzy, illogical, or unquestioned as they may be, they control how you see the world and how you act in response.
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As Needham concluded, “An assertion of belief is a report about the person who makes it, and not intrinsically or primarily about objective matters of truth or fact.” Belief, said Needham, is “ultimately a reference to an inner state.” More, that inner state seems to be emotional. Yet we cannot say, in English at least, that someone is “believing” or “belief-full,” Needham mused.
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Philosopher Jesse Prinz thinks the emotion involved is wonder. It’s wonder that produces both religion and science, as well as art: The three institutions “that are most central to our humanity,” said Prinz, are “united in wonder.” They are not in conflict. They are not either/or. Each of the three feeds “the appetite that wonder excites in us,” says Prinz. Each allows us “to transcend our animality by transporting us to hidden worlds.” It’s wonder, Prinz argues, that makes us human.
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Adam Smith, the inventor of capitalism, wondered about wonder in 1795, Prinz found. “He wrote that wonder arises ‘when something quite new and singular is presented … [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance.’”
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What is it like? the brain asks. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
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Wonder is sensory: “We stare and widen our eyes,” wrote Prinz. Wonder is cognitive: “Such things are perplexing because we cannot rely on past experience to comprehend them … : We gasp and say ‘Wow!’” And then there is “a dimension that can be described as spiritual.” Wonder, concludes Prinz, awakens us. “We don’t just take the world for granted, we’re struck by it.”
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Or we are not. Emotions, brain researchers have found, depend on culture. You will not sense wonder if you’re never exposed to it.
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There’s much we don’t know about the brain. But we know it categorizes. We know it uses concepts and words, finds causes and crafts stories. We know it constantly simulates the world and makes multiple predictions of what we will sense and see—and what we should do in response.
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We know that it’s wired for emotion, for wonder, for ecstasy, but that Western culture disdains and derides this side of the brain. We’re taught to control our emotions, to give up wonder in childhood, to stifle our mystical experiences—or at least not to talk about them. Otherwise we’ll be thought “ignorant, eccentric, or unwell,” says Jules Evans of the Centre for the History of the Emotions in London.
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We’ll be laughed at as loony elf-seers.
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But without words, without the concepts to describe them, you are “experientially blind,” says psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Wonders—elves?—may be all around you, but you will not see them.
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Which brings up the next question I grapple with in <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank">Looking for the Hidden Folk</a>, What immaterial beings are we allowed to believe in, and who is allowed to do the believing?
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You can read more about Iceland and my many adventures there in my new book, <i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</i>, which will be published on October 4 by Pegasus Books. It is now available for pre-order through <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Looking-for-the-Hidden-Folk/Nancy-Marie-Brown/9781639362288" target="_blank">Simon & Schuster distributors</a> or through my shop on <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>. <i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-14274668361896475072022-09-07T11:00:00.000-04:002022-09-07T11:00:00.171-04:00Icelandic Bliss In a way, my new book, <i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth</i>, is about the power of stories. We all tell stories. We always have. But we don’t always take responsibility for the effects of our storytelling. Stories shape how you see the world. They determine not only how you think of elves, but also how you think of such “real” things as mountains—or creeping thyme.
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“When we look at a landscape,” writes Robert Macfarlane in <i>Mountains of the Mind</i>, “we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. … We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory. … What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans—a mountain of the mind.”
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A story that cast a magic spell upon all mountains was Edmund Burke’s <i>A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful</i>. Burke, from Ireland, published it in 1757, when he was twenty-eight. He was, writes Macfarlane, “interested in our psychic response to things—a rushing cataract, say, a dark vault or a cliff face—that seized, terrified, and yet also somehow pleased the mind by dint of being too big, too high, too fast, too obscured, too powerful, too something, to be properly comprehended.” Instead, such things inspired “a heady blend of pleasure and terror. Beauty, by contrast, was inspired by the visually regular, the proportioned, the predictable.” It’s the frisson of fear that makes a Icelandic volcano, or a cliffside swathed in fog, sublime.
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Burke’s book, says Macfarlane, “provided a new lens through which wilderness could be viewed and appreciated.” Macfarlane’s own books do much the same for me. In <i>The Old Ways</i>, he mentions an archaeologist named Anne Campbell who was “close-mapping” a moor. Why that moor? “It is the most interesting place in the world to me,” she told Macfarlane. “So I spend most of my time walking shieling tracks, paths, and the streams and the walls that used to divide up the land. Then I talk to people and try to fix their memories to those particular places.”
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I once visited that part of Scotland, the western edge of the Isle of Lewis, but did not meet Campbell walking her moor. Still, a story Macfarlane told, a little aside, gave me a new perspective on Iceland (the most interesting place in the world to me). Macfarlane wrote, “When it wasn’t too cold, and not so dry that the heather was sharp, Anne liked to walk barefoot on the moor. ‘It takes about two weeks to get your feet toughened up so that it’s no discomfort. And then it’s bliss.’ You should try it when you’re out there. Take those big boots of yours off!’”
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On the western tip of Iceland’s Snaefellsnes peninsula sits the long-abandoned farm of Laugarbrekka, where Gudrid the Far-Traveler was born in about 982. I’ve written two books about Gudrid, sister-in-law to Leif Eiriksson, the Viking explorer credited with discovering America some five hundred years before Columbus. Yet Gudrid spent more time in the New World than Leif did. Gudrid is the real Viking explorer, and a recurring inspiration to me. In 2016, on a sunny Sunday in late July, I visited her monument at Laugarbrekka for the umpteenth time. I walked out to the <i>laug</i> or bathing pool, which is no longer bathwater warm, took off my boots, rolled up my pants, and waded in, but the sharp stony bottom of the lake kept me from going far.
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Back on the bank, I dabbled my toes and gazed at the glacier-capped volcano, Snaefellsjokull, its corruscations of lava catching the light, until it was time to go, then, remembering Campbell’s bliss, decided to walk barefoot back to the car. It was lovely. The heath was springy and soft and comforting to my feet—though they were not even toughened up. Picking along, carefully placing each foot, I found ripe crowberries and almost ripe blueberries, some very blue but still tart. The grass was soft, too, but I found myself preferentially stepping on the berry bushes and fragrant creeping thyme, which tickled. Who would have thought that thyme (not time) equaled bliss?
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You can read more about Iceland and my many adventures there in <i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</i>, which will be published on October 4 by Pegasus Books. It is now available for pre-order through <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Looking-for-the-Hidden-Folk/Nancy-Marie-Brown/9781639362288" target="_blank">Simon & Schuster distributors</a> or through my shop on <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>. <i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-27585507576465855992022-08-24T11:00:00.000-04:002022-08-24T11:00:00.174-04:00The Remarkable Moníka of Merkigil<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-_nE9wO2aNYqyU2uIV-cZxnQ9CYpFT3ikIFjq9j3Ou1SuHzyBx4uBOEmouMuh0J0UsfPDarm_rLkd7kyn1iy--ZIjmGyM9CAirxaPiRKIB-iBmsh_ADmNfxXz2tequ02CGHgArt5YOJlAKDUROibQgnTYm9gNSAgLRC-FMipY6yzRKtAjiR6MtdCtxw/s1400/Konan%20i%20Dalnum.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="905" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-_nE9wO2aNYqyU2uIV-cZxnQ9CYpFT3ikIFjq9j3Ou1SuHzyBx4uBOEmouMuh0J0UsfPDarm_rLkd7kyn1iy--ZIjmGyM9CAirxaPiRKIB-iBmsh_ADmNfxXz2tequ02CGHgArt5YOJlAKDUROibQgnTYm9gNSAgLRC-FMipY6yzRKtAjiR6MtdCtxw/s320/Konan%20i%20Dalnum.jpg"/></a></div>The farm of Merkigil in Skagafjörður, north Iceland, is famous for two reasons: 1) the treacherous gorge you had to cross to get there, before the glacial river beside the farm was bridged in 1961; and 2) the grand, two-story concrete house built by the widow Moníka with the help of her daughters—years before the river was bridged.
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This August, I rode a horse to Merkigil and stayed in Moníka’s house. The trip was organized by my friends Fjóla and Elvar from <a href="https://sydraskordugil.is" target="_blank">Syðra-Skörðugil</a> (from whom I bought my first Icelandic horse 25 years ago, as you can read in <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781490525310" target="_blank">A Good Horse Has No Color</a></i>). A few months before, on Fjóla’s recommendation, I bought and read Moníka’s biography, <i>Konan í Dalnum og Dæturnar Sjö (The Woman in the Valley and her Seven Daughters)</i> by Guðmundur G. Hagalin. There I learned these things about Moníka’s remarkable life:
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In 1924, Moníka was working in a fish factory in Reykjavík when she received a letter. We would call it a love letter. She wasn’t so sure.
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Moníka was then 23, the seventh child of 10 from the little farm of Ánastaðir in Skagafjörður, north Iceland. She was small, sturdy, and powerful, and known as a hard worker. At the young age of 11, she had left home to go to work, spinning, milking, making hay, and caring for animals, children, and old folks at various farms in the district, where she earned a reputation as a young woman you could count on. Then she had followed her two sisters to Reykjavík, where their uncle was foreman at a fish factory, and joined thirty-some other women cleaning and salting fish; her record was 3,000 fish in a day—she found it boring to not work as hard as she could. But she also liked having her evenings free, when the work day was over, and having money in her pocket to buy pretty clothes and enjoy the city, plus more put aside to bring home to her family when she visited them, as she was planning to do that summer.
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Then she got the letter. When she was 11, her very first summer away from home, she had worked at haymaking with a boy named Johannes; he was about 14. The two of them had been sent off to a nearby farm his father had leased and told to hay it; they cut the grass with a scythe, raked it until it was dry, bagged it up into bales, and transported home 40 horse-loads of fine hay.
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Never have I forgotten that summer we made hay, the letter read. It was from Johannes. He and his parents now owned half of a farm named Merkigil, deep in one of the valleys of Skagafjörður. His mother was ill, he said, and he wondered if Moníka could come to Merkigil and take charge of the household.
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Moníka, too, remembered their hay-making. She had become quite fond of Johannes, who was funny and easy-going and hard-working; she recalled how quiet it was in the evenings, as they walked home side by side, satisfied with their day’s accomplishments. What is he really asking me, she wondered. She put off replying to his letter until, finally, it seemed pointless to do so: He must have found someone else by now, she thought.
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She took the boat home, where she immediately ran into a neighbor who said, If you were a man, I’d have a job for you.
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And what job, Moníka asked, do you have that only a man can do?
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He needed someone to cut, dry, bale, and transport seventy horse-loads of hay, and he was willing to pay well.
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I’ll do it, she said. And she did. She visited her parents for a few days, then took a tent, went up to the hayfield with a scythe and a rake, and started making hay. It took her five weeks.
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When the haymaking was over, she packed up her things and prepared to return to Reykjavík. But the boat was late, and she had to wait several days in the harbor town. While she was there, she was accosted by a man named Gísli, who had been searching all over for her, he said. He had a job that only she could do. He needed someone who could work hard, both inside the house and on the farm, and who was also a good nurse, for there was an old, sick couple who desperately needed help. His sister was with them now, but she couldn’t stay.
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And where is this farm? Moníka asked, and was startled when he replied: Merkigil. Almost in spite of herself, she found herself saying yes. Gísli gave her no time to change her mind. He had four strong horses with him, and they set off at once to ride the 50 miles to Merkigil. Late in the evening, they reached the treacherous gorge.
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You’re not afraid of heights, I hope, Gísli said.
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Of course not, said Moníka, though she paused on the brink of the cliff, and looked down into the deep, dark gorge, its bottom hidden in the shadows. They got off their horses and led them down the switchbacked trail, which was snow-covered and a little icy in places, herding their two extra horses ahead of them. They crossed the rocky stream at the bottom, and climbed up the steep slope on the other side.
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<i>Caption: In 2022, I crossed the Merkigil gorge in the opposite direction, on a brilliant summer day. It was still scary. Here we are on the brink, watching our loose horses climb the opposite wall of the canyon.</i>
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<i>Caption: The gorge stretching out below us as we climb and climb.</i>
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<i>Caption: I got an assist from the tail ahead of me.</i>
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<i>Caption: Finally we reached the top.</i>
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A short ride ahead was a cluster of buildings with grass roofs: the barns and houses of Merkigil. Gísli’s sister was delighted to see him and Moníka, when they arrived that night in 1924. She introduced Moníka to 93-year-old Sigurbjörg, who was bed-ridden, and her slightly more vigorous husband, Egill. Then she took Moníka next door to the main living room, where she would sleep. There she was greeted by Johannes and his father, and by Johannes’s mother, who was also bed-ridden. So you have come, she said, thank heavens.
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No one said anything about Johannes’s letter, but two years later he and Moníka married. They had eight children—seven daughters and one son—and then, in 1944, Johannes died of cancer. By then, the whole farm was theirs, and the loans were all paid off. They had three milk cows, some steers, 200 sheep, eight riding horses, three breeding horses, and some untrained foals. The fields were in good shape and well-fenced. Moníka decided to stay and run Merkigil with her children.
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Her oldest daughter, Elín, was then 19; she took charge of the sheep. She and her sister Margrét, 17, also did the haymaking, when recurring stomach pains kept Moníka from doing it. They were helped by Jóhanna, 16, and Guðrún, 14. All went well, in general—except when sheep got lost in the fog and horses fell into the canyon and had to be rescued.
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Moníka’s biggest aggravation was that the house, a traditional wooden frame clad with turf blocks, was falling down around their ears. Turf houses need a lot of maintenance, and the work is heavy and takes some skill. With the help of neighbors, she cut and dried new turf and repaired the walls as best they could, but by 1948 Moníka had decided it was time to build a modern, concrete house.
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The house she designed was two stories tall, with high ceilings and wide windows. She took out a loan, hired a team of housebuilders, and bought building materials, having them trucked as far as the road went, past the neighboring farm of Gilsbakki. Then she and her daughters loaded everything onto horseback—wood for the concrete forms, roofing panels, window glass, doors, a kitchen stove, a bathtub—and conveyed them down the switchbacked trail into Merkigil gorge and up again to the new house site.
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The hardest thing to carry was the cement mixer, but Moníka’s daughters were determined to figure out a way—otherwise, they knew, they’d be the ones mixing the cement by hand—and they succeeded. Then, to save themselves a little more work, they rigged up a motor for it: They wrapped a long rope around the drum of the mixer, and secured it to a horse, which one of the younger children led away. Once the horse reached the end of the rope, the cement was mixed and ready to pour.
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By 1950, the house was finished, inside and out. Three years later, Moníka was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland, for her services to the nation. She was the first woman so honored. At first she was dumbfounded. Why was a simple housewife and farmer being given this honor? Then she thought about it. As she told her daughters, I suppose I deserve it as much as anyone does.
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You can read more about Iceland and my many adventures there in my new book, <i>Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</i>, which will be published on October 4 by Pegasus Books. It is now available for pre-order through <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Looking-for-the-Hidden-Folk/Nancy-Marie-Brown/9781639362288" target="_blank">Simon & Schuster distributors</a> or through my shop on <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>. <i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-2320003895224048062022-04-06T11:06:00.003-04:002022-04-06T11:06:00.201-04:00How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth
Icelanders believe in elves. Does that make you laugh?
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I used to find it funny too. I used to think Icelanders who spoke of elves were playing tricks, poking fun, talking tongue-in-cheek, telling tall tales.
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Then I met Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a well-known elf-seer. We took a walk in a lava field she and her elf friends had protected from destruction when a new road was built nearby. We didn't talk much about elves or the Hidden Folk as we walked. Instead, we photographed lava crags and stacks and pillars, pillows of silver-green moss, caves and clefts and individual lichen-splashed rocks.
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It was by turns warm and sunny and cloudy and cool, a fine summer’s day. The breeze was light—just enough to keep the gnats at bay. The land smelled of peat, with hints of salt and sea.
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We wandered about pointing out plants. I didn’t keep a list, but two hours later, back at my hotel when I wrote up my recollections, I remembered blueberry, crowberry, stone bramble, violet, dandelion, mountain avens, buttercup, butterwort, wood geranium, wild thyme, willow shrubs with pale fluffy catkins, and several kinds of grass, including sheep’s sorrel, which we tasted—it was sour as limes. Elves’ cup moss was the only sign of elves I saw.
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We listened to the wind sighing in the knee-high willows and the incessant cries of seabirds: black-backed gulls barking now! now! now! and arctic terns, many terns, with their piercing <i>kree-yah</i> cries.
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We talked about art and inspiration. What is inspiration? Why do some places attract artists and spark creative thought? Why are some places beautiful—and how do you define beauty?
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And we shared an experience I still can't explain.
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Said Ragnhildur, as we left the lava field, "Now do you believe in elves?"
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In my next book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank">Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</a></i>, I explore Iceland's "elf question." My quest took me wandering through history, religion, folklore, and art, circling back to explore theology, literary criticism, mythology, and philosophy, stopping along the way to dip my toes into cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, biology, volcanology, cosmology, and quantum mechanics. Each discipline, I found, defines and redefines what is real and unreal, natural and supernatural, demonstrated and theoretical, alive and inert. Each has its own way of perceiving and valuing (or not) the world around us. Each admits its own sort of elf.
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Illuminated by my encounters with Iceland's Otherworld over the last 35 years—in ancient lava fields, on a holy mountain, beside a glacier and an erupting volcano, crossing the cold desert at the island's heart on horseback—<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank">Looking for the Hidden Folk</a></i> offers an intimate conversation about how we look at and find value in nature. It reveals how the words we use and the stories we tell shape the world we see. It argues that our beliefs about the Earth will preserve, or destroy, it.
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Scientists name our time the Anthropocene, the Human Age: Climate change will lead to the mass extinction of species unless we humans change course. Iceland suggests a different way of thinking about the Earth, one that to me offers hope. Icelanders believe in elves, and you should too.
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<i><a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Looking-for-the-Hidden-Folk/Nancy-Marie-Brown/9781639362288" target="_blank">Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth</a></i> will be published on October 4 by Pegasus Books. It is now available for pre-order through <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Looking-for-the-Hidden-Folk/Nancy-Marie-Brown/9781639362288" target="_blank">Simon and Schuster distributors</a> or through my shop on <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>. <i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.</i>
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I'm currently putting together my book tour, scheduling both online talks and (let's hope) in-person appearances. Let me know at nancymariebrown@gmail.com if you'd like to organize an event to help get the word out about <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781639362288" target="_blank">Looking for the Hidden Folk</a></i>.
<br><br>Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-76446952687812853372022-03-30T11:00:00.000-04:002022-03-30T11:00:00.219-04:00Sami Tales Told "By the Fire"The Sami of northern Sweden "felt such a personal connection to the trees whose wood they burned, mostly birch and pine, that they chopped 'eyes' in the firewood, so the pieces of wood 'could see they were burning well.'"
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I learned this in a delightful book called <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781517904579" target="_blank">By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends</a></i>. Collected and illustrated by Emilie Demant Hatt, and translated by Barbara Sjoholm, it includes 70-some tales, along with Demant Hatt's introduction, selections from her fieldnotes, and an essay by Sjoholm.
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The nomadic reindeer-herding Sami of the far north often appear in the medieval Icelandic sagas, which provide the source material for most of my own books. The Vikings traded with the Sami for skins, furs, feathers, and walrus ivory, and several Norwegian kings and chieftains forced them to pay tribute--that is, protection money. Sami men and women also appear in the Icelandic sagas as sorcerors and shamans, able to shift their shapes, foretell the future, and find lost things.
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As a student of comparative literature, I am intrigued by how similar some of Demant Hatt's Sami tales are with other folklore I’m familiar with. For example, Cinderella-type stories are found among the Sami, with evil stepmothers, handsome princes, too-small-slippers that require the chopping off of heels or toes, and all.
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As in Icelandic folktales, the Sami speak of Hidden Folk or elves, here called the Haldes. In one story, for example, the evil stepmother tells the girl to spin yarn "at the edge of a gorge, at the bottom of which there was a deep spring. The ball of yarn rolled away from the girl, and when she tried to snatch it, she fell into the spring. But down there she met the good Haldes." The Haldes hire the girl to tend their cows, and eventually let her return home, carrying her wages in gold and silver.
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But what I really enjoy reading folktales for are the differences—the things I have not heard before and would not have thought of myself.
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Along with the Sami chopping "eyes" in their firewood, for example, in <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781517904579" target="_blank">By the Fire</a></i> I learned about the evil Stallo. A kind of people-eating troll, Stallo "goes around whistling all the time so one can hear when he is in the vicinity. All whistling is taboo among the Sami: the sound of it is absolutely connected with the Evil One and with sorcery."
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In Sami language, you can be deaf as Stallo, large as Stallo, or have Stallo's skinny legs. If you had a large head--a small, round head was key to the Sami concept of beauty--you had a Stallo head. If you ate alone, you ate like Stallo. If you had a child with a man you didn't care to marry, that child was Stallo's child.
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Stallo also explains the landscape: A single standing stone marks a Stallo grave. A ring of stones is a ruined Stallo tent.
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And while Stallo is usually presented as evil, his belt is decorated with a silver star bearing three faces; if you find (or steal) a Stallo-star, you can cure many diseases.
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Unlike most folktale collections from the north, as translator Barbara Sjoholm points out, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781517904579" target="_blank">By the Fire</a></i> contains stories told to Emilie Demant Hatt "as part of other conversations, ethnographic and social, that took place 'by the fire' in tents or turf huts or out in the open air."
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Demant Hatt was the first ("and for a long time the only," Sjoholm adds) Scandinavian anthropologist to take an interest in the lives of women and children. Most of the stories she recorded were those that women told among themselves as they worked--sometimes answering Demant Hatt's questions, more often giving conscious performances to entertain the group. In these stories, girls outfox their attackers, girls save their people--and murdered babies come back to haunt their parents.
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<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781517904579" target="_blank">By the Fire</a></i> is beautifully illustrated with Demant Hatt's bold and eerie linocuts. Trained as an artist, Demant Hatt first went to northern Sweden in 1904 as a tourist. Inspired by Sami culture, she returned to live with them for many months in 1907. She studied Sami language at the University of Copenhagen, soon becoming fluent, and taught herself ethnography. From 1910 through 1916 she spent her summers with the Sami, first by herself, then bringing along her husband, a graduate student in cultural geography, who sometimes took notes for her while she conducted interviews. Her field notes fill 500 typed pages.
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Demant Hatt wrote a memoir of her early adventures, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780299292348" target="_blank">With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman among the Sami, 1907-1908</a></i>, which has been edited and translated by Barbara Sjoholm. Sjoholm also wrote her biography, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780299315504" target="_blank">Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer</a></i>. Two more books to add to my reading list!
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For more book recommendations, see my lists at <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>.
<i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.</i>Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-7255623169426894502022-03-23T11:00:00.000-04:002022-03-23T11:00:00.172-04:00The Dark Queens Brunhild and Fredegund The legend of Brynhild, the warrior woman who was betrayed by the man she loved, was one of the most popular stories in the Viking North. As I note in my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, it was told and retold for hundreds of years. Episodes were woven into tapestries. They were carved on memorial stones and doorposts and cast as metal amulets. They were alluded to in poetry and prose and worked into myths and genealogies.
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But the later the version, the more romantic it becomes.
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"I am a shield-maid," Brynhild cries in an early account. "I wear a helmet among the warrior-kings, and I wish to remain in their warband. I was in battle with the King of Gardariki and our weapons were red with blood. This is what I desire. I want to fight."
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But she is forced to marry.
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She swears to marry only a man who knew no fear. But she is tricked.
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Later storytellers focus not on her ambition or the sanctity of her oath, but on passion; her crisis of honor becomes a case of jealousy. At the same time, the hero who betrayed her becomes fused with the famous Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer.
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This is the version most familiar to modern audiences, thanks mostly to Richard Wagner’s reworking of the tale in his opera cycle <i>The Ring of the Nibelungs</i>. Wagner’s Brünnhilde "quickly became opera’s most recognizable figure: a busty woman in braids and a horned helmet, hefting a shield and spear," notes Shelley Puhak in her wonderful history of sixth-century Europe, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781635574913" target="_blank">The Dark Queens</a></i>.
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Brünnhilde's final aria, Puhak points out, gave rise to the expression "It ain't over til the fat lady sings." Her character "has become yet another way to casually ridicule women’s bodies, and their stories."
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But the real Queen Brunhild and her nemesis, Queen Fredegund, the two Dark Age queens of Puhak's book, were much more powerful. Together, they reshaped Europe.
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Brunhild was celebrated as a princess and an efficient bureaucrat; Fredegund was despised as slave-born and feared as an assassin. Both were ruthless politicians in courts teeming with secrets, spies, and hidden lusts, alongside high culture and progressive lawmaking.
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Both queens devised war strategies and even led their troops in battle. Poised and powerful, these two real valkyries played a “game of thrones” even richer than legend would remember.
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That we don't all know about them, Puhak writes, is no accident. The historians of Charlemagne's time organized a smear campaign. The Carolingians "systematically rewrote history" to make it seem that "giving women power would lead only to chaos, war, and death."
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But some sources remain: Accounts by the "naive and credulous" Bishop Gregory of Tours, who knew both women. Some of the queens' own letters. Enough written information to let Puhak break down the doors of history to reveal a Dark Ages we’ve been told to forget: when queens ruled Europe, with wisdom, piety—and poisoned daggers.
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"I don’t know what it would have meant for me, and for other little girls," Puhak concludes in an epilogue, "to have found Queen Fredegund’s and Queen Brunhild’s stories collected in the books I read. To discover that even in the darkest and most tumultuous of times, women can, and did, lead."
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She continues, "The misogynistic logic of patriarchy is curiously circular: women cannot govern because they never have. But this big lie rests upon a bed of induced historical amnesia, the work of numberless erasures and omissions, collectively sending the message that the women who have ruled haven’t earned the right to be remembered."
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Read <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781635574913" target="_blank">The Dark Queens</a></i> and regain your history.
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For more book recommendations, see my lists at <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>. <i>Disclosure: As an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.</i>
<br><br>
For more on my latest book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-72972563096259607042022-03-16T11:00:00.006-04:002022-03-16T11:00:00.179-04:00Is Freydis Real?<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtSvzF6206sabyXYtDCZWX2f5tMyCdSB2glG6dLY939mOH3yYziRFjovqJ0w8tNBM5EjPG_J59I5qo4SSNoNzDn4dZVQU2RJ8Zxr66Rco87dnQV6qgw30OydpX1O--Qi9xExNcwNn41x4N58eMcASIsd6doFpjeHYSDAzOk5-nNunJOs43jRoVAIU90A=s1024" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="542" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtSvzF6206sabyXYtDCZWX2f5tMyCdSB2glG6dLY939mOH3yYziRFjovqJ0w8tNBM5EjPG_J59I5qo4SSNoNzDn4dZVQU2RJ8Zxr66Rco87dnQV6qgw30OydpX1O--Qi9xExNcwNn41x4N58eMcASIsd6doFpjeHYSDAzOk5-nNunJOs43jRoVAIU90A=s400"/></a></div>
Freydis Eiriksdottir is set to become America's favorite "real valkyrie," thanks to Netflix's "Vikings: Valhalla." But is she real? That is, is she a historical figure?
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I don't think so.
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I've written a book on warrior women in the Viking Age: <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>.
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I've also written a book on the two Icelandic sagas in which Freydis appears: <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780156033978" target="_blank">The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman</a></i>.
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In <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>, I argue that Freydis's predecessor as America's favorite valkyrie--Lagertha in the History Channel's "Vikings" series--was based on a real historical figure. Her story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his history of the Danes. It's hyped. It's co-opted to make a political point about the inappropriateness of women in battle. But if you accept that the men named by Saxo are real--men like Ragnar Lothbrok, whose feats are also hyped--you have to accept that Lagertha is real too.
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The writers of the Icelandic sagas didn't follow the same rules as Saxo, however. They were not writing history.
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"Saga" derives from the Icelandic verb "to say." It implies neither fact nor fiction. Some sagas could be shelved as history, others as fantasy: over 140 medieval Icelandic texts are named "sagas."
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Compared to some, the two that mention Freydis--<i>The Saga of Eirik the Red</i> and <i>The Saga of the Greenlanders</i> (known collectively as the Vinland Sagas)--are bare-bones. As I wrote in <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780156033978" target="_blank">The Far Traveler</a></i>, their plots don’t hang together. Their settings and characters are weak. Their use of folk-tale motifs--fortune-telling, belligerent ghosts, one-footed humanoids--is clumsy and repetitious. They read like sketches from a writer’s notebook, not finished works.
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Both sagas tell of the Viking voyages to North America around the year 1000. Both highlight the feats of men like Leif Eiriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, though the real explorer, as I've argued elsewhere (<a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2012/10/who-discovered-america.html" target="_blank">here</a>,<a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2013/10/leif-eiriksson-day.html" target="_blank">here</a>,and <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2014/10/not-leif-eiriksson-day-but-gudrid-far.html" target="_blank">here</a>), was a woman named Gudrid, known today as "the Far Traveler." Despite the fact that the sagas say hardly anything at all directly about her, Gudrid is at the heart of both tales.
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As Richard Perkins suggests in <a href="http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Saga-Book%20XXVIII.pdf" target="_blank">"Medieval Norse Visits to America" (Saga-Book 28 (2004): 26-69)</a>, the stories about Gudrid were likely collected by her great-great-grandson, Bishop Brand, in the late 1100s. The Saga of Eirik the Red may have been commissioned about a hundred years later by another of Gudrid’s many descendants, Abbess Hallbera, who oversaw a convent in northern Iceland.
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Gudrid was a Christian--one of Iceland's first nuns. Her life story was meant to be "a guide for noble women" and "appropriate reading matter" for nuns.
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Which, given the nature of one of the famous stories told about the Vinland expeditions, was a problem.
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Gudrid and her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni led an expedition of three ships to North America. They stayed three winters, exploring Newfoundland and around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. It was in the Miramichi River valley, <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2012/05/where-was-vikings-vinland-climax-of-my.html" target="_blank">archaeologist Birgitta Wallace thinks</a>, that they met the native people they called "Skraelings," or "skin-wearers."
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At first, they successfully traded with Skraelings. Then Karlsefni made a diplomatic mistake. The next time the Skraelings arrived at the Viking settlement, they came in overwhelming numbers, girded for war.
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At this point in <i>The Saga of Eirik the Red</i>, Gudrid disappears, and another woman—strong-minded, adaptable, brave, and pregnant—conveniently shows up. She is called Freydis and is said to be Leif Eiriksson's illegitimate sister.
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Freydis appears in only one scene in this saga, here, as the Vikings flee:<br>
"Freydis ran after them but fell behind because she was pregnant. She was following them into the woods when the Skraelings reached her. She saw a dead man in front of her…. His sword lay beside him. She picked it up and got ready to defend herself. When the Skraelings came at her, she drew her clothing away from her breast and slapped it with the sword. At this the Skraelings grew afraid and ran back to their boats and rowed away."
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As I wrote in <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780156033978" target="_blank">The Far Traveler</a></i>, this fighting technique has a long history in Celtic lore—one that Gudrid could have heard of from her Scottish grandfather. In the ancient Irish epic, the Tain Bo Cuailnge, when the hero Cuchulainn attacked the fortress of Emain Macha, the women “stripped their breasts at him.” Said the queen, “These are the warriors you must struggle with today.” Cuchulainn, shamed, “hid his countenance” and was captured.
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Such an action is in character for the Gudrid we have come to know by then in <i>The Saga of Eirik the Red</i>. It might be too racy, though, for a role model in a saga written for young nuns. I can see a squirming churchman attributing it to another, lesser woman, the fictional Freydis.
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The two women were easily switched: “Some people say that Bjarni and Freydis stayed behind,” one manuscript copy of the saga says, while Karlsefni explored to the south and met the Skraelings. A different copy of the same saga puts it: “Some people say that Bjarni and Gudrid stayed behind.”
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Providing another clue that Karlsefni would not have left Gudrid behind and taken Freydis, the saga is clear that the only child born in Vinland was Gudrid and Karlsefni's son Snorri. Just before his birth, the saga notes: “The men were now constantly at odds, and all the quarrels were over women.” The lonesome bachelors were pestering their few married friends to share their wives. Would Karlsefni leave Gudrid in another man’s arms for a year? Would Gudrid stand for it?
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It seems clear to me that Gudrid, not Freydis, was the woman with Karlsefni when he scouted to the south. It was Gudrid, not Freydis, who revealed herself to be a woman in hopes of surviving the Skraelings' attack.
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But churchmen, like Saxo, have long had a problem with women bearing swords. By doing so, he bemoaned, they "were forgetful of their true selves." When they "desired not the couch but the kill," they "unsexed themselves."
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Sometime in the 100 to 300 years between Gudrid's death and the writing down of her sagas, this sword-wielding Freydis becomes the main actor in another story of exploration, told in <i>The Saga of the Greenlanders</i>.
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While in <i>The Saga of Eirik the Red</i> you have to read between the lines to realize Gudrid organized an expedition to Vinland--and owned one of the three ships--<i>The Saga of the Greenlanders</i> clearly says that Freydis did so.
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Her expedition is a disaster. She breaks her agreement with her Icelandic partners, accuses them falsely of having abused her, and has them all murdered. When her weak-willed husband refuses to kill the women in the Norwegian's crew, Freydis does it herself: "Give me an axe," she famously says.
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Freydis is "the epitome of evil," says scholar Robert Kellogg; "a woman of treacherous deceit," adds Judy Quinn. Her wickedness is unmotivated--except by her greed. "She stands for the other great anxiety: the disruptive power of sex," notes Michael Pye. She "represents the bad old days, the heathen past," writes Judith Jesch, "that, according to the author, is now mercifully replaced by the light of Christianity."
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She is "an entirely fictional figure invented to act as a foil to the pious Gudrid," concludes Perkins.
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How Perkins reached that conclusion--with which I wholeheartedly agree--is a good lesson in how to tell fact from fiction in an Icelandic saga.
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First, look at the genealogies: Unlike Gudrid, Freydis has no long list of descendants in the vast saga genealogies. If she truly was the sword-wielding pregnant woman who fled from the Skraelings, her child is never named or mentioned again. We know nothing about the family she married into, either.
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Second, look at geography: The account of Freydis's voyage to Vinland adds nothing to our understanding of where exactly Vinland is or how to get to it. Instead, it seems to be based on a different disastrous voyage to Greenland that ended in murder and feud.
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Third, look at the repercussions: For Freydis and her husband, there are none. No revenge is taken for the murders; no feud arises. Her actions have no effect. After she returns to Greenland, we hear only that Leif Eiriksson was displeased and "no one thought anything but ill of her." She certainly didn't accompany Leif to England, as in the "Vikings: Valhalla" show.
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Says Perkins, "On the whole, then, it seems unlikely that either Freydis Eiriksdotttir or [her husband] Thorvardr ever existed in reality and it is therefore equally unlikely that they took part in any expeditions to North America."
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Which does not mean that this lusty, greedy, haughty, adventurous woman with an axe--and maybe a sword--has not continued to inspire readers and writers for a thousand years. Why do we so like Vikings--even the evil ones? <a href="https://vanherpens.wordpress.com/2022/03/08/holding-out-for-a-heroine-freydis-fury-of-the-north/" target="_blank">As Sofie Vanherpen writes</a>, "Now, more than ever, we need heroes. We need fearless men and women, who are larger than life."
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For more on my latest book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-10267762210106909462021-12-22T11:00:00.028-05:002021-12-22T11:00:00.174-05:00Viking Women with WeaponsI was taught that Viking culture was divided along strict gender lines. I described it that way myself in my previous books. The Viking woman ruled the house; the Viking man was the trader, traveler, and warrior. His symbol was the sword. Her role was symbolized by the keys she carried at her belt.
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Keys? In my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, I compare the number of women with keys in written sources about the Viking Age (three) to the number of women with weapons, and I claim: "I can name twenty from sagas and histories, another fifty-three in poems and myths."
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Anticipating I'd get asked to actually name them during my book tour, I decided to double-check—and came up with even more women warriors this time.
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First, you need to understand that I'm using the term "women" in the most general way. "Female" might be better, but it's got its problems too, as we really don't know much about ideas of gender in the Viking Age. What we do know is that it wasn't binary, but more of a spectrum with "weak" or "passive" on one end and "strong" or "aggressive" on the other end, and with people able to move back and forth along that spectrum as they grew and aged.
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We also don't know much about ideas of species in the Viking Age. What did they mean when they called someone a giant or a troll—or a goddess or a valkyrie? Since these women often mated with humans (and one definition of a species is that the members can mate and produce offspring) I am including them all in my list of "women with weapons."
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When you look at the question this way, you end up with a lot of names of women warriors and war-leaders. I'm grateful to scholars Neil Price, Leszek Gardela, and Jóhanna Katrín Fridriksdóttir* for coming up with most of the names on this list. Price, for example, has traced the names of 51 individual valkyries (some of whom I discuss below).
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Beginning with medieval historical sources:
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—From the Irish history known as <i>The War of the Irish with the Foreigners</i>, you have the Viking chieftain known as The Red Girl who led her fleet against Munster in the 10th century, along with 15 other named Viking war leaders. (Neil Price also finds two unnamed "female war commanders" who fought against the Irish mentioned in the <i>Annals of Ulster</i> and a "vaguely-defined army of barbarians" that included women in the <i>Annals of Innisfallen</i>.)
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—In his <i>History of the Danes</i>, Saxo Grammaticus also names a Red Girl (Rusila)—who may or may not be the same woman as the Viking leader in Ireland—along with the warrior women Stikla, Hetha, Visna, Vebiorg, Lagertha, Alvild, and Gurith.
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Visna, for example, is described as "a woman hard through and through and a highly expert warrior" who was the king's standard-bearer in battle. Targeted by the Swedish champion Starkather, she did not drop the banner until he cut off her right hand. Starkather himself was forced to leave the field "with a lung protruding from his chest, his neck cut right to the middle, and a hand minus one finger."
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Saxo describes Lagertha as "a skilled female fighter … With locks flowing loose over her shoulders she would do battle in the forefront of the most valiant warriors. Everyone marveled at her matchless feats." The hero Ragnar Lothbrok himself was impressed, swearing "he had gained the victory by the might of one woman."
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—Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings appears in several medieval histories, as well as in 11 Icelandic sagas—always as the villain. One medieval historian calls the years 961 to 975, when she ruled Norway alongside her sons, the "Age of Gunnhild." The stories make clear that she accompanied the armies and devised war strategy. In <i>Heimskringla</i>, Snorri Sturluson even hints that she killed her rival, King Hakon. At a crucial moment in the battle, says Snorri, an arrow of an unusual kind "hit King Hakon in the arm, just below the shoulder. And it is said by many that Gunnhild's servant, the one named Kisping, ran through the crowd shouting: 'Make way for the king-slayer'—and shot the arrow at King Hakon, but others say no one knows who shot it."
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—Snorri also tells the story of Queen Asa, who avenged her own rape and the murders of her father and brother, by arranging the killing of King Gudrod. When the king's warriors confronted her, Snorri writes, she "did not deny it was her plan." She then took her infant son and returned, "at once," to her ancestral home. There she "reigned over the kingdom that her father, Harald Redbeard, had ruled" for 17 years.
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—In the <i>Russian Primary Chronicle</i>, you have Queen Olga of Kiev, who doesn't wield weapons herself but does lead armies and devise war strategies, including one that avenges the death of her husband and another that destroys a city. She reigns over the Viking Rus for about 10 years. When her son is killed at the Battle of the Danube in 971, John Skylitzes notes in his <i>Synopsis of Byzantine History</i>, the victorious "Roman" (Byzantine) army "found women lying among the fallen, equipped like men; women who had fought against the Romans together with the men."
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In the Eddas and other poetic sources, you have:
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—The goddess Freyja, who rides to war in a chariot pulled by lions, claims half the dead, and oversees an endless battle in which the wounded are healed overnight to resume their fight at dawn.
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—There's also the giant Skadi who, when her father was killed by the god Loki's tricks, "took up her helmet and ringmail byrnie and weapons of war" and set off to avenge him.
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—Fenja and Menja, the enslaved warriors in the Eddic poem <i>The Song of Grotti</i>, famously brag: "As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone. Our blades are red."
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—There's Modgud, who guards the bridge on the road to Hel in Snorri's <i>Edda</i> and may (or may not) be the same as the unnamed woman warrior who challenges Brynhild in the poem <i>Brynhild's Ride to Hel</i>.
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—One of Neil Price's 51 individually named valkyries is Brynhild, who when challenged by Modgud replies, "Blame me not, lady of the rock, though I went on Viking raids."
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—Brynhild may or may not be the same woman as Sigrdrifa, the "battle-wise warrior" whom Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer discovers in a fire-ringed fortress wearing a helmet and dressed in ringmail.
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—And there's Brynhild's rival, Gudrun, who shows her warrior training when she defends her brothers. Says <i>The Greenland Lay of Atli</i>: "the fight was not gentle where she set her hand... [She] felled two warriors … She struck such a blow she cut his leg clean off. She struck another so he never got up again: she sent him to Hel, and her hands never shook."
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—Helgi Hjorvardsson, in the poem about him, is given his name by Svava. "She was a valkyrie and rode on the wind and the sea," says the poet. This line has usually been interpreted to mean she was a goddess, but it could just as well be a poetic description of a sailor. The poem continues, "She gave Helgi his name and shielded him often afterward in battle." She also protects him from a giant woman named Hrimgerd who didn't need weapons to kill: She crushed the ribs of men who came into her grasp.
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—Sigrun, in the two lays of Helgi Hunding's-Bane, is said to be Svava reborn; she first appears helmeted, in bloody armor, and carrying a spear with a banner waving from it. Later, it's said that Sigrun is again reincarnated as Kara.
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In the Icelandic sagas, you have:
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—Two warrior women named Hervor in <i>The Saga of Hervor</i>. The first is the famous warrior in the poem <i>Hervor's Song</i> (called by some translators <i>The Waking of Angantyr</i>) who opens her father's grave to retrieve his heirloom sword. She is described as "strong as a man": "As soon as she was able, she practised more with a bow and a sword and shield than at sewing or embroidery." Then, "taking a warrior's gear and weapons, she went alone to a place where there were some Vikings." She joined their band and "after a little while … became the leader."
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The second Hervor commands the border fortress between the Huns and the Goths. She is said to be happier in battle than other women were when chatting with their suitors. She goes down fighting and is avenged by her brother.
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—Thornbjorg in <i>The Saga of Hrolf Gautreksson</i> also grows up practicing the martial arts. She becomes a king and a war-leader and, at the end of the saga, commands the army that rescues her husband, King Hrolf, from the king of Ireland. Their meeting on the battlefield is beautifully dramatic: "Before him stood a most warlike man, fully armed. The man took off his helmet and stepped back—and King Hrolf realized it was Queen Thornbjorg."
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—<i>The Saga of the Volsungs</i> includes three warrior women we've already counted, Sigrun, Brynhild, and Gudrun. In this saga, Brynhild describes herself clearly as a warrior, saying, "I wear a helmet among the warrior kings, and I wish to remain in their warband. I was in battle with the King of Gardariki and our weapons were red with blood. This is what I desire. I want to fight."
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—There are also Randalin in <i>The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok</i>, Aslaug in the <i>Tale of Ragnar's Sons</i>, Freydis in the <i>Vinland Sagas</i>, the sorceress Thorhild in <i>Ljosvetninga Saga</i>, and two women without weapons, but with military skill and training: Nitida (in <i>Nitida Saga</i>) and Sedentiana (in <i>The Saga of Sigurd the Silent</i>).
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By any count, it's clear that the written sources name more women with weapons than they do women with keys. If we want to understand women's roles in the Viking Age, it's time to rethink our symbolism.
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*Sources for <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i> (and specifically for this blog post):
Neil Price, <i>The Viking Way</i> (Oxbow, 2019). See also his new book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780465096985" target="_blank">Children of Ash and Elm</a></i> (Basic Books, 2020)
Leszek Gardela, "Amazons of the North?" in <i>Hvanndalir</i> (DeGruyter, 2018). See also his new book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781636240688" target="_blank">Women and Weapons in the Viking Age</a></i> (Casemate, 2021)
Jóhanna Katrín Fridriksdóttir, <i>Women in Old Norse Literature</i> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also her new book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781350230309" target="_blank">Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World</a></i> (Bloomsbury, 2020)
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For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-64499797627382142062021-12-15T11:00:00.016-05:002021-12-15T11:00:00.172-05:00The Witch's HeartIn her novel, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780593099940" target="_blank">The Witch's Heart</a></i>, Genevieve Gornichec picks apart the ancient tapestry of Old Norse myths, sorts and irons out the colored threads, adds some narrative silver wire and sparkling jewels, and embroiders a stunning new story of the Norse gods and giants.
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Much of what we know about Norse mythology comes from one short book written in Iceland in the early 1200s by a man named Snorri Sturluson. It's called the Prose <i>Edda</i>, or Snorri's <i>Edda</i>. By the time Snorri wrote it, Iceland and the rest of Scandinavia had been Christian for 200 years. No one exclusively worshipped the old gods. Snorri himself was educated in a powerful Christian family. When Snorri was 17, his foster brother, Páll, was elected the Bishop of Skalholt.
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As I explain in my 2013 biography of him, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781137278876" target="_blank">Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths</a></i>, Snorri had no intention of "collecting" or "preserving" pagan myths for us to enjoy 800 years later--though that's what he did. Snorri was not thinking about his "legacy." Like every writer, he had an immediate audience and purpose in mind when he sat down to write. His audience was the 16-year-old Norwegian king. His purpose was to teach the young king to appreciate the poetry of the ancient North--so that he himself could obtain a powerful position at court.
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Snorri was an expert in the songs of the Vikings. He had memorized nearly a thousand poems and could write in the ancient skaldic style himself, with its convoluted word order, its strict rules about rhyme and meter and alliteration, and its many vague allusions to mythology. When he went to Norway in 1218, Snorri brought a new poem to recite. He expected to be named King's Skald, or court poet.
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But young King Hakon thought skaldic poetry was old-fashioned. It was too hard to understand. He preferred the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which were just then being translated from the French.
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Snorri must have been shocked. Skalds, or court poets, had been a fixture at the Norwegian court for 400 years. Skalds were a king's ambassadors, counselors, and keepers of history. They were part of the high ritual of his royal court, upholding the Viking virtues of generosity and valor. They legitimized his claim to kingship. They were time-binders: They wove the past into the present.
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Snorri wrote the <i>Edda</i> to teach the young king his heritage.
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To appease the bishops, who controlled the young king, Snorri put a Christian slant on the myths he told. He wasted few words on female characters, choosing instead stories that would excite a young man: stories of fast horses, magic swords, and trials of strength.
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When goddesses and giantesses do appear in Snorri's <i>Edda</i>, they are reduced to objects of lust--or disgust.
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Such as the one at the center of Genevieve Gornichec's <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780593099940" target="_blank">The Witch's Heart</a></i>.
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"There was a giantess called Angrboda in Giantland," Snorri writes (in the 1987 translation by Anthony Faulkes). "With her Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Iormungard (i.e. the Midgard serpent), the third is Hel. And when the gods realized that these three siblings were being brought up in Giantland, and when the gods traced prophecies stating that from these siblings great mischief and disaster would arise for them, then they all felt evil was to be expected from them, to begin with because of their mother's nature, but still worse because of their father's." The gods capture the three children and take them away--but Angrboda, their mother, lover of the Trickster God Loki, is never mentioned again.
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In <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780593099940" target="_blank">The Witch's Heart</a></i>, Genevieve Gornichec fills that void, imagining the Tale of Angrboda that Snorri never told. It's a love story, an origin story, a coming-of-age tale, and a quest, with an indomitable witch at its center. The mother of Loki's monster children will win a place in your heart.
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For more stories of powerful Viking women, see my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, or read the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-77340887146248721292021-12-08T11:00:00.030-05:002021-12-08T11:00:00.178-05:00Odin's WifeIn his <i>Edda</i>, the 13th-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson presents Norse mythology through a wisdom match between the clever King Gylfi and three gods--High, Just-as-High, and Third--who sit on thrones in Valhalla.
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Asked "Who is the highest and most ancient of all gods?" High responds with a list of twelve names, beginning with All-father. Later he applies the name All-father to Odin--along with 52 more names.
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"What a terrible lot of names you have given him!" objects King Gylfi in Anthony Faulkes’ 1987 translation. "One would need a great deal of learning to be able to give details and explanations of what events have given rise to each of these names."
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Responds High, "You cannot claim to be a wise man if you are unable to tell of these important happenings."
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Snorri Sturluson considered himself a wise man. In his <i>Edda</i> and in <i>Heimskringla</i>, his collection of sagas about Norway's kings, Snorri quotes apt lines from nearly a thousand poems, most of which had not been written down before.
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But because he wrote for an audience of one--young King Hakon of Norway, brought to the throne at age 14--Snorri's tales in these two books skew toward the interests of a boy. As I pointed out in my 2013 biography of him, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781137278876" target="_blank">Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths</a></i>, Snorri wasted few words on women, human or divine. It's no surprise that he fails to tell us the many names of Odin's wife, or to relate the events that gave rise to them.
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In <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780578430843" target="_blank">Odin's Wife: Mother Earth in Germanic Mythology</a></i>, William P. Reaves attempts to fill in the gaps in Snorri's Edda--proving himself a wise man by High's definition. Reaves is webmaster of the site <a href="http://germanicmythology.com" target="_blank">germanicmythology.com</a>, which aims to compile everything of interest to students of Norse mythology that exists in the public domain. It shouldn't surprise you that Odin's Wife is similarly comprehensive.
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Snorri tells us that Frigg is Odin's wife and the mother of his son Baldur, while the Earth, or Jörd, is the mother of Odin's son Thor. According to the <i>Edda</i>, these are two separate goddesses. But as Reaves points out, "while evidence for Odin's wife Frigg and his wife the Earth are contemporary and congruous--occurring at the same time in the same places and genres--they are never shown together. Like Diana Prince and Wonder Woman, we apparently never see Frigg and Jörd side by side." Both goddesses are also called by several other names; one they hold in common is Hlin, which means "protector."
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As Reaves lays out his "preponderance of evidence," the goddess Frigg leaps out of the shadows in which Snorri wrapped her. She convincingly becomes the powerful Earth-Mother and Mother of Gods, including not only Baldur and Thor, but also Freyr and Freyja, whom she had with her brother, Njörd. As Reaves concludes, "She is Odin’s equal in all respects, surpassing him in practical power."
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That Frigg sits beside Odin on his throne, watching (and meddling in) all the Nine Worlds, "should not come as a surprise," he adds: "The sons of Borr bestowed senses, wit, and spirit on Ask and Embla alike. Women are not subordinate to men. The sources, both religious and historical, are rife with strong, independent women. Both men and women appear on the battlefield, as mythological, historical, and archaeological evidence affirms. Equality of the sexes was a Germanic reality, long before modern times."
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See my complete review of <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780578430843" target="_blank">Odin's Wife: Mother Earth in Germanic Mythology</a></i> by William P. Reaves at <a href="https://themidgardian.com/2020/12/review-a-review-of-william-p-reaves-odins-wife-mother-earth-in-germanic-mythology" target="_blank">The Midgardian</a>.
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For more about the powerful women of the Viking Age, see my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, or read the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-22008575157559729032021-12-01T11:00:00.014-05:002021-12-01T11:00:00.169-05:00The Viking Creation StoryThe Viking Age, I was taught, was an era of strict gender roles. The woman ruled the household. The man was the trader, the traveler, the warrior.
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This interpretation—as I've noted previously on this blog—has been taught since the 1800s, the Victorian Age, when elite women were told to concern themselves only with church, children, and kitchen.
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But it’s not the only way to read the sources.
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In my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, I argue that roles in Viking society were decided—not by these Victorian ideas of men’s work vs. women’s work—but based on factors much harder to see.
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I was convinced this was true by studying Norse mythology.
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Our best sources on Norse mythology were written by the Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson. But Snorri is not trustworthy. In 2012, I wrote a biography of him (<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781137278876" target="_blank">Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths</a></i>) and showed that, not only did he put a Christian slant on the myths he told, he was a terrible misogynist.
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In writing down the Norse myths, Snorri wasted few words on females, human or divine. They did not fit his audience or his purpose.
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He began writing the Prose <i>Edda</i> in about 1220 for the 16-year-old Norwegian king to teach the young king to appreciate the poetry of the ancient North, with its many allusions to mythology; Snorri’s real goal was to gain an influential position at court.
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Snorri wrote <i>Heimskringla</i>, his history of the kings of Norway, during the same king’s reign, again to impress the younger man.
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Women in both books are honored mothers or objects of lust, Mary or Eve, as they were in Snorri’s own lifetime. It was the orthodox view of women in medieval Christian society, where even marriage and childbirth were considered matters for churchmen to control.
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But Snorri gives us glimpses of the myths he left out—ancient stories that reflect the values of the pre-Christian Vikings. One of these is the Norse creation myth.
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Here's how it goes: In the beginning two driftwood logs, one elm and one ash, are found on the seashore by three wandering gods. These gods give the wood human shape and bring it to life with blood, breath, and curious minds.
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Unlike the Christian creation myth, where Eve is an afterthought, fashioned out of Adam’s rib, in the Norse myth Embla (the female) and Ask (the male) are equal:
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They are made at the same time out of nearly the same stuff. As different as an ash tree and an elm, they make a good team.
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Ash wood was used for spear shafts and oars. A good rower was sometimes called an “ash-person.”
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Elm was used for wagon wheels. It was also the preferred wood for short, powerful bows: One archer is nicknamed “elm-twig.”
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Both woods had roles in peace and war, for transportation and for killing. Their uses were determined by their size and strength, their resistance to rot or tensile stress, the denseness of their grain, and where they grew.
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I think the same was likely true for the men and women of the Viking Age. They were equals, their roles in society being decided—not by gender—but based on ambition, ability, family ties, and wealth.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWs3M6TRcCUBx7W7qU2uFSiNPvFoiNAJj8wJg6cDEY_ZgWGMlEf8RR3_QVm7XinASMt_tl6pQdKc62kQnnkJh1Hai95ttKe2Oo5klF4VZ1Ms6CFvmdVLbi4_PXXdac7uFMEoBsKPd1F_B9/s1200/RealValkyrie_Whim_r1_v3.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWs3M6TRcCUBx7W7qU2uFSiNPvFoiNAJj8wJg6cDEY_ZgWGMlEf8RR3_QVm7XinASMt_tl6pQdKc62kQnnkJh1Hai95ttKe2Oo5klF4VZ1Ms6CFvmdVLbi4_PXXdac7uFMEoBsKPd1F_B9/s320/RealValkyrie_Whim_r1_v3.png"/></a></div>
For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-72105689355445575652021-11-24T11:00:00.015-05:002021-11-24T11:00:00.182-05:00Words of WisdomA year or two ago, a friend compiled a book of advice for his son's 18th birthday and asked me to contribute. Here is what I wrote:
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When I was young, I was given three pieces of economic advice that gave me the freedom to live the life I wanted, as a writer.
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1. Never pay interest.
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That means paying off the credit card every month. That means buying a car with cash. That means no mortgage and no student loans. Is it possible? Not always, but it's worth striving for. If you can't afford it, you probably don't need it. There is no such thing as "shopping therapy." Buying things only makes you a slave to things.
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In the Old Norse literature I study, there's a set of maxims called <i>Havamál</i>, or "Words of the High One," supposedly spoken by Odin himself more than a thousand years ago. It says (in the translation by Paul Taylor and W.H. Auden):
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<i>A kind word need not cost much,<br>
The price of praise can be cheap:<br>
With half a loaf and an empty cup<br>
I found myself a friend.</i>
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2. Never have monthly bills that must be paid.
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Again, pay cash or don't buy it. But some things are unavoidable: the phone bill, the electric bill, the internet, and you have to live somewhere, so there will be either rent or a mortgage payment. My husband and I were lucky enough to be able to build a house out in the countryside (where the rules are more lax) and pay for it as we went. It was small and, at first, quite rustic (no electricity!). But as <i>Havamál</i> says,
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<i>A small hut of one's own is better,<br>
A man is master at home:<br>
A couple of goats and a corded roof<br>
Still are better than begging.</i>
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We passed on the goats and got Icelandic horses—which is quite an unnecessary expense, but at least not one we need to pay monthly, and they make us happy.
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3. Keep enough cash in the bank to cover one year’s necessary expenses.
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That includes food, taxes, utilities, a mortgage if you have one (we didn't), insurance of various kinds and, for us, hay and shoeing and vet bills for the horses. It also means making up a yearly budget and sticking to it.
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If you follow these three precepts, and have a little luck, you are free. If you have a job, you know they need you more than you need them. You can quit at any time and take a whole year to find a new job without ending up on the street.
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If you don’t have a job and don’t want one (both my husband and I have been freelance writers now for over 15 years), you know how much money you need to make each year to replenish the bank account.
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Once you've done that, you can relax—travel, ride the horses, write something that won't sell. It's up to you.
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Too many people get caught up in the money economy. They buy things they can't afford and then are stuck working in a job they hate in order to pay for them—and they usually end up paying twice as much, in the end, counting the interest and loan fees.
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Money is not nearly as valuable as your time and your freedom. Says <i>Havamál</i>,
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<i>Once he has won wealth enough,<br>
A man should not crave for more…</i>
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And:
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<i>The generous and bold have the best lives.</i>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTphT1_joTyMnVEGYzfvvGwPDXeGKHQUCgJDOunBis7Jg4LT1fptnm7T3M4tjh_SPn61m3SffmuoKvjjh_x34sLiH-bVdNC4TrqZr79UBNlFSHc5UWrewr5qDQvu2UaxQphJApnWvoWYgg/s1200/TheRealValkyrie-Brown-9781250200846-v2.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTphT1_joTyMnVEGYzfvvGwPDXeGKHQUCgJDOunBis7Jg4LT1fptnm7T3M4tjh_SPn61m3SffmuoKvjjh_x34sLiH-bVdNC4TrqZr79UBNlFSHc5UWrewr5qDQvu2UaxQphJApnWvoWYgg/s320/TheRealValkyrie-Brown-9781250200846-v2.png"/></a></div>
For more on my latest book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
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<i>Illustrations by Gerhard Munthe from an 1899 edition of Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-50873750608353393602021-11-17T11:00:00.019-05:002021-11-17T11:00:00.195-05:00The Dangerous Women of Oseberg"What makes a woman dangerous 1000 years after her death?"
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Archaeologist Marianne Moen asked that question in 2016 on a blog called "<a href="http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/08/22/women-viking-age/" target="_blank">The Dangerous Women Project</a>."
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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..."
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTG3A6laroX-Z4gm_-QYT9WRWgJPLRS3V2XmkZE7qR8rYh5aNw9HuAnS-dpxK7P04dfHB_7F4zkfricpIsNI_eOQ-BsP_SP0DBAVe3tSmQIp1vf28y-npQzh7rqXNkmLUvtUd7CXmEGuQC/s2048/Oseberg+prow-NMB.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="5" height="320" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTG3A6laroX-Z4gm_-QYT9WRWgJPLRS3V2XmkZE7qR8rYh5aNw9HuAnS-dpxK7P04dfHB_7F4zkfricpIsNI_eOQ-BsP_SP0DBAVe3tSmQIp1vf28y-npQzh7rqXNkmLUvtUd7CXmEGuQC/s320/Oseberg+prow-NMB.jpg"/></a></div>
Marianne's forthright and honest approach in this essay impressed me. I found and read her 2010 master's thesis from the University of Oslo, <i><a href="https://uio.academia.edu/MarianneMoen" target="_blank">The Gendered Landscape: A discussion on gender, status, and power expressed in the Viking Age mortuary landscape</a></i>, and was even more impressed. There, Marianne outlines the history of how archaeologists have gendered graves--based on very outdated ideas of what men and women are like. She then presents a new interpretation of Oseberg, comparing it to the other famous ship burial from Vestfold in southern Norway, at Gokstad.
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When I went to Norway in 2018 to complete the research for my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, 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.
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"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.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLW4K-boSAeBcwokKf_3MGbzZck0lHEbDbibrqXtELveaZXR8-0DN_PqhH5Blv80PdeDgcTHKYJBoNOxDziHFZroKT3nwJBceo13N_UzgHfNAzUFY5p9t8w76AoihqEO8AIiJM-dhBnJEQ/s2048/Oseberg+NMB-1.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLW4K-boSAeBcwokKf_3MGbzZck0lHEbDbibrqXtELveaZXR8-0DN_PqhH5Blv80PdeDgcTHKYJBoNOxDziHFZroKT3nwJBceo13N_UzgHfNAzUFY5p9t8w76AoihqEO8AIiJM-dhBnJEQ/s320/Oseberg+NMB-1.jpg"/></a></div>
<i>Captions: The Oseberg mound today. Above, the Oseberg ship in the (old) Viking Ship Museum in Norway. Below, the Gokstad mound today.</i><br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBw8KyLCGsN_AMZD4fP558enR85QrBuaHCy5ELM4SEuvG2cEgXTld5PBxiSniQfDGXRunqaaJ6e5jr6TDLAgWpAU52OIZKvfpEM71fi67OheTcGE5x0XKJlUIOCU9D7g4Ehx6fT7yeP6fC/s2048/Gokstad+today-NMB.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBw8KyLCGsN_AMZD4fP558enR85QrBuaHCy5ELM4SEuvG2cEgXTld5PBxiSniQfDGXRunqaaJ6e5jr6TDLAgWpAU52OIZKvfpEM71fi67OheTcGE5x0XKJlUIOCU9D7g4Ehx6fT7yeP6fC/s320/Gokstad+today-NMB.jpg"/></a></div>
"Then you read about them in academic treatments," she continued. "Here, you've got the Gokstad chieftain--it's always the Gokstad chieftain, you know--and there, you have the Oseberg women. Oh, who were they? We just don't know. They're ladies. How come? That's very strange! Were they religious spies? Or was there originally a man there in the grave and he's disappeared?"
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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."
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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.
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The backlash was fierce. Even scholars who had, in the past, collaborated with the DNA-testing team, accused them of having tested the wrong bones, or of polluting the DNA, or of having made some other crucial mistake. These critics were not ready to accept that their picture of gender roles in the Viking Age was wrong. They were not ready to accept that something they thought was a fact was, in reality, only an assumption.
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"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."
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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.
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I asked Marianne how she would respond to that criticism.
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"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.
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"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."
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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.
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Again, Marianne disagrees.
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"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."
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But Viking men are not often found buried with weapons either, I pointed out. Not every man was a warrior.
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"Exactly," said Marianne. "It was only really exceptional men."
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When I first began talking about writing my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>, I heard that complaint from some of my scholarly friends: But you’re only talking about exceptional women, they said.
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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?
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"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."
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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 <i><a href="https://uio.academia.edu/MarianneMoen" target="_blank">Challenging Gender: A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape</a></i>.
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I asked her to tell me a little about it.
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"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 [“<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928638" target="_blank">Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe</a>.”]. I think we should stop thinking about the two-sex model, with binary men and women as complete opposites."
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"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?"
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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 <a href="https://uio.academia.edu/MarianneMoen" target="_blank">Academia.edu</a> page and at <a href="https://sciencenorway.no/archaeology-forskningno-gender-roles/viking-men-were-buried-with-cooking-gear/1554807" target="_blank">Science Norway</a>.
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For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-86348603340865338852021-11-10T11:00:00.019-05:002021-11-13T14:35:37.875-05:00The Myth of the Mighty Viking Ship<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggJgdz5kz10_RM1JsPSLH4yCxQcJWgntFCP7B6A_jgFg-cG7SDoy8C9_1QbSC6iMf9m7Z6BedA3ktu_gUU2GbrRDCTTE8CntY9em90sp3q4_LtGtmhUezf4WgLutMg2cDPfHCUXl8ln1lD/s499/LongShips.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="5" height="320" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggJgdz5kz10_RM1JsPSLH4yCxQcJWgntFCP7B6A_jgFg-cG7SDoy8C9_1QbSC6iMf9m7Z6BedA3ktu_gUU2GbrRDCTTE8CntY9em90sp3q4_LtGtmhUezf4WgLutMg2cDPfHCUXl8ln1lD/s320/LongShips.jpg"/></a></div>
In the midst of World War II, with the Nazis extolling their Viking heritage, the Swedish writer Frans G. Bengtsson began writing "a story that people could enjoy reading, like <i>The Three Musketeers</i> or the <i>Odyssey</i>."
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Bengtsson had made his literary reputation with the biography of an 18th-century king. But for this story he tried a new genre, the historical novel, and a new period of time. His Vikings are common men, smart, witty, and open-minded. "When encountering a Jew who allies with the Vikings and leads them to treasure beyond their dreams, they are duly grateful," notes one critic. "Bengtsson in effect throws the Viking heritage back in the Nazis' face."
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His effect on that Viking heritage, however, was not benign. His story, <i>Rode Orm</i>, is one of the most-read and most-loved books in Swedish, and has been translated into over twenty languages; in English it's <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781590173466" target="_blank">The Long Ships</a></i>.
Part of the story takes place on the East Way, which the red-haired Orm travels in a lapstrake ship with 24 pairs of oars. Based on the Oseberg ship’s 15 pairs of oars or the Gokstad ship’s 16, such a mighty vessel would stretch nearly 100 feet long and weigh 16 to 18 tons, empty. To cross the many portages between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, Red Orm’s "cheerful crew" threw great logs in front of the prow and hauled the boat along these rollers "in exchange for swigs of 'dragging beer,'" Bengtsson wrote.
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This, say experimental archaeologists, is "unproven," "improbable," and—after several tries with replica ships—"not possible."
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But Bengtsson's fiction burned itself into popular memory. Early scholars were convinced, too: A drawing of dozens of men attempting to roll a mighty ship on loose logs illustrates the eastern voyages in the classic compendium <i>The Viking</i> from 1966.
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"Seldom has anything been surrounded by so much myth and fantasy" as the Viking ship, notes Gunilla Larsson; her 2007 Ph.D. thesis, <i><a href="http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A169651&dswid=-930" target="_blank">Ship and Society: Maritime Ideology in Late Iron Age Sweden</a></i>, completely changes our understanding of the Vikings' eastern voyages.
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Like the myth of the Viking housewife with her keys, which I wrote about last week, the myth of the mighty Viking ship is so common it's taken to be true. But the facts do not back it up.
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In the 1990s, archaeologists attempted several times to take replica Viking ships between rivers or across isthmuses using the log-rolling method. They failed. They scaled down their ships. They still failed. Their ships were a half to a third the length of Red Orm's mighty ship. They weighed only one to two tons, not 16 tons. Yet they could not be cheerfully hauled by their crews, no matter how much beer was provided. The task was inefficient even when horses—or wheels or winches or wagons—were added.
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We think bigger is better, but it's not.
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The beautiful Oseberg ship with its spiral prow and the sleek Gokstad ship, praised as an "ideal form" and "a poem carved in wood," have been considered the classic Viking ships from the time they were first unearthed. Images of these Norwegian ships grace uncountable books on Viking Age history, uncountable museum exhibitions, uncountable souvenirs in Scandinavian gift shops.
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But a third ship of equal importance for understanding the Viking Age was discovered in 1898, after Gokstad (1880) and before Oseberg (1903), by a Swedish farmer digging a ditch to dry out a boggy meadow. He axed through the wreck and laid his drain pipes. The landowner, a bit of an antiquarian, decided to rescue the boat and pulled the pieces of old wood out of the ground. His collection founded a local museum, but the boat pieces lay ignored in the attic—unmarked, unnumbered, with no drawings to say how they had lain in the earth when found—until 1980, when a radiocarbon survey of the museum's contents dated them to the 11th century. Their great age was confirmed by tree-ring data, which found the wood for the boat had been cut before 1070.
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In the 1990s, archaeologist Gunilla Larsson took on the task of puzzling the pieces back into a boat. She had bits of much of the hull: of the keel, the stem and stern and five wide strakes, even some of the wooden rail attached to the gunwale. She had most of the frames, one bite, and two knees. About 2 feet in the middle of the boat was missing: where the ditch went through. The iron rivets had rusted away, but the rivet holes in the wood were easy to see and, since the distance between them varied, the parts could only go together one way. The wood itself had been flattened by time, but it was still sturdy enough to be soaked in hot water and bent into shape—the same technique the original boatbuilder had used.
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When she had solved this 3D jigsaw puzzle, she engaged the National Maritime Museum in Stockholm to help her mount the pieces on an iron frame; the Viks Boat went on display in 1996.
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Then she created a replica, Tälja, and tested it by sailing, rowing, and portaging around Lake Malaren. Tälja glided up shallow streams, its pliable planks bending and sliding over rocks. With only the power of its crew, it was easily portaged from one watershed to the next, from Lake Malaren to Lake Vanern in the west, itself draining into the Kattegat.
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A second Viks Boat replica, Fornkåre, was built in 2012 and taken on the Vikings' East Way from Lake Malaren to Novgorod the first year, then south, by rivers and lakes, some 250 miles through Russia the second year. Concludes Fornkåre’s builder and captain, Lennart Widerberg, "The vessel proved itself capable of traveling this ancient route" from Birka to Byzantium.
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The Viks Boat is 31 feet long—longer than two earlier replicas that failed the East Way portage test—and about 7 feet wide, comfortable for a crew of 8 to 10. Its replicas passed the portage test for two reasons. First, they were built, like the original, with strakes that were radially split, not sawn. The resulting board is easy to bend and hard to break—at less than half an inch thick. The resulting boat is equally seaworthy at almost half the weight of the same size boat built with the same lapstrake technique, but using sawn boards. Empty, the Viks Boat replicas weigh only half a ton—about as much as a horse.
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The second reason the Viks Boat replicas proved adequate for the East Way was that archaeologists had set aside Frans Bengtsson’s fantastical log-rolling technique for crossing from stream to stream.
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By studying the ways the Sami had portaged their dugout canoes through the waterways of Sweden and Finland throughout history, the archaeologists began to see signs of similar portage-ways around Lake Malaren. They built some themselves and had teams race replica ships through an obstacle course of portage types: smooth grassy paths, log-lined roads or ditches (with the logs aligned in the direction of travel), and bogs layered with branches. A team of two adults and seven 17-year-olds finished a winding, half-mile course with Talja in an hour. When the portage was straight over 4-inch-thick logs sunk into the mud so they didn’t shift, the boat raced at 150 feet a minute.
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The beauty of the Gokstad ship, its poetic quality, comes from its curves, the hull swelling out from the gunwale then tightly back in, making a distinctive V-shape down to the deep, straight keel. These concave curves improve the ship’s sailing ability at sea. But the keel cuts too deep to float a shallow, stony stream like those that connect the Baltic to the Black Sea.
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Over a portage, even the minimal keel of the Viks Boat replicas needed to be protected with an easily replaceable covering of birch, as had been found on the original. The Old Norse name for this false keel was <i>drag</i>. To "set a drag under someone's pride" was to encourage arrogance.
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Historians and archaeologists of the Viking Age have long benefited from an ideological false keel. With the Viks Boat taking its rightful place as an exemplar of the Viking ship, it's time to knock off that damaged drag and replace it. Says Larsson, "We should get used to a completely different picture of the Scandinavian traveling eastward in the Viking Age, one that is far from the traditional image of the male Viking warrior in the prow of a big warship."
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<i>This essay was excerpted from my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>. To learn more, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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Click on the title to download and read Gunilla Larsson's 2007 Ph.D. thesis, <i><a href="http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A169651&dswid=-930" target="_blank">Ship and Society: Maritime Ideology in Late Iron Age Sweden</a></i>. I highly recommend it.
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</i><i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-45125783606988922202021-11-03T11:00:00.005-04:002021-11-13T14:35:17.930-05:00The Myth of the Viking KeysThe Viking Age, I was taught, was an era of strict gender roles. The woman ruled the household: Her domain was <i>innanstokks</i>, "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.
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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.
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The woman's role, in turn, was symbolized by the keys she carried at her belt.
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Except she didn't.
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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.
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<i>Caption: Illustration of Thor as a bride by Elmer Boyd Smith, from "In the Days of Giants: A Book of Norse Tales" (1902).</i>
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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.
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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.
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Surely archaeology backs up the well-known image of the Viking housewife with her keys, you insist.
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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, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/10177320/Truth_and_reproduction_of_knowledge._Critical_thoughts_on_the_interpretation_and_understanding_of_Iron-Age_keys" target="_blank">archaeologist Heidi Berg in 2015</a> sets only 143 keys, half of which were found in men's graves. In Denmark, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/15598703/The_symbolism_of_keys_in_female_graves_on_Zealand_during_the_Viking_Age" target="_blank">Pernille Pantmann reported in 2011</a> that only nine out of 102 female graves she studied contained keys, and none of these "key graves" otherwise fit the model of "housewife."
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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.
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<i>Caption: For a new look at the meaning of keys, see "<a href="https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-viking-age/the-people/women/" target="_blank">Women in the Viking Age</a>" on the website of the Danish National Museum, where this image comes from.</i>
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By accepting the 19th-century stereotype of men with swords and women with keys, we legitimize the idea that women should stay at home.
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We reduce the role models for every modern girl who visits a museum or reads a history book.
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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.
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How would I re-interpret the role of women in Viking society? I try to answer that question in my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>. To learn more, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-60048549471638091622021-10-27T11:25:00.004-04:002021-11-13T14:34:51.835-05:00Children of Ash and ElmIf you don't lurk on <a href="https://www.academia.edu" target="_blank">Academia.edu</a>, as I do, looking for scholarly articles on Vikings, you'll be shocked by the depiction of the Viking world in Neil Price's <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780465096985" target="_blank">Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings</a></i> (Basic Books, 2020). And even if you do think you're caught up on the latest thinking and research on who the Vikings were and how their society was organized, you still need to read this book.
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If you love Norse mythology and the Icelandic sagas and the stories they tell about the Vikings, you will be as eager as I am to separate the runes and the names of our heroes from the white supremacist neo-Nazis who are trying to co-opt them. Price's <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780465096985" target="_blank">Children of Ash and Elm</a></i> gives you the facts you need.
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It's time to put an end to the idea that the Viking world was ruled by white men.
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"The Viking world this book explores," Price writes, "was a strongly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic place, with all this implies in terms of population movement, interaction (in every sense of the word, including the most intimate), and the relative tolerance required. This extended far back into Northern prehistory. There was never any such thing as a 'pure Nordic' bloodline, and the people of the time would probably have been baffled by the very notion.... They were as individually varied as every reader of this book."
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It's also time to put an end to the idea that the Viking culture is one we want to live in today. These were people who participated in "ritual rape, wholesale slaughter and enslavement, and human sacrifice," Price says. "Anyone who regards them in a 'heroic' light needs to think again."
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None of which means we shouldn't study them, tell their stories, or thieve from their ideas.
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The way the Vikings saw themselves, for example, is more sophisticated than ours. According to Price, they did not divide themselves into body and soul, but into four parts: You had a shape that could shift into a bird's or a bear's. You had a mind (which included your personality, temperament, and character). You had your luck, and if you lost it part (or all) of you died. And you had a fetch, which was "a separate being that somehow dwelled inside every human"—and this fetch was always female. "How marvellous, and how utterly subversive of the male-focussed stereotype," Price notes, "that every single Viking man literally had a spirit-woman inside him."
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Gender is one theme Price explores throughout <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780465096985" target="_blank">Children of Ash and Elm</a></i>, and one that particularly resonated with me, having just finished writing <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i> (which is partly based on Price's work).
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Price notes that patriarchy "was subverted at every turn, often in ways that—fascinatingly—were built into its structures." While he goes along with the standard idea that men's roles and women's roles in Viking society were different, he urges us to "consider the traits that were shared across gender boundaries, in which identity was formed as much by social role as by gender or sex." We also must not ignore what he calls "the vast ocean of lives lived on different terms."
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One of these lives is that of the warrior buried in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden—long considered to be the ultimate Viking warrior burial—whom Price and his colleagues confirmed through DNA tests was female. Their papers on the Birka Warrior Woman in 2017 and 2019 have been both praised and condemned, but Price, discussing the work in <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780465096985" target="_blank">Children of Ash and Elm</a></i>, does not back down.
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"Taking a clear-eyed look at the archaeological data," he writes, "it seems that there really were female warriors in the Viking Age, including at least one of command rank."
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I wholeheartedly agree, and in my new book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>, I recreate her life and times.
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For my complete review of <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780465096985" target="_blank">Children of Ash and Elm</a></i>, see <i><a href="https://themidgardian.com/2020/08/review-of-neil-prices-children-of-ash-and-elm-a-history-of-the-vikings-by-nancy-marie-brown/" target="_blank">The Midgardian Magazine</a></i>.
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For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-75258180163242368792021-10-20T11:00:00.014-04:002021-11-13T14:34:40.384-05:00The Birka WarriorsIn June 2018, I traveled to Sweden to interview Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonsson at the Historiska Museet in Stockholm. Charlotte was the lead author of the September 2017 paper that inspired my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>.
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That paper, "<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23308" target="_blank">A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics</a>," published in the <i>American Journal of Physical Anthropology</i>, 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.
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There was a fierce backlash. Despite the science that said Bj581 was taller than most people around her (5'5" was average), strong, well-fed, and well-traveled, the critics zeroed in on her sex: How could the ultimate Viking be a woman?
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There must be some mistake, they said.
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"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 <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/viking-warrior-women-reassessing-birka-chamber-grave-bj581/7CC691F69FAE51DDE905D27E049FADCD" target="_blank">Antiquity</i> in 2019</a>. "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."
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The bones had been stored in Stockholm since the grave was originally excavated in 1878--one of 1,100 graves Hjalmar Stolpe unearthed on the island of Birka. Stolpe was one of the founders of Swedish archaeology. "He was trained in stratigraphy," Charlotte told me. He introduced the use of graph paper to the field, so excavations would be drawn to scale. "He wrote articles on why you have to be so precise when you document things. We can trust his plans, they’re very good. He was meticulous."
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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."
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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.
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"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."
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If anyone should know what a Birka warrior looks like, it would be Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonsson. Her Ph.D. thesis in archaeological science, <i><a href="https://www.academia.edu/1429897/The_Birka_Warrior_the_material_culture_of_a_martial_society" target="_blank">The Birka Warrior: The Material Culture of a Martial Society</a></i> (Stockholm University, 2006), is based on her first 10 years of research at Birka.
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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."
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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.
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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 <i>hnefatafl</i>, 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.
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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."
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Why is it so hard for people to accept that the ultimate Birka warrior was a woman?
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"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."
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The people who buried the woman in grave Bj581 had something to say. Something we should listen to. They thought it was important.
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"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."
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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
<a href="https://shmm.academia.edu/CharlotteHedenstiernaJonson" target="_blank">https://shmm.academia.edu/CharlotteHedenstiernaJonson</a>.
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For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-33417920756589774632021-10-13T11:41:00.014-04:002021-11-13T14:34:11.870-05:00The Valkyries' Loom"The warp is made / of human entrails; / human heads / are used as weights; / the heddle rods / are blood-wet spears ... "
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<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780813066622" target="_blank">The Valkyries' Loom</a></i> by Michèle Hayeur Smith begins with lines from this famous poem in <i>Njáls Saga</i>, of valkyries weaving a web of war. But Hayeur Smith is not interested in valkyries--or warfare. She didn't write a book like <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>, my exploration of warrior women in the Viking Age. She doesn't even confine herself to the Viking Age.
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Her book, a study of "Female Power in the North Atlantic," as its subtitle says, has a much broader scope. She is taking on a thousand years of women's work--a thousand years in which women's ability to transform wooly sheep into woven cloth determined the success, or failure, of societies.
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The poem, she says, "suggests that powerful magic and the control of fate would be realized in these weaving huts through textile production."
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Hayeur Smith nearly proves that supposition true. She does prove, through a careful examination of archaeological data, myths, and literature that textile production was indeed a female magic, and a source of female power in Iceland and Greenland for many centuries.
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Let's begin with the sheep: the Northern (or European Vari-Colored) Short-Tail sheep. It has a coarse outer coat and a fluffy undercoat "soft as merino wool." Today, Icelanders mix the two, to create the lopi yarn used to knit Icelandic sweaters. For a thousand years, though, Icelandic women combed the wool, using the strong outer hair for the warp and the soft inner hair for the weft when weaving cloth on their standing looms, in which the warp was weighted (not by human heads, but by stones) to keep the web taut.
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From the 800s to the 18th century, every farm in Iceland had a warp-weighted loom. To keep her family of four well-clothed, Hayeur Smith calculates, the average woman spent 260 days of each year, working 8 hours a day, just spinning yarn and weaving cloth.
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A medium-sized farm of 10 people needed 2 women working at clothes-making full-time (8 hours a day) for 325 days each. A chieftain's estate (20 people) and a bishop's manor (40 people) needed 4 and 8 women, respectively, assigned to textile work 8 hours a day, 325 days a year.
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Dyeing the cloth was extra. (Many of the archaeological samples Hayeur Smith examines tested positive for indigotin--they were dyed blue, using the woad plant.)
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Cutting and sewing the garments took even more time.
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And that's just for basic clothing--no fancy embroidery or tablet-woven borders or silk applique (as we know the Vikings loved).
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Bedding was also extra work. Bags and bandages were extra, as were shrouds to bury the Christian dead. These, Hayeur Smith suggests, might have been made out of old clothes. Many of the archaeological finds she examines in Greenland are clothes that were patched with old scraps. "People were reusing every fragment of cloth to repair or salvage garments," she notes. Using accelerated mass spectrometry, for example, she finds that the crown of one tall wool hat from Greenland was 150 years older than the hat's sides.
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Hayeur Smith barely touches on the woman-power needed to weave sails--without which no Viking ever went anywhere. These, too, were woven from sheep's wool on warp-weighted looms, in a weave much like that used for clothing. (Sailcloth was then treated with animal fat and red ochre to make it windproof.)
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Not only did Iceland's women keep the ships sailing and the people clothed. By studying the spin direction of the yarn, the types of weaves, and the thread counts, Hayeur Smith concludes that "during the medieval period, Icelandic women were weaving money in abundance."
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From 1050 to 1550, a standardized weave of wool cloth called <i>vaðmál</i> was used instead of silver for both local trades, taxes and tithes, and as foreign exports. <i>Vaðmál</i> comes from <i>váð</i> (stuff, cloth) and <i>mál</i> (a measure), meaning “cloth measured to a standard.” Quality was critical. The earliest Icelandic laws controlling how it was made and assessed date to 1117. An illustration from a 15th-century lawbook suggests women had a role in both: In the picture, a woman holding some cloth challenges a man carrying a measuring stick. "Are you the King's steward?" she asks.
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"Because <i>vaðmál</i> was a currency produced by women," Hayeur Smith concludes, "it was not just a product traded by men but was the result of a symbiotic relationship between the sexes, in which both women and men were heavily invested." <i>Vaðmál</i> "provided a mechanism through which Icelanders could survive" after the country became a colony of Norway, in the 13th century, then Denmark, in the 14th. <i>Vaðmál</i> "linked Icelandic households to ports, markets, and consumers" in Europe well into the 17th century, when the textile trade was globalized, and even the 18th, when weaving was industrialized.
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In Greenland, weaving went a different way. Cloth was never standardized. It never became a form of currency. Not only did Greenlanders recycle cloth, they wove many more kinds. Archaeologists have recovered samples of two kinds of plain twills, panama twills, diamond twills, pile weaves, and striped or checked cloth. Greenland's weavers were weaving for their families, not to pay taxes or rents.
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And when Greenland's climate got colder, in the 14th century, Greenlandic women created a new weave, using much more yarn in the weft to create a denser, warmer cloth. "The invention of Greenland’s weft-dominant cloth," says Hayeur Smith, "was the result of women taking direct action to devise survival strategies in the face of depleting resources and climate fluctuations."
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It wasn't enough. The Norse settlements in Greenland disappeared in the 1400s. Unlike the valkyries at their loom, Greenland's Norse women could not weave their own fates.
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<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780813066622" target="_blank">The Valkyries' Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic</a></i> was published by the University Press of Florida in 2020. It's a detailed, fact-filled, and eye-opening study of the power of women from the Viking Age to modern times. I highly recommend it.
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For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-41706355843107756192021-10-06T11:07:00.012-04:002021-11-13T14:33:57.281-05:00Men of Terror"Sometime near the end of the tenth century, a man named Fraði died in Sweden. His kinsmen raised a granite runestone in his memory in Denmark. Although the message carved into the stone is hard to interpret, it appears to tell us that Fraði was the first among all Vikings and that he was the terror of men. What did Fraði do in his lifetime that made him so admired…?"
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So begins <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781594163609" target="_blank">Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat</a></i> by William R. Short and Reynir A. Óskarson.
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Emphasis on the "comprehensive." If you have any interest in Viking Age weapons or fighting techniques, or are curious if the heroes in the Icelandic Sagas could really have performed their heroic feats, this 350-page, 2-column book is the one to reach for.
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It's got everything (with one exception, which we'll get to later): the Viking mindset, shields and armor, battle tactics, raiding and dueling...
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Sax, axe, sword, spear, bow and arrows: Short and Óskarson describe each weapon in great detail--enough that you can make one, if you have the skills and materials--and give copious examples from the sagas, myths, and other literary sources of how each weapon was used and thought of. Numerous illustrations and charts complement their descriptions.
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But what really makes <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781594163609" target="_blank">Men of Terror</a></i> stand out from similar books on Viking Age weaponry are the sections on the "physics of" each weapon.
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The long, single-edged knife called a sax (or, less correctly, a scramasax), for example, is "a robust, trusty weapon." Designed for hacking (not stabbing), a sax, compared to a sword, is "less likely to break or fail when abused."
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But it takes more raw strength to kill with a sax.
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Here's why: "Compared to other cutting weapons such as the axe and sword, the sax is generally shorter and lighter, with most of the mass distributed closer to the hand than to the tip. A computer model of the weapon shows the smaller effective mass at the contact point and the lower linear velocities at impact together result in less energy delivered to the target when cutting with a sax compared to cutting with an axe or a sword, all other things being equal. Measurements confirm the model. The energy delivered by a replica sax to a target measured about 40 percent less than the energy delivered by a replica sword, not dissimilar to what the computer model predicted."
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Follow the footnotes and you can peer into Short's Viking research studio, Hurstwic, in Massachusetts. There, he and his team attached a three-axis accelerometer to a heavy boxing-type bag (fixed so it couldn't swing). Multiple fighters attacked the target on the bag multiple times, with a replica sax, sword, one-handed axe, and two-handed axe. The data was recorded, checked, averaged, and then compared to a computer model built from the physical parameters of each weapon and how the hand grasps it.
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<i>Caption: Scenes from the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/hurstwic" target="_blank">Hurstwic Facebook</a> page.</i>
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Did I mention Short is a research scientist with a degree from MIT and dozens of patents? His approach to reverse-engineering Viking combat techniques, he explains, is to "create a hypothesis that can be tested" and then to test it again and again. If you want data, this book has it.
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The physics of the sax may explain why saxes are so rare in Viking sources. Archaeologists in Norway, for example, count 130 swords for every sax they find and, according to Short's own calculations, "only about 6 percent of the attacks in the [Icelandic Family] sagas are made with saxes." Perhaps also, he and Óskarson speculate, "it is for this reason that saxes were the prized weapon of jötnar (giants), ghosts, and men who had the strength of a giant."
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Strength was also the deciding factor, Short and Óskarson argue, in wrestling or "empty-hand combat." In the sagas, this type of fighting is called <i>glíma</i> or <i>fang</i>. It is "the only combative activity alive today that holds a documented, nearly unbroken line that can be traced back to the Vikings," they say, but warn that the art has changed. "In the Viking Age, strength and power were valued in a wrestler," they argue, "but in modern <i>glíma</i>, finesse, agility, and beauty are what is most prized."
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Viking <i>fang</i> "was a test of a man’s strength in a society that placed a premium on strength." It was the sport of Thor, the strongest of the gods.
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As such, it "gives us clues about the mindset of the Vikings in combat," say Short and Óskarson. Wrestlers "need to be constantly on alert." They need to act "with 100 percent determination.... A warrior who has as his basis or foundation an aggressive, power-based wrestling would stand differently than a warrior who has as his basis a more technical system of wrestling or a striking art. A fighter’s lowering his center of gravity and adhering strictly to the most functional way to keep his balance gives us clues as to how he would stand in a combative situation.... The core of fang centered on raw power, swift movement, and cunning."
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Some readers (like me) may have been annoyed by the sexist language in these quotations from <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781594163609" target="_blank">Men of Terror</a></i>. They are not a mistake. <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781594163609" target="_blank">Men of Terror</a></i> is a book-length argument against my thesis, in <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>, that women could be warriors in the Viking Age. Despite the fact that Thor's opponent in his famous wrestling match (as Short and Óskarson do point out) is a woman--the old giant woman Elli, a personification of old age--they believe Viking warriors were men: "men of terror."
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Their book's title comes from a runestone cited and translated in the <a href="https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/m.php?p=ms&i=19040" target="_blank">Samnordisk rune-text database</a>. It begins: "Ástráðr and Hildungr raised this stone in memory of Fraði, their kinsmen. And he was then the terror of men."
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The word translated as "of men" is <i>vera</i>. This word can also mean "of people." It is used, for example, in <i>veröld</i>, which means “world,” with <i>öld</i> meaning “time” or “age.” Thus <i>veröld</i> literally means “the age of humans” or “the time of humans,” i.e. what we now call the anthropocene. <i>Ver</i> is also used in compounds like <i>Oddaverjar</i>, or “people/family of Oddi.” You wouldn’t translate <i>ver</i> today to mean only masculine humans. It refers to all people--which is what “men” used to mean when the first translations from Old Norse to English were made, as in “good will to all men."
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So instead of "Men of Terror," I would call Short and Óskarson's book, "People of Terror"--or would I?
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Let's not be ridiculous. A title is a marketing tool, and "Men of Terror" is much catchier.
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In <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781594163609" target="_blank">Men of Terror</a></i>, Short and Óskarson are simply focusing on men like I focused on women in <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>. Not to exclude the other sex, but to zero in on this particular elite cohort of Viking Age people: men of terror, i.e. professional male warriors with the strength of giants.
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Short and Óskarson don’t need to talk about women warriors—I did that (and Short knows it; he even gave me a nice blurb for the book cover). They also don’t talk about male craftsmen or farmers or old men or boys, etc. Their focus is on what made these particular men terrible. If writing books about exceptional Viking women is justified, so is writing books about exceptional Viking men.
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<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781594163609" target="_blank">Men of Terror</a></i> is a rich and stimulating--and yes, comprehensive!--look at one important aspect of life in the Viking Age. It deserves to be a classic.
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To leave you with one last example of the many quirky questions the book answers, do you remember the episode in <i>Njal's Saga</i> where Gunnar is using his bow to fend off the enemies encircling his house when his bowstring breaks? He asks his wife for two strands of her beautiful long hair to braid into a bowstring, and she refuses--dooming him to death.
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Could that have worked? Can you make a bowstring out of human hair? Flip to page 120 of <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781594163609" target="_blank">Men of Terror</a></i> and read: "The feasibility of using human hair was tested in our research lab by gathering hair, twisting it into a string, and splicing it into a conventional bowstring that had been cut. Measurements showed no significant change in power delivered or accuracy of the shooting when using a string made of human hair. These experiments showed the possibility of using human hair to repair a bowstring."
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Brilliant! I've always wanted to know that.
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For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-77672874383052597312021-09-29T11:00:00.004-04:002021-11-13T14:33:42.572-05:00Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking WorldIn 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).
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In <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781350230309" target="_blank">Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World</a></i>, 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780156033978" target="_blank">The Far Traveler</a></i> and its fictional spin-off <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781608981908" target="_blank">The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler</a></i>.
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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."
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Jóhanna also grapples with the woman at the heart of my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Woman</a></i>, 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?"
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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.
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To understand the lives of women in the Viking Age, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781350230309" target="_blank">Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World</a></i> by Jóhanna Kristín Friðriksdóttir (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) is an excellent place to start.
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For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-28808887208462219072021-09-22T11:00:00.003-04:002021-11-13T14:33:28.852-05:00Did Vikings Get Seasick?<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9e1h206UnMGJMahgWDi-Xc2wQPlidBxaYNC7NNZYwt87wckg6zg7TWwlmcQAKEcj6F-LcxGhaWVa3tbMhP8lK4g2pn8O8giZ7wREaRgvcrtVYbBYdZQPPALl2a3ZNPFFyBwJoWWBY-cBD/s320/gokstad.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9e1h206UnMGJMahgWDi-Xc2wQPlidBxaYNC7NNZYwt87wckg6zg7TWwlmcQAKEcj6F-LcxGhaWVa3tbMhP8lK4g2pn8O8giZ7wREaRgvcrtVYbBYdZQPPALl2a3ZNPFFyBwJoWWBY-cBD/s320/gokstad.jpg"/></a></div>
I get seasick. Really seasick. So to write about sailing a Viking ship, as I've done extensively in my new book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>, as well as in my earlier books about Gudrid the Far-Traveler's exploration of North America around the year 1000, I didn't try to recreate a Viking voyage.
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Sure, I got on Viking ships. I rowed the Viking fishing boat Kraka Fyr in Roskilde harbor. (You can read about <a href="http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-to-row-viking-ship.html" target="_blank">that adventure here</a>.)
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And I tooled around the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island in Gaia, a replica of the Gokstad ship. (<a href="http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-viking-ship-at-midnight.html" target="_blank">See "A Viking Ship at Midnight," here</a>.)
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But mostly, I visited Viking ships in museums and read books by and about other people who had tried to recreate voyages in replica Viking ships.
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One of my favorite passages is from Hodding Carter's <i>A Viking Voyage: In which an unlikely crew of adventurers attempts an epic journey to the New World</i>. (Really, the subtitle tells you all you need to know.) This scene (greatly abbreviated here) takes place just before their replica knarr, called Snorri, had to be towed back to Greenland by the Coast Guard Canada.
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Writes Carter: "Each swell that rocked Snorri, each wave that slapped her across the sheer plank and sprayed over the foredeck--I cherished them all. We were finally attempting something ancient. We had left the safety net of land and civilization. For the Vikings, this had been THE moment ... I felt unbound. 'This is THE MOMENT,' I kept telling myself. I suddenly fell in love not only with sailing but also with the ocean. I liked being at its mercy. ... The water shifted colors again and again. ... Sounds competed for attention. ... I could not sleep that night. ... I knew then why Leif and the others sailed west--not for wood or new land, but merely to feel so much at once. ... By seven the next evening we were more than 130 miles from Greenland, adrift. All that bashing and groaning I had so cherished had taken its toll. Some of the crew were falling apart. Rob was retching wherever he stood. Others were nearly as sick. Snorri was faring even worse. Our huge rudder had loosened a supporting crossbeam, a thigh-thick piece of wooden framing, by constantly pulling forward on it, instantly creating four holes in the bottom of the boat. Water gushed in..."
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No need to read farther, I thought. I'm not going to cross an ocean on a Viking ship. Not me.
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Several years later, between the publication of <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780156033978" target="_blank">The Far Traveler</a></i> (2007) and that of my YA novel based on that research, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781608981908" target="_blank">The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler</a></i> (2015), I had the good fortune to meet the retching Rob of Carter's story. When I asked him about his seasickness, he laughed it off. “Great way to lose 40 or 50 pounds.” (You can read more about Rob Stevens, the boatbuilder who built the knarr replica for Carter, <a href="http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-viking-ship-named-snorri.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)
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As I said then, I would rather fall off a horse (and I have, repeatedly; read about that <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2021/08/getting-back-on-horse.html" target="_blank">here</a>) than be seasick.
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But from what archaeologists reexamining the Gokstad ship discovered recently, it seems the bigger hazard for a sailor on a Viking ship was getting bored.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZoKlS2Bti_i104kDa2RQcae3qE88mz1Ctaj3dOaTtGqwimA0BeR6HqWlChjWgVRqwqY4gLD2JDHjU_ogwRuvbGNdPPD6JGjvj2qmB2i9u9LffMo-AoHLMrycfGlP9EEjK2-SIXGEuklt8/s620/Annestad+Gokstad+footprint.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="389" data-original-width="620" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZoKlS2Bti_i104kDa2RQcae3qE88mz1Ctaj3dOaTtGqwimA0BeR6HqWlChjWgVRqwqY4gLD2JDHjU_ogwRuvbGNdPPD6JGjvj2qmB2i9u9LffMo-AoHLMrycfGlP9EEjK2-SIXGEuklt8/s320/Annestad+Gokstad+footprint.jpg"/></a></div>
<i>Photo caption: Hanne Lovise Aannestad of the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo points at the footprint on a board of the Gokstad ship. The footprint is enhanced by Science Nordic (photo by Hanne Jakobsen/Per Byhring)</i>
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According to <a href="http://sciencenordic.com/dealing-doldrums-viking-voyage" target="_blank">a 2013 story in <i>Science Nordic</i></a>, carved into the original floorboards of this Viking ship buried in about 900 in the blue clay of southern Norway are two footprints. They were discovered in 2009, when museum workers were preparing to transfer the floorboards into a new exhibit space.
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"My guess is that some time or another a person was bored and simply traced his foot with his knife. It's a kind of an 'I was here' message," researcher Hanne Lovise Aannestad of the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo told <i>Science Nordic</i>.
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The footprints are quite small--smaller than Aannestad's--perhaps a girl's? The more distinct of the two prints is a right foot, bare. It even includes toenails. A weaker outline of a left foot appears on another plank. Was it the same girl's? Since the loose floorboards were scattered when the ship was excavated, it's impossible to say. So there might have been two bored young people on the Gokstad ship.
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Or maybe they were trying to take their minds off being seasick.
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To learn how I used those footprints to tell the story of a warrior woman sailing to Birka in the 10th century, see Chapter 13 of my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>. To learn more about the book, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-41090458772017782942021-09-15T11:00:00.005-04:002021-11-13T14:33:13.557-05:00The Science Behind the Real ValkyrieWhat does the Viking world look like if we abandon our ideas of gender? What does it look like if roles are assigned, not according to concepts of male versus female, but based on ambition, ability, family ties, and wealth?
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In my new book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, 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.
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As I've written earlier on this blog (<a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-story-behind-real-valkyrie.html" target="_blank">click here to read "The Story Behind the Real Valkyrie"</a>), <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i>, is inspired by "<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23308" target="_blank">A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics</a>," published in 2017 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Neil Price, and their colleagues, and by their follow-up <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/viking-warrior-women-reassessing-birka-chamber-grave-bj581/7CC691F69FAE51DDE905D27E049FADCD" target="_blank">paper in Antiquity in 2019</a>.
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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.
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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.
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What can modern science reveal about her? Her bones and teeth tell us Hervor was 30 to 40 when she died. She ate well all her life, which means she came from a rich family, if not a royal one. At over 5 foot 7, she was taller than most people around her: 5 foot 5 was the average height of a man in 10th century Scandinavia.
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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.
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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.
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She was seated in her grave surrounded by weapons. None of them are fancy. None are simply for show.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What did Hervor wear? Based on what little remains of her clothing, Hervor dressed like the other Birka warriors in the 10th century. They affected an urban style, distinctive to the fortress towns along the East Way. It was a mixture of Viking, Slavic, steppe-nomadic, and Byzantine fashion, as can be seen in this drawing commissioned by Neil Price and his colleagues.
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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.
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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.
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Who was this valkyrie buried in grave Bj581? To tell Hervor's story, I had to make assumptions. I had to connect the dots.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Besides my conjectural outline of Hervor's life, what links Dublin and York to Kaupang, Birka, and Kyiv? The Viking slave trade, through which young men and women were exchanged for Byzantine silk and Arab silver.
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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.”
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What I learned researching <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie</a></i> 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.”
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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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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWqVExMYms6M_9JFUQhXV9064UsQAa-3b5QV7OwijBjglYWKn5fR67SCWBZgNWLS9Ia6xiVZI9HLPtvqT6YRhYabcCj6JijfaYx6SgPSnsLf8plhppQiF522MBAVNnqZzt26lscXXnRg7S/s1200/RealValkyrie_Whim_r1_v7.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWqVExMYms6M_9JFUQhXV9064UsQAa-3b5QV7OwijBjglYWKn5fR67SCWBZgNWLS9Ia6xiVZI9HLPtvqT6YRhYabcCj6JijfaYx6SgPSnsLf8plhppQiF522MBAVNnqZzt26lscXXnRg7S/s320/RealValkyrie_Whim_r1_v7.png"/></a></div>
For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
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<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3973205393502375970.post-12529897610943073112021-09-08T11:03:00.005-04:002021-11-13T14:33:00.311-05:00The Truth About Women WarriorsAnyone who shares my interest in the "female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics" buried in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden (the topic of my new book, <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>) needs to read <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780807028339" target="_blank">Warrior Women: An Unexpected History</a></i> by Pamela Toler.
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Bj581 gets a couple of pages. The thousands of other historical warrior women Toler finds hiding in plain sight will blow your mind.
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Did I like this book? After I read it, I ordered two more copies for friends.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYYIbWbZAtiAGqjvXzHTOp16nfECunl_mlLIKwamKRURnu4WGJDQe6Yq1qTSUMHEuo3OcgO5I2bGPQJ_9tyL9eOFn5__dkKhS5zRrZZ8iSjQwr418ZI8moAemjkzEfp1fiKedErsQw-oTp/s1024/Toler+Women+Warriors.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="686" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYYIbWbZAtiAGqjvXzHTOp16nfECunl_mlLIKwamKRURnu4WGJDQe6Yq1qTSUMHEuo3OcgO5I2bGPQJ_9tyL9eOFn5__dkKhS5zRrZZ8iSjQwr418ZI8moAemjkzEfp1fiKedErsQw-oTp/s320/Toler+Women+Warriors.png"/></a></div>
<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780807028339" target="_blank">Women Warriors: An Unexpected History</a></i> is bold, brash, witty, and cutting--and deservedly so. "After you read enough variations of historians arguing why a particular woman warrior didn't exist or fight," Toler explains, "you grow a bit cynical." Of the notion that "women are natural pacifists" because they give birth, she notes, "At its simplest, this argument is based on a series of assumptions about the relative natures of men and women that is unflattering to both. It is also counterhistorical."
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Toler as a writer must have massive, well-organized filing cabinets (whether mental, digital, or actual, I don't know). Since girlhood, she has squirreled away stories about women who are "tough/mouthy/opinionated/different" like Joan of Arc and the women who fought in the Civil War dressed as men. Eventually her "women warrior" file got so fat she felt she had to write a book. She then went looking for women who fought "to avenge their families, defend their homes (or cities or nations), win independence from a foreign power, expand their kingdom's boundaries, or satisfy their ambition" and found that she could, in fact, have written several books.
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She settled on a survey. The first woman warriors in her book date from the second millennium BCE: three well-armed women buried in the Caucasus mountains, two with battle scars. The most recent warrior women she mentions are two who completed Ranger School, the US army's elite infantry training program, in 2015; one who completed the Marine Corps infantry officer training program in 2017; and six who earned the Expert Infantryman Badge in 2018--her book came out in 2019.
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In between she reports on thousands of other historical warrior women, from vastly different cultures and time periods, organizing their stories into themes. Are these women freaks and social outcasts? No. They are mothers, daughters, widows, queens. Some are socially expected to fight; others break norms and fight in disguise. Repeatedly, Toler skewers the tropes about women being kind, nurturing, peaceful, weak, squeamish, or somehow "other" than men.
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"Many people who cheer for the highly sexualized women warriors of popular culture," such as Wonder Woman, she writes, "are less comfortable when confronted with real-life images of camouflage-wearing women with shaved heads at boot camp or Ranger School. In fact, that contrast gets at the heart of much of the long-standing, cross-cultural social discomfort with women warriors—the fear that women who chose to fight will lose their femininity or, conversely, that their presence will 'feminize' the army; thereby rendering it less effective, less aggressive, less serious, or just less. It is an old discussion: when Plato argued that women should be given the same training as men and [be] used in all the same tasks, including training in war, he warned 'we must not be afraid of all the jokes of the kind that the wits will make about such a change in physical and artistic culture, and not least about the women carrying arms and riding horses.'"
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<i>Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.</i>
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Why don't we know more about the heroic women in Toler's book? "At some level," she explains, "the disappearance of women warriors is part of our larger tendency to write history as 'his story.'" The problem is particularly acute in the field of military history.
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"Both the current appeal of pop cultural heroines and ongoing battles over the role of female soldiers in the modern military assume women who go to war are historical anomalies: Joan of Arc, not G.I. Joan. This position is summed up in military historian John Keegan's magnificently inaccurate claim that "warfare is … the one human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart. … Women have followed the drum, nursed the wounded, tended the field and herded the flocks when the man of the family has followed his leader, have even dug the trenches for men to defend and laboured in the workshops to send them their weapons. Women, however, do not fight … and they never, in any military sense, fight men."
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Magnificently inaccurate indeed--and Toler has the facts to prove it. Not only do the women warriors in her book "fight men," they often beat them.
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"As long as you focus on one historical figure, or one cluster of women, or on one historical period," Toler concludes, "it is easy to believe any individual woman warrior was indeed an exception who stood outside the norm of her time—created by a national crisis or an anomaly of inheritance—and who consequently stands outside the norm of history as a whole."
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But when you look at the sweep of history, as Toler does, you find these "exceptions" become significant indeed. They change our ideas of what it means to be a "man" or a "woman." They enlarge the role models for every little girl who despises frilly pink dresses and chooses horses and toy soldiers over baby dolls.
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Writes Toler, "The main thing that struck me when I looked at women warriors across cultures rather than in isolation is how many examples there are and how lightly they sit on our collective awareness. I began with hundreds of examples. I ended with thousands."
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<i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9780807028339" target="_blank">Warrior Women: An Unexpected History</a></i> by Pamela Toler was published by Beacon Press in 2019. I'm pleased to add that Pamela likes my book, recreating the life and times of Bj581, as much as I like hers.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOsIctjgDyju3I6jrm8TsXUu6rRLe3LualvQxKGHnw-3W6tj1dol5EE9ODvsfjMYnEdyuTqY1KgqTLAQxQa1OndnwaJWw0Ry1GWWKjfl9J2eh3P08ub-hlPX200Eb3X0GgiGyGQffZhc5x/s1200/TheRealValkyrie-Brown-9781250200846-v4.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOsIctjgDyju3I6jrm8TsXUu6rRLe3LualvQxKGHnw-3W6tj1dol5EE9ODvsfjMYnEdyuTqY1KgqTLAQxQa1OndnwaJWw0Ry1GWWKjfl9J2eh3P08ub-hlPX200Eb3X0GgiGyGQffZhc5x/s320/TheRealValkyrie-Brown-9781250200846-v4.png"/></a></div>
For more on my book <i><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/22269/9781250200846" target="_blank">The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women</a></i>, see the related posts <a href="https://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Real%20Valkyrie" target="_blank">on this blog (click here)</a> or my page at <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200846" target="_blank">Macmillan.com</a>.
<br><br>
<i>Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.</i>
Nancy Marie Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15827129157617421667noreply@blogger.com0