The 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 The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, 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.

But the later the version, the more romantic it becomes.

"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."

But she is forced to marry.

She swears to marry only a man who knew no fear. But she is tricked.

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.

This is the version most familiar to modern audiences, thanks mostly to Richard Wagner’s reworking of the tale in his opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelungs. 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, The Dark Queens.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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."

Read The Dark Queens and regain your history.

For more book recommendations, see my lists at Bookshop.org. Disclosure: As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

For more on my latest book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Is Freydis Real?

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?

I don't think so.

I've written a book on warrior women in the Viking Age: The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women.

I've also written a book on the two Icelandic sagas in which Freydis appears: The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman.

In The Real Valkyrie, 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.

The writers of the Icelandic sagas didn't follow the same rules as Saxo, however. They were not writing history.

"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."

Compared to some, the two that mention Freydis--The Saga of Eirik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders (known collectively as the Vinland Sagas)--are bare-bones. As I wrote in The Far Traveler, 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.

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 (here,here,and here), 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.

As Richard Perkins suggests in "Medieval Norse Visits to America" (Saga-Book 28 (2004): 26-69), 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.

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.

Which, given the nature of one of the famous stories told about the Vinland expeditions, was a problem.

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, archaeologist Birgitta Wallace thinks, that they met the native people they called "Skraelings," or "skin-wearers."

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.

At this point in The Saga of Eirik the Red, 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.

Freydis appears in only one scene in this saga, here, as the Vikings flee:
"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."

As I wrote in The Far Traveler, 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.

Such an action is in character for the Gudrid we have come to know by then in The Saga of Eirik the Red. 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.

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.”

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?

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.

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."

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 The Saga of the Greenlanders.

While in The Saga of Eirik the Red you have to read between the lines to realize Gudrid organized an expedition to Vinland--and owned one of the three ships--The Saga of the Greenlanders clearly says that Freydis did so.

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.

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."

She is "an entirely fictional figure invented to act as a foil to the pious Gudrid," concludes Perkins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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? As Sofie Vanherpen writes, "Now, more than ever, we need heroes. We need fearless men and women, who are larger than life."

For more on my latest book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Viking Women with Weapons

I 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.

Keys? In my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, 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."

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.

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.

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."

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).

Beginning with medieval historical sources:

—From the Irish history known as The War of the Irish with the Foreigners, 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 Annals of Ulster and a "vaguely-defined army of barbarians" that included women in the Annals of Innisfallen.)

—In his History of the Danes, 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.

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."

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."

—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 Heimskringla, 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."

—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.

—In the Russian Primary Chronicle, 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 Synopsis of Byzantine History, 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."

In the Eddas and other poetic sources, you have:

—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.

—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.

—Fenja and Menja, the enslaved warriors in the Eddic poem The Song of Grotti, famously brag: "As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone. Our blades are red."

—There's Modgud, who guards the bridge on the road to Hel in Snorri's Edda and may (or may not) be the same as the unnamed woman warrior who challenges Brynhild in the poem Brynhild's Ride to Hel.

—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."

—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.

—And there's Brynhild's rival, Gudrun, who shows her warrior training when she defends her brothers. Says The Greenland Lay of Atli: "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."

—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.

—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.

In the Icelandic sagas, you have:

—Two warrior women named Hervor in The Saga of Hervor. The first is the famous warrior in the poem Hervor's Song (called by some translators The Waking of Angantyr) 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."

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.

—Thornbjorg in The Saga of Hrolf Gautreksson 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."

—The Saga of the Volsungs 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."

—There are also Randalin in The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, Aslaug in the Tale of Ragnar's Sons, Freydis in the Vinland Sagas, the sorceress Thorhild in Ljosvetninga Saga, and two women without weapons, but with military skill and training: Nitida (in Nitida Saga) and Sedentiana (in The Saga of Sigurd the Silent).

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.

*Sources for The Real Valkyrie (and specifically for this blog post): Neil Price, The Viking Way (Oxbow, 2019). See also his new book, Children of Ash and Elm (Basic Books, 2020) Leszek Gardela, "Amazons of the North?" in Hvanndalir (DeGruyter, 2018). See also his new book, Women and Weapons in the Viking Age (Casemate, 2021) Jóhanna Katrín Fridriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also her new book, Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World (Bloomsbury, 2020)

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Witch's Heart

In her novel, The Witch's Heart, 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.

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 Edda, or Snorri's Edda. 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.

As I explain in my 2013 biography of him, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Snorri wrote the Edda to teach the young king his heritage.

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.

When goddesses and giantesses do appear in Snorri's Edda, they are reduced to objects of lust--or disgust.

Such as the one at the center of Genevieve Gornichec's The Witch's Heart.

"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.

In The Witch's Heart, 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.

For more stories of powerful Viking women, see my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, or read the related posts on this blog (click here).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Odin's Wife

In his Edda, 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.

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.

"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."

Responds High, "You cannot claim to be a wise man if you are unable to tell of these important happenings."

Snorri Sturluson considered himself a wise man. In his Edda and in Heimskringla, 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.

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, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, 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.

In Odin's Wife: Mother Earth in Germanic Mythology, 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 germanicmythology.com, 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.

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 Edda, 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."

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."

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."

See my complete review of Odin's Wife: Mother Earth in Germanic Mythology by William P. Reaves at The Midgardian.

For more about the powerful women of the Viking Age, see my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, or read the related posts on this blog (click here).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Viking Creation Story

The 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.

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.

But it’s not the only way to read the sources.

In my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, 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.

I was convinced this was true by studying Norse mythology.

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 (Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths) and showed that, not only did he put a Christian slant on the myths he told, he was a terrible misogynist.

In writing down the Norse myths, Snorri wasted few words on females, human or divine. They did not fit his audience or his purpose.

He began writing the Prose Edda 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.

Snorri wrote Heimskringla, his history of the kings of Norway, during the same king’s reign, again to impress the younger man.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Ash wood was used for spear shafts and oars. A good rower was sometimes called an “ash-person.”

Elm was used for wagon wheels. It was also the preferred wood for short, powerful bows: One archer is nicknamed “elm-twig.”

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.

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.

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Dangerous Women of Oseberg

"What makes a woman dangerous 1000 years after her death?"

Archaeologist Marianne Moen asked that question in 2016 on a blog called "The Dangerous Women Project."

She wrote, "How much of a threat can a dead and decayed body of a nameless woman really pose? Judging from the academic treatment of the Viking Age female double burial found at Oseberg in Norway, the answer seems to be quite a substantial one. Enough, at least, that in the 100 years since the burial was excavated, academic debate regarding it has centred on finding explanations and interpretations that nearly all share a common purpose of removing the two women from any position of politcal power..."

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, The Gendered Landscape: A discussion on gender, status, and power expressed in the Viking Age mortuary landscape, 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.

When I went to Norway in 2018 to complete the research for my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, meeting Marianne was tops on my list. We managed to connect over lunch soon after I had visited the Oseberg and Gokstad mounds. What follows are some highlights of our chat which, of course, began with a discussion of the Oseberg grave.

"Every time I give a presentation," Marianne said, "I end up talking about Oseberg. It's fascinating if you look at how it's been treated academically--and then you look at Gokstad. Basically, they are identical mounds. They're placed in comparable locations. They've got very comparable grave goods. They're buried within 70 years of each other. Everything pretty much checks out: It's like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. The only difference is that Oseberg is the burial of two women and Gokstad has one man.

Captions: The Oseberg mound today. Above, the Oseberg ship in the (old) Viking Ship Museum in Norway. Below, the Gokstad mound today.

"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?"

Her comic portrayal of the baffled academics made me laugh--but it wasn't truly funny. Working on my history of warrior women in the Viking Age, I saw too many instances of such gender bias in Viking Studies. The "invisible man" theory came up again and again.

As Marianne explained, "A lot of researchers have problems with something that doesn't fit with what we think we know. We think we know the Viking Age so well. In Norway it's a sort of cultural ancestor to our own times. We talk about the Vikings as if we know how they lived--and we don't really.

"There is so much that we've just assumed. Two hundred years ago, a bunch of researchers read the old texts and said, 'Aha, it’s like this.' You look at the gender roles they assigned to the Viking Age--and they are the gender roles of the Victorian Age." They mimic the values of the 19th century, when elite women were confined to church, children, and kitchen. When wife, mother, and housewife were women's only proper roles.

"We don't know it was like that in the Viking Age," Marianne continued. "But somebody said so 200 years ago, and we've referred to them for years and years."

Between the time Marianne wrote about the two Oseberg queens as "dangerous women" in 2016 and we met in 2018, the ultimate Viking warrior burial--the weapon-filled grave known as Bj581 in the town of Birka--was reanalyzed. Ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the bones and--to the shock of many scholars--this ultimate Viking was proved to be a woman.

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.

"What's been so interesting about the Birka Warrior," Marianne said to me, "is that it's really just made this very obvious. If you read between the lines of so many of the blogs and the statements that came out in response to the Birka Warrior, what the critics are saying is: This can't be right because it doesn't fit with what we think we know. Accepting that what we think we know is potentially not correct seems to be pretty difficult."

One approach by the naysayers is to argue that having weapons in her grave is not enough to prove that Bj581 actually fought. They point out that there are no marks of battle trauma on her bones, for instance.

I asked Marianne how she would respond to that criticism.

"There’s this big argument in archaeology today," she explained, "that, obviously, just because you're buried with weapons it doesn't make you a warrior. Fair enough. There's this famous study of Anglo-Saxon graves, where they demonstrated that a lot of the so-called warrior graves were actually young boys or the skeleton had severe physical impairments. So I’m not saying that every weapons grave is necessarily a warrior grave.

"What I am saying," she continued, "is that, just because the grave happens to contain a woman doesn’t mean we should treat it any differently. So if a weapons grave isn't a warrior grave, that means we need to go through 200 years of scholarship and reassess how we talk about all the male graves with weapons. That’s all I'm asking. You can't talk about weapons graves differently just because of the gender of the person buried in one. Because then what we think we know is not based on the actual evidence."

Even scholars who accept that Bj581 was indeed a warrior woman argue that she was very unusual for her time. Finding a single warrior woman doesn't change the conversation about women's roles in the Viking Age.

Again, Marianne disagrees.

"I'm not arguing for the number of female warriors being on the same level as men," Marianne replied, "because we know from the burial evidence that we do have that it's not that often you find women with weapons. But it's often enough."

But Viking men are not often found buried with weapons either, I pointed out. Not every man was a warrior.

"Exactly," said Marianne. "It was only really exceptional men."

When I first began talking about writing my book The Real Valkyrie, I heard that complaint from some of my scholarly friends: But you’re only talking about exceptional women, they said.

I thought about that, and I realized that if I had said I was going to write a book about a Viking king, like Olaf Tryggvason or Eirik Bloodaxe, he would be an exceptional man, and it would be perfectly acceptible to write a book about him. No one would complain about that. Why is it not equally acceptible to write about an exceptional warrior woman?

"This is the problem," said Marianne. "All of the archaeology and all of the history of the Vikings is written about the exceptions. That's the people we write about. We write about the 15-20% who were the elite. We don't know anything about the rest. They leave no trace in the archaeological record. We need to accept that. Yes, the Birka Warrior was probably an exceptional women, but all the stories we tell are about the exceptional people."

And even among these exceptional, elite Vikings, our 200-year-old assumptions about gender roles do not hold true, as Marianne's 2019 Ph.D. thesis from the University of Oslo proves. When we spoke, she was hard at work writing Challenging Gender: A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape.

I asked her to tell me a little about it.

"My central proposition is that we shouldn't apply our understanding of gender to the past. I'm basically going back to Carol Clover's 1993 article [“Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe.”]. I think we should stop thinking about the two-sex model, with binary men and women as complete opposites."

Instead, we should think of Viking people inhabiting a spectrum of gender roles, she argues, based on her reanalysis of several Viking Age graveyards in Norway.

"What I've done," she explained, "is to analyze grave assemblages and also the position of the grave in the landscape, in some selected cemeteries in Vestfold, to try and see if there's any grounds from the burial evidence to assume that men and women fulfilled such different categories.

"What I found in the assemblages of grave goods, is that they share more traits than they actually differentiate. Interestingly, about a third of the graves I analyzed aren't gender-specific at all. They have horses, cooking vessels, common tools, less common tools like trading equipment, things like knives and combs, etc. Nothing particularly spectacular, usually, but a few of them are very wealthy indeed.

"That's where I think it becomes particularly problematic that we talk about the Vikings as if they had this very clearcut binary gender pattern, when actually so many graves are not able to be gendered at all," Marianne concluded.

"So here's my question: If so many of these graves are not communicating gender, then should we not perhaps reconsider our thought that gender was an either/or in the Viking Age? And that there were different ways of living that were accepted?"

I look forward to learning more from Marianne Moen's research in the future, and wish her the best of luck in her scholarly career. You can read more about her work on her Academia.edu page and at Science Norway.

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Myth of the Mighty Viking Ship

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 The Three Musketeers or the Odyssey."

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."

His effect on that Viking heritage, however, was not benign. His story, Rode Orm, is one of the most-read and most-loved books in Swedish, and has been translated into over twenty languages; in English it's The Long Ships. 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.

This, say experimental archaeologists, is "unproven," "improbable," and—after several tries with replica ships—"not possible."

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 The Viking from 1966.

"Seldom has anything been surrounded by so much myth and fantasy" as the Viking ship, notes Gunilla Larsson; her 2007 Ph.D. thesis, Ship and Society: Maritime Ideology in Late Iron Age Sweden, completely changes our understanding of the Vikings' eastern voyages.

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.

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.

We think bigger is better, but it's not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 drag. To "set a drag under someone's pride" was to encourage arrogance.

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."

This essay was excerpted from my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women. To learn more, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Click on the title to download and read Gunilla Larsson's 2007 Ph.D. thesis, Ship and Society: Maritime Ideology in Late Iron Age Sweden. I highly recommend it.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Myth of the Viking Keys

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

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

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

Except she didn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By accepting the 19th-century stereotype of men with swords and women with keys, we legitimize the idea that women should stay at home.

We reduce the role models for every modern girl who visits a museum or reads a history book.

We make it easy to dismiss as unrealistic the warrior women found in every kind of medieval text that depicts Viking society—history, law, saga, poetry, and myth—and which have been attested to archaeologically since 2017, when the famous warrior grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden was DNA tested.

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

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Children of Ash and Elm

If you don't lurk on Academia.edu, as I do, looking for scholarly articles on Vikings, you'll be shocked by the depiction of the Viking world in Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (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.

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 Children of Ash and Elm gives you the facts you need.

It's time to put an end to the idea that the Viking world was ruled by white men.

"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."

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."

None of which means we shouldn't study them, tell their stories, or thieve from their ideas.

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."

Gender is one theme Price explores throughout Children of Ash and Elm, and one that particularly resonated with me, having just finished writing The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women (which is partly based on Price's work).

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."

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 Children of Ash and Elm, does not back down.

"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."

I wholeheartedly agree, and in my new book, The Real Valkyrie, I recreate her life and times.

For my complete review of Children of Ash and Elm, see The Midgardian Magazine.

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Birka Warriors

In 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 The Real Valkyrie.

That paper, "A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics," published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, reported on the analysis of the bones and teeth in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden. Using DNA and isotope testing, along with osteological examination of the bones, the 10-member research team concluded that the skeleton in this grave--long held up as the ultimate Viking warrior burial, due to the great number of weapons it contained--was female. They learned how tall she was (5'7"), how rich she was (she never suffered periods of starvation or malnutrition), and that she was not a native of Birka, where she was buried at the age of 30-40, but came from away. She likely was born in what is now southern Sweden or Norway, and moved twice as a child, likely farther west. She didn't reach Birka until she was older than 16.

There 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?

There must be some mistake, they said.

"Usually when you do research and you publish an article," Charlotte told me, "the job is done. But this time, no. It's been months of work that we didn't anticipate." When we spoke, the team's second paper on Bj581 was in peer review; it was published in Antiquity in 2019. "It gives a fuller archaeological picture of the find," Charlotte explained. "It is also a response to some of the criticism about if it's the right bones, for example."

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."

Each and every bone was marked "581"--even the toe bones, she pointed out. "Apart from the skull, all the bones that are in Stolpe's documentation are actually in the archive."

But some people still were not convinced. The woman in Bj581 must have been the wife, or slave, of a male warrior who had died somewhere else, so she was buried in his place. She--the skeleton--could not be the warrior itself.

"Why was it never an issue as long as we thought it was a male skeleton? It’s very interesting," Charlotte said. "The results from our study have been controversial in a way I didn’t expect, with researchers saying it cannot be true. And it’s more their feeling that it cannot be true than that we have the wrong bones—and we know we don’t. We’re very confident we have the right bones and that in this grave there is actually a woman. That we are certain of. How we ought to interpret that is, of course, something else. But her grave looks like the other Birka warrior graves, and if there’s something special about her grave in comparison to the other ones, I would like someone to explain what it is. If we want to interpret her grave as one that represented someone else, then we must ask ourselves if that’s the case with all the other warrior graves as well."

If anyone should know what a Birka warrior looks like, it would be Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonsson. Her Ph.D. thesis in archaeological science, The Birka Warrior: The Material Culture of a Martial Society (Stockholm University, 2006), is based on her first 10 years of research at Birka.

After Stolpe left, Swedish archaeologists returned to the island in the 1930s, the 1970s, and the 1990s, when Charlotte joined them. Birka, they learned, not only held over 3,000 Viking graves, it was the site of a well-protected market town with a hilltop fortress and a permanent garrison of warriors. "My first summer was in 1996," Charlotte said. "I was becoming a Ph.D. student, and the project was on the defensive structures of Birka. We excavated in the hillfort and its rampart and also the town rampart. Partly it was a rescue excavation. There were so many tourists coming to Birka that things were starting to pop up out of the soil."

The team stayed for almost 10 years, doing a full excavation of the garrison, including its Warriors' Hall (a 2,000-square-foot building). They found weapons, armor, and items of clothing that linked the Birka warriors to the Vikings' East Way, the trade route that led from Sweden east to Ladoga, Kiev, and Constantinople. They learned that the Warriors' Hall was burned to the ground--and never rebuilt--shortly before pagan Birka was replaced by Christian Sigtuna as the biggest market town in the area.

Compared to the other Birka warrior graves, Bj581 is the grave of a war leader. Besides the large quantity of weapons in the grave--more than for almost any other Birka warrior--there are two horses, a stallion and a mare. "That’s definitely a sign of high status," Charlotte explained. There is also a complete set of pieces for the strategic boardgame known as hnefatafl, sometimes called Viking chess. The pieces seem to have been in a bag placed in the woman's lap. Some bits of iron by her side may have been parts of a game board.

Weapons, horses, and game pieces have always been diagnostic of a war leader. "Up until it was known as a woman, nobody even questioned that this was the skeleton not only of a warrior but also a military leader," Charlotte told me. "This is how it’s been described. That’s the most common interpretation, actually. And we didn’t see any reason to change it, since nothing in the grave has actually changed. We just found out something that we didn’t know."

Why is it so hard for people to accept that the ultimate Birka warrior was a woman?

"I think we are so far from war in the Western world," Charlotte said, "that we believe that warriors look a certain way. I also think we are obsessed with individuals and the individual identity in a way that I am not so sure that they were in the Viking Age. Actually, I think they were rather more interested in the role. You filled a role. You had to have the qualities to fill that role, and the more of those qualities you had, the better you would fill the role. And maybe the requirements were even higher for Bj581 because she was a woman. Maybe that’s why they put everything into the grave--why it was important that she have the full set of weapons, because they wanted to emphasize her role."

The people who buried the woman in grave Bj581 had something to say. Something we should listen to. They thought it was important.

"When you look at the high-status graves at Birka," Charlotte said, "they are all different from each other. They all tell different stories. Each and every grave has its own narrative. In the end, if we look at Bj581, we can say that they wanted to show something: They wanted to show that this woman in the grave, she is a warrior."

To learn more about the research of Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonsson on the Birka warrior, see the many books and papers she has made available through academia.edu at https://shmm.academia.edu/CharlotteHedenstiernaJonson.

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

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