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.

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.

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

The Valkyries' Loom

"The warp is made / of human entrails; / human heads / are used as weights; / the heddle rods / are blood-wet spears ... "

The Valkyries' Loom by Michèle Hayeur Smith begins with lines from this famous poem in Njáls Saga, of valkyries weaving a web of war. But Hayeur Smith is not interested in valkyries--or warfare. She didn't write a book like The Real Valkyrie, my exploration of warrior women in the Viking Age. She doesn't even confine herself to the Viking Age.

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.

The poem, she says, "suggests that powerful magic and the control of fate would be realized in these weaving huts through textile production."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Cutting and sewing the garments took even more time.

And that's just for basic clothing--no fancy embroidery or tablet-woven borders or silk applique (as we know the Vikings loved).

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.

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.)

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."

From 1050 to 1550, a standardized weave of wool cloth called vaðmál was used instead of silver for both local trades, taxes and tithes, and as foreign exports. Vaðmál comes from váð (stuff, cloth) and mál (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.

"Because vaðmál 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." Vaðmál "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. Vaðmál "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.

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.

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."

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.

The Valkyries' Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic 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.

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.

Men 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…?"

So begins Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat by William R. Short and Reynir A. Óskarson.

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.

It's got everything (with one exception, which we'll get to later): the Viking mindset, shields and armor, battle tactics, raiding and dueling...

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.

But what really makes Men of Terror stand out from similar books on Viking Age weaponry are the sections on the "physics of" each weapon.

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."

But it takes more raw strength to kill with a sax.

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."

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.

Caption: Scenes from the Hurstwic Facebook page.

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.

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."

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 glíma or fang. 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 glíma, finesse, agility, and beauty are what is most prized."

Viking fang "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.

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."

Some readers (like me) may have been annoyed by the sexist language in these quotations from Men of Terror. They are not a mistake. Men of Terror is a book-length argument against my thesis, in The Real Valkyrie, 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."

Their book's title comes from a runestone cited and translated in the Samnordisk rune-text database. It begins: "Ástráðr and Hildungr raised this stone in memory of Fraði, their kinsmen. And he was then the terror of men."

The word translated as "of men" is vera. This word can also mean "of people." It is used, for example, in veröld, which means “world,” with öld meaning “time” or “age.” Thus veröld literally means “the age of humans” or “the time of humans,” i.e. what we now call the anthropocene. Ver is also used in compounds like Oddaverjar, or “people/family of Oddi.” You wouldn’t translate ver 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."

So instead of "Men of Terror," I would call Short and Óskarson's book, "People of Terror"--or would I?

Let's not be ridiculous. A title is a marketing tool, and "Men of Terror" is much catchier.

In Men of Terror, Short and Óskarson are simply focusing on men like I focused on women in The Real Valkyrie. 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.

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.

Men of Terror 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.

To leave you with one last example of the many quirky questions the book answers, do you remember the episode in Njal's Saga 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.

Could that have worked? Can you make a bowstring out of human hair? Flip to page 120 of Men of Terror 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."

Brilliant! I've always wanted to know that.

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.

Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World

In 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).

In Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World, 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.

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.”

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.

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 The Far Traveler and its fictional spin-off The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler.

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."

Jóhanna also grapples with the woman at the heart of my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Woman, 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?"

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.

To understand the lives of women in the Viking Age, Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World by Jóhanna Kristín Friðriksdóttir (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) is an excellent place to start.

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 I may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Did Vikings Get Seasick?

I get seasick. Really seasick. So to write about sailing a Viking ship, as I've done extensively in my new book, The Real Valkyrie, 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.

Sure, I got on Viking ships. I rowed the Viking fishing boat Kraka Fyr in Roskilde harbor. (You can read about that adventure here.)

And I tooled around the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island in Gaia, a replica of the Gokstad ship. (See "A Viking Ship at Midnight," here.)

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.

One of my favorite passages is from Hodding Carter's A Viking Voyage: In which an unlikely crew of adventurers attempts an epic journey to the New World. (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.

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..."

No need to read farther, I thought. I'm not going to cross an ocean on a Viking ship. Not me.

Several years later, between the publication of The Far Traveler (2007) and that of my YA novel based on that research, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler (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, here.)

As I said then, I would rather fall off a horse (and I have, repeatedly; read about that here) than be seasick.

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.

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)

According to a 2013 story in Science Nordic, 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.

"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 Science Nordic.

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.

Or maybe they were trying to take their minds off being seasick.

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

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

The Science Behind the Real Valkyrie

What 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?

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

As I've written earlier on this blog (click here to read "The Story Behind the Real Valkyrie"), The Real Valkyrie, is inspired by "A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics," published in 2017 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Neil Price, and their colleagues, and by their follow-up paper in Antiquity in 2019.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She was seated in her grave surrounded by weapons. None of them are fancy. None are simply for show.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who was this valkyrie buried in grave Bj581? To tell Hervor's story, I had to make assumptions. I had to connect the dots.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

What I learned researching The Real Valkyrie 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.”

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.

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 I may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Truth About Women Warriors

Anyone 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, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women) needs to read Warrior Women: An Unexpected History by Pamela Toler.

Bj581 gets a couple of pages. The thousands of other historical warrior women Toler finds hiding in plain sight will blow your mind.

Did I like this book? After I read it, I ordered two more copies for friends.

Women Warriors: An Unexpected History 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."

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.

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.

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.

"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.'"

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

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.

"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."

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.

"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."

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.

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."

Warrior Women: An Unexpected History 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.

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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