Viking Women
- marionjabot
- 27 févr. 2018
- 5 min de lecture
Dernière mise à jour : 8 mars 2018
In the previous post, we discovered portraits of pirate women who defied the laws prohibiting them from taking the seas. The Viking Princess Alfhild created a fleet entirely composed of young female sailors and turned to piracy in a plea for freedom and to avoid marrying a man she had no interest in, Prince Alf. Her tale is now narrated to us as the ultimate love story, as her ‘Prince’ came after her to take her back home. This story is somewhat tragic, the Princess who strived for freedom ended up being forced into marriage.
A recent discovery suggests that Viking women might have had a much stronger position within their communities than we thought. The word from which ‘Viking’ stems from, Víkingr, can be translated into ‘pirate’ and is almost solely attributed to men, leading to believe that only males could be warriors. However, accounts of female Vikings have been found in popular culture and sagas from that time. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (12th century) narrated in “Gesta Danorum” the story of Lagertha, a shieldmaiden who fought in a battle against the invasion of Norway by the Swedes. The historian also tells the story of the Battle of Brávellir, during which 300 shieldmaidens dressed as men joined the King of Denmark Harald Wartooth on the battlefield.
‘Valkyrie’ is not just an opera by Wagner or a thereafter named operation against Hitler. Valkyries were female warriors, who held a crucial role in Norse literature. These inhuman characters, sometimes portrayed as semi-goddesses, sometimes as monsters and trolls, may have been inspired by real-life shieldmaidens and female Vikings. Often when female warrior amulets are found, they are assumed to be Valkyries rather than actual warriors, as it seems unlikely to us that women joined the war efforts. Is this a legitimate consideration, or could it be that women were present on the battlefield?
While these above-mentioned stories remain between the field of myth and reality, archaeologists might recently have found historical proof that female Viking warriors actually existed. In 1889 in Birka, Sweden, archaeologists discovered more than 3,000 Viking graves and excavated 1,100 of them. Among these graves: “BJ581”, dating from the 10th century. The grave, which was found on elevated ground, contained one human and two horse skeletons, weapons like shields, a sword, an ax, a spear, and a complete gaming board with its pieces. The nature of the weapons, as well as the presence of a chess-like gaming board used for battle strategies, suggests this might have been the grave of a senior warrior. This evidence, therefore, led archaeologists and historians to believe that this was the tomb of a man. In fact, most Viking burial grounds do reflect these gender roles: men were buried with weapons and women with household utensils and jewellery.
However, this presumption was recently overturned. A somewhat controversial osteological analysis in the 70ies had raised suspicions that the skeleton found in BJ581 might have been that of a woman, triggering the necessity of further testing. A recent DNA analysis confirmed the suspicion: the genome-wide sequence data revealed a double XX-Chromosome. The tests further revealed that the woman was above 30 years old. The furnished grave leads to believe that she held a high position as a warrior and therefore also in society. Scholars have been somewhat reluctant to admit the woman to be a warrior herself, and female fighters have most often been dismissed as myths. But the conclusion of the report is unequivocal: “Our results—that the high-status grave BJ581 on Birka was the burial of a high ranking female Viking warrior—suggest that women, indeed, were able to be full members of male-dominated spheres.” Therefore, this new evidence might suggest that women in Viking society played a stronger role than we believed until now.
The discovery of what might be the remains of a female warrior has however been welcomed with scepticism. Researchers warn from jumping to conclusions; the DNA evidence proves that the skeleton is that of a woman, but not that she necessarily was a warrior. According to some researchers, the grave might have hosted a male before. Others argue that the war-artefacts could carry a purely symbolic meaning, saying more about the deceased’s social status than the actual involvement in battles. J. Jesch, an expert in Vikings and Norse history, is particularly critical of those who assume that the Viking woman was a warrior, without seeking further proof. While she does not categorically deny the possibility of the woman being a warrior, she argues that the writers of the report were too quick to jump to conclusions. According to her “the emotional lure of the woman warrior, especially in the Viking Age, is too strong for reasoned argument”, thereby preventing us from engaging in thorough academical debate.
First of all, the bones might not be the correct ones. As the graves were excavated more than a century ago, the bags of bones could have been mixed up. Secondly, the skeleton shows no signs of harm or another kind of trauma, which leads us to believe that she was not involved in any fights. More importantly, Jesch reminds us of the archaeological consideration that graves reflect who individuals are in death, and not necessarily who they were during their lifetime. As “the dead don’t bury themselves”, the collection of warrior accessories found in the grave might not be a representation of the person’s life.
What is particularly striking in Jesch’s view is that she does not really seem to give the Viking the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that some evidence may actually point towards the woman being a warrior. Or at least, there is no strong evidence against it. The lack of trauma on the skeleton is not a solid proof, as most male warrior corpses do not show such characteristics either. Only 2 out of 49 males found in Birka showed wounds. Moreover, those who did not fight were usually cremated in Viking societies, so that having a grave on her own, on elevated ground what is more, strongly suggests the woman held a high status within her community. Furthermore, Birka was a cultural and economic centre, a meeting point for various communities. It could well have been that this contact with other cultures impacted the burial practices as well, making the male/ female dichotomy less strong as reflected in the tomb. Lastly, the distribution of the elements in the tomb makes the hypothesis of a missing male individual unlikely.
Sure, the weapons do not determine the warrior. But given the exact same context, the grave used to be interpreted as belonging to a male warrior. Now that DNA tests have revealed that it belonged to a woman, this status is being questioned. Hedenstierna-Jonson, the archaeologist at Uppsala University who led the research, believes that the woman was indeed a warrior herself as it is impossible to reach such a high position without having previous fighting experience.
If the woman was actually a warrior, this would break some gender roles perceptions we had about Viking society. But this does not mean that it was not a patriarchal society, and women were still overwhelmingly present in domestic positions. Outstepping these roles was sometimes punishable by law, as for example the medieval Icelandic lawbook Gragas prohibits women from cutting their hair short or wearing male clothes. Women were also placed under the authority of a husband or father.
But warriors or not, women still assumed an important position, especially in the management of the household. Viking women were in charge of finances when the man was away and some evidence suggests they might have been able to conduct their own small businesses. They also had the right to divorce, which was pretty uncommon back then.
It is difficult to determine whether our present conceptions cloud our judgement. We
could be too eager to find strong Viking women, thereby overlooking important historical and sociological factors, which made it unrealistic for women to be warriors in Viking age. At the same time, maybe it was not a problem at all to be both a warrior and woman, and reading history with modern lenses just distorts that reality!
Sources
http://norseandviking.blogspot.fr/2017/09/lets-debate-female-viking-warriors-yet.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23308/full
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