![]() Until more solid evidence comes to light, the Viking woman warrior remains a fantasy. "There is always hope that there were female warriors." "Maybe it's empowering to some extent," Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, the lead author of the paper concluding the skeleton was a woman warrior, told The New York Times. She serves as a canvas onto which we project fantasies of vengeance and power without upsetting the status quo. Claiming the Viking woman warrior existed allows her to be co-opted as a sort of mascot for the ongoing women's movement. So why does the myth of the Viking woman warrior endure? The answer has to do, in part, with our shifting ideas about what female rage, strength, and empowerment look like. Instead, the weapons, the clothes, and the animals found in this grave seem to have originated nearer the Caspian Sea, which is located in Central Asia. 581 are not Scandinavian, which raises the question of whether this person was a Viking at all. 581 was a warrior is also hard to confirm, because as professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch observed, the skeleton shows no marks or wear that might be associated with battle woulds.įinally, the grave objects in Bj. We still don't know what this meant to the Vikings, but it does mean that Bj. On the other hand, it wasn't uncommon for female skeletons to be buried with male-coded objects, such as weapons. On the one hand, there seems to have been a clear delineation between men and women: On the family farm, chores were gender-coded as either male or female from the sagas, we learn that cross-dressing was grounds for divorce. While the DNA evidence suggests this skeleton belonged to a female, we don't know enough about how gender and biological sex related to one another during the Viking Age to conclusively say how this person identified. In fact, we can't say for certain that this individual was a woman, a warrior, or even a Viking. In other words, there is very little in the history books to support the claim that the skeleton in Bj. But similarly to the Valkyries, there is no evidence they ever really existed. In addition to the Valkyries, the Icelandic sagas mention shield maidens, women who wielded weapons and fought in battle. People needed to know how to fight and how to defend themselves. At the same time, Viking Age Scandinavia was a violent society, fueled by vendettas and power struggles. In popular culture, Vikings are mainly known for their fighting abilities, but being a warrior was only a part-time occupation in a life otherwise based on farming and fishing, in which both men and women were needed for the family to survive. 800–1050), men and women from what is today Norway, Sweden, and Denmark set sail to new lands and spread out across a vast area reaching from the North Atlantic to the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean. ![]() That we so desperately want to believe in the Viking woman warrior, despite evidence to the contrary, says a lot about the ongoing women's movement, and betrays our rigid ideals of how we want female strength to be displayed.ĭuring the Viking Age (c. 581 had been a warrior is based on some wobbly assumptions. According to the critics, the claim that the woman in Bj. But what hasn't attracted as much attention is the ongoing controversy among scholars about the validity of these recent conclusions. ![]() She has even been called a "real-life Viking version" of Game of Thrones' iconic female knight, Brienne of Tarth. The tale of the Viking woman warrior from Birka continues to capture our imaginations.
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