Given that women during the so-called Viking Age (793 – 1066 CE) had little or no control and agency over their own lives, shield-maidens were very much iconoclasts defying societal and gender norms, roles, and expectations. Further reasons for females becoming shield-maidens included somewhat misogynistic reasons, including a lack of male family members or to escape a forced marriage or an abusive husband. Others were said to have taken a lifelong vow to become a warrior. Many were said to have temporarily joined Viking raids or battles and then returned home to a life of domesticity. These shield-maidens were a varied bunch, differing in age, physicality, social and marital status.
In Nordic folklore, a skjoldmø (shieldmaiden / shield-maiden) was a female warrior who fought, side by side, with male counterparts in raids, battles, and wars. One of the most enduring, potent, and gender-defying images is of a Viking shield-maiden. Yet littered throughout Old Norse legends, mythology and sagas are depictions and descriptions of female warriors partaking in deadly and violent battles. Though many did have some power when it came to domestic affairs, the fact remained that women were highly marginalized in this deeply patriarchal society. Women had little or no political agency or voice and could not take up positions of economic or political influence. For the vast majority of women, their milieu did not spread farther than the house: they were expected to be wives, mothers, caretakers, and educators for children. Like most early medieval cultures and peoples worldwide, women in Viking societies had very specific and narrow gender roles and expectations. Skjaldmær: Defying Viking societal gender roles and expectations
#Female nordic warriors professional#
"In our opinion, Bj.581 was the grave of a woman who lived as a professional warrior and was buried in a martial environment as an individual of rank.Though they are mentioned in myth, legend, and saga, these shied-maidens were said to have been the inspiration for the Valkyries and fought everywhere from modern-day Canada to Sweden and Bulgaria. "Many other interpretations of both funerary treatment and gender are possible, but Occam's razor would suggest that to reach for them as a first resort is to attempt to 'explain away' what seems to be the most obvious and logical conclusion," the researchers wrote in the study. However, the researchers concluded that the most straightforward interpretation is likely correct: The functional weapons buried with the woman are also suggestive of warriorhood, but the researchers acknowledged that it's impossible to know if these items were actually her possessions or reflected her activities. While the woman does not have any known injuries preserved in her bones, as other warriors who went to battle do, she was buried in an area that "reinforces a warrior interpretation - being situated outside the gate of the Birka hill fort and adjacent to two other burials containing numerous weapons," the researchers wrote in the study. The interpretation of this grave as a warrior burial was never challenged until the burial was revealed to be that of a woman. They found that the so-called male warrior had XX-chromosomes and so was biologically female. In this study, which is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, and her colleagues did a genetic analysis. So in 2017 a DNA analysis was carried out. Moreover, the burial was the westernmost grave in Birka and was originally marked with a large boulder, which would have been visible to the settlement.īecause of the grave goods, Stolpe assumed that the grave was that of a male, but in the 1970s, an anatomical analysis of the bones suggested that they belonged to a female, and in 2016 a second analysis confirmed these findings. There was also a bag containing three antler dice and 28 gaming pieces, including a king piece marked with an iron nail, that sat on the deceased's lap. Sharp weapons surrounded the deceased: a sheathed sword, an axe, a fighting knife, two spears, two shields, a quiver of 25 armour-piercing arrows and a small iron knife. The remains of a mare and a stallion, their legs tucked under them, rested at one end of the chamber. The burial had been placed in an underground wooden chamber, and the body was dressed in Eurasian steppe-style clothing.
In 1897, Hjalmar Stolpe uncovered an unusual burial from one of the cemeteries surrounding the emporium at Birka.
How the burial might have looked just before it was closed in Viking times.Ĭredit: Drawing by Þórhallur Þráinsson Copyright Antiquity Publications Ltd