Were there Norse Female Warriors in Viking Age England?

This thesis focuses on the concept of female warriors during the Viking age. I list seven cases from different parts of the Norse world where women have been buried with weapons and compare these archaeological sources with written sources using methods of material culture studies and theories of gender identity and feminist thought. By looking at these I found evidence of special ideas on- and treatments of- female warriors in line with a concept of third genders which could explain the rarity of their existence. However I concluded that female warriors did indeed exist in the Viking age, even though there were very few of them.

This paper seeks to provide a new contribution to the debates on Viking Age women by focusing on a rather controversial notion of ‘female warriors’. The core of the article comprises a preliminary survey of archaeological evidence for female graves with weapons (axes, spears, swords and arrowheads) from Viking Age Scandinavia. Attention is focused not only on the types of weapons deposited with the deceased, but first and foremost on the meanings which similar practices may have had for the past societies. The author discusses why, where and how the weapons were placed in female graves and attempts to trace some patterns in this unusual funerary behaviour. In addition to exploring the funerary evidence, the iconographic representations of what could be regarded as ‘female warriors’ are also briefly considered. Lastly, a few remarks are also made on the notion of armed women in the textual sources.

Early Medieval Europe, 2011

Various types of evidence have been used in the search for Norse migrants to eastern England in the latter ninth century. Most of the data gives the impression that Norse females were far outnumbered by males. But using burials that are most certainly Norse and that have also been sexed osteologically provides very different results for the ratio of male to female Norse migrants. Indeed, it suggests that female migration may have been as significant as male, and that Norse women were in England from the earliest stages of the migration, including during the campaigning period from 865. Determining the ratio of Norse women to men in England during the period of early settlement up to 900 ad has always been extremely difficult. 1 There is written evidence attesting the presence of women and children with the Norse army that attacked Wessex and western Mercia in the 890s, but no mention of women and children accompanying the army that campaigned from 865 to 878 and succeeded in conquering a Norse settlement zone in eastern England. There is some archaeological evidence for early Norse female settlement, most obviously oval brooches, but this evidence is minimal. The more difficult to date evidence of place names, personal names, and DNA samples derived from the modern population suggests that Norse women did migrate to England at some stage, but probably in far fewer numbers than Norse men. Following the discovery of Norse female burials at Cumwhitton, Cumbria, and Adwickle-Street, South Yorkshire, Judith Jesch noted in 2008 that there remain 'great gaps in our knowledge about the extent to which such women accompanied the Viking settlers', and this situation has not markedly 1 This article deals only with biological sex, rather than gender. 'Norse' is used in the sense of someone likely to be speaking Old Norse, regardless of the region from which they emigrated to England.

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 14, 2018

This paper is a critical response to the recently published ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’ (Hedenstierna-Jonson and others, 2017). Its purpose is to investigate the archaeological sources involved in the DNA research on Birka grave 581. It shows that problems exist with both the excavation methodology and the recording strategy employed by its investigators and publishers. Based on the analysis of documentation and finds kept at the Swedish Historical Museum, this paper comes to the conclusion that grave 581 contained a primary male grave with weaponry and a secondary female burial.

History is an annual series concerned with the archaeology and history of England and its neighbours during the Anglo-Saxon period.

Introduction: Viking women are commonly portrayed in the media as strong warriors in their own right. An example of this would be America Ferrera’s Astrid in the film How to Train Your Dragon, who is initially the most promising student in dragon training. There is little evidence to suggest that viking women were as prominent warriors as the media suggests. Traditionally vikings are considered to have been part of a culture of violent people who murdered, pillaged, and enslaved others, and as Judith Jesch notes, “women have had little opportunity to participate in war, murder, rape, and robbery.” The viking women may be portrayed as champions, however they were considered insignificant and were thus undervalued by their male counterparts.

English: The study of women within the fields of history and archaeology has traditionally been somewhat neglected as both of these academic disciplines have been dominated by an androcentric approach to the study of the genders. Especially within the field of Viking Age studies women and children has been neglected and perceived mostly through their relation to the male gender having resulted in a quite biased approach to, and interpretation of, archaeological material. Through a critical discussion of relevant archaeological and historical academic publications from primarily the late 21st century, compared to arguments for and discussions of examples of Viking Age material culture, putting women in relation to weapons, this thesis argues the approach to objects of material culture exemplified in the social-Anthropological method of 'social biography'. This method, in relation to the principal of unbiased and equal approach to the study of archaeological material and gender as formulated within the field of feminist archaeology, is applied comparatively onto traditional interpretations of selected archaeological finds, in order to examine and discuss the development within the approach to archaeological material. The archaeological material, which in this thesis acts as primary sources to the relation between Viking Age women and weapons, is in the form of depictions from the Oseberg tapestry as well as in the form of Viking Age jewelry of women both with and without weapons; examples of female weapon graves from Denmark and Norway and the inclusion of a child weapon grave from Norway. Combined this material act as strong evidence of Viking Age weapons having not only been objects reserved for men, and it stresses the problems related to gender-automatic interpretations of Viking Age graves where weapons act as a gender marker, having resulted in a false representation of the genders within the archaeological registrations of weapon graves. Only through a continuous reevaluation and critical interpretation of the ever growing mass of archaeological material concerning the Viking Age, is it possible to approach a more accurate and reflected definition of the relations between women and weapons, free of traditional and biased auto-interpretations of gender and material culture. Dansk: Studier af kvinder indenfor både historie og arkæologi har traditionelt set været et forsømt område, da begge disse akademiske discipliner har været præget af en androcentrisk tilgang til køn. Særligt indenfor studier af vikingetiden har områder vedrørende kvinder og børn været negligeret og traditionelt set tolket udelukkende gennem deres relation til det mandlige køn, hvilket har resulteret i en meget ensidig tilgang til samt tolkning af arkæologisk materiale. Gennem en kritisk diskussion af relevant arkæologisk og historisk forskningslitteratur, primært fra sidste del af det 21. århundrede, sammenholdt med argumenter for og diskussioner af eksempler fra vikingetidens materielkultur, som sætter kvinder i relation til våben, argumenterer dette speciale for den tilgang til objekter som er eksemplificeret i den social-antropologiske metode ’social-biografi’. Denne metode, i samspil med det formulerede princip indenfor feministisk arkæologi om en upartisk tilgang til arkæologisk materiale og køn, bliver anvendt komparativt på traditionelle fortolkninger af udvalgte fund, for at undersøge og diskutere udviklingen indenfor tilgangen til arkæologisk materiale. De arkæologiske fund, der i dette speciale fungerer som primærkilder til vikingetidens kvinder og deres relationer til våben, består af afbildninger af kvinder med og uden våben fra Osebergtapetet og fra smykker, samt eksempler på kvindelige våbengrave fra Danmark og Norge og en enkelt børne-våbengrav fra Norge. Tilsammen udgører dette materiale et stærkt bevis for, at våben i vikingetiden ikke var objekter forbeholdt mænd, og viser det problematiske i at lave køns-automatiske tolkninger af grave hvor våben indgår, hvilket traditionelt set har forårsaget en skævfordeling af hh. det mandlige og kvindelige køn i forbindelse med registreringen af våbengrave. Kun gennem en kontinuerligt revurderende og kritisk tolkning af den konstant voksende totale funds-mængde fra vikingetiden, er det muligt at nærme sig en mere præcis definition af relationen mellem vikingetidens kvinder og våben, som er fri af traditionelle, ensidige automat-tolkninger af køn og materiel kultur.

University of Helsinki theses and dissertations, 2023

The Viking Age is the roughly 300-year period of European history marked by the martial activities of raiding and wars of conquest as well as trading and colony building of broadly Scandinavian peoples. These people who left their homelands as part of raiding bands and armies are left their marks on peoples, material cultures and languages of Europe that are visible to this day. The reach of viking warriors was felt from Western Europe to the banks of Volga and the courts of Byzantium. These people are known by their reputation, but how are they defined in archaeological research of the Viking Age and how do these definitions affect archaeological research? This thesis examines the concepts of Viking warriorhood and warrior burials used in the previous research and identify problems these concepts contain. This is done by critical analysis of the definition of warriorhood, and the argumentation used to support it. This analysis is further complemented by examining the archaeological source value of the known burials of the Viking age through existing scholarship and presenting three Viking burial sites outside of Scandinavia as case studies. Patterns of burial behaviour conventionally associated with warrior burials in the Viking context are also tested by employing multivariate analysis techniques. The results are interpreted and used to leverage fragmentary bioarchaeological data of the burials. The multivariate analysis is performed on a cohort formed by sampling the burial grounds of the Swedish Viking age town of Birka. Based on the results reached by the combination of these methods, in this thesis it is argued that both the concept of warriorhood as well as the concept of warrior burials in their present usage contain several problems and no longer represent the current reach of archaeological methodology. As this has ramifications for further research on the subject matter, these concepts need to be refined and adjusted to keep their usefulness for the archaeological research of the Viking warriorhood.

Analysis of the construction and articulation of gender identities has become fundamental to historical and archaeological studies of early medieval society (e.g. Nelson 1997;. However, the gendered dimensions of the Scandinavian raiding and settlement in Britain and Ireland remain underexplored. A handful of studies have addressed the experiences and identities of women in the areas of Scandinavian settlement (Fell 1984; Jesch 1991; Kershaw 2009; see also Boyd, this volume), but the explicit discussion of masculinity has scarcely begun (for an isolated exception see Hadley 2008). This scholarly neglect is surprising on three counts. First, there is now an extensive body of scholarship on early medieval masculinity, which provides a context for understanding masculinity in the Viking Age (e.g. the various contributions to Lees 1994; Hadley 1999; Murray 1999; Cullum and Lewis 2004). Second, there have been a number of studies by literary scholars of the Scandinavian sources for the Viking Ageincluding sagas, poetry and runic inscriptionsin which masculinity is central (e.g. Jesch 2001; Jakobsson 2007; Phelpstead 2007). Third, the study of much of the Scandinavian impact on the British Isles has long been about the activities and behaviour of men, even if the construction of masculinity has not been explicitly articulated. This chapter draws on written, archaeological and material culture evidence to explore the construction and renegotiation of masculinity in urban settlements in England and Ireland in the wake of Scandinavian settlement. The focus is on the manner in which masculine warrior identities and ideals were