The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women

This week's book of the week is The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women by Nancy Marie Brown.  

This book hit my radar not too long after I panned the last book I read on Viking women, and I was a little hesitant to jump into it because...well what if it was just as bad? Happily, it was not. 

 Birka grave BJ581 was discovered in 1878 by archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe. The grave was believed to be the grave of a Viking warrior, a tall man, over 6 feet tall, buried in a saddle, which was assumed given the presence of iron stirrups, and surrounded by sword, scramasax, axe, two shields, two spears, and 25 arrows, two horses, and a set of Hnefatafl—Viking Chess. The presence of the weaponry and chess set made this a foregone conclusion. The body was definitely a Viking Warrior. And since only men could be warriors, it was a man. 

 This belief persisted until 2017, when DNA extracted from a tooth in the grave revealed the body contained therein was a woman. This neatly turned the concept of only men can be warriors on its head. Up until this point in history/archaeology, the references to shield-maids and warrior women in Scandinavian myth was seen as just that: myth and legend, with no basis in fact.  

 Now, there’s several things that make this casual dismissal interesting. First off, literally everyone who studies the Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, Saxo Grammaticus, and other sources, will all readily admit that these sources were written several hundred years AFTER the events they are portraying, essentially putting into writing stories that had been purely oral tradition. So, there are no first-hand accounts from the time these ladies lived, unless you accept that oral tradition was handed down accurately. Which is certainly possible, especially in the poetic Edda. As Brown points out in her book, part of the reason for poetic meter being used is it makes it easier to memorize the story being told. For that reason, the Poetic Edda is seen as being more accurate than the prose Edda.  

 Now, another point which is made peripherally throughout the book, is that why would women warriors be part of the mythic tradition, with Freya being a battle goddess and Valkyries being the choosers of the slain, if women in battle were not actually a thing in ancient Scandinavia? Brown also brings up how virtually every culture the world over has a tradition of women warriors in their stories, as well as real life, historically traceable, examples of women warriors.  

 Yet for some reason, the concept of women going Viking is scandalous and ridiculous. Brown traces this to two wildly separate and yet distinctly linked periods of time. First off, there is the writing of the sagas, written 300 years after the body in BJ581 was interred. At the time the warrior woman was buried, Scandinavia was transitioning from Pagan to Christian, and there is no way of knowing which path she followed; however, given the presence of grave goods, it seems likely she was Pagan. The Christians were in favor of a simple burial, not a vast ritualization. But by the time Snorri Sturluson wrote down his Prose Edda, the Scandinavian countries had been fully Christianized.  

 And Christianity had very strong opinions of what was a woman’s place, and the battlefield was not that place. 

 In reading the Prose Edda, the women who engage in “masculine” past times like war fare and leadership, were seen as troublemakers, not good women to look up to, but harridans and witches. The other time period heavily involved in our modern view of Viking culture is the Victorian era. Quite a few graves were unearthed.... pun not intended...during the Victorian era. And the Victorians were RIGID about women’s work. And since forensic osteology was not really a thing at that time, graves were sexed based on what was found in the grave. Weapons meant it was a man's grave. Lots of jewelry or spinning/weaving tools meant it was a woman’s grave.  

 Now, each chapter is laid out in the same format. Brown opens with a bit of fictional writing, re-imagining the life of BJ581, who she calls Hervor in her stories. Then she references her modern telling back to which bit of the sagas she is retelling. Then she dives into the known history of the time, including the existence of Queens who ruled unchallenged, and other important women from the time, who were known to have existed.  

 And she is able to create a credible telling of known facts and build a strong argument for the woman in BJ581 having been an actual warrior, and not just “a person of high rank.” Among the reason for the argument are other known graves and what is known of funerary rights among the Pagans. They were buried with what they would use in the other world. The Oseberg mound with its “two queens” has everything needed to weave tapestries and create textiles. The Gokstad ship was known to hold someone of importance, despite the lack of weapons, designated male.  

 So, what can of worms did DNA sexing of the tooth of BJ581 open up? Turns out, you can learn quite a lot about a person from their teeth. “The chemistry of her teeth tells us she was not a native of Birka, where she was buried.... As teeth develop, they pick up isotopes of strontium (which mimics calcium) from the local water. The strontium signature of a tooth will match that of the bedrock where the child lived when the tooth’s enamel formed. Her first molars (mineralized before she was three) reveal that she was born somewhere in the western part of the Viking world, in what is now southern Sweden or Norway. Her second molars say she sailed from there, before she was eight, to somewhere else in the west. She did not arrive in Birka until she was over sixteen.” 

 The location of the grave is equally telling. It has a high clear spot, a look out post, over the town of Birka. The few bones that remain say that she was well fed all her life. This says the preference for male over female children in ancient Scandinavia may not be the foregone conclusion that modern interpretations assume it to be. Or maybe she was the only child. Maybe it's entirely foregone. But only by obtaining more DNA from the other excavated graves will unravel that mystery. I do think, given that Viking culture practiced infanticide to weed out the weak, a not uncommon practice in warrior cultures, it’s likely that girls were as valued as much as boys, and so fed just as well. This would have them growing up on the same high protein diet as the boys. And since Viking was a profession, any girl looking to follow a warrior's path would have had to do so from a young age.  

 It takes long years of study to become proficient in any skill, and warrior is no different. If BJ581 had been proficient in anything other than weapons, she likely would have been buried with her needle and thread or drop spindle, much like the ladies in Oseberg were buried. Indeed, testing of teeth from more than a hundred different sites all over Europe, spanning a period of 2000 years, shows that Viking women were “unusually strong, healthy, and tall compared to women elsewhere.” 

 So, if Viking women routinely grew taller than men from other countries, with a high protein diet, which is known and peripherally addressed in this book...basically the grains they grew went to beer brewing not bread making.... then they also grew stronger than men from other countries, where they ate more bread. That carbs vs protein diet has been debated for centuries apparently. 

 As much as what was found in the grave is what was NOT found in the grave. The Tortoise brooches, used to hold up the apron dresses of Viking women, were not in the grave. This also helped contribute to the belief the body contained therein was male. Unlike the body and bones, the leather and wood saddle, metal decays much slower than biological matter. Yet no brooches were found.  

 I loved how the author addressed the bizarre belief held by modern day feminists that women are natural pacifists. You see that all the time of social media, the meme about how if women ran everything there would be no wars. Yet anyone who has ever studied any level of history...from basically anywhere in the world...can tell you how fallacious that argument is.  

 It’s also that belief that had me panning the last Viking women book so badly. That author made the assumption that because she was dressed as a man and had a man's weapons, any woman who fought must have been transgender. Much as Brown decries our current interpretation of burial goods due to being seen through a handed down lens of 19th century Victorianism, that belief outraged me as viewing 1000-year-old history through a 21st century lens of woke politically correct nonsense. Women have always been as equally capable of violence as men. The traditional weapons of women are poison and tears, but there is nothing saying women were not equally capable of picking up a sword and hacking a man to death. Except the Victorian/Christian tradition saying that was unwomanly.  

 This book was comprehensive. She covers the breadth and scope of the Viking world, which ran from Iceland in the west to Kiev in the east, Norway/Sweden in the north, to Spain and Baghdad in the south. She weaves together a tale, based on known historical record, of how the Vikings raided and traded their way to great wealth, and the not insignificant contributions women made to this network. Contributions that have been erased by 1000 years of tradition and remain buried today based on that same tradition and the bizarre layer of politically correct bullshit that strictly enforces those gender roles that have been assigned for 1000 years. Ok. That last bit, about PC enforced gender roles, is me taking another dig at how bad that last book was.

 THIS book, however, was excellent and entertaining. The author is scrupulously honest in when something is known and when something is her interpretation, which I always appreciate in my history books. And I am looking forward to reading her other works, some of which I have.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on March 5, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.