Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World

Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World by Johana Katrin Fridriksdottir was not my favorite of books. I really wanted to like it. But just couldn’t quite get there.

There were only six chapters in the book, so I kind of break down what I liked and didn’t like about each chapter. Each chapter basically covers the life cycle of a human, in this case focusing on women, starting with infancy and childhood.

So, life as a Viking was hard. This was a tough culture and society to be born into and raised in. And while children were certainly a blessing, life was still hard, and that blessing may not have always been a welcome one, since children equals more mouths to feed, and unproductive mouths to start with. Sons were always welcome and daughters were certainly useful around the homestead, but, like with basically all other European cultures, Daughters meant the requirement to provide a dowry for them.

Fridriksdottir discussed that there is reports in the extant resources of Viking culture practicing infanticide, not necessarily as a common practice, just that it was possible. It is not specified in the sources that girls were killed more than boys, although the author speculates this is true because of….The Patriarchy (eyeroll). It’s ALWAYS because of the Patriarchy. And argues it was such an embedded custom among Scandinavian people that when conversion to Christianity occurred, infanticide had to be outlawed. Which flies in the face of pretty much every other pagan people on the continent. Generally speaking, women were among the first to embrace the new cult of Christianity specifically BECAUSE it forbade infanticide.

While it’s certainly possible Scandinavian women were more dedicated to their gods than to their children, that indicates a level of cold bloodedness that I’m just not sure what to do with from a historical perspective. Moreover, I don’t really buy this reasoning. It doesn’t pass the smell check. I mean, there are certainly indications in the mythos that I’ve read that sacrifices were made to the gods, including human sacrifice, it was usually adult males who were sacrificed. Not children. So if infanticide happened, it was likely not religious or due to the Patriarchy. It was probably more a practical matter of this child is malformed, was born missing a limb, unable to see or hear, and so rather than have him or her be a burden on the family resources, they would just expose him to the elements. Don’t know if it ever happened, but that rings more true than killing kids because of The Patriarchy.

One of the resources she pulls from is the Grágás laws (grey goose for pronunciation, at least according to Wikipedia), which were 13th century Icelandic laws that covered everyone, including women.  Not sure I agree with her interpretation of those laws and how they were applied.

She does point out that there are limited resources on what childhood would have been like, which is a fair point. Infant mortality rates were between 40 and 60 percent. And since you could be married as young as 12 or 13 and were considered a full adult, legally able to inherit at 16, they likely didn’t have much of a childhood, and what they did have was likely spent learning how to adult.

The next chapter was on teenage girls. The problem being teenager as a concept didn’t really exist until the 1940’s. 1000 years ago you were a child or you were an adult. There was no in between. But according to Fridriksdottir, if you were a teenage girl, you were screwed. By the Patriarchy. AND the Matriarchy. Women could be just as cutthroat as the men in securing marriages for the daughters, so you were likely to be equally screwed by either parent.

This chapter is when she starts to lose me. Teenage years, such as they were, are when the boys would be heading out to Viking and earn their names and make their marks. If shield maidens existed, so would teenage girls. I don’t know if they existed or not, but I am at least willing to entertain the idea. Fridriksdottir is not. When the Birka grave was found 100 years ago, one of the bodies was surrounded by weapons and was reported as belonging to a Viking warrior. Until 100 years later when DNA testing occurs and reveals the body to be a woman. Now all of a sudden shield maidens don’t exist.

Now, she bases her supposition on the bones were not dense enough to have been a fighter. Ok, there’s some logic there, there’s some actual science behind bone density and physical combat. Or its possible she was in training and died before she was truly tested as a warrior. But where she lost me is Fridriksdottir didn’t just shoot it down as mundane science. She shoots it down as girls who would have fought would have “identified as boys.” i.e. transgendered. I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain and almost went blind.

Especially as the very next chapter, she contradicts herself and says girls who did go off to fight would have given that up in their 20’s to become mothers. Now, the book I read in July, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, states quite clearly that gender dysphoria is a real thing. Like a true medical condition. You don’t just…Get over it to decide you were a real girl all along.

Gender dysphoria as a described medical condition is probably as new as psychotherapy. Meaning it’s about 140 years old. Now, having said that, Scandinavian culture was probably better equipped to handle that concept than most cultures, since there are stories of gender swapping in their mythos. There are three I can think of immediately, two of them involve Loki being Loki, meaning a tricksters gonna trick. That is what they do.

The third involves Odin and is mentioned in the book. And is probably not the best defense of transgenderism, since it involves Odin swapping genders to trick his way into a house and rape a girl. So probably not the defense Fridriksdottir really wanted to put out there. I think she thought she was defending the concept of transgenderism as solid for millennia because per her biography, she was educated at Harvard, and taught among other things, gender studies at Yale. American colleges ruin everything.

So, Odin hears a prophecy that a Princess named Brinda is destined to bear him a son. So he uses runic magic to make her go mad then disguises himself as a woman to gain access to her where he rapes and impregnates her. So…dude dressing as a woman, to gain access to women only spaces, so he can rape a woman. Pretty much every right of center’s nightmare and expectation of trans people. NOT a good defense of the concept of trans as a 1000 year old ideology.

She does go into other career paths women could have had, and that are documented, largely in the Icelandic sagas. So women could have been poets or skalds, Runemasters, they could rung their own businesses, usually in textiles, they could be a Völva or seeress…magicians basically. Once they were married they generally had more agency; however, Fridriksdottir does everything she can to disprove that because….take a guess….The Patriarchy.

Mostly the sagas mention women who were high born, and hey, we all like to think about princesses in power, but in one of histories greatest inversions, the higher placed you were socially, the less freedom and agency you actually possessed. So who is to say there were not actually shield maidens?

The next chapter addresses adulthood, married life, and divorce. Yep, divorce, because that was one right Viking women absolutely had—The right to get out of a shitty marriage. Once you were married, when the marriage ended, either through death or divorce, you had a bit more agency. Unless you were rich or royalty. Chalk one up for peasant happiness.

On one of the ships that rolled out for colonization, the ships rolls included 13 single women. And they were granted farms on their own, so these weren’t slave women, these were freedwomen. And this would have been unheard of in some of the other European cultures. So it’s kind of cool that single women were granted passage and allowed to farm land without the help of a man. But she downplays that. Patriarchy!

If they end up being a skald, runemaster, or craftsman after their marriage, they had the ability and freedom to travel, and make a living doing such.

She did mention that there were laws against transvestitism, which is the wearing of clothes of the opposite gender. Which means if there were shield maidens, they were bloody damn good at it to get away with it. Also means the Vikings definitely understood evolutionary biology and the concept of boy/girl dichotomy. Something that humanity has known for millions of years. Up until about a decade ago, when we all got very confused about science.

She does mention concubinage, which we learned in The Last Viking. However, man taking a concubine was not reason for divorce, provided he did not also abandon the marital bed. So as long as he’s shtuping them both, we’re all golden.

There were four general reasons for divorce: marital discord, domestic violence, abandonment of the marital bed, and failure to maintain dependents—basically, take care of your kids.

The next chapter has to do with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. And she does an excellent job highlighting the values of mothers and motherhood to Scandinavian cultures 1000 years ago, highlighting the importance of family as a unit and as a means of survival, using stories from the sagas where mothers would intercede for their children with their fathers.

Now, she also points out some instances of toxic motherhood. I drew definite conclusions of Oedipal mothers. And whether or not their were shield maidens, it does seem likely the Viking women were fiercely protective of their children.

Chapter five has to do with widows because while women could and certainly did die of a host of issues, they were more likely to outlive their husbands. And once you were widowed you were, unless you were very rich or royal, free to live your life however you saw fit. Rich or royal and you were likely to be forced into remarriage. By the king or one of your parents, who were likely to use your status as wealthy heiress to increase their own social mobility.

In this chapter, Fridriksdottir moves away from the sagas and highlights two real life widows and their accomplishments, which we know about because they became successful tradesmen in their own right and left runestones to tell their stories. They were apparently not psychotic mothers cause their kids also talked about their mothers on runestones. So that’s a remarkable accomplishment. And it was a nice reprieve from the social justice warrior ideology being forced on me in the rest of this book. Although, she couldn’t help patronizing the past when discussing runestones left by Sigurthur, which depicts part of a saga of the slaying of a dragon. She just couldn’t believe that a woman might have found a story like this interesting or exciting enough to memorialize them in such a fashion. Because apparently all women everywhere anytime, only like Jane Austen.

The final chapter is old age and death. And here is where she discusses the Völva because typically the seers would have been older women with a bit of life experience and the veneration that comes with old age. And this chapter I was most aggravated by her contradictions, and she contradicted herself constantly throughout the course of this book, applying this double standard of what means what.

See in the chapters on teenagers and motherhood, we had contradictions. Let me explain. Chapter on teenagers, Fridriksdottir explains there is no way women could have been warriors and still identified as women. The most famous grave is that Birka female Viking burial mound, she basically shrugs this off as male fantasy. I mean, the body was real, the sword in the grave was certainly real, but she goes into great mental gymnastics and detail on how a girl could not have been a warrior despite the presence of the sword and how burial rites are for the living and good buried with her were denoted status and not the belief she would actually use this in the afterlife. Then in the chapter on motherhood, she discusses a young boy who was also buried with a warriors kit and says “one wonders whether the young boy was buried with a complete kit or sent to the afterlife with the weapons that their mother had intended to give them when they came of age had they lived.” So which is it? Why is it so impossible to believe the sword was buried with the girl for the same intended use as the boy?

 As a final nail in the coffin of stupidity in this chapter on burial and old age, she highlights several burial mounds of women, including the famous Oseberg burial mound where the women were absolutely buried with items they would have used in the afterlife. Like weights and measures, spindles and looms. So which is it? They were buried with stuff they’d use…like maybe a sword? Or only with ceremonial items because burial rites are for the living?

So I liked parts of the book. I think there was some good history when the author pulled her head out enough to get out of her own way, she could make some good points. I did find some of her references to the sagas confusing, because she would mention the same sagas but different parts in different chapters to try and prove her point. She would cross reference, like see chapter two for more on this, but I don’t want to have to flip back and forth to find a reference and see the whole point.

Among the other confusing points is that she cherry picks which sagas she wants to pull from, discounting some as heroic myth, but then pulling from those same heroic myths to describe a woman who used rune magic to protect herself and her family. So again…which is it? You don’t get to have it both ways.

The contradictions make it obvious she’s pushing an agenda, and history doesn’t really have an agenda. It is what it is….it’s just history. You can learn new facts about history, which is what Jack Weatherford did in his Genghis Khan book last month, but saying the parts you disagree with are bullshit but the parts you like are cool? There are definitely problems with this book. I feel like the subject, in the hands of someone not pushing a political narrative, would be very cool indeed. But this book ain’t it. I was really disappointed in this book. I wanted to like it. I just couldn’t.

Some of the history was good, if a little confusing. But it wasn’t so much history as ideology and speculation. Stupid speculation…millions of years of evolution and suddenly we’re stumped by the concept of boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.

I disliked the perpetual harping on the Patriarchy because…well duh. Women contributed, but men built a huge chunk of the planet. What are you gonna do?

21st century gender political ideology being forced on 1000 year old history is not a happy pairing. It does not work. It’s so blatantly obvious that an ideology is being pushed that I am, as I finished this book, convinced that Vikings are smarter than your average Harvard trained gender studies teacher of history.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on December 12, 2021, but review is now up on Rumble and PodBean.