![]() Trusting Snorri (who was well known, in his lifetime, for being un- trustworthy), modern scholars classify valkyries as “mythological.” They are “firmly supernatural” or, at most, “semi-human.” Writing in Iceland between 12, this Christian-educated lawyer, politician, and poet described valkyries as pagan battle-goddesses with shield and sword (or spear) who ferried dead heroes to Valhalla, the otherworldly feast hall of the god Odin, and there served them celebratory cups of mead. The Old Norse word valkyrja combines valr, “corpse,” and kjósa, “to choose.” The standard definition comes from Snorri Sturluson. Like the others, she is dismissed as a “valkyrie.” By that the experts mean she is not real. The figurine from Harby is the first three-dimensional portrayal to appear. Similar images of women with weapons, fashioned from thread or carved in stone, come from Norway, Sweden, and Russia. These images were found in Denmark, England, Germany, and Poland. I know of seven flat metal images of a woman with weapons, and seventeen showing a shield-carrier facing a horse rider armed with sword and spear, both perhaps female. His find, cleaned up, was an intricately detailed figurine of gilded sil ver, about an inch tall, in the shape of a woman with long hair twisted into a ponytail. In December 2012, a man using a metal detector near the village of Harby in Denmark found a small face peering up at him from a lump of frozen dirt. What does her grave tell us? That we don’t know the Vikings as well as we thought. Their grave goods, though rich, are horses and boats and knives and tools: things that cannot be gendered.Īnd now, in Birka grave Bj581, we have a woman buried as a Viking warrior. ![]() Half of the elite burials in some Viking graveyards contain neither weapons nor jewelry. Even the elite, the people whose graves announce their high status, often hide their sexual identity, as if their gender mattered not at all. Yet most people who died in the Viking Age were buried with nothing that will sex them. When we hear the word “Viking,” we imagine a well-armed man. The result? Historians and novelists write confidently of ships carrying only “huge and brawny men.” Museum designers and filmmakers and Viking reenactors re-create in exquisite detail a male-dominated Viking world. The thirty-some Vi king graves in which slender, female-looking bones were unearthed beside weapons are ignored as “noise in the data.” Graves with weapons-even cremation graves in which the bones have been crushed after burning-are catalogued as male those with jewelry are female. Instead, “sexing by metal” has been standard procedure since 1837, before archaeology as a science even existed. DNA sexing is difficult and expensive and, so, rarely done. There’s no internationally agreed-upon definition of “robust” there’s no absolute scientific scale for pelvic structure. Sexing them by their robustness or by the shape of the skull or pelvis is often not possible-and is always open to interpretation. How does an archaeologist know a buried Viking is male? The bones found beside the buried swords, if any, are degraded. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the idea that mercilessness is a masculine trait. They would pillage at will, mercilessly cutting down all opposition.” ![]() Assuming all sword-bearers are male, writers limn the Viking Age as hypermasculine: a time when “shiploads of these huge and brawny men would suddenly appear out of the sea mists. Three thousand Viking swords are known from Nor way alone. I have no fear the Viking hordes Will sail the seas on such a night.Īrchaeology backs up the Vikings’ violent image: Across Northern Europe, from Russia in the east to Iceland in the west, Vikings are found buried with swords. Bitter is the wind tonight, White the tresses of the sea
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