Female_Warriors_of_the_Viking_Age_Fact_o.pdf

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University of Iceland
School of Humanities
Archaeology
Female warriors of the Viking age
Fact or fiction?
Antonio Redon
Final paper in Master-degree in Archaeology
Kt:
291190-4999
Supervisor: Gavin Lucas
January 2017
Abstract
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.
Keywords:
Archaeology of gender, Viking age, Female warrior, Valkyrie, Shieldmaiden.
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Table of contents
1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 3
1.1. Background .................................................................................................................. 3
1.1.1. Women warriors of other cultures ...................................................................... 5
1.2. Purpose and research questions .................................................................................... 7
1.3. Theory .......................................................................................................................... 7
1.4 Method ........................................................................................................................ 11
1.4.1. Warriors in gender and identity ........................................................................ 14
1.4.2. Osteology - Sexing bones ................................................................................. 14
1.4.3. Geographical and temporal limitations ............................................................. 15
1.4.4. Etymology......................................................................................................... 16
1.4.5. Layout ............................................................................................................... 17
2. Previous research ............................................................................................................... 19
3. Textual sources ................................................................................................................... 27
3.1. Saxo Grammaticus ..................................................................................................... 27
3.2. Icelandic sagas ............................................................................................................ 33
3.3. Non-scandinavian written sources ............................................................................. 36
3.3.1. Annals ............................................................................................................... 37
3.4. Pictorial sources ......................................................................................................... 38
4. Archaeological sources ...................................................................................................... 41
4.1. Typical male and female burials ................................................................................ 43
4.2. Case studies ................................................................................................................ 45
4.2.1. England ............................................................................................................. 46
4.2.2. Sweden .............................................................................................................. 51
4.2.3. Norway ............................................................................................................. 53
4.2.4. Denmark ........................................................................................................... 56
4.3. Case studies - Endnote ............................................................................................... 58
4.4. Valkyrie artefacts ....................................................................................................... 59
5. Discussion & conclusion .................................................................................................... 64
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 74
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1. Introduction
The focus of this thesis will be to discuss the presence of female warriors in the Viking age.
Though there are definitely archaeological findings of females buried with weapons and other
artefacts related to warfare it is hard to say if these were actual warriors and how common or
uncommon they were. By looking into written sources and comparing them to archaeological
sources of mainly Viking age graves and analyse those that contain women with weapons, I
hope to be able to shed some light on the phenomenon of female warrior graves from the
Viking age.
1.1. Background
There has been a lot of research done about Viking age society in Scandinavia and the Norse
influenced parts of western Europe and the eastern regions of Russia, Ukraine and beyond,
but the consensus with scholars about women in the Viking age seems to often simply confine
them to household roles.
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While female warriors appeared to have existed, these are often
relegated to the fringe and the unusual of what it meant to be a woman with modern
traditional gender roles probably playing an effect in the interpretations, which mainly
identifies the warrior lifestyle to that of a man. When a person does not conform to the
expectations of their gender roles it often leads to strong reactions from the society around
them and so we can examine the definitions and theoretical limits of acceptable behaviour in
contemporary sources.
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A problem with Viking age research of older archaeological excavations is that often times,
the leading archaeologists did not bother performing osteological analyses on the human
remains found in graves and simply determined the gender of the buried person by looking at
the grave goods
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, this leads one to think of the probability of pre-determined gender roles of
the archaeologists own times to have influenced their interpretations. Elisabeth Arwill-
Nordbladh wrote a short book on gender research in archaeology and provided an interesting
example of gender bias in a series of articles written about an archaeological find. In 1999 an
extraordinary find was made in a cave in southern France, a pair of children's footprints had
been preserved in the mud floor, 26000 years ago. The newspapers of the time reported them
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This is discussed in more detail in chapter 2.
McLaughlin 1990: 193
Arwill-Nordbladh 2001: 18. Gardela 2013: 276.
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as from a boy around 10 years old who probably scraped animal bones together with his
father, The tracks were from a child but somewhere between finding the footprints and
reporting them, the child had become a boy. The cave also had extensive cave paintings
which leads to an idea of hunting and magic being associated with the cave, and since these
activities were thought of as masculine, the child became a boy which then became a boy and
his father (though no adult footprints were found).
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The women were here completely absent,
invisible, and the find was determined to be male due to a perceived masculine activity.
While it is not possible at this time to re-examine every single Viking age grave with modern
technologies and osteological analyses with the precept of these possible mistakes, it does
good to bear in mind that there may have been a lot more women in warrior graves than we
know. My work will mostly include finds that have been osteologically sexed and are with
minimal doubt women in warrior type graves. There are many types of distinctions between
men and women, common people and royal/noble people and how their graves were
composed. Due to the religious beliefs of the ancient Norse, graves were often filled with
grave goods that the dead could use in the afterlife - gold, silver and other valuable items,
weapons, tools and household items - which were to be brought by the dead into the afterlife.
The social status of a person was also reflected in their grave goods, the poor would have very
little in death as they had in life while the rich could have horses, their favourite pet and
sometimes even slaves accompanying them to the grave and warriors would be buried with
their weapons.
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A Viking warrior must have been proud of their combat exploits and even though most
Norsemen who participated in raids and battles were also farmers, their graves are filled with
weapons and loot. Though most graves from the Viking age are not warrior graves, the ones
that are, come mostly from men. Men and women both had their roles in society and it is not
impossible to think that these roles could change or be switched, men have been found with
household items and women with warrior equipment in their graves; these are the exceptions
to the rules that I want to explore, in this case focusing on the women with warrior equipment
rather than the men with household items. It is also highly possible that all those buried with
warrior equipment were not actually warriors but aspired to be or wanted to be perceived as
such and thus their graves could simply show what they wanted to show, not what they
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Arwill-Nordbladh 2001: 6p.
Roesdahl 1998: 60. Haywood 1995: 44.
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