A female Viking warrior’s grave?

It seems only natural that in the tribal European mind, where women incited conflict or noble martial deeds, men and women might also indulge in fantasies about female warriors, despite Adamnan’s proscription against their involvement in battle.^** The aggression shown by Freydis in Vinland suggests that the saga poets did; but is there any evidence that women in reality engaged in physical combat? An article published in August 2017 entitled ‘A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics’ has caused quite a stir for those hoping to find the material evidence of women at war.

Modern archaeologists like to confirm the sex of their skeletons by independent osteological analysis;^†† they know that making assumptions about gender roles in the past is risky, and they know that the structured deposition of human remains in a grave carries all sorts of coded messages, some of them indecipherably complex or beyond our ken. In today’s cemetery studies, grave goods and skeletons undergo separate, independent analysis to ensure that we are not projecting our assumptions onto reality. Just because someone is buried with an artefact, or set of artefacts, it does not necessarily mean that we should read them as a biography or portrait of the deceased.

Like good detectives, archaeologists are wary of prejudging their evidence. Some males buried with warrior gear, for example, look very much as though they had never been anywhere near the field of combat. Grave goods are symbols, even if they are also personal possessions, and they are placed not by the deceased but by the living, who may have their own statements to make about those who have gone. When archaeologists excavate skeletal material whose sex cannot be assigned because of poor preservation, there is a natural temptation to use gender-associated grave goods – spindle whorls and jewellery or weaponry, for example – to apply a biological sex to a skeleton; but these are dangerous waters.

Doubts about the sex of Bj581 were first raised in a 2013 conference report of a re-examination of the skeletal material, which suggested that the bones were, in fact, those of a woman. The new analysis, led by the Swedish archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, confirmed that the skeletal material contained no Y-chromosomic (male) trace and that the skeleton must, therefore, be that of a female.

If the individual interred here between the ninth and tenth centuries was a warrior she was unique, so far as Viking Age burial archaeology is concerned. Scandinavian myth, like Irish myth, was peopled with marvellous women: evil hags, impossibly beautiful maidens, sirens, creatures of the deep and other fantasy figures – most obviously the Valkyries. In the pantheon of Norse superheroes and gods, these were the mistresses of Valhalla, Odin’s hall, where great warriors passed their days after being killed in battle. These long-gowned females, of whom there are several depictions on a tapestry from the Oseberg ship burial, scoured the field of battle and chose those worthy of admission to the hall, where Valkyries served them limitless food and drink.

Scientific proof of the existence of a Viking warrior woman, buried with all her martial gear, is impressive confirmation that such women existed in reality and that, in death, they were honoured.

Offering readers a closer contextual parallel, albeit poetic, the journal article ends with the following, taken from the ‘Greenlandic Lay of Atli’ in the collection called the Poetic Edda:

Then the high-born lady saw them play the wounding game

She resolved on a hard course and flung off her cloak;

She took a naked sword and fought for her kinsman’s lives.

She was easy fighting, wherever she turned her hand.¹³

Case closed? Not according to Professor Judith Jesch, whose 1991 book Women in the Viking Age addressed the textual and archaeological evidence that then existed for, among other things, female warriors. In an internet blog post in September 2017,¹⁴ Jesch questions some of the conclusions of the genomics study. That the biological sex of the remains is female is no longer in doubt: the skeleton from Bj581 is that of a woman. But there are serious concerns about the interpretation and context of the burial. First, the possibility that the remains as catalogued have been mis-associated with grave Bj581. Without a detailed look at the original archive of the 1880s it is impossible to say, although any modern professional burial archaeologist would be able to make a judgement on that if they saw the original field notes and the records of curation of the remains and associated grave goods in the 130-odd years since. Jesch’s complaint is, rather, that the matter has not been addressed sufficiently in the context of such an important claim.

Jesch raises a second objection: that the remains of the woman might have accompanied another, male skeleton, which had decayed to the point where it was invisible.

Assuming, then, that the bones do belong to the right grave, and that no other remains have been missed or mixed up, this female was buried with the full paraphernalia of a warrior. Does that make her a warrior? The authors of the article argue that if the skeleton had been a male there would be little hesitation in describing him as a warrior. Jesch argues that this is specious. Archaeologists have in the past, it is true, been guilty of the sin of simplistically assigning ‘professions’ to people on the basis of their grave goods: after all, no one questions that the Oseberg ship burial grave goods belonged to at least one of the women interred there or that she was of the highest social rank. In the case of Bj581, we might well conclude that the goods and horses buried with the woman were her professional equipment. But one must also allow the possibility that they were the possessions of a widow, whose warrior husband was either buried elsewhere or whose remains had never been recovered from battle, shipwreck or some other fate far from home. She might, then, like the widows of twentieth-century wars, have displayed her husband’s military regalia with pride in life and in death.

To question the conclusions of the genomic study is, as Jesch is keen to point out, not to reject the idea that Viking women might fight as warriors. We know of real women who led military forces into battle: one was ?thelfl?d, the tenth-century ‘Lady of the Mercians’;^§§ another was St Olga of the Kievan Rus,^## who died in 969; and the Cain Adomnain^∫∫ implies that women were combatants in early Ireland. The argument is about the care and rigour with which claims that are bound to provoke widespread public discussion are handled.

^* But perhaps already the home of some adventurous Irish monks.

^† Scholars believe this must have been the area in the province of New Brunswick now called Miramichi Bay, on the southwest side of the Gulf of St Lawrence.

^‡ See the story of the Mochica stirrup vessel, likely to have been employed in childbirth practice: page 114.

^§ Discovered in 1985 in a manuscript in Madrid, by John F. Benton.

^# It is hard to know exactly what this means: a postnatal air embolism, perhaps.

^∫ Trota has a place at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party artwork.

^Ω La Señora de Cao, in chapter 2, was a Mochica shaman (see page 51).

^≈ The outstanding example belongs in the Staatliches Museum für Volkerkunde, Berlin.

^∂ See page 43.

^π See page 7.

^∆ She recurs as a motif: see page 228: Three faces of Artemisia Gentileschi.

^** See page 54.

^†† See page 15.

^‡‡ See page 51.

^§§ See page 78.

^## She was regent for her son, Svyatoslav. She put down an uprising of the Drevlians, who had killed her husband, King Igor, and was the first ruler of the Rus to convert to Christianity.

^∫∫ See page 56.