Peace-weavers, war-spinners

For Early Medieval poets, lawmakers and hagiographers, women fulfilled conflicting roles, not just in idealised reality but in dreams, fantasies and psycho-religious dramas. Holy virgins and fecund mothers alike were celebrated; soothsayers and seeresses welcomed, feared and vilified; mead-goddesses eulogised and blamed.

A handful of poems shed light on the sorts of stories that women inspired in the late Anglo-Saxon period. In Beowulf, a tale of the Heroic Age on the cusp of prehistory, the women we meet (aside from the mother of the monster Grendel) are high-born queens. Hygd is the wife of Beowulf’s uncle and patron, King Hygelac of the Geats: her noble character is revealed in generosity towards her countrymen:

Great in his hall, Hygd very young was,

Fine-mooded, clever, though few were the winters

That the daughter of H?reth had dwelt in the borough;

But she nowise was cringing nor niggard of presents,

Of ornaments rare, to the race of the Geatmen.¹⁰

In the country of the Danes, King Hrothgar’s daughter is a

…highly-famed queen,

Peace-tie of peoples, [who] oft passed through the building,

Cheered the young troopers; she oft tendered a hero

A beautiful ring-band, ere she went to her sitting.

Oft the daughter of Hrothgar in view of the courtiers

To the earls at the end the ale-vessel carried,

Whom Freaware I heard the hall-sitters title,

When nail-adorned jewels she gave to the heroes:

Gold-bedecked, youthful, to the glad son of Froda

Her faith has been plighted; the friend of the Scyldings,

The guard of the kingdom, hath given his sanction,

And counts it a vantage, for a part of the quarrels,

A portion of hatred, to pay with the woman.

Freawaru – a name meaning, literally, ‘peace-weaver’ – is explicitly sacrificed to a political marriage alliance, in order to end a blood feud. Her mother, Wealhtheow, Hrothgar’s queen, is the first lady of the mead hall, Heorot. She fulfils the role of hostess and cup-bearer, plying warriors with praise and ale. But she also plays the part of the goad, inciting Beowulf to fight the monster Grendel. Wealhtheow

…graciously circled

’Mid all the liegemen lesser and greater:

Treasure-cups tendered, till time was afforded

That the decorous-mooded, diademed folk-queen

Might bear to Beowulf the bumper o’errunning;

She greeted the Geat-prince, God she did thank,

Most wise in her words, that her wish was accomplished…

…He accepted the beaker,

Battle-bold warrior, at Wealhtheow’s giving,

Then equipped for combat quoth he in measures,

Beowulf spake, offspring of Ecgtheow:

‘I purposed in spirit when I mounted the ocean,

When I boarded my boat with a band of my liegemen,

I would work to the fullest the will of your people

Or in foe’s-clutches fastened fall in the battle.

Deeds I shall do of daring and prowess,

Or the last of my life-days live in this mead-hall.’

These words to the lady were welcome and pleasing…

It is the explicit duty of the hero to respond to her challenge, to defeat the bane of her people, the dread monster Grendel. After his death at Beowulf’s hands, the queen honours the hero with praise and gifts, including a famed necklace…

Wealhtheow discoursed, the war-troop addressed she:

‘This collar enjoy thou, Beowulf, worthy

Young man, in safety, and use thou this armour,

Gems of the people, and prosper thou fully,

Show thyself sturdy and be to these liegemen

Mild with instruction! I’ll mind thy requital.

Thou hast brought it to pass that far and near

Forever and ever earthmen shall honour thee,

Even so widely as ocean surroundeth

The blustering bluffs. Be, while thou livest,

A wealth-blessèd atheling.

Jewels and treasure…’

The idea that women might incite men to war, or to fight for their honour, finds an early expression even in Bede’s History of the English People. Before his reign as king, the exiled Northumbrian atheling Edwin^∂ was offered sanctuary by King R?dwald of East Anglia, generally considered to be the occupant of the seventh-century ship burial discovered in the 1930s in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. The king was bribed by Edwin’s brother-in-law to hand him over to his enemies and R?dwald was about to betray the prince until his un-named queen

…dissuaded him from it, warning him that it was in no way fitting for so great a king to sell his best friend for gold when he was in such trouble, still less to sacrifice his own honour, which is more precious than any ornament, for the love of money.¹¹

In the language of the warrior age, this was metaphorically known as placing a sword in a man’s lap. The king, chastened, took his queen’s counsel, stood by his friend and helped Edwin win back his kingdom: the queen acted as both goad and moral counsellor to her correspondingly weak husband. In later centuries, Anglo-Scottish border narratives tell of wives who, eager to send their husbands out a-reiving (raiding across the border for cattle and portable booty), would serve them a plate of spurs for their supper.

The ninth-century poet Cynewulf extended the repertoire of heroic queens with Elene (St Helena), none other than the mother of the Emperor Constantine who was in large part responsible for the biblical archaeo-tourism of Jerusalem experienced by the wide-eyed Egeria.^π Elene, leading a military expedition to the Holy Land, forced the elders of Jerusalem to reveal to her the hiding place of the True Cross; constructed a church on the site; and directly manifested God’s power in converting the doubting heathens. The same poet also versified a life of Juliana, a martyr of the fourth-century persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian.

A more vengeful and insouciant character is portrayed in a retelling of the Old Testament story of Judith and Holofernes, contained in the same manuscript as the Beowulf epic. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s general, Holofernes, might be Grendel personified, the vile heathen persecutor of her people, the Israelites; she is the cool-handed bedroom executioner, champion of the oppressed, both holy and wise.^∆ These poetic images of women during the Viking Age, when Christianity’s fragile triumph among the Anglo-Saxons was beset on all sides by the threat of pagan Scandinavian conquest, surely reflect men’s need to be inspired by their women or face losing country, honour and faith.

Njal’s Saga, an thirteenth-century Norse tale of a long-running blood feud, contains a grisly story, supposedly set in eleventh-century Caithness, which taps into a much darker allegory of women’s power to shape martial events. A man named Dorrud saw twelve valkyries – supernatural females whose role in Norse myth was to choose the best warriors from the slain of the battlefield and escort them to Valhalla – entering what he calls a ‘women’s room’, which we understand to be a weaving hall. Peering in through a window, he sees that the women have set up a loom on which the warp-weights are the heads of men and the threads of warp and weft are their intestines, while a sword is being used as a batten and an arrow as a pin beater. The women are singing a verse (just as the women weavers of the Northern Isles sang work songs right up until the twentieth century), to be understood as an allegory of the battle of Clontarf in 1014 between the Irish Christian King Brian Boru and the pagan Sigtrygg Silkbeard, king of the Dublin Norse.

A wide warp warns of slaughter; blood rains from the beam’s cloud…¹²

Here we must imagine fine red-dyed warp thread hanging from the beam of the loom, while the weft is a ‘spear-grey fabric’, the battle ranks of the antagonists.

We wind and we wind the web of spears, which the young king [Sigtrygg] has carried on before. Let us go forth amongst the fighters when our dear ones deal out blows…

We wind and we wind the web of spears, there where the banners of bold men go forth; we must not let his life be lost – valkyries decide who dies or lives…

And the Irish will endure an evil time which will never lessen as long as men live. Now the web is woven and the war-place reddened; the lands will learn of the loss of men.

The explicit use of the loom as a means of generating both prophecy and battle memorial, and its otherworldly female mistresses both watching the fray as from above and as puppeteers controlling the action, conjures a marvellous image of a battle narrative literally woven into the warp and weft of a tapestry, mirroring the embroidered battle-cloth of Bayeux later in the same century.

The saga-poet ends his story like a stage manager dismantling the flats of a theatrical set after a last-night show…

The women then pulled down the cloth and tore it to pieces, and each of them kept the piece she was holding in her hand. Dorrud then went away from the window and back home, and the women climbed on their horses and rode away, six to the south and six to the north.