Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It

by Janina Ramírez

Two men playing a tafl game while drinking from horns are painted on the Swedish Ockelbo Runestone, suggesting it was a common pastime. Rich ship burials, like that at the royal sites of Vendel and Välsgarde, also contained board games with the pieces laid out as if still in play, deliberately placed into the grave to project something symbolic about the deceased.

But gaming pieces placed in warrior burials may symbolise something other than high status. They may also reflect the strategic skills needed by the individual in life to coordinate battles and organise armies. While gaming boards are often found in elite male graves, Bj 581 is the only Viking-age female burial to include one.

the gaming pieces positioned alongside such a large array of weapons could suggest she was seen as a military strategist. Buried so close to the garrison buildings, it is possible she was involved in the sort of tactical military endeavours usually attributed to

no horned Viking helmets have ever been discovered.20 There are many reasons why it’s not pragmatic to have horns on a helmet, not least because they provide a visual target, are cumbersome and would be a hindrance in battle. It’s

Admittedly it has been suggested that helmet plaques, like those found both in England on the Sutton Hoo helmet and on the Torslunda plates from Sweden, show warriors with horns on their helmets.

But closer investigation reveals that these ‘horns’ have hooked beaks. This is a feature found throughout early medieval art and it is much more likely that the ‘horns’ represent two birds; a symbolic rendering of Odin’s ravens Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory). There is a big difference between a helmet worn for protection during battle and a ceremonial headdress donned for symbolic purposes.

The hijacking of Viking culture by German nationalists was a deliberate strategy, and in just twenty years the horned helmet was reproduced on everything from cruise menus to children’s books. Tying Germany to a perceived Viking ancestry only intensified under the Nazis.21 The runic Sowilo symbol inspired the SS lightning bolt insignia, and the Ahnenerbe, Heinrich Himmler’s think tank, searched for proof of the racial superiority of Germans through Aryan and Nordic links.

As the twentieth century loomed, the British and Germans raced to gain control of the seas and to lay claim to their most famous historical seafarers. The painting by English painter Frank Dicksee from 1893, called The Funeral of a Viking, presents a view that is still firmly embedded in modern consciousness.

As texts of the Scandinavian sagas were rapidly being translated into English and devoured by a public keen for adventure and tales of conquest, an image of unbeatable, unfettered warriors emerged. The British Empire was still ‘master of the seas’ and there was a symbolic potency in harking back to Viking origins.

Archaeologists, linguists and place-name specialists all added fuel to the fire, uncovering evidence that the history of the British Isles led back to the Vikings. They were not wrong, but the tenor of this nationalistic misappropriation is clear from Dicksee’s painting.

There is an unrestrained romantic otherness about the men – these are not dignified Victorian gentlemen; these are their pagan forefathers. We’re led to believe that inside the refined and sophisticated Victorian man lies the passion and power of earlier ancestors. But this is empire-fuelled fantasy. The real world of the Vikings was very different, as was the idea that nineteenth-century men were restrained and upstanding.

The very idea of the Vikings being a unified race, or even a distinctive group, is problematic. The term ‘Viking Age’ is only used from 1873 onwards. In early medieval texts, the Old Norse word ‘víking’ describes an activity a group of ‘víkingr’ (explorers, merchants, travellers) would carry out as they took to the seas on expeditions. These could include raiding, trading, diplomacy, settlement and intermarriage. And when their violent attacks were recorded, their victims never called them ‘Vikings’. Instead, they were Norse, Swedes or Danes. If written about in a damning way they were ‘pagans’, ‘heathens’ or ‘wolves’.

the Vikings originated in distinct Scandinavian regions and warred as much between themselves as they did with outside groups. Certain

Their religion was polytheistic, with the greatest gods and goddess displaying vices and virtues aligned to a warrior society. Their language, social structure and legal codes were loosely related, and their legacy in material culture – zoomorphic art, metalwork and armoury – can be seen as a unifying factor.

There is the assumption that Vikings were bearded, dirty barbarians. The evidence remarkably comes down to a single, and distinctly unfavourable, account by the tenth-century Arabian writer Ahmad ibn Fadlan.

He describes the ‘Rus’ (Vikings who settled along the river routes between the Baltic and Black Seas) as being ‘the dirtiest creatures of God’.

Ibn Fadlan’s account was designed to shock his civilised Arabic readers and his writing is full of flamboyant ‘tales of adventure’ likely exaggerated for his intended audience. Travel writers are known to sensationalise what they encounter for entertainment purposes. Yet these accounts have been isolated and repeated by historians down the centuries, shaping our perceptions of all the Scandinavian groups of the Viking Age.

Accounts of barbarism were exaggerated, with one suggesting that they drank from human skulls. This now-infamous claim was again the result of one account; a mistranslation of an Old Norse kenning (a poetic term for the combination of two words which creates new, metaphorical meanings) in the 1630s.

similar misunderstanding underlies the legendary ‘blood-eagle’ – long thought to be a form of Viking execution. It is mentioned in two sources, and Ivar the Boneless reputedly used it to punish the king of Northumbria:

‘They caused the bloody eagle to be carved on the back of Ælla, and they cut away all of the ribs from the spine, and then they ripped out his lungs.’ However, the sagas in which these references are made were written after the twelfth century in a Christian society.

As St Sebastian was shot through with arrows until his organs were displayed, so the blood-eagle seems a later literary elaboration designed to chime with a newly Christianised audience.26 It’s a misreading, but ...

Even the more seemingly authentic contemporary accounts were largely penned by monks who had an agenda: their monasteries had been attacked and plundered. These we...

Alcuin’s version of their attack on the island of Lindisfarne in AD 793 has been regularly cited by historians as heralding the start of the Viking Age.

As a tidal island, undefended and used as a safe house for much of the wealth of the Northumbrian Kingdom, Lindisfarne was an easy target for Norsemen out ‘a-viking’.

North Sea to attack an unfortified site with a glut of portable wealth was tempting. The fact the inhabitants were monks would not have been an issue, as the eighth-century Norsemen did not share the Christian moral framework which designated monasteries as sacred spaces. At this event two world views collided, and history has recorded it by tarring all ‘Vikings’ as savage, opportunistic, pagan and bloodthirsty.

in the case of the historical reputation of the Vikings, history was written by the victims. British monks could record their accounts of the raids, but the Vikings were an orally literate society and didn’t write down their own histories, stories, traditions, laws and ideas.

It was not until the start of the second millennium, when Christianity was spreading through Denmark, Sweden, Norway and up to Iceland, that the Scandinavian people began using writing as a means of documenting and recording.

Preserving older accounts of their eighth-, ninth- and tenth-century predecessors has left behind a version of their past filtered through the moral prism of Christianity. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors like Snorri Sturluson, who provided the earliest surviving account of Viking mythology, would have had different religious views to the ancestors they wrote about.

Rather than dirty, violent and barbaric, finds from burials consistently show that Viking people were fastidious about their appearance. Tweezers, combs and ear scoops for removing wax were frequently placed in graves.28 The importance of washing regularly is even preserved in the Old Norse term for Saturday – ‘laugardagr’ or ‘bathing day’.

Grave goods indicate that men and women decked themselves in beads and jewels from across the known world.

We can deduce that the foreign materials and ideas they encountered on their travels were prized, displayed and treasured. These archaeological discoveries present a Viking world which was curious, wide-reaching and powerful.

In many respects, life for Viking women was beset by the same issues that have affected women across time.33 They were used as diplomatic pawns through arranged marriages, had to endure the trials of childbirth, were responsible for the upbringing of children and were in charge of caring for the home.

It has been suggested that female infanticide, to avoid the need to provide for too many daughters, was practised in some parts of early medieval Scandinavia.34 Unwanted babies could be ‘bera út’ (carried out) and left to die exposed to the elements.35

When Norway converted to Christianity, laws were frequently passed preventing infanticide, which suggests it was indeed ...

Recent studies have found that the movement and settlement so characteristic of the Viking Age may have been a necessity due to a disparity between the male and female population.36 Men were able to take more than one wife, leaving many single men with not enough women to marry them.

Frequent discoveries of keys in female burials suggest that women had responsibility for household property, could be involved in trade and were able to run businesses. Surviving law codes, designed to provide moral and legal guidance, also indicate that many Viking women could live well and arguably had more rights than their southern European counterparts.

They could own property, divorce their partners if treated badly, and run their own estates. If her husband hit her, a woman could demand payment of a fine.

The Odendisa Runestone, from Hassmyra in Sweden, includes an inscription where the husband laments: ‘No better wife will come to Hassmrya to run the estate.’ The woman’s name – Odendisa – is very rare and translates as ‘Goddess of Odin’.

Viking gods that the role of women is even more prominent. A woman – Freyja – arguably holds the second-most important position in the pantheon of the gods, after the All-Father Odin. She’s known commonly as a goddess of love, death, sex, beauty and war, and was entitled to take half the dead to her realm, Folkvangr, while Odin received the other half in Valhalla.

Valkyries emphasise their bloodthirstiness, and one describes them as ‘the desiring goddess of the excessively drying veins.’40 They are women thirsting to feed from the ruins of war; they swoop over the battlefield like the carrion beasts of Odin, pecking over their spoils.

Today we envisage war as a moment when two distinct forces engage in battle. Warrior culture for the Vikings was a way of life that fed into, and was fed by, their spiritual practices. Instead of thinking in terms of our modern religions, the Vikings had a belief system that was bound to, and adapted to, their social and cultural practices. As warfare was an essential component, it is unsurprising to find men and women reflecting warrior aspects in their rituals and attitudes towards the supernatural world.41

Texts record that some women acted as seers, known as ‘völva’ (which means ‘holder of the magic staff’). Völvas would strive for ‘seiðr’, which was a form of magic connected to Freyja and Odin (the female and male deities) that could foretell and shape the future.

In Scandinavian communities, where family groups (who may not have had physically strong trained young men to protect them) were isolated from one another, it is perfectly feasible to imagine that a woman could have picked up a weapon and have been trained to use it. When winters were brutal and entire villages could be decimated by illness or famine, every individual counted and to designate roles as ‘male’ or ‘female’ would have been detrimental.

Laxdaela Saga describes the ninth-century settler of Iceland, Unn the Deep-Minded. Wife to the self-professed ‘King of Dublin’ Olaf the White, she travelled extensively with her family, following her son to live with him in the Hebrides.

Her life is retold in many sagas; a foundation story centred on a powerful woman was celebrated and remembered down the centuries. Recent DNA studies in Iceland show that the early settlers were indeed from Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia, so Unn’s legacy continues today.47

commanded by ‘the fleet of the Inghen Ruiadh’, translating as the ‘Red Girl’. This casual reference infers a woman was capable of being a fleet commander.

Oseberg ship, it now stands alongside its predecessor in the Viking Ship Museum and the differences are notable.

The Oseberg ship was a commemoration of two individuals, not one. And the discovery that the bones of both skeletons were female led to great confusion. While the Gokstad skeleton fitted preconceived notions of a Viking warrior, scholars searched valiantly for an explanation as to why an elderly and a middle-aged woman would be worthy of a burial as extraordinary as the Oseberg ship.

Instead, the boat burial, complete with four sleighs, a large carriage, furniture, household objects and textiles, was focused on these two women alone, aged roughly 50 and 80.50 Attempts have been made to determine who they were, with a popular suggestion that one was Queen Åsa, grandmother to Norway’s first king.

mounds; it seems that often, at some point after burial, shafts were driven into the ground at the point where the body was located, and some of the skeleton removed. It’s hard to imagine the purpose of this.