Finally, although separate gender roles are likely to have existed in the Viking Age, this isn’t to say that people never crossed or blurred the boundaries between these spheres. Queerness is not a new phenomenon, and Halldor’s experience as depicted in this novel is just one way that someone we would interpret as transgender could have lived. We’ll never know how many people we’d recognize today as LGBTQIA+ have been omitted from history, but we have always been here, and we always will be.
