'If it was a man, we would say that's a warrior's grave': Weapon-filled burials are shaking up what we know about women'

[Judi Lynn]

'If it was a man, we would say that's a warrior's grave': Weapon-filled burials are shaking up what we know about women's role in Viking society

By Laura Geggel published 3 days ago

New research is finding that some women in Viking Age Scandinavia were buried with war-grade weapons. Experts are divided about what that means.



In Birka, Sweden, there is a roughly 1,000-year-old Viking burial teeming with lethal weapons — a sword, an ax-head, spears, knives, shields and a quiver of arrows — as well as riding equipment and the skeletons of two warhorses. Nearly 150 years ago, when the grave was unearthed, archaeologists assumed they were looking at the burial of a male warrior. But a 2017 DNA analysis of the burial's skeletal remains revealed the individual was female.

Skeptics scrambled to explain away the evidence, said Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and first author of the 2017 study.
Even now, despite further studies strengthening the case for the Birka individual's martial profession, some archaeologists still insist she wasn't a warrior.

The Birka controversy highlights the fraught archaeological debate about the existence of Viking women warriors. Viking mythology and lore are filled with tales of women who lived for battle and engaged in violence, but whether these stories reflect real life is unsettled.

Across Scandinavia, at least a few dozen women from the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) were buried with war-grade weapons. Collectively, these burials paint a picture that clashes violently with the hypermasculine image of the bearded, burly Viking warrior that has dominated the popular imagination for centuries. And it's possible that, due to gendered assumptions, archaeologists may be systematically undercounting the number of Viking women buried with weapons.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/vikings/if-it-was-a-man-we-would-say-thats-a-warriors-grave-weapon-filled-burials-are-shaking-up-what-we-know-about-womens-role-in-viking-society