Valkyrie: The Women Of The Viking World
Johanna Katrin Fridriksdottir Bloomsbury Academic £20
When we think of Vikings, we immediately conjure up a vision of hairy men in pointy helmets with nothing but pillage and slaughter on their mind. But what about the women? Where were they and what were they doing while their menfolk set sail from Scandinavia to England, Ireland and even Russia in their longships? Far from simply sitting at home in a subservient huddle, Johanna Fridriksdottir suggests that some women and girls were busy leading their communities, running businesses and even, on occasions, donning armour and taking to the battlefield.
This isn’t wishful thinking on Fridriksdottir’s part. She’s a university professor and has conducted a fingertip search of a multitude of sources, including archaeological artefacts and epic poetry ranging from the 8th to the 11th Centuries. She’s honest, too, about the fact that not all women had an easy, let alone heroic, time. Being born a girl into a poor family where there were already several daughters could mean you were ‘exposed’ – a polite way of saying left outside to die. It wasn’t just a case of too many small mouths to feed, it was also because girls needed dowries if they were to marry at the age of 15, which meant a future financial burden hanging over the whole household.
Even if your family was rich enough to give you a dowry, it didn’t mean you had the freedom to fall in love. Marriage was a business transaction between men, and teenage girls were routinely sent off to start new lives as wives in families they had never met before.
It wasn’t all bad, though. A married woman was regarded as co-head of the household. Many Norse women were buried with scales and weights, suggesting that they traded with neighbours and at markets, and were responsible for ensuring everyone in their household, including the servants, was comfortably fed and clothed. What’s more, a woman had as much right to a divorce as a man – all that was needed was five witnesses. Grounds included domestic violence, failure of a partner to maintain dependants, and abandonment of the marital bed. There was, Fridriksdottir explains, no shame attached to divorce and no reason why either side should treat it as moral failure. She also raises the intriguing possibility that the Vikings may have been more relaxed about gender than we tend to think. In 1878 archaeologists discovered a lavish warrior’s grave in Sweden in which the 35-year-old soldier had been buried surrounded by a rich array of swords, spears and arrowheads. So imagine the excitement in 2017 when scientists discovered that DNA analysis of the warrior’s bones revealed that ‘he’ was actually ‘she’. Currently scholars are busy debating whether this proves that Norse women regularly went into battle alongside the men or whether, in fact, we have stumbled upon a transgender Norse woman. Fridriksdottir is too rigorous a scholar to leap to sensationalist conclusions but she brilliantly manages to make the Vikings feel far closer to us than ever before.