Warrior and reveals not all fearsome longship invaders had beards
the buried stories of these formidable female Vikings in a documentary to be screened on National Geographic on December 3.
She said: “I’m a National Geographic Explorer. There’s an assumption that women aren’t really in this field and then I get people surprised or questioning my capabilities. It’s a recurring theme.” Ella was inspired by a game- changing revelation two years ago about the Birka warrior, found in one of the world’s most iconic Viking burial sites in Sweden. DNA analysis revealed this military commander was actually a woman – turning the world of Viking archaeology on its head. “Birka is the ultimate example of a Viking warrior burial, so you couldn’t have made it up that she was female.
“T h e r e’s something quite joyful about that. It’s revolutionary.
“People assumed that because of the massive cache of weapons she was buried with, she was male.
“It’s good science to be less biased.”
The question now is how many more female warriors’ remains have been wrongly assumed to be men?
Ella believes many female Viking warriors could be hidden across Scotland as it was a popular target for Viking raids.
“You can’t look at Vikings in t h e UK without looking at Scotland, it’s so significant,” she said.
“We need to go back and re- analyse these skeletons.
“I think some really i n t e re s t i n g discoveries could be made in Scotland and that, in the next few years, people will be re- analysing many Scottish sites.
“Scotland was the first point of contact for many Vikings, so it’s interesting to think about what we might be missing.”
Christopher uses Scottish Heather Honey made by a local producer and flavours his mead with locally-foraged fruits and berries. Now he’s trying to whet our appetite for “misunderstood” mead. “A common misconception is that mead is very sweet because commercially manufactured mead is full of sugar and chemicals. “Now someone is making it the right way, my mission is to make it popular again.”
Christopher started making mead at University where he was inspired by reading about the drink in Celtic literature and Norse mythology.
“Mead is referenced throughout Norse mythology. Vikings definitely drank it,” he said. “There’s no preserved recipes but we can assume what they were drinking was lower in alcohol content compared to what I make today, which is 17% abv. “They would have used lots of berries and fruits and possibly grain, so it would have tasted like a fruit beer.”