Around the seated body were the remains of two sacrificed horses, as well as a double-edged sword, a scramasax (a long, thin knife), a bow, a shield, and a spear-every weapon known to the Viking world. It was an astonishing find, especially since Viking warrior graves rarely contain more than three weapons. There was also a full set of hnefatafl, the board game often known as Viking chess, which indicates the strategic thinking and authority of a war leader. The weapons, game pieces, location: Everything told scholars that the man buried in what is known as grave Bj 581 was a prominent, well-respected Viking warrior.Ī thousand years ago, the site would’ve abutted the Warrior’s Hall, where a garrison lived to protect the bustling Viking town of Birka. No one was really prepared when DNA tests were conducted in 2017 and a new story began to emerge. This was a prominent warrior, all right, but the occupant of Bj 581 wasn’t a man. Nancy Marie Brown’s new book explores the life of the warrior woman buried in Bj 581. Viking historian Nancy Marie Brown’s new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, explores what life might have been like for the warrior woman of Bj 581. Using more evidence from the recent tests conducted on the remains, Brown traces her journey from Norway to the British Isles to Kiev then, finally, to Birka. Brown imagines the unnamed warrior meeting other prominent Viking women, such as Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, or Queen Olga, ruler of the Rus Vikings in Kiev. She also explores the Viking sagas and contemporary sources with a new lens.Ītlas Obscura spoke with Brown about her new book, valkyries, and the assumptions that underlie the history we think we know. But they must have been there.How did you initially get interested in Vikings-and female Vikings in particular ? “We don’t tend to imagine the women sitting on the longships. “We are getting quite a lot of evidence that the gender roles may have been more fluid in the Viking period than we thought, and that it’s quite possible women may have been regarded as socially male even though biologically they weren’t – and might have been able to assume positions of military leadership,” Larrington says. There are thought to be further anomalies in Norway and Sweden. So how many more warrior bones have been presumed male that might be female? In Poland, “archaeology is really getting to grips with a number of anomalous graves”, according to Carolyne Larrington, professor of medieval European literature at Oxford University. When we do that, we’re just reproducing the past in our image.” “I think that’s a mistake that archaeologists make quite often. “Because it was buried with weapons, it must be a man,” Gowland says. I do believe she was a warrior,” says Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, the archaeologist at Uppsala University who led the research. Nothing in the archaeology has changed – only the gender. “Before we knew it was a woman, it was interpreted as a warrior grave. Might the gaming pieces indicate only that she enjoyed board games? Were the bones – excavated and labelled in the 19th century – put with the wrong weapons? Or do these questions prove that we recreate the past in the light of our own prejudice? But some experts still express doubts about the warrior’s identity. It took many years and, finally, genomic testing to establish the lack of a Y chromosome. The bones from grave Bj581 always looked female – they were slender – making it a so-called “anomalous” grave where the gender of the skeleton appeared at odds with the martial objects buried with it. But historical fact has largely lagged behind the fictions. Valkyrie amulets have been found depicting women wearing dresses and armour. The female Viking warrior is a familiar figure in popular culture, from early incarnations such as the Völsung cycle of Norse mythology through to the History Channel’s Vikings series.
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