Slavic Warrior Women, pt. 10: Viking Age

Link to my full dissertation, Amazons, Shieldmaidens, and Daring Polianitsy: Slavic Warrior Women in Medieval Literature and Folklore: https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/r207tq787

Time for Slavic Warrior women, part 10! Today we’ll discuss an introduction to the Viking Age as described in medieval Scandinavian & Slavic literature. A quick note: this is a longer section, but I felt there was more information that might be relevant to next discussions (also it’s a fun topic).

Lagertha, a real figure from medieval Norse literature, as she appears in the not at all historically accurate History show "Vikings"

Like the earlier Greeks and Romans across the sea, the Vikings possessed numerous examples of warrior women in their poetry, sagas, chronicles, and pre-Christian religion.^[1] The Norse pantheon offers the goddess Freya, who embodied equal parts war and womanhood. Appropriately, Freya received half the souls of the heroic dead into her hall, Fólkvangr; the other half went to Odin’s Valhalla, a much more familiar destination to the modern reader. The heroic dead themselves were selected and transported to their assigned afterlife by Valkyries, armed and armored female spirits who rode winged horses, combing the battlefield to choose the worthy from among the slain.^[2] Medieval Norse literature likewise provides examples of mortal warrior women fighting alongside their warrior men. Lagertha, who first appeared as a skjaldmær (‘shieldmaiden’) and later jarl (‘leader’ or ‘king’) in Saxo’s History of the Danes, is perhaps the most famous of these warrior women due to her inclusion in the History Channel’s popular show Vikings.^[3] Yet, she was hardly the only literary skjaldmær. To name just a few, Brynhildr, Hervor, Auðr, and Freydis took up swords for various reasons, usually revenge.^[4] Some medieval Norse authors also mention societies comprised exclusively of warlike women, similar to the Amazons, located in the far north.^[5] However, as with their ancient predecessors, most historians—then and now—dismissed such accounts as fictional.^[6] 

Nevertheless, compared to the plethora of material evidence of the Scythian warrior women whom ancient authors mythologized into Amazons, the existence of real skjaldmeyjar among the Vikings remains contested. What evidence does exist suggests that such women were extreme exceptions, and furthermore, that they may have come from beyond the borders of Scandinavia.^[7] More specifically, these warrior women were thought to originate in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, territories occupied only generations before by the Scythians. Even in Viking Age Scandinavian graves that contain the remains of women buried with weapons, the style of clothing and accessories, and sometimes the style of the burial itself, suggests Slavic or Central Asian origins.^[8] For example, one famous warrior grave, known as the Birka Warrior, was confirmed as female through osteological and DNA analysis in 2017 after decades of scientists assuming she was a male chieftain. The Birka Warrior was buried with a Slavic style hat likely made in Kyiv.^[9] 

During the Viking Age, Eastern Europe gave rise to various principalities and kingdoms that, although strongly patriarchal and subject to Scandinavian influence, begat female rulers whose military legacies endured well beyond their own reigns: Olga of Kyiv, Libuše and Vlasta of Bohemia, and Sigrid the Proud. Of these, only Olga and Sigrid may claim Scandinavian roots, but this claim is nevertheless disputable since contradictory origins are presented for Olga, and Sigrid may have been originally a Polish princess. Though their narratives did not appear in written record until several centuries after their deaths, each of these queens reigned during the Viking Age, which is defined by the years 793-1066. In this chapter I will explore the narratives of these warrior queens not only in the context of the fusion of Slavic and Scandinavian cultures that characterized their era, but as heirs to Scythian Amazons, who provided both historical and literary models for medieval authors to consult as they framed these narratives. In so doing, I will demonstrate that while the societies they ruled bore strong marks of Scandinavian influence, the queens themselves share more in common with their Scythian-Amazon predecessors than any Viking skjaldmær or Valkyrie from Scandinavian literature.

With regard to skjaldmeyjar, sagas and laws offer conflicting evidence. Legally, women and slaves were expressly forbidden from carrying weapons, yet some women in the sagas did. Contrary to what the modern reader might infer from this law, one theory is that women were forbidden from carrying weapons as an attempt to protect them in a society that so venerated masculinity, considering it dishonorable to harm someone who was not capable of defending herself.^[10] However, it is more likely that warrior women were considered an existential threat to the social order that kept men’s and women’s responsibilities separate, and as such, those who transgressed their assigned gender role had to be outlawed.^[11] In an interesting take on Viking concepts of gender, some suggest that traditionally masculine qualities were encouraged in women, despite their illegality, precisely because masculinity was so highly valued in general, while feminine qualities were disparaged in both men and women.^[12] Femininity was so detestable that accusing a man of effeminacy, to include taking a passive role during intercourse, was considered a capital offence.^[13] The accused was legally justified as well as socially pressured to challenge his accuser to a fight to the death. In fact, not aggressively retaliating to such an insult would have been dishonorable, adding further emasculation to a man’s reputation; for the Vikings, masculinity was a quality that required recurrent confirmation through one’s actions, not an innate aspect of one’s biology.^[14]

While it was a grave offense to accuse a man of womanly qualities but a compliment for a woman to possess manly ones, a combination of written literature and archaeological evidence indicates that women acting like men—wielding weapons, defending their honor, being generally aggressive—was socially acceptable, albeit unusual.^[15] So why, then, did Norse legal codes outlaw women from carrying weapons or dressing in male clothing?^[16] The potential occurrence of skjaldmeyjar represented a threat to the established social order, robbing men of their monopoly on violence. But some women must have nevertheless transgressed their assigned roles, or else there would be no point establishing a law against it. Rules exist out of perceived necessity. If specific activities were prohibited by Viking law, it could only be because those activities transpired, and they represented enough of a societal threat to warrant prohibition. Thus, the very illegality of women carrying weapons in Viking and Viking-influenced societies like Rus’ provides evidence that at least some women were, in fact, carrying weapons.

In most instances in the sagas, women took up arms only in defense of themselves, their loved ones, or their honor when the menfolk normally responsible for such defense proved unwilling or unable to do so.^[17] However, just as Scythian mothers were charged with protecting the camp while the able-bodied men and childless women went raiding, so, too, were Viking women expected to defend the children, elderly, and infirm of the community whenever their men left on an expedition.^[18] Norse sagas and medieval Slavic literature also contain examples of women urging their husbands, brothers, or sons to take violent revenge for either injury or insult. Indeed, incitement to violence is one of the primary methods of influence women seemed to employ during the Viking Age, at least according to surviving epic literature. It was only when the incitement failed that these women would enact the violence personally.^[19] 

However, it is also possible, even probable, that select women accompanied armies and military campaigns as warriors and in a few instances, as key leaders.^[20] Archaeological finds like the famous grave of the Birka Warrior with the Kyivan hat, who turned out to be a woman, support the existence of women serving as key leaders. While these skjaldmeyjar were compared to the Amazons of antiquity by medieval and modern historians, they nonetheless defied the norm.^[21] Based on the general wealth accompanying Viking Age burials of armed women, such warlike women must have come predominantly from the noble class. Regardless, once the necessity for violence ended, Viking women were expected to lay down their weapons and return to their domestic lives. For Viking women, ‘warrior’ could only be a temporary status, not a destiny in itself. We lack the evidence to say definitively whether the same was true of Slavic women, but given the tremendous cultural overlap between the Scandinavians and Slavs for the duration of the Viking Age, we can assume with few exceptions that any Slavic woman who took up arms likewise did so temporarily.

Whether or not they participated in military campaigns as skjaldmeyjar, women of all societal ranks participated in war in some form or another, often as camp followers. As has been well documented throughout military history, women—sometimes wives, daughters, or mothers of soldiers, and sometimes prostitutes—nursed the injured, cooked and laundered, performed other logistical work, and, in special cases, served as advisors and strategists.^[22] When describing the Viking Age, medieval Slavic and Scandinavian literature tends to focus on the heroic, the exceptional, thereby glossing over the mundane roles ordinary women (and ordinary men) fulfilled during wartime. Warrior women are viewed as innately transgressive, flouting gender norms by taking on a culturally masculine role; in literature their role as warriors could only be temporary, so the ones who were worth immortalizing were those whose identity was noteworthy beyond their temporary warrior status.^[23] Thus, when medieval authors devote attention to warrior women, they discuss members of the noble and ruling class: warrior queens.

Unlike the Amazons, Viking Age warrior queens generally did not wield a sword directly, but neither did they shy away from the battlefield. Given the same trend among male monarchs of overseeing the carnage without fighting on the front lines, we can hardly frame female monarchs as cowardly for avoiding the heart of the mêlée, nor label them as any less worthy of the warrior mantle than their male counterparts. King or queen, the strategic placement of the militant monarch outside the bounds of direct battle derives from practicality. Even modern military leaders observe and direct their troops from a distance. The necessity of preserving a strategic mind outweighs the benefits of a key leader’s bravado, which is doubly true when that strategic mind also symbolizes the state itself. Should the queen fall to an errant arrow, so, too, falls her queendom. Rather than risk leaving the state without a head, as orchestrators of war the competent monarch would don armor and weaponry, inspire the army with a rousing speech, and then supervise the battlefield from higher ground. In the following sections, I will discuss examples of warrior queens who did precisely that.

Next installment, I’ll talk about one of my favorite figures from medieval literature and folklore, the Bohemian progenitrix Libuše.

Citations:

[1] While ‘viking’ in Old Norse refers to the act of raiding or pillaging and not to the raiders themselves, I will conform to the term’s modern usage, which describes the people of the Scandinavian countries as well as their outlying settlements, including their various colonies across Europe from the eighth to eleventh century.

[2] Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Boydell Press, 1991): 139; Self, “Valkyrie’s Gender,” 147. When I am referring specifically to Vikings (including the Rus’) as opposed to warrior women in general during the Viking Age, I will use the Old Norse term. The plural form of skjaldmær is skjaldmeyjar.

[3] Terri Barnes, “The Intrigue of the Female Warrior,” Medieval Warfare 9, no. 1 (2019): 43.

[4] Leszek Gardeła, “Warrior-women in Viking Age Scandinavia? A Preliminary archaeological study / Wojownicze kobiety w wikińskiej Skandynawii? Wstępne stadium archeologiczne,” Analecta Archaeologica Ressoviensia 8 (2013):  305.

[5] Birgit Sawyer, “Women in Viking-Age Scandinavia – or: Who Were the ‘Shieldmaidens’?” Vinland Revisited: the Norse World at the Turn of the First Millennium, ed. by Shannon Lewis-Simpson (Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Inc., 2003): 2; Gardeła, “Warrior-women in Viking Age Scandinavia,” 305.

[6] Carol J. Clover, “Maiden Warriors and Other Sons,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85, no. 1 (1986): 36.

[7] Judith Jesch, “Women, War, and Words: A Verbal Archaeology of Shield-maidens,” Viking 84, no. 1 (2021): 134 and 138.

[8] Leszek Gardeła, “Amazons of the Viking World,” Medieval Warfare 7, no. 1 (2017): 14.

[9] Neil Price et al, “Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581,” Antiquity 93, no. 367 (2019): 184.

[10] Short, Viking Weapons, 13.

[11] Julie Wheelwright, Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020): 11.

[12] Clover, “Regardless of Sex,” 12; Raffield, “Playing Vikings,” 820.

[13] Short, Viking Weapons, 8; Clover, “Regardless of Sex,” 8; Self, “Valkyrie’s Gender,” 152.

[14] Clover, “Regardless of Sex,” 13; Short, Viking Weapons, 8.

[15] Clover, “Regardless of Sex,” 7.

[16] Raffield, “Playing Vikings,” 820.

[17] Gardeła, “Amazons of the Viking World,” 15; Gardeła, “Warrior-women in Viking Age,” 306.

[18] Santa Jansone, “Ladies with Axes and Spears,” Medieval Warfare 4, no. 2 (2014): 12.

[19] Gardeła, “Warrior-women in Viking Age,” 306.

[20] Raffield, “Playing Vikings,” 820; Jesch, Women in the Viking Age, 177.

[21] Blythe, “Women in the Military,” 246; Gardeła, “Amazons of the Viking World,” 15.

[22] The necessity of long logistical trains during military campaigns is universal, and the phenomenon of camp followers fulfilling this role with the assistance of civilian merchants appears in practical descriptions of every army, from ancient Rome to the American Civil War. Viking Age Europe was no exception. Modern armies utilize professional logistics, sometimes incorporated into the military itself and/or outsourced to contracted civilians, but the basic principle is the same. Wars are won and lost due to logistics as much as strategy. There is much more to war than battle; one could argue that actual fighting represents the smallest piece.

[23] Wheelwright, Sisters in Arms, 25.