The Viking shield
maiden has often captured the popular attention. There is something about the idea of women
fighting alongside men during the Viking era but does it have any basis in
reality?
Various sagas and
other primary accounts of the era do
mention women fighting as warriors. Saxo
Grammticus in his History of the Dane, written in the 12th century,
makes reference to a number of women warriors including Sela, a woman
warrior and accomplished pirate and Lathgertha the wife of Ragnar Lothborg who
possessed a man’s temper in a woman’s body as well as Hetha and Visna and
Vebiorg who fought in the great battle
of Bravellir where Harald the War-tooth
lost to his nephew Ring. Hetha survived
and was given a portion of Denmark to rule over but various warriors rebelled
because they disliked the thought of having a woman in charge.
As Judith Jesch points out in her book Women in the Viking Age, Saxo depicts these women as being ultimately defeated and after the Christianization
of Denmark, no women warriors appear. Equally
in the 12th century Irish epic about the Irish war with foreign
invaders, Cogadh Gaedrhel re Gallaibh one of the fleets of Viking war ships
belongs to the Red Maiden but the reference is very brief and there is no way
of judging if it is accurate or not. At the start of the Laxdalea saga, Unn the
Deep Minded appears to have had some sort of command over a number of ships.
She is the one who controls the land and portions it out amongst her followers.
The term shield maiden also appears to be have used interchangeably
with valkyrie – the legendary women who pick out the best warriors for Odin and
lead them to Valhalla. Perhaps the best known shield maiden of sagas is
Brynhilda who wanted to marry Sigurd. In the Volsunga saga which is detailed in
the Poetic Edda. But the problem is that most of these sagas originate from a
post pagan world and therefore might not be an accurate representation of what
actually happened. It has been suggested
that Saxo used the myth of valkyrie to embellish his histories. You also have
the myth of the goddess Skathi who wore her father’s armour.
We do know that a Byzantine account of a 971 battle in Bulgaria where the
Varangians as the Eastern European Vikings were sometimes known suffered a rare
defeat mentions finding armed women amongst the dead.
The archaeological evidence is tentative and hampered by the fact it was originally
assumed that women could not be buried with swords. If a woman was found buried
with a sword, it was assumed that the second male skeleton had somehow gone
missing. There have been female burials
in Kaupang where arrowheads and small axes were found but the vast majority of
female graves have only contained things which are relevant to the female
sphere such as weaving and spinning implements . And even if a woman was buried
with a sword, this does not mean she actually used in warfare. There are no
representations of women with swords or in battle.
So were there women warriors or not? Impossible to say. All
we can say is that it makes for a good story and in the case of legendary women like Lathgertha, there is
probably some basis in fact. However
once the Scandinavian countries became Christian, any warrior tradition
amongst women died out. I would like to think given the nature of the society,
that a few women did take up arms and were good at.
Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical
romance in a wide range of time periods, including the Viking era. Her next
Viking will be published in November 2013. Her most recent published work An Ideal Husband? is an April 2013
release. You can learn more at her website www.michellestyles.co.uk
