Having said that, the study of women warriors is not straightforward, with valid concerns raised on a number of sides. The discourse of women and violence tends to change along with contemporary concerns, reflecting in part larger shifts in how women’s agency and right to independence and equality is viewed at any given time. All in all, the jury is still out on an academic consensus on this topic, but it remains a fascinating debate. However, as this is often taken as a matter of course in male graves and usually only questioned in female ones, it seems fair to suggest that weapons in any grave is likely to have symbolised the same thing, be that in a woman’s, or a man’s grave. Some even suggest that women in weapon graves may mean the grave originally contained a male body, though so far no evidence has been found to support this most cases.Ī more reasonable objection is that we do not actually know whether weapons in a burial symbolised warrior status at all. Other schools of thought argue that the images are representations of mythical creatures, or that weapons in female graves must be read as gifts not possessions. Nor is any of the evidence I have mentioned here uncontested. However, as stated, there is nothing to suggest this was very common.
Aside from burials, women with weapons are also found depicted on amulets, picture stones and tapestries from the period, and there are contemporary written sources describing women involved in battles and war. It also stands apart in the impressive array of weapons it contains, as other cases tend to be more typically female graves with one or two weapons (axes and shields for instance) intermixed with other objects. This is far from the only burial of a woman which contains weapons, though it is to date the only one whose sex is determined with a DNA analysis.
In recent years, the now famous weapons grave from Birka (Bj.581) has drawn much attention after it was revealed to contain a female body buried with high status weaponry (see original article here). There is no shortage of sources which can be argued to support the existence of female warriors, though nothing indicates this was a particularly common phenomenon.
The extant evidence argues strongly in favour of the involvement of some women in war, and that some of these women were directly involved with violent acts.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I will offer my own assessment: I consider it likely. In truth, there are as many answers to that question as there are scholars to answer it, and anyone interested will find persuasive arguments both for and against. Many readers of this article will be looking for an answer to the question of whether or not women really did fight in the Viking Age, and I am afraid they may be disappointed if they seek a definite solution here. The book is the result of a conference organised by the Centre for Viking Studies at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, and amongst the diverse approaches to war, violence and Vikings it brings together, it offers three separate chapters which all query the topic of women and war (see suggested reading, below), making it the obvious place to start for those wishing to read more about the subject. In fact, this brief introduction to the topic coincides with the publication of the Viking Special Volume titled Viking Wars, edited by Frode Iversen and Karoline Kjesrud. Today, both academic and public interest in the question of female Viking warriors remains high. It is, in many ways, a debate which at its core is as much about what we believe men and women can and cannot do, as much as it is about knowing the Viking Age.
In the research history on this topic, we can trace changing ideologies and beliefs about men, women, status and power. This shifting interest is characteristic of research on a question that, when raised, never fails to raise debate and engage opinions. At the same time, it has roused different levels of public engagement at different times. Was there such a thing as a female Viking warrior? That question has come up at different times throughout academic research on the Viking Age, and brought with it varying degrees of debate.