Althouse: "Here’s a headline that just sounds awesome: 'Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female.'"

September 8, 2014

"Here’s a headline that just sounds awesome: 'Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female.'"

"A lot of people have sent us this link these past two days. It raised my 'Really?' flag, so I got the original source paper...."

42 comments:

Phil 314 said...: Do you mean half of the Norse population in the 7th century was female!?

Amazing.; 9/8/14, 8:07 AM
chickelit said...: So, the Valkyries were for real and not just Nordic myth?; 9/8/14, 8:16 AM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: I think that anyone who learned their Norse history from watching Bugs Bunny's interpretation of opera could have told you this.; 9/8/14, 8:24 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: Bursting bubbles can be harsh. But, females, even then, mostly didn't have the upper body strength to fight effectively on offense against males. And, don't build it nearly as quickly. It does appear that they may have been trained in defensive arms.

It shouldn't be surprising that some cultures brought their women along when their men went exploring. And, this appears to be what happened here. It should also be remembered that one of the big reasons that the US and Canada are primarily English speaking, and owe or owed allegiance to the UK is that English speaking settlers and explorers brought their families, and French speaking tended not to. By the time that the armed conflict was resolved, the French speaking North Americans didn't really have a chance, being greatly outnumbered by the English speaking after 100-150 years of large families here on the part of the latter. And, some of the English speaking settlers here may have been descendants of those Vikings settling in England a millennium ago.; 9/8/14, 8:49 AM
pst314 said...: "but females, even then, mostly didn't have the upper body strength to fight effectively on offense..."

I believe we are not supposed to notice, much less publicly acknowledge, such politically inconvenient facts.; 9/8/14, 8:55 AM
traditionalguy said...: Norse teens were always looking for a new place to take a family with them and settle it. The amount of arable land around the edge of fjords was ridiculously small. The new families had to leave.

These Norge conquered and ruled the eastern half of Scotland ( just across the North sea from home) for 400 years and from there they also moved families into northern Ireland and from there on over to western Pennsylvania and then south down the frontier valleys to Tennessee and then west over to Missouri and Texas where a Spanish Army sent to exterminate them encountered vikings at San Jacinto.; 9/8/14, 9:06 AM
Quaestor said...: Do you mean half of the Norse population in the 7th century was female!?

The paper is about Scandinavian settlement in the British Isles in the 10th century. But what's 300 years between friends?

Women certainly did have a more equal status in Norse society than in Early Medieval European society. Women owned property in their own right, and they attended and presumably made their opinions known at the the Icelandic Allthing, although only the men voted.

Norse women also achieved considerable political power in Viking kingdoms. Åsa Haraldsdottir was the regnant queen of Agder, the richest kingdom of Norway at the dawn of the Viking Age. Because she is only known from the Yngling Saga, Queen Åsa is considered a quasi-historical figure. Nevertheless she is believed to be the subject of the Oseberg ship burial.

In 1905 the most well-preserved and beautifully decorated Viking longship was unearthed from within a mound near Oslo. Local tradition had it that the mound was the tomb of Åsa Haraldsdottir, hence the name Oseberg -- Åsa's hill. The ship contained the remains of two women, one very elderly and crippled, the other middle-aged and healthy. The elderly woman is believed to be the legendary queen and founder of the dynasty that united Norway. The other is deemed to be a servant who was sacrificed to tend her mistress in the afterlife. The material wealth found in the ship greatly exceeds any other Viking Age burial, male or female.

It's also know that women accompanied men on at least a few expeditions of exploration. A spindle whorl found at the L'Anse aux Meadows site shows that women were among the Viking explorers of the New World.; 9/8/14, 9:17 AM
Hagar said...: Again, you need to separate "Vikings" from "Old Norse."
Vikings did not settle anywhere; they lived by raiding and moving on. And the moving was done as much by rowing as sailing, so, yeah, upper body-strength was a plus.

Norse migrants would bring their women, children, and some livestock with them. And those are the ones you can find buried in cemeteries.
Who would bother to bury dead Vikings?; 9/8/14, 9:18 AM
Jaq said...: So much for the idea that the world would be peaceful if only women ran it.; 9/8/14, 9:27 AM
Wince said...: Isn't this consistent with the stereotypical blonde pig-tail helmet wigs worn by a female opera performer?; 9/8/14, 9:29 AM
Shanna said...: We should always be suspicious of claims that sound unlikely. Of course, Shield Maidens were a thing (probably? At least they are in the sagas. It seems likely there were some warriors). I would love a good research project that tells us how many of these people were warriors. I wonder if there is any way to look at the bones and tell.

"but females, even then, mostly didn't have the upper body strength to fight effectively on offense..."

True, but nordic types tended to be rather taller than some of their foes. That could have helped even things up on issues of reach, which I understand matters in a fight.; 9/8/14, 9:29 AM
Hagar said...: Osebergskipet was found near Tønsberg in Vestfold where Aasa was "queen," or at least wife of the local "petty-king." Nowhere near Agder.

And the ship, which indeed is beautiful, is thought to be her personal "yacht." In any case it is too early for the Viking Age proper, and of too weak construction to be much good in open waters. It s not a longship, but in the line of ancestry.; 9/8/14, 9:29 AM
Larry J said...: Shanna said...

I would love a good research project that tells us how many of these people were warriors. I wonder if there is any way to look at the bones and tell.

I believe the answer to your question is yes if they performed the kinds of analysis that they did on Kennewick Man. Close analysis of the bones can tell a great deal about what kinds of activities the person did in life. It would make a fascinating study if someone is willing to pay for it.; 9/8/14, 9:38 AM
Quaestor said...: That women could own property and dispose of it as they saw fit is illustrated by the sagas. A few days ago I quoted a verse from Egil's Saga. Here it is again:

My mother once told me
She'd buy me a longship,
A handsome-oared vessel
To go sailing with Vikings:
To stand at the sternpost
And steer a fine warship
Then head back for harbor
And hew down some foemen

It's Egil Skallagrimsson's mother who offers to purchase the ship, not his father.

Tracy V. Wilson wrote in the linked article: And there is plenty of evidence that, yes, there were female Norse warriors (and neither I nor the source am saying there were not)

So she's goes to the trouble of disabusing the rabble of the notion that half of the Viking warriors were girls, and then goes on to claim without citing evidence that there were female Viking warriors. There certainly are many on television, but in the sagas there are none who are human; and in Norse art there are but few: a two-inch figure from Haarby in Denmark, some figures on the Oseberg tapestry, and a brooch.; 9/8/14, 9:47 AM
Alexander said...: There may - may - have been a period in which bred horses had strong enough backs to support a female rider but not yet a male one. In which case, there exists a fairly narrow window of time, for a narrow range of cultures, in which its feasible that the female warrior was a social norm. Of course, these female warriors would have had to be able to kill six or seven more enemies that the available man to make it worth the attrition cost of losing her as a mother, but it's possible.

But Vikings? Ha! Not a chance. I wonder if Viking women had the upper body strength to even row across the North Sea, let alone fight anyone once they got across to England!

No, what we see here is the shocking, *SHOCKING!* racism of the Nordic people, who when they conquered land with the intent to colonize, they desired their own women and desired their own offspring to inherent their newly gained wealth, and no interest in investing resources in half-Nords who would be primarily raised inevitably in their mother's culture.

Like I said, completely shocking and unexpected.

Of course, the fact that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock weren't half Mohican should have been evidence enough to suggest that women of group X just might have been brought over to conquered lands without doing any of the actual conquering.; 9/8/14, 9:49 AM
Quaestor said...: Some people here may take me to task for the use of the term girl. There are no girls over the age of twelve, they may sniff, they're young women.

The general term for a warrior in Old Norse is carl as in the related Anglo-Saxon word huscarl. The literal meaning is "boy".

If young Viking women were warriors then they were girls.; 9/8/14, 9:52 AM
Quaestor said...: Hagar wrote: Osebergskipet was found near Tønsberg in Vestfold where Aasa was "queen," or at least wife of the local "petty-king." Nowhere near Agder.

Åsa was buried near Oslo because she was the wife of Gudrød Veidekonge, the Jarl of Borre in Vestfold, which at the time encompassed the land which became the county of Oslo. According to Yngling Saga Åsa was the daughter and sole heir of King Harald Granraude of Agder, thus she was Queen Åsa Haraldsdottir in her own right.

Every king in Norway was a "petty-king" before Harald Finehair, Åsa's grandson.; 9/8/14, 10:10 AM
Quaestor said...: Hagar wrote: [The Oseberg ship] isnot a longship, but in the line of ancestry.

Dr. Arne Christensen disagrees with you. I spoke to that venerable academic while visiting the Ship Museum back in 1992. I mentioned the low freeboard as an objection to the Oseberg ship being a warship. He told me that while the Oseberg was undoubtedly a kind of royal yacht, the definition of a longship is based on the proportions and the number of oars. By that reckoning the Oseberg craft is a longship.; 9/8/14, 10:27 AM
Mary Beth said...: Do you mean half of the Norse population in the 7th century was female!?

The paper is about Scandinavian settlement in the British Isles in the 10th century. But what's 300 years between friends?

The paper says up to 900 AD and refers to the "latter ninth century", so it's really only 200 years.

Still, warriors schmarriors. Their descendents must have gotten soft living on the farms since they couldn't keep out the Normans.

Maybe it's because they didn't let the women warriors join in. /s; 9/8/14, 10:29 AM
politicaltragic said...: This comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever been asked to move a couch.; 9/8/14, 10:42 AM
Stephen A. Meigs said...: So were Viking women buried with weapons or not? And did the research paper indicate that? There seems to be a pay or registration wall put up to isolate the research paper, but it seems most of the commenters at this article who discuss the matter indicate that it has been demonstrated that Viking women (in some unknown proportion) were buried with weapons. (Ideally, this article should not have ignored this point.) When Viking women are buried with at least one weapon, surely it is fairly suggestive that they are warriors.; 9/8/14, 10:45 AM
Quaestor said...: Another point about the Oseberg ship, at least three full-scale replicas of the Oseberg have been build in the last dozen years or so. At least one sailed to Dublin. So the Oseberg was likely to be similarly seaworthy -- able to sail to a likely destination, e.g. Ireland, in good weather.

However, this was true of all longships. They weren't suited to stormy winter sailing, nor were they used like that. Summer was the season for Viking raids. Fine summer weather was dreadful to the people of Viking Age England and Ireland. An Irish monk penned this verse in the margin of a manuscript he was working on:

Is acher ingaíth innocht
Fufúasna fairggæ findfholt
Ní ágor réimm mora minn
Dondláechraid lainn ua Lothlind

Bitter is the wind tonight
It tosses the ocean's white hair
I fear not the coursing of a clear sea
By the fierce heroes from Lothlind

If a viking needed to cross a stormy sea he sailed in a knorr, not a longship.; 9/8/14, 10:59 AM
Quaestor said...: When Viking women are buried with at least one weapon, surely it is fairly suggestive that they are warriors.

Viking men weren't routinely buried with their weapons, they were too valuable. The supposed viking warrior girls are based on a few artistic depictions. The sagas are silent on this subject. Mostly there is the tradition of the valkyries, which is known chiefly from Snorri Sturluson's eddas and a few artistic depictions: a two-inch figurine from Denmark, a tapestry from the Oseberg ship burial, and a brooch from Sweden.

There are some weapons in the Oseberg ship, but there are also cooking pots, knitting needles, a wagon, several sledges, and many, many more items that a wealthy woman might acquire or use in the afterlife. Whether the weapons were intended for the royal lady's direct use or were intended as offering to the gods can not be determined.

Interpreting any archeological find by today's notions of what's cool or pc is a big mistake.; 9/8/14, 11:16 AM
Hagar said...: Uff da!
You made me look it up, and you are right about Aasa. She was born and raised in Agder. Gudrød Veidekonge proposed and was turned down, so he attacked the Agder "kingdom," killed Aasa's father and brother, and took her home for his "wife." Aasa did not think much of the proceedings, so she had Gudrød assassinated. They had a son, Halvdan Svarte, who became "king" in Vestfold and was Harald Haarfagre's father.

However, the folks in Agder still take pride in claiming that they provided the stiffest resistance to Harald when he went on to gather "all" of Norway into one kingdom. ("All" in quotes, since there were people in northern Norway who never heard of Harald Haarfagre until they got a school system teaching history 1000 years later, and in southern Norway there were many who disputed his kingship with very rude language and occasionally violent actions.)

A longship is a warship. They were constructed as light as possible since they served as landing craft and had to be capable of being run overland on rollers from river to river and whatever else a crew of Viking raiders might take into their heads to do in pursuit of their trade. But they had to be seaworthy enough to get the guys to wherever the action was going to be - at least in the hands of skilled sailors, which they were, and not burdened down with women, livestock, or heavy freight on board.
And Osebergskipet was not suited for either ocean travel or overland runs. Its keel was spliced together from several smaller timbers, and would not have stood up under that kind of abuse.
It is also thought that the ship actually was quite old at the time Aasa died, and that might be another reason it was selected for the funeral.; 9/8/14, 11:48 AM
David said...: Mostly hand to hand combat in those days. If females were in combat it was a form of human sacrifice and ladies first.; 9/8/14, 12:12 PM
Anonymous said...: Quaestor, Hagar, thanks for the interesting discussion.

Female Viking Warriors! Facebook history, gah.

In the days before we cancelled our cable tee-vee subscription because the en-dumbification had become endemic and unbearable, we chanced upon some "history" program about the existence of gladiatrices, based on some weapons (or more likely "things that were possibly weapons", I don't remember) having been found in the grave of some woman of Roman Britain.

I'd like to be able to say that was the stupidest program I ever saw on one of the allegedly "more serious" cable channels, but alas, it wasn't.; 9/8/14, 1:59 PM
Quaestor said...: There's considerable evidence that the Norse did practice human sacrifice.

Ibn Fadlan encountered the Rus while traveling along the Volga to the court of the king of the Bulgars as an ambassador. His account of the funerary rites for a Rus chieftain includes a vivid depiction of the sacrifice of a young slave girl by strangulation. This begs the question of the identity of the Rus and whether Ibn Fadlan's account is pertinent to the Scandinavian Norse.

Adam of Bremen in his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum gives us an account of his visit to the ritual site at Upsala in modern Sweden, one of the last pagan holdouts in the Viking world. In times of famine or plague human sacrifice was offered to the gods worshiped there, again by strangulation or hanging.

The contemporary accounts of sacrifice by strangulation were reinforced by the discovery of the Tollund Man in a Danish peat bog. Whether the man was sacrificed, executed for a crime, or simply murdered isn't clear, but the method is -- strangulation with what appears to be a purpose-made ligature, which was found still around the Tollund Man's neck. Of course Tollund Man died a thousand years before the Viking Age. However more recent bodies have been found in Scandinavian bogs.; 9/8/14, 2:06 PM
Hagar said...: The Rus that Ibn Fadlan met were most likely Swedes, or of Swedish extraction, and anything can be believed of such people.

The "Tollund man" does not confirm anything about the Old Norse, since they are not only 1000 or more years separated in time, but also at that time by 1000 miles or more in distance.; 9/8/14, 2:50 PM
Quaestor said...: Hagar wrote: Again, you need to separate "Vikings" from "Old Norse." Vikings did not settle anywhere; they lived by raiding and moving on.

I think your definition of the term viking is considerably skewed. One cannot separate the vikings from the Old Norse -- which is a linguistic classification, not a people, per se -- because they're the same people. The vikings weren't a people, they were practitioners of a trade, as it were, the trade that was sometimes piracy and sometimes commerce, usually both.

At the beginning of the Viking Age in the 9th century the viking trade was part-time employment, it was something you did in the summer between sowing your crops and harvesting them, provided you could get a berth on on longship. By the close of the age vikings were mostly full-time professionals in service to a king like Harald Bluetooth of Denmark or in the Varangian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors. (The Viking Age opens quite arbitrarily in 796 with the raid on Saint Cuthbert's monastery on Lindisfarne and ends quite definitely in 1066 with the defeat and death of Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge at the hands of the Saxon king of England Harold Godwineson) Those professional vikings were recruited from all over the Norse world, and they served for regular pay, for a share of the spoils, or for land on which to settle, often for all three.

Harald Bluetooth (In case you're wondering the wireless protocol is indeed named for him. The logo on your head set is the bind rune for HB, so Harald would recognize that trademark as his initials.) organized his vikings into regiments based at purpose-build forts called trelleborgs after the first such fort discovered by archeology. Just last week the discovery of another trelleborg was announced, making eight known forts so far.) It's thought that Swein Forkbeard also used the trelleborgs to organize his forces for the invasion of England in 1013.

Another group of professional vikings were the Jomsvikings, a highly disciplined mercenary force of devoted pagans who fought for anybody, heathen or Christian, who could pay.; 9/8/14, 3:34 PM
Hagar said...: I had, but it is now lost, a book about English place names that claimed that in the Danelaw (roughly north and east of Watling Street, or a line running from London to Liverpool, and south of Scotland, the place names for what then was the good land (easily farmable with the tools and equipment of the time) remained "English" while the less desirable lands tended to have names derived from Old Norse. The authors thought this indicated that the Norse (and Danes) did not conquer this area, but rather immigrated with their families and established new farms on previously unoccupied land.; 9/8/14, 4:00 PM
Hagar said...: And Haraldr Gudvenarson and his brother Tostig were about as "Saxon" as I am.; 9/8/14, 4:03 PM
Hagar said...: Well, perhaps a little more. IIRC, half the brothers had Norse names and half "English."
No Latin or Celtic names though.; 9/8/14, 4:26 PM
Hagar said...: I have seen lists of every grave find in Indre Hardanger and Lyngdal, Kvinesdal, and Lista in Vest-Agder, and no woman's grave from any age have held weapons; just pots, jewelry, needles, and spinning wheels.; 9/8/14, 4:31 PM
Quaestor said...: And Haraldr Gudvenarson and his brother Tostig were about as "Saxon" as I am.

Unless you're completely Saxon they were more Saxon than you, Hagar. If you want to be goofily "racial" about it the Godwineson brothers (wherever you're getting this "Gudvenarson" name is probably the source of your confusion here) were 3/4 Saxon and 1/4 Dane. Their father, Godwine of Wessex, was a Saxon (Godwine's father was Wulfnoth, a thegn of the South Saxons.) Their mother was Gytha, the daughter of the Danish-born jarl Thorkel Sprakling and an unnamed Englishwoman.; 9/8/14, 4:32 PM
Hagar said...: And "Enn er ikke alle Jomsvikinger døde!" though as far as I know, it has not yet been established with certainty even where they lived, much less what kind of people they were, but apparently they are not thought to have been any kind of Scandihoovians.; 9/8/14, 4:38 PM
Quaestor said...: The authors thought this indicated that the Norse (and Danes) did not conquer this area, but rather immigrated with their families and established new farms on previously unoccupied land.

This is just part of a pattern of Marxist deconstructionist historiography that got started in the 1950's and really got its legs in the 1980's which sought to "debunk" English history into a boring porridge of competing manorial systems instead of the more exciting tale of existential conflict between complacent Christian Saxons and restless heathen Northmen.

If the thesis is correct (just how would a Cambridge don know good land from bad?) and the Norse were just harmless farmers willing to settle on unused land, then the Saint Brice's Day massacre is difficult to account for, no?; 9/8/14, 4:49 PM
Quaestor said...: Apparently they are not thought to have been any kind of Scandihoovians.

I hereby proclaim you Hagar Stenhoved, Jarl of the Skørvikings, aka Hagar the Unhelmed; 9/8/14, 4:55 PM
John Cunningham said...: Eric S. Raymond has a good extensive discussion of women warriors on his blog, at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6220; 9/8/14, 6:45 PM
Hagar said...: And I am getting to think you sound a lot like A Reasonable Man.

As for the Jomsvikings, the speculation I have seen from long ago was that their home base was somwhere on Rügen. Have you any better information?; 9/8/14, 6:46 PM
Æthelflæd said...: I have always found it curious that so many feminists are enamored of the female warrior, yet are for gun control.; 9/8/14, 7:23 PM
Pettifogger said...: Read Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles or at least the descriptions of clashing shield walls. The battles were horrifying for either sex, but the idea that significant numbers of women could hold a place in such a wall is fatuous. I doubt I would personally last five minutes.; 9/8/14, 8:37 PM
Quaestor said...: The neighborhood of modern Flensburg has been proposed. Convenient, yet generally beyond the immediate influence of Jelling.; 9/8/14, 9:44 PM