by Cat Jarman
For much of the study of the Viking Age, women have been waiting faithfully back home on the family farm, passively watching a migration process going on around them. There’s still a lot we don’t know about their roles and agency, but many new discoveries and a new way of thinking are beginning to change things. Repton remains one of the very few burial sites with undoubted Viking associations in England and, probably, one of the most significant outside Scandinavia. So if we can understand who the women from Repton were – and why they were there – that is a great place to start.
If Viking excursions were almost exclusively male ventures, you would expect to find evidence of mobility both into and out of Scandinavia – i.e. people who had migrated at some point in their lives – to be found only among men. That, however, turns out not to be the case, as I discovered a couple of years before I started working in Repton. As a student in Norway, after months of application letters, ethical committees, training and preparations, I had finally been given the golden ticket: permission to sample the remains of forty Viking Age skeletons that were kept in the basement at the anatomical department of the University of Oslo. I had become interested in studying mobility, wanting to find out how widespread migration really was among those who died during the Viking Age. Especially the women.
When I was finally given access to the Schreiner Anatomical Collection at the University of Oslo, I ventured down the metal stairs to find the skulls of seven thousand people, their anonymous faces staring out from behind glass-fronted, timber cabinets. That day I spent some time just walking up and down the rows of cabinets containing shelf upon shelf of skulls, each gingerly placed in a shallow cardboard box with its accession number handwritten in ink across the front. I had a list of numbers preselected from a database, corresponding to individuals that fitted my strict criteria of time, place and age. I would take the skulls with me back upstairs to the preparation lab, put on a white coat and goggles, and as carefully as possible sample what I needed before returning them to their shelves.
Just as in Repton, the samples were sent to a lab for strontium and oxygen isotope analysis and I played the waiting game until the list of numbers came back in a spreadsheet. Some of the results were quite unexpected. The majority of those showing evidence of mobility – in other words, those buried in a very different location from where the isotopes indicated that they grew up – were women. Two of the women seemed unlikely to have grown up in Norway at all; their tooth enamel fitted with values from either elsewhere in southern Scandinavia or, intriguingly, in Britain. While I was looking at only a small sample, it didn’t fit with the common idea of the housewife who stayed at home.
I also wondered if this couldn’t demonstrate that some of those grave goods from far and away had travelled with the women after all. Infuriatingly, I wasn’t able to match up anyone who’d clearly migrated with an imported artefact: most of those graves did not have bones and teeth that were well enough preserved to analyse. So I began to look elsewhere too, at studies that others had carried out, to see if the results were the same. It turns out that they were: of all the strontium and oxygen isotope studies that I could find at the time, where both sexes were present in the burial record there seemed to be as high a proportion of migrating women as men. The biggest problem was that there appeared to be far more male graves from the Viking Age than female (another hot topic of debate: more on that later). Nevertheless, this was new information, albeit on a small scale.
Within the next few years, more studies began to back up the early results, and the first ancient DNA analysis of Viking Age skeletons from Norway also found evidence of mobility among women. In this study from 2015, DNA was extracted from burials and their mitochondrial haplotypes (mtDNA) were established. The genetic material that is passed down solely through the female lines, mtDNA is especially interesting: while you inherit the mtDNA in your body from your mother’s side, you can only pass it on to the next generation if you are a woman. This means that the data from studies like this can say something about gender-specific ancestry, something that is especially useful if you are trying to work out whether men or women (or both) migrated in the past. The study found that several individuals had mtDNA haplotypes that were inconsistent with what you would have expected from Norway, meaning that either they or one of their near ancestors had most likely migrated there. One of the women sampled in the study was even more intriguing than the rest.
In 1927, on a small farm by a river running east from the Trondheim Fjord, a team of workmen were digging trenches to extend the railway across a plain. In the process they came across some artefacts: a woman’s brooch, a sword and part of a horse harness. Finding no more evidence of a grave, they continued their work until, four hundred metres further on, they came across more artefacts, this time associated with a body. There were two very well-preserved oval brooches of a typical Viking type, laid out in position on the deceased’s chest. Further down were two beads, one made of brown glass and the other of a ceramic material. All that was left of the skeleton was, according to Trondheim Museum’s archives, ‘the cranium, thighs, and shins, reasonably preserved, and it is hoped that also the remaining bones will be obtainable’. The bones and artefacts were donated to the museum, with the former finding their way into the Schreiner Collection.
There the woman remained, anonymous and unremarkable, until 2015, when the Norwegian study’s analysis of her bones showed that her mtDNA lineage most likely belonged to a group known as Hg A*.[1] Very rare in Scandinavia and also in Europe, the haplogroup is more common in the Black Sea region, including among Turkish populations. This is, however, almost all we know about her. Nothing about her grave stood out; the osteological analysis carried out almost a century before had classified her skull as of ‘Nordic type’ (although now we know that this type of classification is meaningless at best and racist at worst). Her grave goods were typical and unelaborate.
This might actually be what I find the most intriguing: here we have a woman who, somehow, genetically, has ties to the Black Sea and presumably to the movements east, but absolutely nothing from the traditional evidence supports this. She is not mentioned in any of the history books, nor is her story one that we might recognise from many other examples. We don’t know if it was actually she who migrated from those regions or one of her maternal ancestors; nor do we know in what capacity. Independent traveller, wife, daughter, warrior? This, the role of women in the Viking world, is one of the key questions we need to answer, especially when it comes to those who travelled abroad.
WARRIOR WOMEN
There are no burials at Torksey that we know relate to the Great Army, so the objects are all that we have to go on. The presence of a spindle whorl there has been taken as evidence that women were present as textile manufacture was considered more or less exclusively a female task.[2] There is good evidence that jobs, on the whole, were gendered in the Scandinavian homelands, so there is no reason to assume that they wouldn’t have been when away from home, too.
It’s almost certain that there were women in the Viking camps: it’s hard to imagine a group of thousands of army members and hangers-on gathering without a single woman among them. Yet there are two important issues. First, if we accept that women were there, taking part in what were essentially military operations, who were they? Had they accompanied the group from Scandinavia, such that we can confidently label them as ‘Viking’ women? Alternatively, could they have been hangers-on who had joined the group along the way, either voluntarily or through coercion? Would that still let us define them as Viking women in the same way? Second, we have to consider what their roles were. If the presence of spindle whorls is what leads us to think that women were present, a corollary is that we assume these more domestic tasks were what they were there to do. This is where the women in the Repton charnel come in. Now that we feel quite confident that the mass grave relates to the ninth-century Great Army, we can reconsider their presence there.
When
Martin and Birthe published their analysis of the bone deposit, they concluded that roughly a fifth of the bones belonged to women. We don’t know if that truly represents the whole group because you can only work out sex when certain parts of the skeleton remain: usually a pelvis or a skull, because this is where there are clear sex differences like broader mandibles and pronounced brow ridges for men, or a pelvis broad enough to allow for childbirth in women. This means that the 20 per cent is probably a minimum, and in fact the DNA analyses that Lars Fehren-Schmitz and his colleagues carried out showed that at least one of the Repton jawbones that was thought to be male is in fact that of a woman.
In the original analysis, it was thought that these women were likely of local origins because of their comparatively shorter stature. The conclusion was no doubt also affected by the fact that at the time the original work at Repton took place, it was overwhelmingly assumed that women did not take part in the raids. It’s now not clear if the statistical analyses relating to stature still stand up and, infuriatingly, the isotope evidence has been inconclusive. The women in the charnel who have been tested are certainly not local, but it’s not obvious where they’ve come from. Two of them, though, seem very unlikely to have come from England at all, as they have strontium values that are very rare here, and in Britain can only be found in highland areas of Scotland or possibly Wales, though they would equally be at home in inland Scandinavia and many other places in continental Europe.
The isotopes show that those women could have migrated like the men and could just as well have come from Scandinavia. However, this doesn’t tell us what their roles were. Is it possible that rather than being wives and hangers-on, they were part of the Great Army fighting force – that they were female warriors? Women warriors certainly do feature in the Viking world, but we don’t know if they are real or mythological. Yet very recently one particular Viking woman might have changed that, making a major mark on the world more than a millennium after her death: she is the now rather notorious ‘Birka warrior woman’.
In 2017, researchers from the University of Uppsala published a study showing that the skeleton in the grave of a warrior from Birka was, in fact, that of a woman and not a man as previously thought.[3] Using ancient DNA, the team had reanalysed a skeleton, Bj.581, that had been excavated in the late nineteenth century, concluding that the body had two X-chromosomes and was therefore biologically female. This was surprising because for more than a hundred years the grave had been considered that of an archetypal warrior, very much as that of G511 in Repton has been – and still is – described.
In Birka, the burial circumstances are even more compelling. The deceased was placed in an underground chamber, cut out of the earth and lined with wood, creating a rectangular room. Near the centre, the body had been carefully arranged by the mourners, probably seated and facing east. On a small platform at the foot end of the chamber lay the remains of two complete horses, nestled tightly together and facing their former owner. The horses seem set for action; one of them is bridled and ready to be ridden. All around the body, objects had been placed: two large shields, a sword, an axe, two lances and a fighting knife, along with twenty-five arrows of a type specifically designed to pierce chainmail. Whoever mourned this person had made a concerted effort to equip her with whatever might be needed in battle by someone with a wide range of military skills, from hand fighting to mounted archery.
Such a richness of objects was rare even in Birka, despite its many burials. In fact, Bj.581 was one of only two from the entire site that contained a full complement of weapons. For these reasons, it’s not surprising that in 1878 the occupant of the grave was thought to be a man. Yet when the genetic study was published in 2017, the news hit the headlines worldwide and went viral on social media. Here not only was the proof that twenty-first-century sentiments hungered for – that women too could demonstrate martial prowess in the past, just as the media depict – but this evidence had been provided by that holy grail of scientific endeavours: DNA. The Birka warrior made her re-entry into the world in a perfect storm of circumstances. Even so, not everyone was enthusiastic about the new findings. The main objections were twofold.[4] One: just because this woman was buried with weapons, did that make her a warrior? And two: this was only a single individual; could she really be used to say something about the roles of women in Viking society as a whole? In other words, did that really mean there were a lot more like her?
To answer the first question, many turned to the bones. I got to see Bj.581 in Stockholm during a visit to the Swedish History Museum with Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, the archaeologist who had led the new study. Laid out carefully on a table in a bone lab, the unnamed woman had been reunited with many of the artefacts she was buried with. Her bones were fragmented and brittle; and her skull was still missing after it had been mislaid by an unnamed antiquarian at some point in the last century. The one thing that the researchers had searched for (and the same question that I am repeatedly asked about the Repton charnel women) was if there was any evidence of violence or traumatic injury. Bj.581 yielded none. There was no axe wound to her pelvis; no sword marks slicing a lower arm raised in defence: nothing like the injuries G511 had sustained. In fact, we have no idea at all how she died, aged only in her late thirties. But here absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as the missing skull and poorly preserved bones could easily be hiding past injuries.
Equally, many have searched for evidence of the repetitive strain that would have been caused by typical ‘warrior’ activities, like signs of stronger arms from wielding heavy weapons, in a similar way to how a professional tennis player’s serving arm will be considerably larger than the other. Archery, for example, causes a considerable strain on the body because the repetitive movements require a strengthening of muscles that, when used repeatedly, cause the bones to modify in the places where the muscles are attached. Evidence like this has been found among tenth-century Hungarian burials, in men buried with extensive archery equipment, showing that we can look for such evidence in past populations too.[5]
Bj.581 was buried with arrows and probably a bow to go with them, but her body exhibited no definite evidence to suggest that she had used them repeatedly. For this reason, many have argued that the objects were symbolic of her role rather than actual, physical evidence of it. In other words, they might signal how someone wanted to present her in death rather than a demonstration of what she did in life. Comparing her with G511 from Repton, it seems that the only major difference between the two – apart from their gender – is that the Repton burial has severe injuries: there is no doubt that he met a violent end and therefore at some point took part in fighting. This could make it seem as if injury is what defined you as a warrior; though that seems a little unfortunate, because surely those who were either successful in battle or simply very lucky would not be represented in this way.
If you accept the interpretation of the Birka woman as someone who held a martial role, that has strong implications for the Repton women too. Although she dates to the tenth century, several decades after Repton, she shows that this type of role was at least possible for a Viking woman: she could, certainly, have been part of a fighting force. This shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, because she wasn’t the only one. There are other female burials with weapons in Scandinavia, although they are relatively rare. But if we look elsewhere in northern Europe, there are contemporary examples of women wielding military power, the best known being Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, who was the daughter of Alfred the Great: possibly the only woman from Anglo-Saxon England known to have led military forces (though ironically, in this context, her main foes were the Vikings). Meanwhile, on the continent, another woman was in charge of a fight against Vikings too: Gerberga of Saxony, the sister of Otto I of Germany, organised the defence of Laon in northern France in 945–6 when her husband, Louis IV, was captured. What both Aethelflaed and Gerberga have in common is that they independently led forces
and attacks and organised defences in a tenth-century environment, which is typically thought of as a time when only men could hold power. In both cases, these women owed their political position to a family connection, but at the same time, both are described as well educated, intelligent and possessing the ability to lead military strategy with the support of their contemporaries.
It’s tempting and not unrealistic to place the Birka woman in the same sort of context. We should also remember that power was certainly afforded some women in this period, the Oseberg burials being a prime example. Neither of the two women there has been associated with military roles because the grave didn’t contain any weapons. However, as the Oseberg mound had clearly been robbed, we can’t be sure if there were originally weapons that were stolen. A curious, arrow-like wooden object described in the early twentieth-century catalogue of the grave has been interpreted as a hærpil, a so-called war arrow or bidding stick used to alert or rally people for defence and warfare. Perhaps this was indicative of a military role after all. In any case, isn’t it likely that someone with so much wealth and no doubt a lot of power would also have been in charge maybe not of a military force, but at least of fighters capable of defending land, wealth and resources? I would certainly think the Oseberg women commanded power in some way, even if they themselves didn’t fight.