River Kings

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River Kings Page 13

by Cat Jarman


  Nevertheless, such examples are rare, both in the historical record and in the archaeology. Could that 20 per cent finding in Repton represent an actual proportion of women who were part of an army – if that’s what they were – when we have so little evidence from anywhere else? There are some intriguing historical sources to look to as well, the most famous being the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote in the twelfth and early thirteenth century. In remarkably negative tones, he describes the following:

  There were once women among the Danes who dressed themselves to look like men, and devoted almost every instance of their lives to the pursuit of war, that they might not suffer their valour to be unstrung or dulled by the infection of luxury. For they abhorred all dainty living, and used to harden their minds and bodies with toil and endurance. They put away all the softness and light-mindedness of women, and inured their women’s spirit to masculine ruthlessness. They sought, moreover, so zealously to be skilled in warfare, that they might have been thought to have unsexed themselves. Those especially, who had either force of character or tall and comely persons, used to enter this kind of life. These women, therefore (just as if they had forgotten their natural state, and preferred sternness to soft words), offered war rather than kisses, and would rather taste blood than busses, and went about the business of arms more than that of amours. They devoted those hands to the lance which they should rather have applied to the loom. They assailed men with their spears, whom they could have melted with their looks, they thought of death and not of dalliance.[6]

  We don’t know if Saxo’s descriptions are true and it is clear from the tone of his account that he really didn’t approve of the concept of female fighters, writing, as he did, from a very religious perspective. As a Christian cleric, for him these sorts of actions did not fit into a feminine sphere.

  He doesn’t give details such as the number of female warriors or how common they were, but he does go on to name specific memorable women and their actions. Here, they are listed in far more complimentary ways, like Hetha and Wisna, two female captains, who he describes as having the bodies of women on whom ‘nature bestowed the souls of men’. Even if his writing is exaggerated, perhaps the takeaway message from Saxo is that being a fighter and part of a military force was a possibility for a woman during the Viking Age, even if it wasn’t quite as common as some fictional twenty-first-century representations would have us think.

  The Icelandic saga literature also features fighting women, and although these stories date to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they may have some roots in reality, even if the characters are largely fictional. While none of them leads armies specifically, there are several examples of women who knew how to handle weapons and who you definitely wouldn’t want to anger unwittingly. One of the most fascinating characters is Freydís Eiríksdóttir (even if much of her behaviour is quite shocking): the daughter of Erik the Red and sister of Leif Erikson (who according to the sagas first reached North America), Freydís travelled west from her home in Greenland to the new settlements set up in Vinland, probably somewhere on or near the coast of Newfoundland. Unfortunately for those travelling with her, her journeys all ended in violence. In one case, she demanded the murder of her co-settlers, picking off the women herself when the men refused to do it for her. In another story, her expedition group, having made it to Greenland, was attacked at night by the native population armed with strange weapons (possibly catapults). The men in the group, roused from sleep in this new and hostile territory, were terrified by the missiles being launched at them and fled, but Freydís, who was clearly not fazed by this unexpected turn of events, admonished them for their cowardice. Picking up a sword, she engaged in battle and – the best part – exposed one of her breasts, slapping it with her sword, and giving a loud and piercing battle cry. The attackers were clearly terrified at this, for they turned and ran. It should also be mentioned that Freydís was heavily pregnant. While her morals are questionable, she is portrayed in the sagas as both fearless and brave, taking action – including violence – that is no different from that of her male counterparts. It might be that this is more a reflection of a romanticised, thirteenth-century idea of brave women than a genuine reflection of a Viking Age reality, but it could also be taken to show that such behaviour was not wholly unexpected, nor was it unlikely that women could use weapons, regardless of whether or not they’d fit into our ‘warrior’ category.

  A problem with attempting to use accounts like those of Saxo and the sagas as historical sources is the heavy influence of religion: all the stories recount a world viewed through a Christianised lens. Such descriptions communicate an often admonitory view of the pagan past, where women do unwomanly things, often with dire consequences, that a good Christian woman would never do. This makes it difficult to assess the extent to which they reflect reality. Another source is different: John Skylitzes, an eleventh-century Greek historian, describes a battle which took place in 971 at Dorostopol, part of a war of the Imperial Byzantine Empire against the Rus’, eastern Vikings we will hear more about later. In an offhand remark, Skylitzes describes how, after defeating the Rus’, the Byzantine soldiers scour the battlefield for anything they can scavenge from their enemies’ corpses. Among these, they discover the bodies of women wearing armour, who had clearly been fighting alongside the men. Unlike so many of the other near-contemporary accounts, this information isn’t given in an admonishing or preaching way, which increases the chances of it being an actual description of a real circumstance rather than something that was written with an ulterior motive.

  Finally, we have the women who feature so prominently in our understanding of Norse mythology, often with crucial roles pertaining to the violence and warfare that are so familiar: the Valkyries. Made even more well known and popular by Wagner’s opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung (where fictional horned helmets make their first appearance), for more than a century the Valkyries have captured people’s imagination as a highly romanticised image of warrior women. The operas are loosely based on what is known from written sources, but with plenty of creative licence. In Norse mythology, the Valkyries were the choosers of the slain: after a battle these flying figures would sweep down to the battlefield and select who among the defeated would make it to Valhalla – Odin’s hall in Asgard. One source describes them riding through the sky in full armour: as they pass through, the sweat from the horses’ manes falls as dew in the valleys and as hail in the forests. In Valhalla, the lucky warriors could eat and drink from an endless supply served to them by the Valkyries, when they were not engaged in leisurely fighting among themselves. A benefit of Valhalla was that if you died in one of these battles, you would automatically be revived at the end of the day – all of the fun, none of the risks.

  The Valkyries are shown as ‘tragic warrior women, doomed by their love for mortal men’.[7] They often become the protective, supernatural lovers of mortals, shielding their chosen man on the battlefield and existing as a form of spiritual wife; sometimes so passionately in love that they continue their relationship in the afterworld. With names like Geirsko˛gul (Spear-Shaker), Sigrlo˛ðr (Victory-Hostess) and Randgríðr (Victory-Urger) to entice you into their world, it’s perhaps not surprising that this image captured the imaginations of later writers and composers. The Valkyries embody the powers of Odin, including the ability to cloud the mind, induce confusion and freeze limbs: in short, essential skills to ensure the opponent loses both the battle and his life.

  The Valkyries aren’t the only women in Norse mythology who count among their attributes strength on the battlefield and feminine charm: they are matched (or rather, surpassed) by the powers of the goddess Freya. Freya is closely linked to the Valkyries because when they swoop down on the battlefield to choose their dead for Valhalla, those who don’t make it to Odin get picked for Sessrumnir, Freya’s hall on Folkvang (the Field of Folk). In fact, according to the poem Grímnismál, the true order of events was the opposite: it was Fr
eya who got the first pick of the fallen warriors. Freya herself ventured into battle on a chariot drawn by two cats, though don’t let that fool you into thinking she wouldn’t be a fearsome opponent, with her sword and shield held up in front of her and her hair in a long, flowing ponytail. How much these myths and legends reflected a reality in which women took part in battle is unclear. But what is clear is that in the Viking world, we do come across fighting women and women perfectly capable of wielding a sword or an axe; some real, some imaginary. So when new objects come to light, like a small silver figurine found by metal detectorists in Denmark in 2012 of a woman with a ponytail, sword and shield, we can’t know if she is a fictional Valkyrie or a representation of a real-life fighting woman.

  I try to understand what this means for the women found in the charnel in Repton. I’m not convinced that we’ll ever be able to answer whether they were warriors or not, but cases like the Birka woman are important. Thanks to her, and the almost contemporary Aethelflaed, there’s no reason why the Great Army could not have had women within its ranks. I wondered if there were any other objects in the charnel building that might be informative. Clearly, many grave goods had originally been mixed in with the bones and these would usually be how we identify and interpret gender in past burials, though as Bj.581 so wonderfully demonstrates, this can be deeply problematic. There was a spindle whorl mixed in with the bones in the Repton charnel: could that provide evidence of women acting in more domestic roles there, as has been assumed at Torksey? I wondered too about the carnelian bead. Who would have worn it, a man or a woman? Yet trying to say something about whether or not women travelled abroad based on the objects that they might have worn can be very problematic, as such interpretations have had deep repercussions to date.

  MIGRATION

  Until recently it has been assumed that in similar cases in the Scandinavian homelands, exotic and imported artefacts buried with women were gifts from men. This is especially so in western Norway, where artefacts looted from Britain and Ireland have mostly been found in women’s graves. But the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials. The recurring problem is trying to work out whether it was the object or its owner who travelled.

  When it comes to women in the Viking Age, the conclusion has almost always been the former, which has had an enormous impact on how we have viewed women’s agency – their involvement and individual participation – in the entire period. Partly the issue is that the interpretation of the objects has been based on a number of assumptions that lead to circular arguments, a serpent biting its own tail, going right the way back to the start of the Viking Age.

  The traditional story that begins with ferocious, unprecedented and vicious attacks on monasteries like Lindisfarne is backed up by the presence of exotic looted objects, often from ecclesiastical settings, in eighth-century graves in western Norway. Most of these artefacts are clearly not things that would have been sold or peacefully traded: fragments of stunning chip-carved book covers repurposed into brooches or a near-perfect reliquary shrine are extremely unlikely to have been taken from a sacred place such as a church without some loss of blood, or at least the threat of it. What is peculiar is the appearance of these early artefacts from Britain and Ireland almost exclusively in women’s graves. Every textbook describing this will tell you that the objects were gifts from brothers, fathers and husbands who found success and wealth overseas on a daring raid in the west. The assumption is that all these exotic goods came to Scandinavia through violent raids that women would surely not have been part of.

  This may well be true, but looking at the evidence more carefully reveals something interesting: many of the foreign objects in women’s graves are not things that must necessarily have been stolen. In fact, graves often contain items like bowls, ladles and serving equipment, objects that related to feasting and to social occasions.[8] These would have been suitable as gifts bestowed in the making of alliances: the sort of thing you might have taken with you as a dowry. Could the women with whom the objects were buried not have travelled as well? The isotope evidence from the Norwegian skeletons in the Schreiner Collection revealed a number of non-local immigrant women, some of whom may well have come from Britain. This should make us reassess the objects as well.

  The remarkable shift in the way we are learning from the past and the scientific evidence – the osteological analysis, isotopes, DNA – is having a tremendous impact. Still, it’s not always a straightforward relationship and we have to be very careful how we interpret the new evidence. The Birka woman is a key example: while the debate centred around the sex of this individual, it soon returned to the concept of a ‘warrior’. Just because this woman had been buried with weapons, did that really mean that she had had a martial role in life? Yet if we weren’t asking questions like this for a male burial, why should we do it for its female equivalent?

  There has been a recent shift in the understanding of women’s roles in the settlement of England too. Until very recently it was assumed that the Viking or Scandinavian migrants who came over to settle were overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, male. What changed this view was – again – metal-detected artefacts, this time female jewellery. Dr Jane Kershaw at the University of Oxford collected evidence from the Portable Antiquities Scheme database because previously only a handful of Scandinavian women’s brooches were known from England.[9] Metal brooches were a common feature of women’s fashion, maybe even as ubiquitous as belts (at least among those who could afford them). Some are exceptionally intricate and beautifully ornate; oval and shaped like a tortoiseshell with snaking designs, worn in a pair high on the chest. In fact, tortoiseshell brooches are so commonly found in women’s graves in Scandinavia that they often become the definition of womanhood, their presence or absence determining whether we believe the occupier was a woman. It follows, then, that if you find these objects abroad, women must have been there to wear them. And that’s exactly what Jane found. Her trawl through the database showed a twenty-fold increase in the number of Scandinavian-style female jewellery and dress accessories found in eastern England over a twenty-five-year period.

  Of course, we don’t know if the women who wore the brooches had obtained them through trade or if they were local women who had been given them by Scandinavian relatives. But Jane could quite convincingly show that over time the sort of designs and fashions that were available very closely mirrored changes seen in Scandinavia, which is something that would be far more likely to have happened if the brooches arrived along with the women themselves, rather than on the ships of a trading merchant. The question, then, isn’t only whether the Viking women were there (either at home or abroad), but also what roles they had. Were they ‘just’ wives and daughters, or slaves and concubines? Or did they take more of an active part in their journeys and what was going on there? Importantly, were the women who did accompany the River Kings also from Scandinavia originally, or did they join along the way?

  There are examples of travelling women in the sagas who are not specifically fighters. There’s Aud the Deep-Minded, for instance: daughter of a Norwegian chieftain (the unflatteringly named Ketill Flatnose), who according to the sagas became infamous as one of the first settlers of Iceland. Married to a Norse king of Dublin, Aud lost both her husband and son to fights, at which point she decided to make it her task to move to the new, green, promised lands, marrying off her granddaughters along the way. Clearly a woman of means and ability who was highly respected, Aud prepared a ship in secret for this mission and had twenty free men accompany her.

  The problems with our current knowledge of Viking women are important because they relate to current thinking about the origins of the Viking Age. One issue is the major bias in the archaeological record in that there seem to be far more male burials than female in Scandinavia.[10] This was first discovered in the 1980s, when the search for Viking women started in earnest. Looking at the statistics of male vers
us female graves, it was discovered that in some areas of Norway male graves outnumbered female by a staggering seven to one. Over the years this has been taken very literally to suggest that there were more men than women around in the Viking Age. But that is problematic. It’s extremely uncommon for there to be a big sex difference in a population without very particular circumstances – for example, large numbers of men dying in battle. Even so, this would only explain the discrepancy in an adult population, and shouldn’t cause such a difference in the numbers of burials. If equal numbers of girls and boys are born in the first place, equal numbers of women and men should be buried at death.

  The most likely explanation for the difference in Scandinavia, it has been argued, is that selective female infanticide was carried out. This could have led to a situation much like that of modern-day China, where the one-child policy and a strong cultural preference for sons have caused a profoundly skewed sex ratio in favour of men due to an increase in selective female abortion, infanticide and abandonment. Unfortunately for the Viking Age, we don’t have the evidence either to prove or disprove this claim, rendering it mere speculation. It’s almost impossible to prove that infanticide took place on a large scale: infant burials rarely survive, and even if they do, determining the sex of an infant skeleton has only been possible with recently developed DNA techniques.

  In fact, the only supposed evidence we have that infanticide took place at all is from the saga literature dating to the twelfth or thirteenth century, in which one story includes a female infant who was left exposed to the elements to meet her death because a female child was less valuable than a male. This is unconvincing as evidence that the practice was so common almost five hundred years earlier as to cause a major imbalance between the sexes. Even more importantly, in the sagas, male infanticide was at least as common as female, so this really cannot be used as convincing proof that more girls were murdered than boys.

 

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