Dan Snow's History Hit - Valkyrie: The Warrior Women of the Viking World

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

I was thrilled to have Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir on the pod. We talked about Viking women, old Norse-Icelandic sagas, mythology and poetry. Who were these Viking women who were champions on the battlefield, did they really exist, and is there much historic evidence? Jóhanna answered all these questions drawing upon the latest archaeological evidence. It seems the lives of Viking women were far more dynamic than we might imagine. Enjoy!For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I hope you're all doing okay. I hope you're doing as well as can be expected. If you're locked down wherever you are in the world, keep it tight, stay at home. Let's keep the lockdown working. Let's not put pressure on our medical systems. And the sooner we do it, the sooner this is going to be over. We can get this done. This is another podcast. Try and pass some time. We've got the brilliant Johanna Katrin Fridik's daughter. She is a Norwegian scholar. She's a historian. And she's gone there again, which I can't resist talking about.

She's gone there. She's talking about shieldmaidens. She's talking about women warriors in the Viking world. She's written a book called Valkyrie. There is this enduring fascination with, for some reason, why are we obsessed with female warriors, particularly in the Viking world? You don't get this obsessed with other cultures and civilizations. And it was a chance to ask her about our enduring fascination

with the women who fought in the Norse Viking world. Why are we enduringly obsessed with the myth, the culture of female warriorhood? She had some very interesting answers about that. It's about myth, it's about archaeology, it's about literature. So enjoy this podcast. We've got plenty of Viking material, plenty of early medieval material

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history channel. On Friday morning, on Friday, we are talking to James Holland about the Second World War, about D-Day in particular, after his best-selling book. We've had Chernobyl this week. We've had a history of pandemics. We've had Margaret Millen talking about the First World War. We'd like to hear any suggestions you may have. Please use the hashtag HistoryHitLive and let us know. In the meantime, here is Johanna Katrin Friedrichsdottir. is Johanna Katrin Friedrich's daughter. Hello, welcome on the podcast. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you so much, Dan Snow. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you very much. Now, we've had this subject on the podcast before. People love arguing about this. Warrior women in Norse Viking history. Where's the scholarship at the moment? Are the shield maidens a reality? Were these women fighting on the front line alongside the menfolk or is it all mythology? Well it's a

great question, really fascinating. I have to admit I'm a little bit sceptical that there were many of them but I'm sure there were some and you can kind of try to break it down a little bit into the archaeology and the sagas. Yeah, great. Well, let's do that. Let's start with the sagas because, well, I was going to say they were there first, but of course the archaeology was there first. But archaeology is, I guess, a more recent development. So let's start with the sagas. What do they tell us about gender, about Valkyries, about this tradition that seems so strong of female warriors? Yeah, it's really interesting that these Scandinavians have all these legends and myths about them. And I think the Valkyrie is a really, really fascinating figure. That's

the supernatural woman who decides who lives and dies on the battlefield and sort of hovers in the air during the battle. But then in these kind of more realistic sagas that are usually called the King's Sagas, they kind of describe all these battles, both in Scandinavia and also overseas, when the Vikings were going around. And they usually don't have, or they don't have any women, period. And then it's like when you get into the more realm of fantasy

and you start having sagas like with dragons and magic potions and like dwarves and all kinds of more like mythical figures that's where you start getting female warriors so I don't think that necessarily Scandinavians thought of female warriors as like real or the people writing these stories down a little bit after the Viking Age. Aren't there one or two little glimpses, like little hints in the written sources that there were women wielding hard power as well as operating perhaps at court, perhaps, you know, within families and powerful families?

There's definitely lots of women, you know, partaking in various political machinations. And most of them are just as ruthless and cruel or not enough as the men. So when they succeed in politics or don't succeed, it's not necessarily because of their gender. But then you kind of have a few written sources from Ireland and the continent where there's like mentions of women being kind of around the Vikings. But like most of them kind of talk about how in the British sources they say that the Vikings had their wives and children with them when they were going around England, but that they would put them away before battles and stow them away in a safe place. them away before battles and stow them away in a safe place and then there's a really great French annal that talks about like a Viking siege of Paris and they seem to have their wives with them and they're like kind of berating them for not being manly enough during the battle which

is a frequent occurrence in the sagas actually like women goading to violence but like most of the written sources kind of don't really have any fighting unless it's like in a fantasy realm there's one source in Ireland that talks about a red maiden as being among the vikings and I'm not really sure I think that's really you know quite possible in which case then we would have one but like some scholars kind of dismiss that written source you know as sort of being propaganda and so they would have made the vikings seem more barbaric and maybe that than they were including having women warriors i love that quote i often i often read it out to my daughter and it talks about the vomitings of pagan ships doesn't it it's extraordinary and then fleet of the red the red girl or whatever I just find that so tantalizing okay if our obsession a modern obsession with shield maidens doesn't come from even from the

literary slash historical written evidence the sagas where does it come from? Well I suppose like most recently it comes from this grave in Berka in Sweden that's like reignited maybe an old debate about women warriors and that's a really amazing grave. It's not new so there's nothing new about discovery, it hasn't been recently excavated, it was done in the 1880s, and it was always interpreted as a really high-status warrior grave. But then, quite recently, this team of archaeologists in Sweden, they did a DNA analysis of the bones, and it turned out that it was a biological woman in the grave, and because of all of the weapons,

it had always been kind of interpreted as this quintessential warrior grave and then this just kind of totally went viral I think it was in the autumn of 2017 and yeah I didn't really anticipate this field kind of being written up in all of the major newspapers in the world and so on and then yeah I guess we've been kind of talking about that grave ever since. Yeah people are obsessed that grave aren't they I mean is there some suggestion that the because the excavation was quite a long time ago it might not be the body that was originally in the grave like where are we at the moment on that are we are we confident that that woman was buried in that place with all those weapons of war And what was she buried with exactly? Yeah, she was buried with all kinds of weapons.

And what was really interesting as well was some of the clothes were sort of like not very traditionally Scandinavian and were probably imported from somewhere in Kiev or something like that, somewhere in Ukraine. And I think there were aspirations cast on the bones and whether the bones were actually correctly identified but I'm pretty sure that they've been able to prove that they used the correct bones in the analysis. Yeah it raises a lot of questions I guess about like who this person was because I don't know whether they were able to place the person as as coming

from a specific place but I know at least they said they were not from that area like Birka so yeah we we really don't know who this this person was. Why have you written this book whereas you wouldn't have written this book if it had been like warrior women in the Anglo-Saxon England. Like, what is it with our obsession with Norse women and violence? Like, you know, why do we keep hunting for it? Well, that's a question I ask myself a lot as well. But I guess I wrote the book because I was teaching Norse mythology and then the students would ask me these questions. And because of the written sources, I mean, I don't think in Anglo-Saxon culture you have any kind of equivalent of Valkyries or shield maidens

to the extent that they're developed in Scandinavia at least and so because you know everything might kind of fit together quite neatly the shield maidens and the graves and everything and then these little amulets like there's this amazing little figurine. I think it's a silver figurine that was found in Denmark. And it's clearly like a woman holding a sword and a shield. And so there's just all these kind of interconnected motifs and everything. And so it sort of speaks again to the,

like maybe the cliche that Scandinavian women are so strong or something like that but yeah I don't have a clear answer to it. Well it's good for you that people are fascinated by it because you can write wonderful books like this. I know. So what else in the archaeology is happening at the moment? Are there any other glimpses of female warriors in the archaeology? I think there's a couple of graves that are sort of being re-analysed and I think there was another one in Norway and they're doing a DNA analysis of that one and that was again the bones were sexed female in the 80s I think but the grave itself was much had been excavated much

earlier and that was a really interesting grave as well, because the person in it was quite short. And again, like, I don't think there was sort of signs of this woman having been a very robust warrior, you know, with lots of battle wounds that have healed and so on, which kind of some archaeologists, they don't really want to categorise anyone as a warrior unless the bones actually suggest that sort of lifestyle. So there's a lot of questions coming up, but I don't think we have any new graves that are showing up at the moment. So rather than exploring what we don't know, what do we know about the status of women? I mean, how would women have fared in Norse society, Viking society? Did it strike contemporaries as different to how Britain and Ireland, for example, or Northern Germany handled, saw its gender roles and gender politics?

Well, first of all, it depended a lot on your class. And I think for most people, life was just a never-ending cycle of work and I think that goes for all of the countries that you mentioned but maybe for women in Scandinavia what was unusual was that the men were going away on these Viking expeditions which included raiding and you know doing trade and so on and so then they would kind of have to keep life going in the meantime and that's perhaps some explanation of why they sort of enjoyed a relatively good status legally but most of their days would have been you know caring for children making textiles I mean the work that was involved in making textiles was just like all consuming,

basically, just to keep everyone, you know, in clothes. And what about travelling? Because we think of the settlers, well, in fact, when I was in Iceland, there was a very interesting DNA study being done about who were the women that came to Iceland with the first wave of Norse settlers. Were they British and Irish slaves, effectively, or women from the the Isles or were they Norse women that came across with the men? How much travelling do you think women would have done? Yeah that's actually something that's sort of developing and becoming more refined. So there was this famous study that came out like almost 20 years ago I think now that said that basically Icelandic DNA is male Norwegian and female, sort of mostly Irish and, you know, from the British Isles, basically.

And that's sort of been refined recently, and studies are showing that there's a lot more Norse female DNA in Iceland than was previously thought. So that really tells us that people were uprooting themselves as a family and the women were going with their Norse men. And it wasn't as simple as Norse men just going off and, you know, stealing a wife or buying her and then moving to Iceland. And so it really kind of tells you that these women were real sort of settlers along with the men and there are stories in written sources in Iceland that depict a few women as coming to Iceland and taking land

by themselves. What do you think I always ask Viking specialists this North specialists what what is the enduring fascination obviously for you I mean you're from that part of the world but around the world it's this absolute fascination with these you know maritime settlers raiders traders in the north sea in the north atlantic in this period why do you think we continue to find them so fascinating well i think a big reason is because of the written sources kind of giving us their stories and of course you know they're filtered through a couple of centuries of time and everything but to me it's just this kind of universal human appeal of the stories and the mythology and it just gives us this I don't know insight into a way of life and a way of thinking that is in some ways so different from anything we experience but because of the way that

they're still dealing with their family problems and adverse conditions and and succeeding and I think that's maybe what appeals to a lot of people just this mixture of heroic spirit and tragedy and and everything and I suppose the fact that they emerge from a previously kind of overlooked part of the world and briefly play a quite significant part in global trade patterns, settlement, conquest, over a huge area. Exactly. And you find these, for example,

Viking women had these brooches as part of their sort of normal costume. And we find like really similar brooches somewhere in Ukraine and then, you know, somewhere as far west as Iceland. And, you know, it's just amazing to think that maybe the same person could have traveled these vast distances when most people, you know, never traveled, probably most Europeans, you know, they might have gone to the next village or something.

And yeah, it's just astonishing that they went all the way to Greenland, Newfoundland. And just the kind of resourcefulness and the resilience, I think, appeals to a lot of us. Well, it certainly does. So tell us the name of your book. Yes, it's called Valkyrie the women of the viking world and it's out April 2nd from Bloomsbury it's certainly a very good title my daughter wishes that I'd called her Brynhildr she's furious that we gave her such a boring name she'll be reading this book that's for sure thanks for coming on the podcast yeah thank you so much

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