Gone Medieval - Warrior Viking Women

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

One of the enduring mysteries of the Viking Age is the identity of two people buried in a spectacular blood drenched ship in southern Norway in the autumn of 834. Why the mystery? Because these remains were of women accorded the most lavish Viking burial ever discovered.Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Heather Pringle to discuss research that reveals how Viking women were warriors, traders, and leaders, and how their lives have been long overlooked by history.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega and edited by Ella Blaxill. The producer is Rob Weinberg, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here. One of the enduring mysteries of the Viking Age is the identity of two people buried in a spectacular blood-drenched ship in southern Norway in the autumn of 834. Why the mystery? Because these remains were of women, interred with elaborate ceremony, and accorded the most lavish Viking burial ever discovered. The Osseburg women, as they have come to be known, were discovered in 1904 in a 70-foot-long ship adorned with intricate carvings and filled with treasures. The presence of these women in such an elaborate burial raised questions about their roles and their status in society, which is probably

still typically thought of as being dominated by militaristic, seafaring men. Women in the Viking story have, on the other hand, usually been relegated to domestic roles. However, archaeological research reveals that women played diverse roles as warriors, traders, and leaders, and the society they lived in was more complex than we might have imagined. In this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm delighted to be joined by renowned science journalist Heather Pringle, her latest book, The Northwomen, untold stories from the other half of the Viking world, is a groundbreaking study of the lives of Viking women who have been long, overlooked by history. Firstly, Heather, thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, well,

thank you so much for inviting me. I'm a big fan of Gone Medieval, so I'm just delighted to be here today. We are absolutely delighted to have you because your work is encompassing some of my favorite things, which is in the first place, women. Yay, women. Yes. But also, I love talking to archaeologists, because as a historian, obviously, you know, I'm just looking to gossip about what people have written down. And we learn so much from what our friends, the archaeologists, dig up. And this Osberg site is so interesting in terms of what it can tell us about women in Viking society more generally, which is a place where we don't always have the greatest written records. So I'll start you off with a huge question. You know, no pressure, but who do we think that these Osberg women were?

Okay. That's the million-dollar question. you've hit on it immediately. There have been lots of theories about who these women are. One of them may have been a high-born princess. The other woman who is buried in the ship may have been a servant or a companion of some sort. So that's one theory. Another theory is that one of the women, or perhaps both,

were very important ceremonialists, ritualists. But the theory that seems to be gaining a lot of traction here over the last two decades, let's say, is that these women, one of them at least, was a sorceress. And I think that there is really quite intriguing evidence for this, let's say. In the ship in which they were buried in, there were a number of items that were found in the ship that match items that were carried by sorceresses in the old Icelandic sagas. So, yes. I'm just making delighted and interactive.

captured faces. I'm delighted to see them too. So in the sagas, the old Icelandic sagas, the saga of Eric the Red, as a matter of fact, we have this wonderful description of a sorceress who is invited to the house of a farmer, a Greenlandic farmer. And there's a famine in Greenland at that time. And of course, Greenland was settled by the Norse. So there's a famine. And the Viking Norse farmer invites the sorceress to come and help them. He wants her to perform a ritual to predict the future, to see how long the famine will last, and how is it all going to end for them.

So she arrives at the farmer's house, and she is dressed in the most extraordinary thing. She has this wonderful cloak, a blue-black cloak, which is trimmed in stones. I imagine them as glittering stones, who knows, but all the way down to her hem. She has got shoes on, that have brass knobs that probably tinkle when she walks.

She has a leather pouch around her waist, and inside that pouch are magical amulets and charms. And most importantly of all, she's carrying a staff. And this staff is adorned with, it seems like, bronze, knobs and so on. And it's quite a striking object. And it's an important tool of a sorceress. These staffs play key role in many of the rituals that they perform. So there she is. She's dressed to the hilt, and the farmer invites her in. He's got his household

there. They all greet her with the highest respected honor. They give her the high seat in the hall, which is like a pretty big deal. And they also feed her. This is a famine. They feed her a dish that consists of all the hearts of the animals in the local region. So, It's wild, right? So I love this about the heart pie because one of my particular interest is magic. And this eating of hearts comes up all the time across Europe in magical recipes and magical spells. And usually you see it for things like exotic animals. So for example, if you are going to make a love spell, you go find the heart of a hoopy bird.

And you cover it in honey and you fill it with spices and you try to feed it. to the object of your affection. And it's really interesting to see these hearts come up here. So it makes a sort of magical sense with medieval understandings where, yes, you get all of the animals that you want her to bring and you go get their hearts and feed them to her. So it's such an incredibly lived experience of the idea of magic. I love this.

I'm sorry. I'm too excited immediately. No, no, no. I love hearing this because it really does reinforce this picture of her sorceress. So she dines, and the farmer finally, I think, works up the courage because these women were both revered and feared, I think. He kind of works up the courage and said, well, can we expect you to maybe look into this matter that we discussed, namely, when is the famine going to end here? And she said, well, I'll think about it overnight. And I'll give you my answer tomorrow.

So the next day rolls around. And she says, yes, I'll give a saither appearance, which is her ritual. But she says, I need some women who can sing the songs so that we can summon the spirit successfully. And the farmer scoos around the household, trying to find if there's any woman there that knows these songs that the sorceress wants to have as chanting in the background of her ritual. So she wants to have someone in the household sing some of the sacred chants in order to summon the spirits. Well, she tries to find the answers to the questions that the farmer has posed. So the farmer and his staff look around the household, and they come up with this woman, Gudrid, who was a Christian,

but who had learned the songs when she was young. So they prepare for the ritual. They bring in a high chair for her again, and she sits on it and Gudrid starts singing the songs. And the sorceress, basically later, after the ritual is over, tells the farmer, the famine will end soon. Things will be fine here. Everyone will have food on the table again.

And Gudrid is going to make this brilliant match, by the way, she adds. So she's very gracious, but she performs a ceremony. And we have this wonderful account, but I particularly like the account of the way that she is dressed. It is really a striking description. The way that she's dressed, then this then matches up with the Osberg women that we find. Or do we see similar things like the brass on the shoes or the stones on the cloak? No, we don't see the brass on the shoes or the stones on the cloak.

Interestingly enough, we don't see that. And in fact, there's been a study by Dr. Neil Price, Uppsla University. He's basically done a very extensive study of burial records of high-status Viking women looking for many of these objects, leather pouch, magical amulets, so on and so forth. And to my knowledge, he has not found a pair of shoes that match to the description. of the sorceress in the psychoviric the red. In the Osaberg women's burial, archaeologists have found a leather pouch with amulets.

They have found cannabis seeds, presumably psychoactive drug, and it may have helped her enter a trance state or a state of entering into a portal into another world kind of thing. But most importantly at all, they found in a really beautiful chest, a wooden staff, very, very finely worked. It seems to be just beautifully polished and worked

and almost faceted as well. So it matches some of the descriptions of sorceress staff. Some of them are apparently made of wood. And apparently there is a particular type of sorceress staff that belongs to some of the most powerful sorceresses. And it's used to tame or break the human will. So it's a very powerful tool. You know, the description of this tool almost seems to fit the staff that was found in the chest in the burial of the Osberic women. I just find this incredibly exciting. I simply love a magical woman. I can't help it.

Finding a woman of such high status and her servant, of course, as well. And seeing that she seems to fit these certain key characteristics of what we expect from a sorcerer, Is this the kind of thing that we see often when we find graves of women? I mean, it seems to me like sorcerer women, they're people who, as you say, they appear in sagas. But I suppose when people think of Viking society, that's not the number one woman they picture. So is this like a brand new discovery? Is this something wildly off piece that we wouldn't expect to see from women? Or is it kind of slotting in in places where we just haven't had these discoveries yet?

That's a really good question. I mean, certainly we've had these sites. descriptions of sorceresses, there's quite a few of them. But what I think is really interesting is that archaeologists, and I should just interject here for a moment, I'm not myself an archaeologist, I am a writer who specializes in archaeology. I've been doing this for, so I just want to state that clearly. But what I think is really happening here is that we're starting to see evidence that matches the descriptions in the sagas.

And when Neil Price published his book, The Viking Way, which was an examination of magic in the Viking world, he was able to state that there were ten graves that looked as if they had very good evidence for sorceresses. So that's just ten female graves from the burial records that he was able to examine and so forth. It was a pretty exhaustive study, but still ten graves. And then there were other graves that he felt ranked as containing possible sorcery stuff. and so on. So I don't think these women were very powerful ones with the sorcery staff. I don't think they were very common in Viking society, but they certainly were present and they were powerful. I think that this is such an important point because, of course, a lot of the way that we discuss Viking society, it's specifically about the act of Viking, right? Getting it about going over there, these sorts of things. But there's all kinds of things going on behind the scene that create the society that makes these things.

possible. Yes, exactly right. I mean, one of the things that really surprised me and delighted me was some of the experimental archaeology projects that have been done showing how much of women's work went into weaving those immense sails on Viking ships. I mean, these women, the women who were doing all this weaving, and it's not just weaving cloth, I should ask, it's processing the wool. You know, you didn't get your shears out or clippers, electric tools. it was all hand-plucked. Anyway, an enormous amount of work has gone into trying to quantify how much of women's work went into making just even one sale from one Viking ship. And some of this work has been done by a textile researcher named Amy Lightfoot.

And then there was a second study that kind of looked even more deeply into the number of hours by Anna Nourgard. And the result was that to make just one sale for kind of a an average Viking ship would have taken just over 10,000 hours of a woman's time to make this sail. These women were so important to these famous raiding fleets that we know about the merchant ships, the ships that were moving into the North Atlantic and helping people colonize and settle islands in the North Atlantic and eventually even America. So women were extensively involved in the entire process of equipping a ship. And they were making the clothes, of course, for the men, the woolen clothes for the raiders and the traders.

There's some evidence to suggest they were making cloth armor, too, for the raiders and traitors. I mean, it's just crazy how much work of women went into making these items for raiders and traders. Now, you have hit on already my kind of next set of questions. Because I'm thinking about the incredible site here of Gamla Uppsala. And this tells us kind of a lot about when we see a big shift in Viking society because we had kind of a society of farmers living on small farms, we think, prior to about 536. And then you get a bunch of volcanic eruptions. And then this leads to, guess what, crop failure, terrible conditions for farming and, of course, famine. And we think that this is the point when everyone says, hang on, I might get into a boat and go see if I can seal us.

some to eat. And so how do we see natural disasters like this influence major societal shifts and what that means when we look at them from an archaeological point of view? It's an interesting question. You certainly see them at this extraordinary site of Gamla Uppsla, which became a royal estate and it was power center basically in the landscape in Scandinavia. And what you see happening is that during that very catastrophic event of 530, there was famine, there was enormous hardship. And there was probably a very high rate of mortality. And we can see that because farms are just suddenly abandoned.

I mean, it's just as if people just one day either keeled over or they just walked away and they moved somewhere else. I mean, it's hard to say exactly. But a lot of land was abandoned in Scandinavia, certainly in this region around Gamla Uppsala. So there's all this deserted land. And in the Norse world, in the Viking world, land is power, basically. So as soon as some conditions start to improve after these volcanic eruptions, some people seem to have said, look at all that empty land over there. My neighbors are gone now.

Why don't I just take that land and incorporate it into my holdings? And so certainly the local aristocracy, those who survived the catastrophe, they said to themselves, I could take this land here. Basically, I think there was a power grab and land grab that was happening. And we start seeing these great halls starting to emerge, these immense timber buildings where the local lord would entertain his men, his warriors. He would have a warrior band. He had to have a great hall for this.

And the great hall was a place of feasting. It's also a place for sleeping as well for the men. But it was a place of feasting. And again, we can start to see, you know, some of the importance of women. I want to keep coming back to this because sometimes it's so easy to lose the thread here. But women were very important in this scenario as well because they were, in some cases, acting as ritualists during the feast. There would be drinking ceremonies. The Vikings were very big on drinking ceremonies.

They're just like me. Just like us all. Oh, indeed. And in the drinking ceremony, usually the lady of the estate, the Lord's wife, would then perform this ceremony. She would fill the cup of the Lord first and give the cup to the Lord, and he would drain the cup. And then she would take the cup around to all the Lord's men. And it wasn't just, hey, have a drink here. It was a ritual that demonstrated the seniority within the band, because the,

these warrior bands were highly competitive. I mean, they each were jostling for position within the band trying to establish seniority because the Lord, in exchange for their valor on the battlefield, so to speak, and their assistance in fighting, their Lord was expected to be generous. So they were constantly jostling for positions in the band, trying to establish that they were best fighter or whatever. But the lady of the estate, she'd start with the most senior person in the band. and then she'd work her way down to the lowest ranked person in the band.

And by accepting her cup and by taking a drink from the cup, that was an acceptance of that hierarchy, that ranking, whatever, in the band. So she was establishing an order in the band. And it was a very important role. It was. And we see depictions of women holding out cups to men in the Viking world. And it seems to have been an absolutely essential part of those. ceremonies. So we see women, obviously, as you say, involved in these integral parts of a more

militarized society, like making the sales for the ship, establishing what the hierarchy is among a band of warriors. But women are also within this society managing a lot of the land when men are gone as well. We see a lot of evidence for women's wealth in these archaeological burials as well. Is that correct? Oh, absolutely. We certainly do. In the Viking world, in the Norse world, a woman could inherit property. Males would always have precedence over females.

We can see this in the very earliest legal codes in Scandinavia. Men would have precedents over women. But if there was not a son or if there was not a suitable male guardian, then a woman could actually inherit an own land. And so women did become landowners. There was a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of a landowner. You had to, of course, organize the labor, and there were tenants, there were slaves. I mean, there was several different classes of people living on the property, so to speak, on the land.

And a female landowner had to make sure that everything was running smoothly. She had to make sure that the dairy operations were running smoothly. The storehouses were filled and well guarded, probably, and so on and so forth. There was a lot of responsibility. A woman landowner was responsible for all of this. And we see the amount of wealth that these powerful women amassed in their burials. We know that they are landowners because the burials are covered by an earthen mound. And that seems to be a signal of a landowner.

And this distinction stays with them long past death. I mean, I just love how this works. And so in these graves, we see beautiful jewelry, really incredible jewelry. A lot of it is silver and some of it is very exotic. and one of the female landowners that lived near Gamla Uppsala. Basically, it's a little plaque that has an enamel depiction of what looks to be like a swan. And this seems to have come all the way from Italy. It is just an incredibly beautiful little piece of art.

It really is. It's extraordinary. She also had this big brooch, which was a type of brooch called the Disgone Bow brooch. so ritualist mistresses of the cult of Freya and the Deezer. So Freya, who was an old Norse goddess, was a goddess of prosperity, a goddess of love, a goddess of the battlefield. And she was also a goddess of magic as well. She's a very powerful woman. Some scholars have called her the great goddess of the North.

She had this piece of jewelry. She saw it being made by four dwarfs. instantly wanted to have it. She was just filled with this. Oh, I must have this. It's beautiful. Anyway, the dwarf said, well, you could have it, but you have to sleep with each one of us, which she did. So she got this ornament. It looked like it was brilliant red, a burning ember kind of thing. And it has its own name, Brasangaman. It's just gorgeous. And she's very proud of this brooch. and it would seem that the ceremonialists who are mistresses of the cult of Friah and the Dizzer, they seem to have worn broaches that are intended to evoke this brooch because some of them are studded with garnets

or some of them are covered in red enameled. I mean, they're really spectacular brooches actually. So a woman Gamla Uppsala, who I called Swan Lady, because of the Swan Broach, she was buried with one of these brooches. So the female landowners, they were wealthy, they were powerful because of their land, and they also had ceremonial power as well. So they're pretty important women. I've got a question here about what the limitations are of when we find incredible burial things, right? Because I'm thinking here of the burials that were found in around Trondheim, where you have lots of British things in them.

So obviously, somebody went over to Britain. They stole a lot of Christians. which you know what absolutely get it guys I love this an incredible thing to do right and then we find them in sort of everybody's graves so we find them in women's graves we find them in men's graves and I know initially some people were kind of thinking oh well this shows that women were going on raiding expeditions but I think now we're a bit more reluctant to say that because you know who's taking care of the farm it just might be that oh you did a great job taking care of the farm, honey, got you a reliquary of some guy. You don't know who he is. Do we need to be careful,

I suppose, about reading what we want into grave goods? Absolutely, we do. There's no question about that. And certainly with archaeology, there's always a certain sense that this is a possible explanation or if we're lucky, maybe a probable explanation. And what is required is that we have to bring multiple lines of evidence together in order to try to make a good case for this. So if we're we have some saga evidence and then we actually can match it with artifacts from a grave, then I think we're a good way there, I think, to making at least a suggestion that we found the graves of sorceresses. And so, of course, one has to be careful. You can't just say, ah, you know, this means that and so on. You have to find, I think, multiple lines of evidence.

And I think that once you can bring these disparate lines of evidence together, then you have a stronger case. No question about it. Is it the case, though, when we see these interesting grave goods show up with women, that they may have been involved in more ritual roles that were seen to assist raiders? If you end up with a pretty sweet reliquary, could it be that this is kind of a payment for doing some form of magic before the men sail off to Britain, for example? There seems to be evidence of this. There's a researcher, Keene Peterson, who's been working on this, and I love her research. I think it's really interesting. So this reliquary is, it was constructed to hold some relic of a saint. It's not

something that any monk or any priest would have parted with willingly. It's a miniature shrine. And this particular type of reliquary that we're talking about here that was found at Melhus, they would have worn it around their necks during processions. These things were very holy. And it's not something that we've just given to a person that showed up on their shores here, take this. No, you know, that just doesn't seem possible. So these things were plundered. And then in a ship burial, it's a much more modest ship burial than the Oseberg women. But in this burial at Melhus, the human remains had decomposed to the point where they could not determine male, female.

I mean, there just wasn't any real bones to work with left there. So what Hing Peterson did was that she examined and analyzed all the fine spots for all the artifacts. So exactly where were they found in the ship. And there was a cluster of artifacts that were decidedly female in one part of the ship. And then there was a cluster of artifacts that seemed to have been male in another part of the ship in the burial. So in the part that was female, that was where the reliquary was found. And the reliquary may well have been used to conduct rituals. Part of the evidence relates to the dating of the burial.

It appears to date to right around 800 AD, which is only seven years after the first documented Viking attack in the British Isles at Lindisfarne. So it's very early days for the Viking raiders. And archaeological evidence suggests that the route that the raiders took was not kind of hugging the coast of Norway and then hugging the coast of Denmark and the low countries and then eventually crossing the English Channel. So in other words, staying pretty much inside of land for a good part of the trip. No, the route appears to go directly from Norway across the North Atlantic. And then the route would have led to the Orkby Islands and Shetland. So it was a open ocean cruising. And it would have been probably in the early days of raiding a difficult route.

No GPS, nothing like that, of course. I mean, they certainly were good navigators, but even so, it would have been a difficult journey. and the coastline that they would have reached in the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands was often foggy. It was often, you know, reefs and so on. It wouldn't have been a very fun place to be sailing in a small boat when you didn't know exactly where you're going. So these early raiding expeditions to the British Isles would have been dangerous. It would have been extremely dangerous. And we even have a few accounts where the raiders actually shipwreck while attempting to raid among,

a settlement and the locals come out and as the occupants of the shipwreck finally struggled to shore, the locals basically beat them to death. So, I mean, these expeditions were, they were difficult. So it's interesting that we find the reliquary in the grave. This is one of the graves in which Neil Price identified a possible sorcery staff. It's possible that this woman was a ritualist who was using the reliquary to perform ceremonies to protect the raiders before they headed on. That's one theory and I find it really kind of interesting. So obviously we have these women in Viking society who are able to amass wealth and certainly cultural importance, you know, whether it's through making these incredible sales or managing huge tracts of land or being, you know, a really important sorceress and an important part of rituals.

But we also find grave goods that suggest that women were involved in raiding as raider. as well. Is that right? We have some evidence from Sweden, from a Viking trading town called Birka. And the evidence, again, comes from a burial. I mean, some of our best evidence for these more extraordinary women, a lot of that evidence does come from burials. And in this case, the grave was excavated in the early 1900s, and archaeologists found a large number of weapons in the grave, everything from swords to shields and spears and arrows. And the, the grave, There was also a human skeleton and also two sacrificed horses as well. And the skeleton was assumed to be the skeleton of a man.

The interpretation of the grave at that time was, here we have a wealthy male warrior. He's got two horses. He's got this little arsenal of weapons. He's buried not very far from a military garrison in Birka. There's a military garrison there. So his burial is almost right next door to the garrison. And you got to think that this person was closely associated with the military activities in the garrison. It was long assumed that that burial was the burial of a man.

However, in 2016, DNA tests were done on the skeleton, ancient DNA test. And it turned out that male warrior was in fact biologically female. So the interpretation of that grave has changed quite dramatically in the eyes of many. And it's sort of a, I think a little bit of a cautionary tale to many archaeologists working on the Viking Age that's important to keep eyes open and to, you know, not make assumptions about in terms of gender, who was doing what. So it's very good evidence of a woman warrior. And there are other graves that are now undergoing analysis in Norway, which also contain skeletons of apparent females and with weapons. Henry as well. Now, DNA results have not been published yet, so those findings are yet to be confirmed. But right now, it appears that there are other female graves that fall into that category as well.

You know, I think there's a tendency sometimes, and it's quite modern to really celebrate women for doing masculine things, right? Like, oh, this is proof of a worth of a woman is if she can do masculine things, like be a warrior, which isn't to denigrate doing it, because, you know, it's kind of cool. We all love Zina warrior princess. You know, like there's nothing to say other than that. But it is also, I just think, interesting from my point of view in that it shows us that there is at the very least a bit of fluidity in terms of what gender roles are in Viking society. Because, you know, whether or not we can say that this is a person who was, you know,

specifically what we would call trans now or non-binary, what we do see is fluidity in terms of opportunities for people instead of an incredibly rigid structure here, I would argue. anyway. No, I think that makes perfect sense, actually. And what I find interesting is that this grave of the warrior woman seems to be a very high-ranking woman, you know, a warrior, perhaps even a military commander. And that raises ideas in my mind of men accepting this individual, this biological female. You know, we don't know whether she was trans or non-binary. We just don't know. But what I find interesting here is that if she was indeed a commander, there were men who accepted her for just the person that she was and who respected her abilities on the battlefield, who

respected her abilities in combat and so on. So I think that's important for our picture of the Viking world. I mean, we need to know that there may have been women in these kind of leading positions, military commanders, who were highly respected by their men. And we certainly do have historical accounts of such women. There is a very famous. woman, Princess Olga of Keev, who was of Scandinavian descent. And at one point, she leads an army with her son to basically crush the Derevians, neighbors of the Keevan Rus. So we have examples of women as military commanders in the historic record. Now we have it in the archaeology. And I just think it's interesting. We think of the Vikings being so very macho, but in fact they were willing,

it seems to accept women in roles in combat. I suppose, lastly, I wanted to talk about enslaved women, right? Because we've been talking about all of these incredibly powerful women and the fact that within Viking society, really women can achieve a lot of things that we consider to be classically masculine. But what is also happening at this time? And, you know, we see this with the burials we were speaking about at the very beginning with the sorcerer woman and her servant.

You know, was she enslaved? You know, when you go over to Britain, you're not just bringing back cool reliquaries. You're often bringing back enslaved people. And a lot of these people are women. And do we get to learn very much about them from burials? Or is it the case that we tend to know more about the richest in society because they're the ones who have a really sweet burial with a bunch of cool stuff in it? Yeah, no, that's exactly right, Illinois. That's exactly right.

I mean, the enslaved people were not given fancy graves or even much of anything in the way of graves. In fact, we have this one account that was written by an envoy from Baghdad, and he encounters a group of Viking traders bringing enslaved women to a market in what is now, along the Volga River and what is now Russia. And he talks about the treatment that these women were accorded by their captors. When one of these enslaved women dies, they don't bury her. They just leave her body out to be eaten by dogs or. carrier eaters. So in a lot of cases, I think we can assume that the slaves are not given burials at all. In some cases, there is evidence for slaves being sacrificed, it would seem, to accompany somebody else, someone wealthy and important. And so there have been arguments made

that certain graves are the graves of wealthy and important people and their slaves. So that happens. There have certainly been people that have made those arguments. But I suspect for the most part, We don't see much of anything in terms of graves for those people. Well, that's depressing. But, you know, I think it is important to just kind of have that conversation because it's a way of making these women visible, even if we can't know that much about them. And this brings me to the last couple of things I wanted to chat to you about,

because, you know, we're sitting here talking about how initial excavations of women who we can see as warriors are interpreted as men. And here you are a woman who is working quite rightly. to talk more about women in the Scandinavian world. Do you think that this is a function of these new ways of looking at women? The fact that more women are simply participating in history and archaeology now, you know, to me it really seems crucial to just get women in there in order to interpret things these ways,

because the more eyes we have on anything, the more ways we have to think about them. Would you say that that's fair? I think it's fair. I absolutely do, because there was a time when, 19th century, early 20th century and so on, when archaeology was really dominated by men. I mean, I really do remember when I first start writing about archaeology way back in the 1980s,

I would go to conferences and I would see mostly men there. And of course, there were women, but that women were in the minority. And that has changed dramatically. I mean, certainly more women are entering the field. And as more women have entered the field, I think what's happening is that they're asking different questions. I think they're saying, well, could women have done this? They're just starting to look at the evidence with minds that are a lot more open to the possibility that some women in the past may have lived lives that were really quite important in their societies. I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that for a lot of Viking women, life was raising children and cooking porridge and all the domestic kinds of activities.

And those are important activities. I'm not disparaging now at all. But there were some women, it seems, who didn't follow the traditional plan. They were maybe they were rebels. They were women who had the wealth and the power to live different kinds of lives. And I think that now that there are more women in the field of archaeology, we're starting to get the stories of some of these more extraordinary Viking women coming to light. I really believe that. I just think it's so important because, you know, I think as someone else who works on women in the medieval period,

there's kind of a knee-jerk reaction where people say, well, why should we care about these women who died sort of 900 years ago? And to me, I think that the reason it's important to look at women's stories like this is to show that there's never been any one thing that is true about women in society. You know, women are doing all sorts of things all the time. And just because, I don't know, in the 1950s, one section of society stayed at home and only ever cared for children, you know, for middle-class women. That doesn't mean that that's what was happening all the time. And when we look at the past, I think it can really help us reimagine the present. And that's why I really value all the work that you're doing. So thank you so much for being out there.

Thank you. And I certainly agree with you about that. I mean, I think that if we only look at sort of what Viking men we're doing, we're missing a huge part of the picture. And I think increasingly we're starting to see little bits and pieces of that coming to light. Anyway, thank you so much for inviting me, Eleanor, to talk about this. Heather, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you. And delightful to actually sort of meet you after listening to you all these years. Thank you so much. My thanks to Heather Pringle, and if you want to know more about the women who played such a central role in the Viking world, check out her latest book, The North Women, Untold Stories from the Other Half of the Viking World. And thanks to you for listening to Gaughan Medieval from History Hit. As always, Matt Lewis will be back on the Gone Medieval Throne on Friday. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly

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