The question everyone asks
No subject in the history of Norse women draws more interest, or more wishful thinking, than the shield-maiden.
The short answer is this. Women who take up arms are common in Norse legend. In the historical and archaeological record they are rare, but they are not absent. The honest position is neither "Viking women were warriors" nor "women never fought." It is that a few probably did, that it was unusual, and that the evidence is still being argued over.
Shield-maidens in story
The legendary literature loves a woman with a sword.
- Hervor, in the saga that bears her name, dresses as a man, leads a band of raiders, and goes alone at night to her father's burial mound to demand his cursed sword from his ghost. The poem of their exchange is among the finest in Old Norse.
- Lagertha, in the Danish history written by Saxo around 1200, fights in the front rank with her hair loose over her shoulders and wins a battle for the hero who later marries her.
- Brynhild and the Valkyries stand between the human and the divine: warrior women who choose the slain.
These are stories, written down centuries after the Viking Age, and several of their authors plainly disapprove. Saxo, a churchman, describes shield-maidens as women who had forgotten their true nature. Their popularity tells us what medieval audiences found thrilling and troubling. It does not, on its own, tell us what happened.
Hints in the written record
A few scraps of historical writing point the same way. A Byzantine chronicler reports that after a battle against the Rus in 971, the victors were astonished to find armed women among the enemy dead. An Irish text mentions a Viking fleet led by someone called the Red Maiden. And Icelandic law, as noted on our Viking Age page, forbade women to carry weapons or dress as men, which suggests that the idea, at least, was not unthinkable.
The grave at Birka
The most important single piece of evidence is a grave at Birka, on the island of Bjorko in Sweden, cataloged as Bj 581. It was excavated in 1878 and at once recognized as the burial of a high-ranking warrior. The dead person lay in a timber chamber on a prominent terrace beside the town's garrison, with a sword, an axe, a spear, armor-piercing arrows, a fighting knife, two shields, two horses, and a full set of pieces for a board game of strategy.
For more than a century the occupant was assumed to be a man. Then study of the bones suggested otherwise, and in 2017 a genetic analysis confirmed it: the person buried in Bj 581 was female.
The argument
The finding was challenged at once. Weapons in a grave, critics said, do not prove that the dead person used them; they may express rank or family standing. That is a fair point. It is also a point that nobody had thought to raise during the hundred and forty years in which the grave was believed to be a man's. If a sword, two horses, and a seat beside the garrison make a male burial a warrior's grave, the same standard has to apply here.
A coincidence we are fond of
The genetic study of the Birka grave was published in the autumn of 2017, a few months after Heathen Women United was formed. We had nothing to do with it. But the debate that followed, about how readily a woman's presence is explained away, was one our founders recognized.
Other finds
Bj 581 does not stand entirely alone. A handful of other Scandinavian graves contain women buried with weapons, among them a young woman in eastern Norway laid to rest with a sword, a spear, an axe, arrows, and a horse. Small silver figures of armed women, holding sword and shield, have turned up in Denmark and elsewhere; they are usually called Valkyries, though we cannot be sure what their makers intended.
Against this must be set the thousands of women's graves with no weapons at all. Whatever the armed women were, they were exceptions.
What we can and cannot say
| Claim | Standing |
|---|---|
| Shield-maidens appear in Norse legend | Certain |
| A few women were buried as warriors | Well supported |
| Some women actually fought | Probable, in small numbers |
| Women warriors were common or an accepted institution | Not supported |
| Women never bore arms | Not supported |
Why we do not need her
The shield-maiden is a splendid figure, and Heathen women are right to enjoy her. But it would be a mistake to rest the worth of Norse women, or of Heathen women now, on the question of whether some of them carried swords.
To do so quietly accepts the idea that fighting is what makes a person count. The women of the old North ran the farms, clothed the people, made the sails, kept the memory of the dead, led the household rites, and spoke prophecy to kings. The Oseberg women were buried with looms, not spears, and no king had a grander funeral. Courage has more than one shape. The sources honored women for many kinds of it, and so do we.