Inside the threshold
Norse society divided the world of work at the door of the house. What lay outside the threshold was the man's charge. What lay inside was the woman's, and she ruled it.
That inner realm was not small. A Viking Age farm was a business with many dependents. Its mistress managed the stores on which everyone's survival through winter depended, directed the household's labor, oversaw dairying, brewing, and above all the making of cloth. When her husband was away trading, raiding, or at the assembly, as he might be for months or years, she ran the whole farm.
Keys are found in a number of women's graves and have long been read as a sign of this authority. Scholars today are more careful, since most women were not buried with them. But the literary picture of the housewife with keys at her belt is consistent, and the authority itself is not in doubt.
Marriage, divorce, and property
Our best evidence for the law comes from medieval Iceland and Norway. It was written down after conversion but preserves much that is older.
- Marriage was a contract between families. A maiden's marriage was arranged by her father or guardian, but the sagas show daughters being consulted and treat marriages forced on unwilling women as the beginning of disaster. A widow could not be married without her own consent.
- Property. The bride received a payment from the groom and a dowry from her own family. Both remained her property throughout the marriage.
- Divorce was available to either spouse. In the sagas it is carried out by a simple declaration before witnesses, and wives divorce husbands for violence, for failing to provide, and for insult. The law codes as we have them, written down under the influence of the Church, are narrower and name particular grounds. A wife who left with good cause took her property with her.
- Inheritance. Daughters inherited when there were no sons, and women inherited from their own children. One Swedish rune stone traces an estate as it passes through the hands of a woman named Geirlaug and her daughter Inga, death by death, with the precision of a legal document.
The limits
The same laws shut women out of public life. A woman could not speak or vote at the assembly, could not serve as a judge, and could not generally act as a witness or prosecute a case. If she inherited a chieftaincy she had to hand its exercise to a man. Icelandic law even forbade women to wear men's clothing, cut their hair short, or carry weapons. Influence, for a Norse woman, meant property, kinship, a sharp tongue, and a long memory, and the sagas are full of women who used all four.
The work of women's hands
Textile work was the great labor of women's lives and one of the foundations of the whole economy. Every garment, blanket, tent, and sail began as raw wool or flax and passed through women's hands: sorted, combed, spun on a drop spindle, and woven on the upright, warp-weighted loom.
The scale is hard to grasp. Experimental work suggests that the wool sail of a single large ship took more labor to make than the hull beneath it. The Viking expansion sailed, quite literally, on women's spinning. In Iceland, standard lengths of homespun cloth served as legal currency.
Women also traded. Folding scales and sets of weights, the tools of a merchant, are found in women's graves as well as men's in trading towns such as Birka in Sweden.
Settlers and travelers
The settlement of the North Atlantic was a family enterprise, and some of its leaders were women.
Aud the Deep-Minded, also called Unn, was the widow of a Norse king in Dublin. When her son was killed in Scotland around 890, she had a ship built in secret, gathered her grandchildren and household, and sailed for Iceland by way of Orkney and the Faroes, arranging marriages for her granddaughters along the route. In Iceland she claimed a great tract of land, divided it among her followers, and gave freedom and farms to those who had been her slaves. The sagas remember her as one of the great founders of the country.
Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir was born in Iceland, settled in Greenland, sailed to North America, and bore a son there. Late in life she made the long pilgrimage to Rome. Few people of her century, of either sex, saw more of the world.
Memory in stone
Thousands of rune stones survive from the late Viking Age, and many were raised by women, alone or with their kin, in memory of husbands, sons, and daughters. They are among the few words we have that women of the period chose for themselves.
In Norway, a mother named Gunnvor had a bridge built and a stone carved for her daughter Astrid, "the handiest maiden in Hadeland." In Sweden, a husband raised a stone for his wife Odindisa, declaring that no better mistress would ever come to manage the farm at Hassmyra. And on a stone in northern Sweden the carver signs her own work: Gunnborga the Good. She is the one woman known to have been a rune carver in Viking Age Sweden, and there is no reason to think she was the only one.
Poets
Poetry was the highest art of the Norse world, and women practiced it. Jorunn, called the Poet-Maiden, composed for kings. Most striking is Steinunn, an Icelandic woman who, around the year 999, confronted the missionary Thangbrand. When his ship was wrecked she composed verses, which survive, declaring that Thor had smashed it and that Christ had not been able to protect it. Then, the saga says, she preached the old faith to him at length. He did not convert her.
Priestesses and household rites
Women held religious office. The Icelandic Book of Settlements gives several women the title gydja, priestess, and one, Thurid, is called hofgydja, priestess of a temple. A saga tells of another, Steinvor, who had charge of the chief temple in her district and to whom all the farmers paid the temple dues.
In the home, the evidence suggests that the mistress of the house commonly led the rites to the Disir, the elves, and the spirits of the place. And beyond the household stood the seeress, whose authority we have described elsewhere.
Those who were not free
All of this describes free women, and mostly wealthy ones. The Viking world ran on slavery, and many of the enslaved were women, taken in raids from Ireland, Britain, and the lands to the east. They did the heaviest work, had no legal standing, and could be used and sold as their owners wished.
The Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan, who met Norse traders on the Volga in 922, describes the funeral of a chieftain at which an enslaved young woman was killed to accompany him, in a rite directed by an old woman the traders called the Angel of Death. His account is hard to read. It should be read anyway. Any honest history of women in the Viking Age has to hold both of these women in view: the one who presided, and the one who had no choice.
In sum
Norse women were not the equals of Norse men before the law, and no amount of admiration should lead us to say they were. But free women held property in their own right, could end a marriage, managed the productive heart of the economy, kept the memory of their families, and held recognized religious authority. They were, in a phrase the sagas use of more than one of them, people to be reckoned with.