So, among Viking-oriented friends this week (of whom I have a surprising number), the big news was a study that showed that half of the Viking invaders of England were female. This contradicts long held beliefs among scholars of the graves of early Viking invaders, because the grave goods are only very rarely female brooches and dresses, and almost always are swords or other weapons. Scholars assumed that this meant that the person in the grave was a man.
On studying the bones themselves, however, it turns out that lots of those buried with weapons turn out to have been women.
I see that our old friend Lars Walker is not impressed with the study. He cites a rebuttal, and comments:
The importance of the finding goes beyond that there were women among the earliest settlers, though. It is that women were not restricted to the roles that our scholars assumed they were restricted to filling.But, this paper essentially uses the presence of six female migrants and seven male as evidence that women and children most likely accompanied the Norse armies with the intent of settling the land once it was conquered, rather than migrating in a second wave once the fighting was over. It is, sadly, not at all about female Viking warriors, and not some Earth-shattering evidence that Norse armies were evenly split among women and men.They'll still have to prove to me that there were any female Viking warriors at all, but the point is made.
We have plenty of reason to doubt that women fought in the field as part of Viking armies, both in terms of the written evidence from the early sagas, absence of mention of it from the surviving Anglo-Saxon records, and of course the physical facts of Viking-age combat. On the other hand, there is ample evidence in the sources of women who were trusted with the defense of homes, and homes being established in an invaded land will of course need especial defense. For that matter, the prominent role of women in the population of Northern Europe, and their affection for weapons even as wedding gifts, was remarked as far back as Tacitus' Germania.
What I think is important to take away from this study is that what scholars were certain about for generations about the rigidity of female gender roles simply wasn't so. Many women built their lives around an image of themselves with a sword, not a brooch, and their contemporaries accepted this so much that they honored them in death with the marks of the life they had chosen. We are the ones who assumed they wouldn't, or couldn't, do that. Best not to repeat the mistake, which was more a relic of 19th-century attitudes than a careful reading of the writings of our ancestors.
23 comments:
Romans often commented, didn't they, on the very different attitude the Northern Europeans had toward their women? There was clearly something very different going on up there. I'm used to thinking of Western Civ as the product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but in the U.S., as in England, it doesn't do to overlook the different strain that came in from all those barbarians, with their wilder view of liberty, and their skepticism about kings. Compared to them, all the Romans looked like tidy, obedient, central-state bureaucrats.
You should read Jefferson on the point: one of my favorite of his letters, really, on the core importance of the barbarians to our particular traditions. But it's true for the French (Franks were Germanic barbarians) and Spaniards (the Visigoths moved in there), and of course the Germans, and Scandinavians, and then there were the Huns pushing more Germanic tribes into the Eastern Roman Empire as well...
Tacitus, whom I cited, is the most famous writer on the mores, and the only one I've read at length on the subject, but Eric Blair probably can talk more about other Romans who discussed it. He is much more attuned to Roman history than I am.
Wild West frontier villages often had women mixed in with various male defense forces, since the specialists aren't always around to do their job, they may be out in the woods scouting out new water sources while a raid happens. So people, like a SF team, had to learn other people's roles and specialties.
There was clearly something very different going on up there.
They were probably talking about the Celtics.
I can't remember the exact details now after so many years.
The real problem with taking any Roman writing on non-Romans is that the Roman writer always had an ulterior motive in writing, whether it was to build the Germans up as paragons of virtue in contrast contemporary Roman decadence (Tacitus) or whether it was to build the Germans up as this military threat that required military action (and attendant glory when successful) (pretty much every emperor from Julius Caesar through Valens)
I too, question the study, and there are probably lots of reasons that swords might have been buried with those women, from yeah, she was a shield maiden to oh, she needs to take to her man in the afterlife. We just don't know. But already I have seen this study being used by reenactors I know to justify women in armor and fighting--basically imposing 21st century gender equality on history where it was not the case. The problem I've seen so far is that the women fighters I've seen in armor would just get knocked over in anything resembling a real test of arms. Nobody wants to admit this.
We don't have that problem in ARMA, because we just knock them down. If women want to learn how to fight in armor, they need to learn how to fight in armor.
On the other hand, when Gunnar in the Saga of Burnt Njal turns to his wife and asks her to plait him a new bowstring from her hair, he seems to expect her to whip one out! And even in the Norman (rather than North-man) period, Edward didn't think twice about turning the generalship of his army over to his wife in the Scottish campaign. She didn't fight on the field, leaving that to her field-grade officers (if you like), but she was two miles away from the field of battle when the king of Scotland was captured by a member of her army. Nobody thought he was doing anything crazy in this, either, as it was a regular thing that Norman women did: they arranged for and commanded the defense at home while their husbands went on expeditionary wars.
In any case, bones are bones. This isn't a wild flight of fancy; we have to accept that these women were buried with those weapons. We have to account for that somehow, and it doesn't seem very hard to me. There's a clear role for women in this tradition present in the historical sources, from Tacitus through the sagas and well into the Norman period.
The idea that women could ever have been anything like equal citizens in a culture in what mattered most was who could knock the most people down has always seemed to me like a desperate stretch. The modern era is a huge break with the past, and probably wouldn't survive a breakdown in order that would return us closer to a society in which personal physical force more often resolved public conflicts.
Well, bear in mind that Gunnar's wife turned him down. His response wasn't to run her through for treason, but to accept her right to refuse though it meant his life.
Actually, the whole saga of Burnt Njal involves women pursuing their own ideas about justice and vengeance on an equal basis. The men never punish them for having made trouble; they just live, or die, or figure out how to resolve the trouble. But no one ever says to one of the women, "How dare you?" Of course she did -- she'd been offended.
The Arthurian poetry is like this to a substantial degree as well, especially the parts the Normans influenced.
Well, Noble women are something else again.
And there are always outliers.
Yeah, but there were no nobles in Iceland. His wife had been married twice before, and had killed one of her husbands, and arranged to do away with the second. He could have picked a different free woman to marry, but he liked her.
Also, her name was Hallgerðr langbrók: that latter is "...longpants."
One more thing: you're making the same argument I hear from feminists who want to insist on the vision of women as universal victims in this era. 'Oh, there were some outliers.'
But where are these outliers in the histories we have in front of us? It's not like this woman is strange -- Njal's wife behaves exactly the same way. Nobody anywhere says, "Get control of your wife, because she's crazy." (Which is what modern students tend to think, when they encounter the saga.) They all say, "Well, I guess you're going to have to work out another weregild for this latest killing. How do you plan to do it?"
Actually, that's not quite right. There is one person who warns Gunnar explicitly about marrying Hallgerðr. That's Hallgerðr herself. But having heard the explicit warning, and having married her anyway, when she decides to let him die he accepts her call, and dies without attempting any vengeance against her.
This is like the idea of romance being lovers killing each other I see.
And I only remember the name Gunnar from the Banner Saga.
One more thing: you're making the same argument I hear from feminists who want to insist on the vision of women as universal victims in this era. 'Oh, there were some outliers.'
This was my thought on reading the original post (and as I've thought further about the discussion of Medieval women at - I think - VC). Back when I was a neophyte feminist, a lot of emphasis was placed on reclaiming women's history by which was meant pointing out that women "in olden times" did more than sit down, shut up, and gaze admiringly at their men accomplishing stuff. It's disappointing that the current feminist emphasis often seems to be on insisting that women were never really allowed to do anything but sit down, shut up, and gaze admiringly at their men accomplishing stuff. I'd rather be able to do something (even if not everything) than be a victim without agency.
And as both a woman and someone with mostly Scandinavian ancestors, I'd just like to say "Go, us". Whatever the exact reason Viking-invader women were buried with swords, it seems a pretty compliment that they were.
There's an odd tendency, though, to posit a strict either-or approach: either women had no rights at all, or they were equal citizens. The reality has generally been somewhere in between, with an emphasis on autonomy or agency in their private lives rather than anything like a widespread equal participation in public, political, or economic matters.
I agree there's no reason to minimize it when it happens. I'm always happy to see examples of people winning autonomy and agency. Knowing how they pulled it off is likely to come in handy.
It's doubly remarkable to see the (relatively) high status of women in the Icelandic sagas (like the one cited by Grim) because they were a genuine anarchy...with laws but no government. I don't read about women having such a high status in the anarchic parts of Afghanistan, and I'm not sure about Somalia; but someone here might know more about it than I do.
(If I remember, the stubborn lady he's talking about liked to commit her crimes and assert her status through men...as when she sent one of her slaves to steal from the neighbors...and relied generally on her family to shield her. She decided not to give her husband a spare bowstring in revenge for his slapping her much earlier in the saga.)
Since the anarchies I know always revert to some kind of clan rule, that suggests they "pulled it off" by asserting their influence through the family. A really independent character (like Hrafnkel the Priest of Frey - who wouldn't pay wergild, and became an open atheist) had to be a tough personal combatant. And a man like Gunnar, who was strong enough in combat, could defy a judgment against him by demanding single combat (or at least that's what I remember him doing).
Gunnar did that once, in response to a man who had earlier done it to someone else. Though he was a formidable warrior, he existed successfully in spite of numerous feuds because of honorable behavior. He tended to follow Njal's advice on the law very keenly, and made settlements generously when he came into conflict with people.
Especially he and Njal, in spite of their wives' best efforts to bring the families to war, always resolved things honorably between each other. Usually they gave each other the right to name freely the compensation the other was seeking, because they could each trust the other to be fair in his demands for compensation.
Proof, if anyone needed it, that the Hillary Clinton approach to power--trading on your husband's position--is no modern innovation, but as old as the hills. Also that that sort of ancillary power doesn't often garner much respect, and hasn't got a lot to do with equality as a civilizational achievement.
I don't think Joseph is right, though: those mechanisms are as available in Afghanistan and elsewhere. What was going on in Iceland, and before it in Germania, and after it in England and Scotland and Normandy, was something else.
There's something different about how civilizations from that northern European root conceptualize women and their role. There's a reason why it was plausible to leave your home in charge of your wife for a Viking, or a Norman king, and not for an Afghan warlord or Arabian sheikh. They exercise family power too, but look to other male members of the family exclusively (although one of Mohammed's wives led a revolt after his death -- but she is a genuine outlier, in the sense that she's one-off and is understood by the whole society as an especially bad example rather than, as Njal's wife, as normal).
I don't think Joseph is right, though: those mechanisms are as available in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
How could I be "right" or "not" when I didn't say (because I don't know) why anarchic Afghans did it differently from anarchic Icelanders? I simply note that they did.
There's something different about how civilizations from that northern European root conceptualize women and their role. There's a reason why it was plausible to leave your home in charge of your wife for a Viking, or a Norman king, and not for an Afghan warlord or Arabian sheikh.
Any idea what that reason is? I can think of two, neither of them "respectable."
I'm sorry if I misunderstood you, or if I misunderstood what I thought Tex was taking from what you said as being present in what you said.
I would say that the Northern European cultures had this concept of the female role from prehistory, so we aren't really able to say with certainty what it was behind it. As far back as we can look, though, it seems to be present. Lurking in prehistory, there do seem to be some powerful female goddesses in the Vedic cults -- some interpret the Beowulf as a surviving finger of all that, with Grendel's mother lurking in the lake in the place of the goddesses who demanded drowned kings as sacrifice.
Celtic and various steppe or barbarian cultures seemed to over prioritize virtue in warrior traits. Similar to the loyalty and fidelity issues seen in the old samurai class of Japan before the Meiji era sort of banned them from existence (though not life).
In Japan, even the old koryu era, women would inherit the martial lineages and dojos in the blood, even if they needed to find a male husband to do most of the external interfacing for a patriarchal society. Thus everyone else would be normal and not expected to learn martial skills in their life time, but only successors and blood line inheritors of certain old samurai families or samurai classes would be expected to do so. And that would be considered "normal", even though the overall society considers women weak or warrior virtues obsolete.
In the Celtics, it would be the obverse, where society still prioritizes warrior virtues, but that by doing it so much, it breaks the gender roles and normal authorities. Instead of the woman owing fealty and obedience to the patriarchy or males, they owe their obedience and loyalty first and foremost to their clan of warriors, and if that means killing everyone that is a threat to said clan, gender roles or no gender roles, then so be it. (Boadicea)
A warrior would not thus tolerate being seen as the equal of a female fighter from another tribe, but within their own tribe, the hierarchy and loyalty system would be adjusted as needed based on humans sorting the pack order. Because people who stick out like a nail in a tribe are hammered flat. So it'll either be the female that gets hammered flat and stripped of her warrior virtues or status, exiled or killed, or the disobedient boy curs that think they can outmatch a trained and experienced warrior, female though she is. Somebody's going to take the top and sort the order. Once sorted, things become stable.
There's also 3 different forms of hierarchy or authority powers. Military. Spiritual. Political.
The gender roles may remain static for everybody else, but not for the top 3 in those spheres.
Joan of Arc, military and spiritual. Politicians didn't like that, though.
If the male military and political leaders have a designated successor, then woman or boy, that chain of succession will be protected due to the loyalty owed to the military and political leaders. Come hell or high water.
Still can't remember the various details of Celtic life that I read about in 200 BC to 50 AD that I thought was surprisingly advanced. But the above are some of the things I've noticed in other cultures and timelines.
The Swiss, though, have a long history. Going way back. Julius Caesar stayed clear of those people and their mountain villages (whether before or after fighting them), although he might have recruited them into his own legions as auxiliaries. Barbarian auxiliaries but very good pikemen.
Western barbarians in Rome's time were surprisingly different and advanced. Not much like the gender stratified roles I saw in medieval Europe or the Renaissance.
Hmm... what I actually meant to write was "Vanic cults," not "Vedic" ones. Still, since we're talking about prehistory...
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