Erika the Red: Were Viking women warriors?

Dalya Alberge
The Observer
Sat, 02 Nov 2019 15:50 UTC

© Eloisa Noble/National Geographic

Ella Al-Shamahi comes face to face with the Viking woman’s skull.

Think of a Viking warrior and you probably imagine a fearsome, muscular, bearded man. Well, think again. Using cutting-edge facial recognition technology, British scientists have brought to life the battle-hardened face of a fighter who lived more than 1,000 years ago. And she's a woman.

The life-like reconstruction, which challenges long-held assumptions that Viking warrior heroes such as Erik the Red left their women at home, is based on a skeleton found in a Viking graveyard in Solør, Norway, and now preserved in Oslo's Museum of Cultural History. The remains had already been identified as female, but her burial site had not been considered a warrior grave "simply because the occupant was a woman", according to archaelogist Ella Al-Shamahi.

© National Geographic

A facial reconstruction image of the skull of the Viking woman found at Birka shows a large head injury, possibly sustained in battle.

As they worked on reconstructing her face for a 21st-century audience, scientists found that not only was the woman buried amid an impressive collection of deadly weaponry, including arrows, a sword, a spear and an axe, she also had suffered a head injury consistent with a sword wound. Her head, resting in her grave on a shield, was found to have a dent in it serious enough to have damaged the bone.

Whether the wound was the cause of death is unclear as scientific examination has revealed signs of healing. But Al-Shamahi believes that this is "the first evidence ever found of a Viking woman with a battle injury".

"I'm so excited because this is a face that hasn't been seen in 1,000 years... She's suddenly become really real," said the expert in ancient human remains, who is to present a forthcoming National Geographic documentary featuring the reconstruction.The skeleton was always identified as female, but never as a warrior, even though her grave was "utterly packed with weapons", added Al-Shamahi .

Dr Caroline Erolin, a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee in the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification which worked on the reconstruction, said that the face was built up anatomically working from the muscles and layering skin. She added: "The resulting reconstruction is never 100% accurate, but is enough to generate recognition from someone who knew them well in real life."

New technology also recreated the grave, showing how weapons were placed around the skeleton. In the documentary Al-Shamahi travels across Scandinavia to examine Viking burial sites, using visualisation techniques to reconstruct their contents, noting that such discoveries are "transforming" our knowledge.

Among other skeletons in the new research is the Birka Warrior, which was unearthed in Sweden over a century ago, surrounded by a stash of weapons, including arrows. Until recently, it was assumed to be the remains of a man, but science has proved that it was female.

Al-Shamahi said that she "could have been a military commander", although some experts still resist the idea that women could have been such warriors.

Comment: Likely due to a lack of evidence.

While she acknowledges that women risked being overpowered in hand-to-hand combat, she argues that they could have been long-distance killers, firing deadly arrows from horseback, making them "an equal match for men".

Professor Neil Price, a Vikings expert and archaeological consultant on the project, believes that the findings challenge assumptions: "There are so many other burials in the Viking world... It wouldn't surprise me at all if we find more [female warriors]."

Viking Warrior Women airs on National Geographic on 3 December at 8pm

Comment: Interesting commentary can be found in an article published in The Week just last month that calls into question the Viking woman warrior claim:

In other words, there is very little in the history books to support the claim that the skeleton in Bj. 581 was a Viking woman warrior. In fact, we can't say for certain that this individual was a woman, a warrior, or even a Viking.

While the DNA evidence suggests this skeleton belonged to a female [...]

On the one hand, there seems to have been a clear delineation between men and women: On the family farm, chores were gender-coded as either male or female; from the sagas, we learn that cross-dressing was grounds for divorce. On the other hand, it wasn't uncommon for female skeletons to be buried with male-coded objects, such as weapons. We still don't know what this meant to the Vikings, but it does mean that Bj. 581 is not unique.

That the individual buried in Bj. 581 was a warrior is also hard to confirm, because as professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch observed, the skeleton shows no marks or wear that might be associated with battle wounds.

Finally, the grave objects in Bj. 581 are not Scandinavian, which raises the question of whether this person was a Viking at all. Instead, the weapons, the clothes, and the animals found in this grave seem to have originated nearer the Caspian Sea, which is located in Central Asia.

Another article Upper-class Viking men were buried with cooking gear shows that these grave goods could be interpreted in a number of ways:

[...] upper-class men and women generally were buried with the same types of items - including cooking gear.

"The key is a good example. It is often considered to be the symbol of a housewife," Moen said. Nonetheless, almost as many men's graves had keys as women's graves.

However, from his own work in Vestfold, he had the impression that farmers were much more concerned with marking gender in their graves than the upper-class citizens, although he points out that this was not the focus of his research.

There are still a few clear differences between genders for the elite. Men generally have weapons in their graves, while women have jewellery and textile tools, as Moen's work shows. More than 40 per cent of the male graves contained jewellery such as brooches and beads.

See also:

• Viking city: Excavation reveals urban pioneers not violent raiders
• 'Lavish' jewels unearthed at 6th century burial site in Lincolnshire, UK
• The Medieval warm period and how grapes grew where polar bears now roam