VIKING WARRIOR WOMEN

Whether thanks to a gender bias on the part of previous generations of historians or the limited availability of artefacts and records, the lives of Norse women in the Viking era are particularly mysterious, but that’s changing. While there are still debates about the exact roles women were and were not permitted to take on in their lives, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that their world was far more diverse and featured more opportunity for self-expression than we might previously have believed. Vikings were a patriarchal society, but women could hold a lot of power and influence when circumstances opened up for them.

Some evidence for this can be seen in the stories they told each other; namely the Norse myths and in particular the role of Valkyrie. These warrior women determined who lived and died on the battlefield, claiming the fallen and taking them to the afterlife. As a recurring feature of the Viking sagas, Valkyrie play a multitude of roles, and much as the stories we tell today might give clues to the social and political events of the age, so we might be able to find interesting evidence from the epic Norse poems. To that end we spoke with Dr Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, author of , to discuss what we know about the lives of women in