Historical story

Female Viking a warrior or not?

A woman was found in the famous Viking grave in Birka, Sweden, according to DNA research. According to scientists, the woman was even an officer, because of the many weapons in the grave. Have we been blind to women on the battlefield for too long or are we too eager for them to exist?

Archaeologists have already excavated the grave in the former Viking city of Birka at the end of the nineteenth century. For a long time, scientists thought that this was a man from the tenth century. This is because of the military grave goods, such as a sword, axe, spear, shields, arrowheads and two horses. But using modern research techniques into ancient DNA, Swedish researchers have now determined that a woman was buried here. What does this say about this grave and about our interpretation of history?

DNA research

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In this study, scientists from Stockholm and Uppsela Universities looked at both the warrior's DNA and morphology. The latter means that you can tell whether someone was male or female by certain features of the skeleton, such as the pelvis and the eyebrow arch. In this case it was a woman.

However, the researchers wanted to be even more certain, because this is a controversial topic. For the DNA test, they therefore compared the DNA from a tooth and a bone. If this does not match, you have DNA from something or someone else. In this case it turned out to be one person.

They estimated the sex by determining which pieces of the DNA found belong on one of the two sex chromosomes (X and Y). In this case, 248170 pieces of DNA were found that belong to the X chromosome and 247 that belong to the Y chromosome. This means that the ratio between those two is 0.001 and a ratio of less than 0.016 is female. This is therefore an estimate, but a reliable estimate given the external characteristics of the bones that also point to the female gender.

Interpretation of grave goods

The researchers also interpret the grave goods differently than in the past. They see in the buried woman not only a warrior, but even an officer, because of the presence of many weapons and a board game. The latter would indicate the use of military tactics during her lifetime.

"The presence of a board game does not specifically indicate a soldier, but especially someone with a higher social status," says Annemarieke Willemsen. She is curator of the Netherlands Middle Ages collection at the National Museum of Antiquities and is not associated with the research.

The woman's bones examined showed no fractures suggestive of fighting. The question now is whether we can say that it was a warrior on the basis of the grave goods. Judith Jesch doubts this. This professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham describes in her blog why she thinks it is too premature a conclusion based on the evidence. According to her, society wants female Viking warriors to exist and the researchers are too involved in this research. But Jesch doesn't rule out the existence of female warriors either.

Willemsen agrees:“It is certainly not impossible that there were female warriors, such as Joan of Arc. But a grave is not a photograph of the past. The next of kin determined the image of the deceased. Certain grave goods could give someone a status that he or she did not have during life, for example because the person had died too young. These grave goods and thus the status were visible to everyone. Funerals and cremations were in fact a public ritual in the Viking period, which were experienced by the entire community.”

Falhalla fapping

When a woman was given war gear for her journey to the afterlife, it does not mean that she was also a warrior. “It is possible, but it is not necessary,” Willemsen explains. “We have also found male remains with many female grave goods, but that does not mean that the deceased was a transvestite or something like that. And a child's grave with full armor does not mean that the child was a warrior."

“We think there were more weapons in graves than there were armed people, but why? Did the next of kin want to portray the deceased as more warlike than he or she had been and thereby fool Valhalla? We just don't know what people thought about what happened in Valhalla, or why grave goods and weapons were needed.”

Black and white

According to Willemsen, we will be faced with these kinds of surprises more often in the future. “Many graves have been excavated as early as the early twentieth century and we are still working with the interpretations that were made then. They are not necessarily wrong, but they are black and white. If there was no skeleton left from which to determine the sex, scientists easily assumed that a grave with weapons belonged to a man and a grave with jewelry belonged to a woman. We have only been investigating DNA in poorly or fragmentarily preserved material for about fifteen years now, and that will certainly lead to even more new interpretations.”

So open for discussion. "Nice is not it? If there were no discussions, science would come to a standstill and you would achieve nothing with that," says Willemsen.