#birka warrior

[silly-songs]

Lord, I did not need this today:

For anyone who wishes not to be ignorant like the person I just blocked, you can read about some trans persons from history here:

If you would like to learn more about two spirit history and modern two spirit persons, I highly recommend checking out instagrammers like @ ohkairyn or @dineaesthetics. The terms of “transgender” or “non-binary” may be modern, but the concept of being assigned the wrong gender at birth or of being genderless has always been a thing.

Ok, but can we talk about Bj 581 (the Birka Warrior), please?

In 1889, a 10th century chamber grave was discovered and excavated in Birka, Sweden. The grave goods - two shields, a sword, axe, knife, spear, arrow heads, two horses, and pieces to the game hnefatafl (a Viking precursor to chess) - indicated that the person buried there was a high ranking military official, and an experienced battle strategist. Archaeologists assumed the person buried in the grave was male, and the discovery was logged as Bj 581 and not really analyzed further.

In 2017, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, a member of the Viking Phenomenon research project, and her team performed osteological and DNA analysis on the person from Bj 581. Both tests confirmed that they were biologically female. The team concluded that Bj 581 contained the first confirmed high ranking female Viking warrior.

Given the implications of this for literally everything we know about Viking gender roles, archaeologists and other scientists clambered for some alternative explanation. Some claimed that, since its original discovery, the bones may have gotten mixed up with another grave. Others claimed that, despite no traditionally female grave goods being present and no evidence of another body in the grave, the woman must have been buried with a man.

A few thoughts on all of this:

It certainly says something about our patriarchal society that the immediate reaction to a sound scientific conclusion that this was a warrior woman was to default to androcentrism. Even other archaeologists ignored the physical artifacts and original state of the grave, as well as the presence of shield maidens in Viking sagas and mythology, in order to insist that Hedenstierna-Jonson’s conclusion just had to be wrong. This person did not possess any Y chromosomes.

It says even more about our society and archaeological interpretation’s tendency toward androcentrism that, when presented with a female body in a distinctly male grave, not even in 2017 could the scientists offer the conclusion that the person was either a Viking warrior woman OR a trans Viking warrior man.

I love archaeology, it’s my favorite area of science, but my God are so many of its practitioners opposed to discoveries that defy the previous historical record. Which makes me wonder: why are you an archaeologist if you can’t handle history being rewritten by new discoveries?

[coochiequeens]

As modern science and better archeology methods reexamine historical sites more of women’s history will emerge

by Sarah Durn September 27, 2021

  

The National Museum of Stockholm's Ride of the Valkyries was painted during the Victorian period, which saw renewed interest in Vikings. Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images

In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history.

In 1871 on the sleepy island of Birka, Sweden, Hjalmar Stolpe, a Swedish entomologist turned archaeologist, discovered the lavish grave of a Viking warrior. Around the seated body were the remains of two sacrificed horses, as well as a double-edged sword, a scramasax (a long, thin knife), a bow, a shield, and a spear—every weapon known to the Viking world. It was an astonishing find, especially since Viking warrior graves rarely contain more than three weapons. There was also a full set of hnefatafl, the board game often known as Viking chess, which indicates the strategic thinking and authority of a war leader. A thousand years ago, the site would’ve abutted the Warrior’s Hall, where a garrison lived to protect the bustling Viking town of Birka. The weapons, game pieces, location: Everything told scholars that the man buried in what is known as grave Bj 581 was a prominent, well-respected Viking warrior. No one was really prepared when DNA tests were conducted in 2017 and a new story began to emerge. This was a prominent warrior, all right, but the occupant of Bj 581 wasn’t a man. She was a woman.

Viking historian Nancy Marie Brown’s new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, explores what life might have been like for the warrior woman of Bj 581.

Using more evidence from the recent tests conducted on the remains, Brown traces her journey from Norway to the British Isles to Kiev then, finally, to Birka. Brown imagines the unnamed warrior meeting other prominent Viking women, such as Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, or Queen Olga, ruler of the Rus Vikings in Kiev. She also explores the Viking sagas and contemporary sources with a new lens.

How did you initially get interested in Vikings—and female Vikings in particular?

When I went to college, I actually wanted to study fantasy writing and, you know, learn to write like Tolkien. I learned very quickly that that was not appropriate for an English major in the 1970s, so I decided to study what Tolkien studied, and he was a professor at Oxford University, teaching Old English and Old Norse. So I started reading all of the Icelandic sagas that I could find in translation. And when I ran out of the English versions, I learned Old Norse so that I could read the rest of them.

One of the things I liked about [the sagas] the most was that they had really interesting women characters. There’s a queen in Norway who appears in about 11 sagas, Queen Gunnhild, Mother of Kings. She led armies. She devised war strategy. And then I was looking at the valkyries and the shieldmaids and thinking, you know, these are really interesting people that have always been considered to be mythological.

So when I learned in 2017 that one of the most famous Viking warrior burials turned out to be the burial of a woman, that just absolutely dazzled my imagination.

Is this the first confirmed grave of a female warrior that we have?

This is the one that has the best proof. There are one or two others that have since been DNA tested and proven to be female. But in each of these cases, it’s hard to say if the person in the grave, whether male or female, actually was a warrior, or if the object that we are interpreting as a weapon was used for hunting or for some other purpose.

In this case, it’s every Viking weapon known to history. So it’s such a clear result. And the DNA was so completely female.

When Stolpe discovered the Viking gravesite Bj 581 in 1887, he assumed the remains were of a man. That assumption was shown to be wrong 140 years later. Rapp Halour / Alamy Stock Photo

What do we know about the life of the Viking warrior woman in Bj 581?

In 2017, by testing her bones and her teeth, [scholars] could say she was between 30 and 40 years old when she died. They could also tell that she ate well all of her life. So she came from a rich family or maybe even a royal one. She was also quite tall, about 5’7”. By the minerals in her inner teeth, [scholars can determine] she may have come from southern Sweden or Norway, and also that she went west maybe as far as the British Isles before her molars finished forming. She didn’t arrive in Birka until she was 16.

We also have her weapons and a little bit of clothing that were found in the grave. And these link her to what is known as the Vikings’ East Way, which was the trade route from Sweden to the Silk Road.

We can link, through the artifacts and through the bones, that she could have traveled from as far west as Dublin to as far east as at least Kiev in the 30 to 40 years of her life.

How do we know that there were Viking warrior women?

They are mentioned many, many, many times in the literature. In most cases, they have been dismissed as mythological because, of course, we know warriors were men. But we don’t know that. That is an assumption that is based on traditional Victorian ideas that because women are mothers, they’re nurturing, they’re peacemakers, and they don’t fight.

That’s not historically true. Women have always fought. And they appear in most cultures until the 1800s, when Viking studies and archaeology pretty much started. So we sort of have this problem of bias in our earliest textbooks.

But now we have actual scientific proof of one warrior woman in the Viking Age. And as the scientists who did the study say they would be very surprised if she was the only one.

This small female Viking warrior figurine discovered in Harby, Denmark, has been interpreted as a mythological valkyrie. John Lee / National Museum of Denmark

There’s this assumption that the warrior men of myth must have been based on real people, but it’s not the same for the mythical warrior women. Why is that?

It’s just an assumption based on what people think women are like. Most of the material we have from the Middle Ages was written by men, and most of the material we have until the 1950s was written by men, and women are slowly making their way into the field of Viking scholarship. But many of them are still working under the assumptions that they were taught.

I noticed when I went back and reread some of the sagas in Icelandic that there wasn’t this clear distinction between the warrior women being mythological and the warrior men being human. When you actually look at the old Norse text, there’s a lot of words that have been translated as “men” that actually mean “people,” but it’s always been translated as “men” because it’s a warrior situation.

If you’re translating, you have to make decisions and sometimes your decisions have repercussions that you don’t expect, like writing women out of the history.

By the time Hjalmar Stolpe excavated Bj 581, he had become adept at recognizing where graves could be found in the hummocky Birka landscape. WS Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Is it possible for historians to remove all of those biases?

No, I don’t think it is. I think we all are looking through our own lenses. But we have to revisit those sources every generation to see past biases. So when you have layer after layer after layer of removing biases, you may get closer to the truth.

What most surprised you in the course of researching your book?

One of the controversies right now in Viking studies is should we really be talking about men and women at all? Maybe there were all kinds of different genders. We don’t know if there were more than two genders in the Viking age. Maybe it was a spectrum.

If you look at this one group of sagas called the Sagas of Ancient Times that are often overlooked because they have all these fabulous creatures in them, like dragons and warrior women. It’s really interesting [because] these girls grow up wanting to be warriors. They’re constantly disobeying and trying to run off and join Viking bands. But when they do run off and join the Viking band, or, in another case, become the king of a town, they insist on being called by a male name and use male pronouns.

So it was very shocking to me to go back and read it in the original and say, “Wow, all this richness was lost in the translation.”

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

Photo & text

Birka grave Bj 581 is a significant archaeological site located in Birka, Sweden. This grave, originally excavated in 1878, was initially thought to contain the remains of a male warrior due to the presence of numerous weapons and other martial artifacts. However, a 2014 osteological analysis and a 2017 DNA study revealed that the remains were, in fact, of a female.

The grave is situated high on a rocky promontory overlooking the lake and was originally marked by a large boulder, making it visible from both the settlement and the water below. The internal structure of the grave is that of a chamber tomb. The body was found collapsed from a sitting position, wearing garments of silk, with silver thread decorations.

The grave contained a variety of items including a sword, an axe, a spear, armor-piercing arrows, a sax, two shields, two stirrups, gaming pieces, dice, and the possible remains of a gaming board. Additionally, the remains of one mare and one stallion were found. Possible shards of a mirror were also discovered.

The 2017 study claimed that the person in Bj 581 was a high-ranking professional warrior. This interpretation attracted worldwide attention, as well as criticism from some academics who disputed the interpretation of burial goods. Despite the controversy, the discovery of a potential female warrior in a Viking grave has contributed significantly to our understanding of gender roles in Viking society.

Thanks ✨🫶

[oh-dear-so-queer]

There the story might end – with a new understanding of the capacity of women and the honour given to them, even in early Viking society. But in 2020, the professor of archaeology at Uppsala University proposed a new spin: that the warrior was a trans man, as he says 'someone living as a man'. So no Viking woman warrior after all, but a person with female DNA and male gravegoods. Not a fully fledged fighting woman with respect from her Viking comrades – but a woman borrowing male goods? Wearing male clothes? Passing herself off as male? And why is this a more persuasive explanation for a woman buried as a Viking hero than the more obvious suggestion that she was a birth female Viking heroine? And that military success can be won by a woman?

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[merovingian-marvels]

Birka’s warrior woman

This grave was found on Birka (Björko) in 1878. The grave contained human remains, remains from two horses, bowls, weaponry, a shield(boss), a chess game and saddle stirrups. The burial room was built in wood. Most likely the person was buried seated, with the bones collapsing on themselves. Some remains of textile were found.

The assumption that the person was a man was quickly made and the “high status burial of a Viking warrior” was often cited in research.

It would take until 2017 when both osteological and genetic testing proved the person was in fact a woman. To this day it is the only genetically and archaeologically proven female warrior from the Viking age.

The reason I say genetically AND archaeologically is because it is assumed that gender was a very loose concept in the Germanic age. Biological gender wasn’t necessarily denied, but there are indications that people would take on “the role” of the other gender. A woman could “step up” as a man’s son, as seen in blood feud tales where the patriarch is killed, but if there is no son to avenge him, a woman would “take up the role” and set out, armed for revenge.

Biologically male individuals have been found with “female” attributes such as beads, pendants and certain decoration styles.

From the limited amount of research there is, it seems possible that cross-dressing, gender fluidity and gender role exchange were very normal before mass christianization.

Excavated by: Hjalmar Stolpe

Found in: Birka, Björko, Ekerö - Sweden

Drawing by: Hjalmar Stolpe

[feminist-furby-freak]

Multiple old burials have been found of warriors that are also female, meaning female warriors existed, not just men. But many have said that they must be transgender. What do you think of that? E.g. the Birka Burial. Others also suggest Boudicca identified as trans because she was a warrior. Others suggest Elizabeth 1 was trans because she never married or had kids. Thoughts?

Ugh. This is so annoying. Don’t get me started on St. Joan of Arc. TRAs love to scream from the rooftops that we are so regressive and sexist yet whenever they see a historical woman behaving in a masculine way or achieving something women were excluded from they say “oh well she must have been a trans man then!” So you’re saying women can’t be warriors or leaders? 🤨

Also, I’m open to being educated but I’ve only ever seen this done with women…

[soberscientistlife]

In the mid 1800s in Birka, Sweden, archeologists found the gravesite of a Viking. In the grave with the Viking were the skeletons of two horses and more than a few fine weapons. The Viking in the grave was dressed in fine silk robes decorated with gold threads. The archeologists said, “This is the grave of a great Viking warrior. Maybe even a king.” One hundred years later, osteologists studied the skeleton and determined that the skeketon was that of a woman, a great Viking warrior, maybe even a queen. She lived sometime in the 8th or 9th century. Women as warriors is not a new fangled concept and Deborah in the Book of Judges was not the only one. A new fangled idea was promoted this week when Pete Hegseth said there is no place for female combatants in the military. The patriarchy is built on lies.

[woedans]

The helmet of Vendel 1. Photographed at @historiska Stockholm a while back. This is by far my favorite helmet and also the grave I am reconstructing in my living-history project. More on that very soon.

This helmet, much like many other helmets from Vendel and Valsgärde, is covered in so called pressblech images. These gilded foils show different designs of what is believed to be (part of) an initiation ritual. Some of the elements show likeness to continental European designs and designs found in England. Objects like this belonged to the absolute elite of Early Medieval martial society and were among the most valuable items in material culture.

The gold adorned helmet is dated to around 625AD and was excavated in the 1910’s by Hjalmar Stolpe, who would later also write the excavation reports of the famed Viking burial site at Birka.

The grave, a boat burial, also contained two elaborate swords (more on that soon), a shield, smithing material, a horse, horse equipment, a spearhead, skeletons of dogs, beakers, food preparation material and grooming accessories. Needless to say it was a very elaborate grave.

At the burial site ar Vendel now stands an old church with a churchyard.

I like to think the spirits of these long gone elite warriors now reside in the great halls of the Historiska museum in the afterlife. The helmet is on display in what they call the Gold Room.

More coming soon.

Photos of the drawings are from the original report. Last photo courtesy of the Historiska museet.

[willtheweaver]

OC Halloween costume tag

Thanks for the tag @inkednotebook

What would your OC dress as for Halloween and why?

Let me see… as none of my characters are familiar with Halloween, I will be assuming a modern AU:

Fen would go as either Luffy, Robin Hood, or The Doctor (specifically as either 4 or 11)

Playa I’d imagine would find some historically accurate Viking apparel and go as the Birka warrior

Opal would dress as ‘The High Priestess’ tarot card, and believe me when I say it is entirely hand sewn and absolutely gorgeous

Rail would 100% go as something punny (Rock and roll, Cereal killer, etc.)

That was fun

Tagging @gioiaalbanoart @corinneglass @eccaiia @tildeathiwillwrite @oh-no-another-idea

@somethingclevermahogony @indecentpause @theink-stainedfolk @ahordeofwasps @cherrybombfangirlwrites and open tag

[nebris]

The grave known as Bj 581, situated in Birka, Sweden, is a notable archaeological site. It was first excavated in 1878 and was initially believed to be the burial site of a male warrior due to the assortment of weapons found within. This interpretation was based on traditional views of such graves.

However, a shift in understanding occurred when a 2014 osteological analysis, followed by a 2017 DNA study, confirmed that the skeletal remains were indeed female. This groundbreaking revelation led to the conclusion that the individual interred in Bj 581 was likely a high-ranking warrior of the Viking Age, and importantly, a woman. This discovery has significantly contributed to our understanding of gender roles in Old Norse society. It challenges previous assumptions and highlights the potential for women to have held high-status roles in Viking Age Scandinavia.

[nimblermortal]

Drengr Thesis

So in saga age Iceland (possibly Scandinavia, what do I know) you've got two genders, Male and Female. You've also got two gender qualities, drengr and ergr, masculine and not-masculine.

I've seen ergr interpreted as 'gay' - it's not, though receptive (? what's the academic term for this) male homosexual acts are ergr, and things mocked as gay in the 2000s are generally ergr. Ergr is also not 'feminine,' exactly. I'll come back to this with my own interpretations.

Drengr, on the other hand, is not just masculine but very much toxic masculinity - you gotta be strong, you gotta be fast, you gotta be able to grow a beard and pick up big rocks and sail a ship and oh, you've also got to be able to do some form of art (physically creative art or poetry), and ideally you should also be versed in law.

A lot of the qualities of drengr translate directly to modern masculinity, so half the drengr thesis is "this sense of masculinity has passed directly down to modern times, largely unchanged in the last thousand years, and that's depressing."

(We did, of course, excise the interesting bits and decided that making art is ergr now. Practicing law is no longer drengr or ergr, but it is evil, in a potentially admirable way. Penetrative male homosexual acts are not drengr, they're just also not exactly ergr. Think rape culture. Uh, very much so, there's also a way to start a feud that's basically revenge porn.)

-----

Now for the fan theory, which is not supported by history or archaeology that I am aware of. It's also not a rosy good thing.

In this version, ergr is more closely tied with femininity - it's not that ergr means feminine, but that feminine acts are okay for women to do. Women are inferior creatures, it's okay for them to do inferior things. Drengr is a good quality, ergr is a bad one - so a woman doing drengr things is good, if she does not claim to be a woman while doing them. Trans man? Good! Drengr! Trans women? Bad! Ergr! Woman dressing in men's clothes and doing men's chores and practicing drengr while claiming to be a woman? Weird! Transsexual! Not actually any of my business unless her husband says so.

Saga example 1: Aud Broka (Breeches Aud) does exactly this. She wraps her legs like a man (sometimes translated as codpiece because we modern idiots don't have a concept of leg-wrapping), she does men's chores, she contributes to the farm. This is weird, but since her husband Thord doesn't acknowledge it, it can continue because it's not the community's job to police their household. But when someone tells him that it's happening, so that he can't have plausible deniability, then he has to denounce her for it and it becomes the community's job to enforce gender roles by granting him divorce, and it becomes morally incumbent on him to ask for that divorce or he's practicing ergr.

(Note that there is an interpretation in which Aud wasn't actually doing any of these things, Gudrun just threatened to spread a rumor that she was so that Thord would have to/could divorce her and marry Gudrun - and that when Aud then dresses in men's clothing to get her revenge on Thord, it's as a mockery/direct response to Gudrun. I just prefer the transvestite interpretation.)

Saga example 2: Uhhh I forget the guy's name. Old dude marries young woman Gudrun, she doesn't want to be married to him, so she sews him a low-cut shirt. He has to wear it because his wife made it, but as soon as he does she declares that he's cross-dressing and divorces him over it. There is no scenario in which a person born with a penis can do feminine things without being transgressive and ergr.

Archaeological example 1: The Birka warrior gets a lot of press for being buried as an esteemed male warrior - but the skeleton tests as female by modern standards. Leaving aside how unreliable skeleton sexing is, in large part because I know nothing about it or what was done, we have a feminine skeleton treated as a masculine person. My interpretation: It's a trans man. Person without a penis declares he is a man, practices drengr, is treated as a man up to and after his death.

So the other half of the drengr thesis is this partially-queer interpretation of things that I personally find fun to play around with. And because it's for fun and is fiction, the injustices are part of the point.

[pwincesstrixie]

"historians will dig up your bones and call you male" sooo they're just gonna ignore the grave goods and funerary practices and iconography and isotopic analysis and any fucking sliver of cultural context? this is a non argument, we have been finding transgender bodies for years look up birka female viking warrior, the 'gay caveman' in prague, Big boobies girls kising hard

[allpowerfulspacevalkyrie]

We also can't really know someone's gender based on bone measurements. The bones of Founding Father of the American Cavalry, Casimir Pulaski were found not too long ago and at first it was thought a mystery woman somehow got buried at the monument dedicated to him. His bones had all the measurements of a woman. But family DNA testing and a well documented injury records thanks to the fact he was upper class and a major American leader proved they were his bones. There is no documented evidence that he had anything physically intersex about him and the images we have of him, he had a mustache. So with any set of luckly found well preserved bones (because the vast majority are not well perserved), unless we have their name, some living family DNA to test, and historical documents, we can't really determine a skeletons gender in life. Someone like the Birka Viking woman warrior grave may have actually been a cis man in life, just with some kind of situation that produced "female" bones. We have no written historical record, no name, no family tree. We can not know their gender for sure.

If you want a good object lesson about what we can and can't know about the past, we don't know Ea-Nasir was a dishonest merchant selling shoddy goods.

What we know is we have found a cache of complaint tablets about him selling low quality copper as high quality, in a site that was probably his own residence. We know multiple people complained he was a cheat. It's entirely possible they were right. It's also entirely possible that he kept these complaint letters as records of people he would no longer do business with, because they had made accusations and threats in order to bully him into giving them free copper. That is an equally valid interpretation of the evidence.

My point is not that we have maligned Ea-Nasir, my point is that thousands of years later, we do not and cannot know.

[throne-for-queens]

There is also the time she said she wished she had a giant sword to swing at Brian.

The giant sword statement was a joke from her show ‘legends of the lost with Megan fox’ about female Birka warriors lol. The expert and Megan were literally praising women for their combat role in history and the comment was made in the context that the female warriors were never considered an archeological possibility bc they were considered as incapable of wielding a swords.

Here is the proof:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8eylau

Time stamp 7:53

Everyone can now see how this fake anon bitch, that’s literally obsessed with Megan is doing a hit and run with these twisted fake claims only bc they think nobody is going to validate shit. Well guess what fake bitch, your lies stand exposed.

Now before coming up with any other fake ‘hitting stories’ make sure you come up with the receipts.