To Live Like the Women of Viking Literature

“Princess” was an insult in my family when I was growing up. A princess was someone who couldn’t sleep when a pea was placed under her stack of mattresses, while my sister and I were descended from Vikings and were expected to act like it. Though I think my parents would have been horrified if we picked up swords and began dueling with each other, we still had to carry firewood, cross-country ski for miles, and do our chores without complaining.

My parents were drawing from a long history of literature about Viking women: strong and capable, independent while their men were away, and even acting as warriors when circumstances required. Designating the word “princess” an insult reflects an ambivalence about femininity, and so too does the earliest Viking literature. While it’s impossible to know exactly how women—or anyone—acted, thought, and felt over a thousand years ago, real Viking women influenced the oral literature of their age and the written literature that records it.

The Viking Age is considered to have begun in 793 CE with the Viking attack on the British monastery at Lindesfarne, and to end with the Norman of England in 1066 CE. Contemporaneous sources for this era are archeology, runes carved on monuments, and written records from cultures that encountered Vikings, either explorers or victims of Viking raids. The Vikings’ literary legacy is recorded from the Icelandic sagas and other written productions of medieval Iceland. These include prose narratives that may be considered Europe’s first novels, histories, and records of some of the poetry that Vikings recited. While all of this material was written down a few centuries after the era it describes, the stories have roots in earlier oral traditions.

From the contemporaneous sources, we know that, like other women at the time, most Viking-Age women’s lives revolved around the household and children. The goods most frequently found in women’s graves include spindle whorls, loom weights, jewelry, kitchen implements, and the bundle of keys that was the symbol of the housekeeper’s power. The vast majority of Viking-Age Scandinavian women spent their lives performing stereotypical women’s tasks: bearing and raising children, cooking and cleaning, and keeping their families clothed.

Women’s appearances in Viking literature go far beyond this, though even a housewife of the period could be a powerful force. She martialed the household resources to feed hundreds of men, and frequently this is her role in the Icelandic sagas: either a bountiful hostess, or a poor and ill-tempered one, with consequences either way for the men in her life.

Women also have a key place in the spiritual literature that survives. The Prose Edda and Poetic Edda are our main sources for Norse mythology; the word “edda” means great-grandmother in Old Norse (though it has other meanings as well), perhaps implying these works relate the wisdom of very old women. Further, the Poetic Edda contains the Volva, a seer and sorceress, who tells portions of the world’s creation myth to Odin in the Voluspa section.

Women as well as men created Viking literature. Skalds in the Viking Age are analogous to the bards of early Irish history. Skaldic verse was a martial form that memorialized the exploits of the warrior class in poetry rich with kennings and alliteration. Most skalds were men, but the poetry of four woman skalds has also come down to us in medieval Icelandic writings. The women’s verses commemorate the same battles and sea voyages that the men’s do, though frequently with an ironic twist—for example, commemorating the voyage of a man who failed to leave the harbor. Another woman poet uses the tropes and phrases of skaldic verse to beg a king not to outlaw her son, putting a men’s heroic verse form to a mother’s use. Four is too few to generalize from, but we can say that these women skalds were respected enough for their poetry to be recorded in writing later, and that they were conversant with a typically masculine literary genre.

Viking literature also contains women explorers. A woman, Gudrid, was among the Viking travelers to the New World, attested in the Vinland Sagas, and confirmed by the find at L’Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. According to the Landnámabók, the book of Icelandic settlements, women were among the earliest Norse settlers of Iceland. These included Aud the Deep-Minded, a main character in the Laxdaela Saga. While many details of the saga can be questioned, the fact remains that a women, whose existence is attested in multiple sources, survived in memory past the end of the Viking Age. She claimed land for herself, attracted and managed a large retinue, and generally was able to take on many of the leadership powers of a noble man.

In sagas like Laxdaela, set in Viking-Age Iceland and written down in the 12th century, we meet violent, trouble-making women who sometimes wear men’s clothes. Most of these tales center on feuds that spiral out to involve families and generations, and women are frequently the characters who push reluctant husbands and male family members to action. Women who urge men onto battle is a literary trope seen from the Greek Helen to the Irish Morrigan, and it functions as a way of removing the moral responsibility for battle from male warriors.

The Icelandic sagas were written in Christian times to describe a pagan past. Feud was far more exciting in a tale than the more law-bound conflicts of medieval Icelanders. A good Christian might be expected to feel some ambivalence about endorsing feud, and if these heroic men are urged on by vengeful women, it decreases their culpability. These women did not always appear negatively in the sagas, though; frequently they prompt a man to guard his honor when he is in danger of neglecting it.

The literary source for most of our images of Viking warrior women is a 13th century Danish monk known as Saxo Grammaticus, whose Gesta Danorum grafts classical ideas of Amazons onto Scandinavian legends, transforming the Valkyrie from a battle observer into a warrior in her own right. He may have done this as a way of painting the pagan Scandinavians as backward, sinful, acting against God’s plans for men and women, but he also created heroines like Lagaertha (who appears in The History Channel’s Vikings) who capture the imagination to this day.

Valkyrie literally means “chooser of the slain.” Valkyries are also the supernatural women who wait upon the warriors in Odin’s Valhalla, his heaven for warriors. While they are often depicted as warrior women in Victorian art, in the Eddas they serve as hostesses in Valhalla. In other tales, Valkyries have a more gruesome, but still stereotypically feminine task: of weaving the entrails of the dead into a tapestry.

Women warriors were a potent literary fantasy, especially in a hyper-masculine medieval world where honor and avoidance of effeminacy were key motivators of male action. In narratives that contain women warriors, it is often the role of the male hero to turn them into wives and mothers, and their submission thus enhances the male hero’s virility. Women warriors, at least in the surviving literature, are never the central heroes of the tales, but ambivalent figures to be wooed and conquered.

In Norse legends, Skadi is a giantess who weds one of the Aesir gods. She comes to them with sword and mail seeking vengeance. Whether this indicates that women did sometimes bear arms or whether that aspect of her is meant to be monstrous and unnatural as befits her giant heritage is unknown. In the absence of men, or in dire circumstances, women might sometimes take up arms to defend themselves. It is even possible that occasional women took up arms as a career, but there would be many societal pressures against it. Still, these few examples may have inspired their outsized presence in the surviving literature.

Just as today we enjoy both male and female power fantasies in movies that reflect, but do not faithfully represent, the roles of men and women in the modern world, so too did Vikings and the medieval Icelanders who wrote down their stories. It is impossible to know all of the roles that women took in Viking-Age Scandinavia, but we can see the influence they had on the literature that reflects them. Women like Aud the Deep-Minded, and Gudrid the Far-Traveler are extraordinary, both as characters and the real women that inspired them—and a good example for me, as a child, to learn to withstand discomfort and work hard without complaining.