Viking Women on the battle field?

[Astronuc]

Apparently more women accompanied their husbands or families during Viking journeys/migrations than previously thought. Some apparently fought on the battlefield, or at least wielded swords and possibly wore armour.

http://content.usatoday.com/communi...11/07/invasion-of-the-viking-women-unearthed/

Overall, McLeod reports that six of the 14 burials were of women, seven were men, and one was indeterminable. Warlike grave goods may have misled earlier researchers about the gender of Viking invaders, the study suggests. At a mass burial site called Repton Woods, "(d)espite the remains of three swords being recovered from the site, all three burials that could be sexed osteologically were thought to be female, including one with a sword and shield," says the study.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/09/female-viking-warriors-proof-swords#470354

The bad news first: while many women have been found buried with weapons, the evidence doesn't support the claim made in the title of equal gender representation on the battlefield. The 2011 study that the article cites concludes: 'Although the results presented here cannot be used to determine the number of female settlers, they do suggest that the ratio of females to males may have been somewhere between a third to roughly equal.' The key thing to note is the word 'settlers': the article is arguing that women migrated from Scandinavia to England with the invading Viking army in the 9th century. Several of these women, the article notes, were buried with weapons, but they are still far outnumbered by the armed men. Most of the women settlers mentioned in the study were buried with 'traditional' female outfits: brooches that held up their aprons.

The good news, though: while women buried with weapons are rare, they *are* being found, and this is in large part thanks to an increased willingness to trust the bone specialists. Archaeologists have been using bones to identify the biological sex of skeletons for the past century, but when burials were found which didn't fit their notions of 'normal,' they tended to assume that the bone analysts had made a mistake. This is not entirely unreasonable, because bones are often so badly decomposed that it is impossible to tell the sex of the person. But I can point to cases where the bones clearly belong to a woman, and the archaeologists insisted that it had to be a man because only men were warriors. That's modern sexism plain and simple, and bad archaeology. But thankfully, archaeologists in recent decades have become aware of this problem, and as a result, more and more women are showing up with weapons!

 

[edward]

That is really interesting. I have read how the narrow Viking ships could sail or use oars. They were the perfect vessel for the European rivers. The bottoms of the ships were even shaped to enable them to land on sandy beaches.

We have see so may artists paintings of Viking ships full of men, now to think that half of them may have been women is incredible. It makes me wonder if perhaps they were going along to help establish permanent encampments and supply bases.

Here is another link

Researchers at the University of Western Australia decided to revamp the way they studied Viking remains. Previously, researchers had misidentified skeletons as male simply because they were buried with their swords and shields. (Female remains were identified by their oval brooches, and not much else.) By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/09/female-viking-warriors-proof-swords

 

[WWGD]

Why is it sexist to assume that warriors were all men? Your average woman is physically weaker--significantly so-- than your average man, so it is not a good idea in general to have women fighting in face-to-face combat. Would you likely hire your average 5'3'' , 130 female bouncer for a rowdy bar, to deal with your average 5'9'', 180 lbs male? It is a different issue nowadays, in the way fighting is done. The man-hating far-left feminists can be as absurd as the far-right anti-government, anti-women nuts.

 

[Helios]

Now in Viking marriages, the new wife is given her husbands sword, so there's sentimentality to the thing. So a sword buried with a women could mean it was special to her, or that it was a status symbol, not that she was a warrior.
On the other hand, there were warrior women types in Conan and Lord of the Rings. These being my principle historical references.

 

[AlephZero]

That is really interesting. I have read how the narrow Viking ships could sail or use oars. They were the perfect vessel for the European rivers.

Indeed. Repton is about as far away from the sea as you can get in the UK - 85 miles in a straight line to the east coast (it's actually closer to the west coast), and I would estimate 120 miles by boat up the Humber estuary and the river Trent.

I haven't followed all the content of the links in this thread, but Repton is well documented as the overwintering camp of the Danish army in 873/4 AD. The Danes commandeered and fortified the church as their headquarters, and built a grave and cairn for a mass burial of about 250 people, of which about 25% were female. But it's more likely those deaths were from an outbreak of disease than from combat.

 

[Jupiter5]

There is no hard evidence that of female warriors-female vikings. Women that made a significant influence were buried with certain items of respect.

"Some women made their mark through exceptional status or achievement. One of the richest burials of Viking Age Scandinavia is that of the Oseberg 'queen', buried in a very grand style with a richly-decorated ship and large numbers of high-quality grave goods in 834. Later in that century, Aud the 'deep-minded' lived a veritable Viking Age odyssey. The daughter of a Norwegian chieftain in the Hebrides, she married a Viking based in Dublin and, when both her husband and son had died, took charge of the family fortunes, organising a ship to take her and her granddaughters to Orkney, Faroe and Iceland. She settled in Iceland, distributing land to her followers, and was remembered as one of its four most important settlers, and as a notable early Christian."

the source and interesting full article about life of Vikings is here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/vikings/women_01.shtml