The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women
by Nancy Marie Brown
Genres: Historical Fiction, History, Non-fictionPages: 336
Rating:
Synopsis:In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden, was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history and literature to reinvent her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined. Nancy Marie Brown links the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines Hervor’s adventures intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as the Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor’s short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, the sagas, poetry and myth carry weapons. In this compelling narrative, Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.
This is a much-belated post for a book I read and reviewed a while ago, and realised I never reviewed here. My memory of the book’s contents isn’t the sharpest now, but I can try, if anyone has questions!
The Real Valkyrie is about 40% fiction by volume, which is not entirely what I expected. The author has chosen to name and give a fictional biography to the Viking warrior found in Birka who was, after DNA testing, proven to be a woman. The author names her Hervor, and vividly reimagines her life using a mixture of information gained from archaeology and information gained by reading the sagas that have been recorded and handed down.
It’s well-known that the sagas contain quite a lot of truthful detail and history, e.g. in making it clear that Vikings went as far as the Americas in their voyaging, and Brown makes the very good point that the number of female warriors in them probably doesn’t reflect pure fantasy either. I think she’s at her most interesting while discussing the sagas, to be honest: her fictional biography of Hervor made her lose sight of how little she actually could say about the real warrior, and she kept believing far too much in her own story. (The Birka warrior and Ragnhild probably never met, so that’s why they didn’t stay friends…)
It’s an interesting reconstruction, but I’d have preferred to stay focused on the facts (even including those picked from sagas).
Rating: 3/5
On the one hand, demonstrating that women were warriors is cool. On the other hand, I’m extremely leary of the idea of DNA proving someone’s gender. Does the book at all deal with the limitations of the available tools and data for interpreting the genders of people in the archaeological record? (I somehow doubt this if nearly have the book is inventing a fictional biography on scant evidence).
As I recall, no, it didn’t really reckon with that aspect.
Interesting review. I read this author’s earlier book (all nonfiction) about Viking women. Reviewed it here:
https://maefood.blogspot.com/2008/09/viking-hearth-in-iceland-greenland-and.html
The question about DNA revealing gender/sex is a bit naive. Women have two X chromosomes, men have an X and a Y — very straightforward. That’s one way they can tell if a baby is a boy or a girl.
best… mae at maefood.blogspot.com
Hi Mae, a reminder of my commenting policy: transphobia is not welcome here. Perhaps you didn’t intend to come across as such, in which case I invite you to correct yourself and apologise to both Faranae and myself for your comment.
Gender and how we think about it has changed massively through time, and for someone to identify as a gender other than the one others (then or now) might expect based on their physical characteristics and DNA is not new. Sometimes when we see someone in a role that we wouldn’t expect for someone of that sex, it may be because they didn’t view themself as being that sex. Or it may be that in inhabiting that role, society in general could ascribe a different gender to them. Or many other complexities in between.
In addition, though I think this is really a distraction from the main point that someone’s gender is whatever the person in question says it is, sex is far from that simple: someone with XX chromosomes can develop fully as male-bodied, and vice versa. Lots of different genes regulate the development of sex characteristics, and it would be more sensible to view sex as being a broad range of phenotypes. It’s just more convenient to the human brain to lump things into just two groups and class anything outside those as anomalous, but nature doesn’t actually care.