On the island of Björkö, in Lake Mälaren, Sweden, is a curious-looking landscape of gently undulating grassy mounds, from which more than 1,000 burials have been unearthed. This grave field is part of Birka, a Viking settlement that was occupied between 750 and 950 AD. When the skeleton marked as “Bj 581” was first excavated there in the late 19th century, it was assumed to be that of a man because of the axe, sword, spears and quiver of arrows buried alongside it, and was dubbed the “Birka Warrior”. This identification was questioned in the 1970s, as the slender forearm and the wide inlet of the pelvis were commonly female characteristics, but it wasn’t until 2017 that DNA extracted from a tooth showed two X chromosomes. The Birka Warrior was a woman.
Surviving law codes show that Viking women could own property, run their own estates and divorce their husbands if improperly treated. At Birka, the weights and scales of traders were found in more female graves than male. The incredibly preserved Oseberg ship, one of two now displayed at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, was found in the burial mound of two high-status women. The Vikings even venerated women as gods: their second most important deity was Freyja, goddess of no less than love, death, sex, beauty and war. Given what we now know of women’s place in Viking society, “the grave at Birka suddenly seems less of an anomaly”, writes the BBC broadcaster and Oxford academic Janina Ramirez in Femina, an interdisciplinary, revisionist history of the women of the Middle Ages.
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