Did women stand in the shield wall or are we just making that up? by Donovan Cook
I’m going to be honest with you here. When I first came up with Thora in Odin’s Betrayal, she was going to be very different from the character she ended up being. In fact, originally, she was going to be the one who betrayed Sven at the end and handed Charles over to his brother and the Franks. But as the story developed in my mind, so did her character and she became Thora Haraldsdóttir, shield maiden and protector of Charles.
But did women in medieval Scandinavia really go raiding as warriors and stand in shield walls, or were their roles similar to the women in the rest of Europe at that time?
Now, this is not exactly a new question, but it is one that has been debated over for many decades and is still a very interesting one. Most archaeological evidence suggests that Scandinavian women had the same roles as their Christian counterparts. They were responsible for the upkeep of the family home and preparing meals. They also spent a lot of time working wool, spinning yarn and making clothes for the family. They helped out in the fields and when the men went raiding, they were responsible for the harvest and the running of the farmsteads.
But that is where the similarities ended. Unlike women in the Christian nations to the south of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Scandinavian women enjoyed more freedom and had more rights. They could own property, run their own businesses and even trade with men as equals, something which wasn’t allowed in Europe until the 19th century. Women in Scandinavia could also divorce their husbands if they felt their husbands did not perform their duties effectively. When the marriage was ended, they could even have their dowries returned to them.
A symbol of these freedoms and of the authority of women in the household, Scandinavian women would wear rings of keys, a symbol of Frigg, the wife of Odin, around their waist and many of these have been discovered in the graves of women in Scandinavia and in other countries as some women also travelled with their husbands when they went raiding or on trading expeditions.
But what about shield maidens? Thora was a shield maiden, after all, not a housewife. There is plenty of evidence of shield maidens in literature. Johannes Skylitzes, a historian in the Byzantium era, wrote about women fighting in the Varangian guards, an elite unit of Scandinavian warriors who protected the emperor of Byzantium. Saxo Grammaticus, the 12th century Danish historian, also wrote about communities of women who dressed like men and practised with swords and other weapons. He goes on to say that about 300 hundred of these shield maidens fought in the Battle of Brávellir in the 8th century. And not to mention, the Viking TV series which introduced us all to Lagertha, shield maiden and wife of Ragnar Lothbrok, who was also mentioned by Saxo Grammaticus. The sagas also tell us about Freydis Eiriksdottir who travelled to North America and fought against the Native Americans.
But despite all of this, there is still little evidence that shield maidens existed. Not until 2017, when a DNA analysis of a skeleton discovered in a grave of what was believed to be a male warrior in Birka, Sweden, showed that it was actually a woman. The grave had originally been discovered in 1878 and the reason it was believed that the grave belonged to a man was because of the weapons found beside the skeleton. Naturally, it had been assumed that the grave belonged to a man because women did not fight in battles and therefore had no need for weapons. It could be argued, I guess, that these weapons might have been gifts from a grieving husband or father, or that they were merely ceremonial because of the role she might have had in life. But it could also be argued that she was a shield maiden and that there are many more unidentified or misidentified shield maiden graves out there. A study of the mass graves in Repton, UK, showed that about a fifth of the bones discovered there belonged to women, which might suggest that there were shield maidens in the great heathen army.
Unfortunately, though, we may never know the truth about shield maidens. Did they really exist or were they fictional? One can only hope that in the future more graves like the one in Birka are unearthed so that this question might finally be answered, but for now, I think it is up to you to decide. I see no reason that there could not have been shield maidens. Women play active roles in police forces and militaries around the world. If women today can do that, then why could a 9th century woman named Thora Haraldsdottir not pick up a sword and stand in the shield wall?