Ancient Viking warrior grave...

This may or may not be her.

viking-jacket-feminine-dale-of-norway.jpg
 
“Can we be sure that the person in Bj.581 was a woman, in a gendered sense? No, we cannot. She may have taken on a man’s social role, while retaining a feminine identity,” explained the study’s authors.
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Well, I mean, we wouldn't want to assume her gender, even though we assumed that she was a "warrior" based on nothing other than the high-status things she was buried with, and extrapolated on a (highly suspect) N=1 that there were more cases like this, and the person in the grave was not only a "warrior" but a "commander."

“We would be very surprised if she was alone in the Viking world; other women may have taken up arms in the same seasonal or opportunistic context as many male Viking raiders,” they wrote. “A few may have risen to positions of command—indeed, the quality of the individual’s clothing, and the presence of the gaming set, implies that she may have been one of them.”
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Marauder06 said:
“Can we be sure that the person in Bj.581 was a woman, in a gendered sense? No, we cannot. She may have taken on a man’s social role, while retaining a feminine identity,” explained the study’s authors.

Well, I mean, we wouldn't want to assume her gender, even though we assumed that she was a "warrior" based on nothing other than the high-status things she was buried with, and extrapolated on a (highly suspect) N=1 that there were more cases like this, and the person in the grave was not only a "warrior" but a "commander."
Click to expand...


Sir...I think we can assume she was a hot archaic warrior commander babe who liked to cut the heads off enemies while wearing skimpy outfits. I think that's legitimate science.
 
Last edited:
Marauder06 said:
“Can we be sure that the person in Bj.581 was a woman, in a gendered sense? No, we cannot. She may have taken on a man’s social role, while retaining a feminine identity,” explained the study’s authors.

Well, I mean, we wouldn't want to assume her gender, even though we assumed that she was a "warrior" based on nothing other than the high-status things she was buried with, and extrapolated on a (highly suspect) N=1 that there were more cases like this, and the person in the grave was not only a "warrior" but a "commander."
Click to expand...
Heya Mara. I think you're reading the authors rebuttal to someone who disputed the results of the her original article from2017. The article kinda cuts off a good snippet of dialogue, speech, thinky brainy stuff? Below is a link to the rebuttal that's being referenced. Basically she's defending her findings.
Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581
Can we be sure that the person in Bj.581 was a woman, in a gendered sense? No, we cannot. She may have taken on a man's social role, while retaining a feminine identity (cf. Clover 1993). Queer theory also provides a potentially fruitful means of engaging with this individual, and their sense of self may have been—in our terms—non-binary or gender-fluid; identity may have been something to negotiate, to choose and re-choose on a daily basis (e.g. Solli 2002; Reeder 2008; Geller 2017). Of all the many suggestions that we have received since our 2017 article, both from academics and the public alike, probably the most common has been a transgendered reading. While we understand this line of thinking in the context of contemporary social debates, it should be remembered that this is a modern politicised, intellectual and Western term, and, as such, is problematic (some would say impossible) to apply to people of the more remote past. All this is also inevitably speculative, considering the limitations of the archaeological material. There are many other possibilities across a wide gender spectrum, some perhaps unknown to us, but familiar to the people of the time. We do not discount any of them.

Can we prove that the occupant of Bj.581 was a warrior? This depends on definitions. We can first consider the non-literal interpretations. Perhaps she was a farmer, a housewife, a fisherwoman, a merchant, a craftworker, a poet or a slave, buried with expensive and dangerous things that did not belong to her, and with none of her own possessions. Perhaps she was, for some reason, interred with objects that conferred a proxy identity that she never had when alive. Equally, she may have lived as a warrior, but in a symbolic sense. In this light, we should also consider other early medieval cemeteries, both in Scandinavia and beyond, where we find people buried with what were clearly non-functional weapons, either unfinished or in such poor repair as to be useless. Similarly, we find operational weapons interred with individuals such as young children, who could never have physically wielded them (e.g. Lindqvist 2004: 76–77). There are more variants on a similar theme. What is important here, however, is that all these combinations of artefacts and individuals—whether preserved from life or bestowed after death—refer to the concept of bearing arms, the gendered notion of ‘warrior-ness’ (the extensive literature on Viking ‘warrior’ ideology, ritual and burial includes Jakobsson 1992; Nørgård Jørgensen & Clausen 1997; Nørgård Jørgensen 1999; Biddle & Kjølbye-Biddle 2001; Price 2002; Pedersen 2014; Harrison & Ó Floinn 2014). To be a warrior was, at least in part, a social construct, and not necessarily directly connected to entering actual combat. If such a thing applied to the person in Bj.581, we do not know exactly how this operated, and it is possible that we are just seeing the high-end ‘straight-to-Valhöll’ option from the Birka funeral directors, but it would have made this individual a warrior nonetheless.

Despite these possibilities, however, we contend that there is far better contextual evidence for the more literal and traditional interpretation, as summarised above. The person in Bj.581 was buried in a grave full of functional weapons and war-gear (and little else), in close proximity to other burials with weapons, next to a building saturated with weapons, outside the gate of a fortress. Furthermore, the interment took place at a time when the hillfort and ‘garrison’ were at their zenith. Many other interpretations of both funerary treatment and gender are possible, but Occam's razor would suggest that to reach for them as a first resort is to attempt to ‘explain away’ what seems to be the most obvious and logical conclusion. In our opinion, Bj.581 was the grave of a woman who lived as a professional warrior and was buried in a martial environment as an individual of rank (Figure 8).
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The first report from 2017 was much better at detailing what they found. I posted a link to the online the pdf version, but it's kinda blurry. So I'm posting the link to the original report from 2017.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23308

Add on: For shits and giggles, I can try and look for the rebuttal to the 2017 article that caused the shit storm that led to the 2019 rebuttal.
 
Marauder06 said:
Well, I mean, we wouldn't want to assume her gender, even though we assumed that she was a "warrior" based on nothing other than the high-status things she was buried with, and extrapolated on a (highly suspect) N=1 that there were more cases like this, and the person in the grave was not only a "warrior" but a "commander."
Click to expand...
Haha. Reminds of this guys schtick...pick it up at about the 2:00 or 3:00 min mark:
 

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