{"id":40350,"date":"2017-10-03T03:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T07:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40350"},"modified":"2018-09-18T11:07:41","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T15:07:41","slug":"viking-warrior-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/10\/03\/viking-warrior-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Viking warrior women?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/u\/0\/+EricRaymond\/posts\/H832821gSXv\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">ESR<\/a> posted a link to this article by <a href=\"https:\/\/acculturated.com\/female-viking-warrior-isnt-real-many-people-want\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Julia Dent<\/a> on the much ballyhoo&#8217;d &#8220;discovery&#8221; of the grave of a Viking woman warrior:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You may have heard of L\u2019Anse aux Meadows, the discovered Viking site in Canada (because I repeat, Vikings actually settled in North America, even if it didn\u2019t last long), but did you know that they uncovered <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/2016\/03\/160331-viking-discovery-north-america-canada-archaeology\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">another Viking site<\/a> only last year? If you listen to Dan Snow\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historyhitpodcast.com\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">History Hit podcast<\/a> (which I highly recommend), you may have heard about it, but I only saw a couple of articles about the discovery. This finding is further proof that Leif Eriksson and his fellow Vikings actually settled in North America years before Christopher Columbus was even born, so it isn\u2019t insignificant in the least.<\/p>\n<p>But Leif Eriksson was overshadowed once again\u2014this time by an unknown woman\u2019s grave. However, there\u2019s more to the story than meets the eye. I\u2019ve written about <a href=\"https:\/\/acculturated.com\/nikon-sexist-wants-create-camera-women\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the danger of people leaping to conclusions<\/a> before, and it appears that it\u2019s happened again. While there may have been female Viking warriors, there isn\u2019t strong evidence that this Viking woman was actually a \u201chigh-ranking officer\u201d or even a warrior. University of Nottingham professor of Viking studies <a href=\"http:\/\/norseandviking.blogspot.co.uk\/2017\/09\/lets-debate-female-viking-warriors-yet.html\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Judith Jesch<\/a> burst everyone\u2019s bubbles with an article going through the \u201cevidence\u201d from the grave site and <a href=\"http:\/\/mashable.com\/2017\/09\/12\/female-viking-warrior-military-leader-doubts-debunk\/#1lb2jWy8tmqB\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">contesting<\/a> it all. I highly encourage you to read her analysis in full, but here\u2019s a quick summary of some of her points about the authors who published the \u201cevidence\u201d that the grave site was for a female Viking military officer:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The authors listed on the article don\u2019t include a language specialist, even though it starts with referencing \u201c\u2019narratives about fierce female Vikings fighting alongside men\u2019, and concludes with a quotation from an Eddic poem in translation.\u201d The authors even referenced one of Jesch\u2019s books but not the book where she actually writes about women. The authors also make a lot of references to \u201chistorical records\u201d without specifying which ones they\u2019re talking about.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The authors pretty much decide that this Viking woman is a high-ranking officer based on what she was buried with. The grave contained \u201c\u2019a full set of gaming pieces\u2019 which apparently \u2018indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy\u2019\u201d and \u201c\u2019the exclusive grave goods and two horses are worthy of an individual with responsibilities concerning strategy and battle tactics.\u2019\u201d There isn\u2019t even any conclusive evidence that men buried with those items were military leaders.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>This gravesite was actually excavated over a century ago and things weren\u2019t labeled well, so the female Viking bones may not have even been buried with all those items. Someone even commented on Jesch\u2019s article that there was a third femur found with this woman\u2019s bones, but the authors just ignored it. There were also no signs of harm to the bones, which means she was either one heck of a warrior who never got injured, or that she wasn\u2019t a warrior at all.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So the authors assumed this female Viking was a military leader without any actual evidence and they ignored evidence that didn\u2019t go along with their theory. Like many people today, they leapt to conclusions, and everyone was eager to agree that this woman was definitely a military leader because that suited a contemporary narrative, not a historical fact. This doesn\u2019t mean that people in the future won\u2019t find hard evidence that female Vikings could be military leaders, but you can\u2019t \u201cconfirm\u201d that this Viking was a military leader quite yet. Even if there weren\u2019t female Viking warriors, women in Viking times were actually well-respected and enjoyed <a href=\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/mchonors\/2015\/honors2015_Dent_J.pdf\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">many rights and freedoms<\/a>; they could divorce their husbands, own land, and could even have government representation. Women like <a href=\"https:\/\/thornews.com\/2016\/04\/24\/viking-woman-freydis-eiriksdottirs-fearless-fight-against-indians\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Freydis<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gu%C3%B0r%C3%BAn_%C3%93sv%C3%ADfrsd%C3%B3ttir\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Gudrun<\/a> had a significant impact on their societies, even if they didn\u2019t lead troops into battle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>ESR also commented on the more direct physiological arguments against the &#8220;warrior woman&#8221; theory:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Accessible treatment of why to be skeptical of the recent media buzz about female Viking warriors.<\/p>\n<p>My wife Cathy and I are subject-matter experts on this. We&#8217;ve trained to use period weapons and have studied both the archeological and saga evidence. And we can tell there&#8217;s a lot of PC horse exhaust being emitted on this topic.<\/p>\n<p>On average, men are so much faster and stronger than women that what would happen to women using using lethal contact weapons on a pre-modern battlefield is highly predictable. They&#8217;d die. They&#8217;d die quickly.<\/p>\n<p>The mean difference in physical ability (especially at burst exertion and upper-body strength) is so great that it takes a woman way over in the right tail of the Gaussian to stand against an average male. My wife is one of those exceptions, but we don&#8217;t fool ourselves that this is the typical case.<\/p>\n<p>See also the U.S. Olympic women&#8217;s soccer team being defeated by a squad of 15-year-old boys. That is what&#8217;s normal for humans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ESR posted a link to this article by Julia Dent on the much ballyhoo&#8217;d &#8220;discovery&#8221; of the grave of a Viking woman warrior: You may have heard of L\u2019Anse aux Meadows, the discovered Viking site in Canada (because I repeat, Vikings actually settled in North America, even if it didn\u2019t last long), but did you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,16],"tags":[288,347,1235,961,43],"class_list":["post-40350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-history","category-science","tag-archaeology","tag-debunking","tag-esr","tag-vikings","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-auO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40351,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40350\/revisions\/40351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}