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marieintheraw's review against another edition
4.0
Viking warrior women is a history genre that I did not know that needed to read from before this book.
I received an ecopy of this book through Netgalley; however, my opinions are my own.
I received an ecopy of this book through Netgalley; however, my opinions are my own.
kleonard's review against another edition
4.0
Starting with the confirmation that a warrior buried with full warrior signifiers at Birka was a woman, Brown constructs a possible life for her based on her grave goods, historical information data, and written accounts of the period. I loved the detail and information about the world this woman lived in, and how she might have lived. Brown does an excellent job--as usual--in bringing the Viking world and its trading partners to live. My only reservation is about the lack of discussion of transgender identities during the period--Brown discusses how pronouns and signifiers like "King" changed as women took on certain roles, but not whether there is any evidence of trans identities as we understand them today. Perhaps there is simply no information currently known about transmen and transwomen in Viking like, but I'd wager that there were, and am curious about the lives they may have lived. Overall, though, this is a rich and fascinating book, and I recommend it highly.
wyrdmedieval's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Seamlessly weaving fact and fiction, Brown brings the world of the warrior in Birka’s famous grave Bj 581 to life. Each chapter opens with a snapshot from the life of Hervor, Brown’s chosen name for the buried woman, drawing on scientific, literary, and material evidence to produce a plausible glimpse into the life of a warrior woman in the 9th and 10th centuries. These short excerpts lead into more detailed discussion of the available evidence, providing the reader with a thorough understanding of the way that historians, archaeologists, and other researchers “read” the evidence provided by this, and other, Viking burials in order to understand the broader world during the Viking Age.
Using Hervor’s life as a narrative device, Brown takes the reader on a journey across the Viking world, largely through the lenses of material culture and the sagas. Acknowledging the limitations and refutations to her sources, Brown nevertheless chooses to focus on the elements that support the idea that female warriors existed in the 10th century. While scholars are still debating the idea that Bj 581 could be a woman’s burial, due to the fact that the DNA sexing of the bones does not match the traditional sexing of the grave via its “masculine” grave goods, Brown argues that the mass of evidence for this idea is greater than that which argues against it, if you dare to look past the naysayers who discredit every warrior woman in the literature as “most likely fictional” due to the traditional narrative.
Our Hervor is well-travelled, traversing from the Western settlements in Dublin through to the Eastern reaches of the Rus along the Volga river. She encounters a wide array of material goods along these trade routes alongside differing fashions and ways of life. Strong women are not uncommon in her world, from Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, her speculative foster-mother, to the Red Girl in Ireland, and the women of the sagas and histories, such as Laegertha, Brynhild, and Hervor (of Hervor’s Saga; our warrior’s namesake). Medieval Christian and later Victorian ideals of womanliness have not yet infiltrated her worldview, and readers gain insight into the ways that life as a 10th century woman differed drastically from our expectations.
I enjoyed this book immensely. While it may be unconventional to mix fiction and non-fiction, this method is incredibly effective at bringing the subject of this burial to life as a fully-fledged human being, rather than a two-dimensional concept, or a question of “male or female.” I am a firm believer in the power of bringing history closer to home, because it is so easy to get lost in facts and figures and forget that the eras we study are as real and complex as the one we live in. While I believe there could have been more discussion on the evidence against the Bj 581 burial’s gender, or the general issues with applying gender to individuals based on grave evidence, this book accomplishes its goal of presenting a Viking age where women have more options in life than to become mothers, queens, or slaves, and the arguments it makes are well-supported by the evidence presented.
madhamster's review against another edition
4.0
Fascinating.
Others have the mix of speculative fiction & non-fiction difficult to follow, but I appreciated the mix, & the author's speculation.
Others have the mix of speculative fiction & non-fiction difficult to follow, but I appreciated the mix, & the author's speculation.
nataliealane's review against another edition
3.0
I love reading about women in history, so of course I jumped at the chance to read a book about Viking women warriors. As Brown points out, most warriors whose graves are found have long thought to be men, associating grave items like game boards and weapons to me and “domestic” tools and jewelry to women. However, more recent studies have shown this isn’t necessarily true. Brown’s whole book challenges the idea that Valkyrie were not simply mythological figures, although they may have been integrated into Norse myths; women could be great warriors, too, and weren’t necessarily rare. In The Real Valkyrie, Brown imagines the life of “Hervor,” a warrior buried at Birka, whose grave shows the warrior was highly revered and successful, and was long thought a man until research revealed otherwise. Each chapter begins with the next part in the life of the imagined Hervor (the warrior at the Birka grave) before giving details about a certain part of Viking life, from trade routes to feasting halls and artisanship. I love that Brown chose to intersperse historically-based storytelling into her nonfiction. It’s not something I’ve really seen (although creative nonfiction is newer to me), so although I think her creative writing wasn’t quite as captivating in its style and I’m not a huge fan of present tense, it was a cool touch I can definitely appreciate. It’s not my favorite read out of the “women in history” nonfiction I’ve read this year but it does make me want to look more into the topic and also read more creative nonfiction.
jdintr's review against another edition
4.0
Quick: what do you imagine when you think of a Viking? Blond. Ox horns sticking out of metal helmets. Warriors. Male.
Much of that is wrong--at least, that's the case Nancy Marie Brown makes in The Real Vaklyrie, a paradigm-shifting look at late 10th-century Vikings.
The research at the base of Brown's book is surprising but not new. In 2017, archeologists investigating a trove of Viking burials at the site of Birka on an island west of Stockholm, found a remarkably preserved warrior's grave, which they labeled "Bj581."
Among the artifacts inside were a sword, a battle axe, and a gameboard. The surprise came when DNA from the skeleton was tested: the warrior was a Woman! (In fact, genetic testing would go on to identify female remains in about 40% of the warrior burials at Birka.
Brown stretches the word, "real," in her account of the warrior. In each chapter, she focuses on one element of the grave, mixes in research and archaeology, and sprinkles in details from the Nordic sagas to bring to life a warrior named Hervor, placing her at crucial sites of activity, which stretch from Dublin to the Orkney Islands, to mainland Norway and Sweden, then on to Estonia, the land of the Rus (Russia) and Kiev.
Each chapter begins with a fictional account of Hervor and closes with the evidence--both from the sagas and the science--behind Brown's characterization. To be honest, some of the research bogged down the story--I worked to get through the specifics of cloth weaving, for example, or the forging of a sword--but there's a point to the minutiae: total immersion in the life of a warrior woman at the height of the Viking Era.
As Hervor's voyages stretched ever wider, my interest grew: new perspectives on the far corners of Europe, populated by these viking raiders (but I repeat myself--one of my favorite lines of the book was "Vikings weren't a race, they were a job description").
I didn't come to The Real Valkyrie with a great knowledge of the Viking Era. I read the book, thanks to NetGalley, and I looked forward to the review I might write. So here it is: I left the reading of TRV with a wealth of new knowledge about Vikings, and a completely new way of thinking about who it was who really set wooden shields on the sides of ships, wore the funny helmets, and sailed the seas and rivers from Vinland to Kiev.
Much of that is wrong--at least, that's the case Nancy Marie Brown makes in The Real Vaklyrie, a paradigm-shifting look at late 10th-century Vikings.
The research at the base of Brown's book is surprising but not new. In 2017, archeologists investigating a trove of Viking burials at the site of Birka on an island west of Stockholm, found a remarkably preserved warrior's grave, which they labeled "Bj581."
Among the artifacts inside were a sword, a battle axe, and a gameboard. The surprise came when DNA from the skeleton was tested: the warrior was a Woman! (In fact, genetic testing would go on to identify female remains in about 40% of the warrior burials at Birka.
Brown stretches the word, "real," in her account of the warrior. In each chapter, she focuses on one element of the grave, mixes in research and archaeology, and sprinkles in details from the Nordic sagas to bring to life a warrior named Hervor, placing her at crucial sites of activity, which stretch from Dublin to the Orkney Islands, to mainland Norway and Sweden, then on to Estonia, the land of the Rus (Russia) and Kiev.
Each chapter begins with a fictional account of Hervor and closes with the evidence--both from the sagas and the science--behind Brown's characterization. To be honest, some of the research bogged down the story--I worked to get through the specifics of cloth weaving, for example, or the forging of a sword--but there's a point to the minutiae: total immersion in the life of a warrior woman at the height of the Viking Era.
As Hervor's voyages stretched ever wider, my interest grew: new perspectives on the far corners of Europe, populated by these viking raiders (but I repeat myself--one of my favorite lines of the book was "Vikings weren't a race, they were a job description").
I didn't come to The Real Valkyrie with a great knowledge of the Viking Era. I read the book, thanks to NetGalley, and I looked forward to the review I might write. So here it is: I left the reading of TRV with a wealth of new knowledge about Vikings, and a completely new way of thinking about who it was who really set wooden shields on the sides of ships, wore the funny helmets, and sailed the seas and rivers from Vinland to Kiev.
jmkemp's review against another edition
5.0
The Real Valkyrie is the second book I've read by Nancy Marie Brown, and like The Far Traveller, it weaves together the stories from the sagas and what we've found through archaeology to tell a tale that could have been true. Neither quite fiction nor history, there's a possible story, and then a discussion of the evidence that places that possible story at the heart of what we know about the history. For me this is the best of archaeology and the old stories. Both on their own are absolutely fascinating, and in The Real Valkyrie Nancy Marie Brown has woven them both into something that makes me think about how the assumptions we bring to the facts change the interpretations of those. She shows how the way the Christian faith twisted how we saw past that came befroe it, how it shaped the assumptions that the earlier archaeogists used to interpret their findings. Only with the addition of more modern scientific analysis were we able to show that many of the viking warriors that have been found were genetically female. This, combined with an understanding of the sagas, shows that gender roles were more fluid in the viking age.
barmatron's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
mysterious
medium-paced
4.5