A review by wyrdmedieval
The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women by Nancy Marie Brown

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.