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