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

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.