DNA evidence proves "male" Viking warrior actually a woman

For a touch of the WWI equivalents, see:

Relevant bit starts at 2:50.

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Fun fact: all skeletons are the product of sex.

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Which is awesome! Mistakes of the past were made, the “holy shit, this is cool!” factor of such a rare find is what makes archeology worth it.

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They point I intended to convey (which you did better) was that the people who made this miscategorization weren’t archeologists, historians, anthropologists or even scientists as we understand those terms today… regardless of credentials, in terms of skill they were pretty close to grave robbers.

And coverage in the news media is terrible - for example:

Narratives from the early Middle Ages provide accounts about fierce female Vikings fighting alongside men. However, the women warriors have generally been dismissed as mythological phenomena, even though they continuously reoccurred in art as well as in poetry.

This seems to me to be complete and utter bullshit, it’s essentially news media outlets claiming that people like me and my friends are so blinded by the patriarchy we’ve discounted all the Sagas we’ve read. It’s just not true, it’s a made-up story to sell papers. “Generally been dismissed?” By who? Literally nobody of any repute dismissed the plentiful documentary evidence.

I’ve been to probably a hundred seminars on Vikings, I have friends who read Old Norse as easily as you read English, I have sailed on three Viking ships (OK, two longships and a faering boat) and I’ve got the catalogs from the Viking exhibitions at the British Museum and the Field Museum on my bookshelf. Despite all this interaction with the community of people who study Vikings, I have never met a single person, ever, who would even consider “dismissing” the abundant historical evidence that has been continuously available since the 13th Century and even earlier.

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Very true. There’s also the inescapable fact that women are not all built the same (even though there seems to be a societal expectation that we MUST be all the same) and there is a lot determined by genetic inheritance. Assuming that ‘all’ women have slender slight bones appears to be a mistake made by the sportswear industry, for example, which cuts women’s clothing to fit a narrow shouldered template, when athletics, particularly those involving strength training (which actually is most) changes structure and muscularity. As well, women, like men, have structures that tend to predispose them to excel in a certain sport. A high-caste woman warrior will have trained from girlhood with weapons, horsemanship and ground work, all of which build bone stock and engender muscular development.

BTW, I used to box - women fighters to me are very natural - and that’s just in the battle arena. Anywhere there’s a struggle for parity, equal rights or just personal safety and safety of families, women are fighters - it’s as much a part of us as nurturing.

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brady-bunch-surejan

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I’d agree it’s a bullshit assertion. But for different reasons. All those sagas you read were typically composed well after the Viking age, after the christianization of Scandinavia. And essentially works of literature. Remixing oral folk traditions and mythology. Other references either aren’t contemporaneous or come from adversaries both of which don’t bear well on accuracy.

So I’ve not run across too many credentialed people, even those with an active interest in challenging this sort of thing who accept that evidence as definitive and literally true.

The commonly accepted interpretation seems to be that the literary and folklore references amount to allegory and allusion to the Valkeries. And for the sagas thematic representations of the values a Norse women was meant to hold, analogous to chivalrous literature. And the references from Christian groups are awful similar to smears applied to pagans and foreigners we know not to be true. Highlighting the barbarism of an outside group. And delineating them as unchristian by masculinizing their women.

That is however predominantly drawn from literary and history fields. So the humanities. The science end seems to have been poking it with a stick a lot more aggressively. And interpretations there have been evolving faster, as they often do.

Now that can all be valid even if these documents also represent a legitimate tradition of women in combat. And as a matter of fact women in nearly all cultures participated in combat in one fashion or another. Whether as a practical concern (not enough men around) or at least the many examples we have of women mascarading as men to go to war.

So the actual question is more about whether it was usual and routine for women to participate in combat or raiding at the front as a usual part of combat forces.

Answering that question is where it seems to have fallen down. The lack of physical evidence had answers varying from “probably” to a more common “maybe”. For multiple cultures. And there wasn’t enough there to confirm anything. Which is what this current spate of discoveries is about. We still don’t seem to have enough finds to flesh it out. But the consensus seems to moving towards “probably”.

So experts weren’t dismissing things, just interpreting the documentary evidence we did have in a vacuum of physical evidence. A vaccum created by some biased assumptions. But that bias was also exasperated by lack of tech and older techniques. It’s not as easy to determine gender from physical remains as many assume. And using grave goods can work if you firmly establish that a particular garment or artifact is really associated with a single gender. That didnt happen in the case of graves full of weapons for sexist reasons. And we have DNA and computer now so we have more comfortable methods.

So what your seeing is the news taking a complex, evolving interpretation, that’s moving beyond those base biases. And reframinging them in the dumbest way possible. That’s what crap science reporting does.

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Among the Vikings, it was neither usual nor routine; it was sufficiently special and celebrated to merit special treatment in literature and art.

On this we can certainly agree!

The reasons for it are pretty understandable:

“We have a boatload of fish that will start to go bad if we don’t do something about it. Its cold and we are desperate”

No explanation why people CONTINUE to eat the stuff. Its awful.

“We don’t have enough large intestine casings to make this look like appealing sausages”???

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See we don’t know that. Much of the literature and art in question comes from a few centuries after the Viking age. And well after the christianization of Scandinavia. The oldest sagas apparently date to the 13th century, with the Viking age proper ending in the 11th. And christianization of Scandinavia running from the 8th to the 12th. Though there are evidence of earlier fragments being included, And they’re presumed to be based in part on earlier folk tales and traditions. There are contemporaneous claims from people defending against Viking raids that make reference women being a large portion of the Norse forces. And that being at least somewhat usual. IIRC there are runic inscriptions making references to shield maidens and female warriors. But it’s unclear if they’re references to legendary or folkloric figures or actual people and a tradition of women on the battle field.

And that’s where it stood until we started identifying these burials. We have several identified from high status, apparently warrior class, graves. But the interpretation of that isn’t clear. Because it isn’t clear that people buried this way actually ever fought. I’ve also heard it proposed that these women may have been sacrificed, then buried this way in reference to the Valkyries. Though that’s a proposal, And I don’t think there’s much work backing it up. Either way something “celebrated”. If I’m remembering it right and there are battle graves with women in there. Then that’s not something so celebrated and unique. As we’re talking about the routine shallow grave not far from a battle site.

We have much better physical evidence backing the idea up now. But still insufficient to give us a clear idea what was going on. Which is why there are so many teams running around gender testing bodies. Got fill in that gap.

More over if it was that sort of rare and unique. Well your kind of talking about it being no more common than in other European cultures. And sometimes less (the Celts and Germanic tribes seem pretty into it). The major difference being they celebrated the idea more and earlier than Christian Europe. Which is basically where things stood before we started finding the physical evidence.

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The preponderance of evidence has always pointed to it, and it is the mainstream belief among people who spend lifetimes carefully studying this stuff.

I think I can agree with that. And that’s a very, very different narrative from “historians, anthropologists and archeologists were incapable of understanding the reality of shieldmaidens because they are programmed by patriarchy” or “historians, anthropologists and archeologists believed that female Vikings didn’t exist”.

All that to the side, skeletal examination is routinely used by skilled professional diggers to identify gender and warrior status. You don’t need DNA or artifacts for either determination. And while it is possible that the number of remains recovered at Birka made it impractical to do properly thorough examinations, I would (and do) argue that is no excuse, digging up more bodies than you can handle is archeological incompetence. Those guys were schmucks!

Stop! Next you’ll be picking on pirates. Yarr!

It seems that another possibility worth considering (especially in the light of modern discussion of same) is that the warrior in question was transgender.

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Freydís Eiríksdóttir, (Eric the Red’s daughter), was pretty badass. When attacked by indigenous warriors at the Vikings’ Vinland camp, she berated her retreating menfolk:

“She calls out, “Why run you away from such worthless creatures, stout men that ye are, when, as seems to me likely, you might slaughter them like so many cattle? Let me but have a weapon; I think I could fight better than any of you.” They give no heed to what she says. Freydis is eight months pregnant at the time, but this does not stop her from running out of her tent and grabbing the sword from her fallen brother in arms, Thorbrand, Snorri’s son. Then come the Skrælingjar upon her. She lets down her sark so that one breast is exposed, and strikes her breast with the sword, letting out a furious battle cry. At this the Skrælingjar are frightened and rush off to their boats, and flee away.”

Of course, there’s also the little detail of her killing five women with an axe for some sort of insult.

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Those guys also had an entirely different state of the art. The weirdly complicated calculations needed to reliable determine gender in ambiguous remains weren’t developed yet.

This one doesn’t seem to have been ambiguous. So 1880s schmuck was a schmuck. I’m betting DNA, which is still pretty pricey, was chosen because it couldn’t be argued with. And there are people really interested in that argument.

That’s an entirely valid interpretation. And one I largely agree with. I just don’t think it was the only valid interpretation, even if it was my favored one. But from what I’ve seen the overall consensus was vaguer for a long time. It seems to have been rapidly moving towards the “yeah” side of things the last decade or two. The new efforts to determine gender in more objective ways have given us some stuff that’s hard to argue with. But there’s been other stuff cropping up or going ignored/under publicized for a while.

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Ironically, Chitterlings may well come from a Norse root. It’s certainly old or middle English.

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Oglaf is all the evidence I need.
image

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In an argument discussion of epistemology we’re going to trust someone named Loki? We don’t even know if you’re Asa-loki or Utgard-Loki!

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It appears, from what little information that I can find on Birka and Hjalmar Stolpe (the fellow responsible for the misidentification of the skeleton) that Stolpe’s doctorate was in zoology, and that he specialized in ants - he trained to be what today we’d probably call a myrmecologist. While investigating the ants of Björkö he stumbled across the Birka grave field, and he built a career in anthropology and archeology based initially on the fame that his inexpert diggings at Birka brought him. He later came to be regarded as a great pioneer of Swedish ethnology, based mostly on his grave-robbing expeditions across the world that brought home more than 75,000 specimens from Peru, Tahiti, Oahu and Japan.

Stolpe’s documentation of his finds is notably sketchy - at least one of his biographers claims that this is because his standards for scientific writing were so extremely high that he didn’t have time to write very much. I question this assessment!

On the conclusion of the researches at Björkö he was commissioned to investigate the grave-fields in Vendel, Uppland, where some of the most remarkable finds of the Iron age in Sweden had been discovered. Needless to say, this work was carried on with the same care and minuteness that characterized his operations at Björkö. The examination of the caves on the island of Stora Karlsön at Gottland also fell to him and was prosecuted for a long time. It is to be regretted that Stolpe did not find the opportunity to publish more exhaustive descriptions. By nature he was extremely punctilious and critical in the preparation of his writings, desiring them to reach perfection both in form and in content before publication. A series of works of monumental character, both in Swedish archeology and in general ethnology, might have been built upon his researches, but partly through force of adverse circumstance and partly on account of his deep conscientiousness, he was not successful in concluding them before his untimely death.

–source: 1906 essay by Stewart Culin in American Archeologist, based on 1905 memoir by Dr Gusta Retzius published in Ymer. Emphasis mine.

What I take from all this is that any existing physical evidence from Vendel and Stora Karlsön needs to be extensively re-evaluated. Stolpe was a product of his time, sure, and may well have been a nice enough person, but he was a crap archeologist, at least by modern standards.

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