In Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, has crafted a compelling study of Viking Age female life courses using her expertise in written sources to provide the first such comprehensive overview in almost three decades. It is a welcome update, guaranteed to become an invaluable tool, both for students and others seeking an accessible overview of a complex field.
Charting a complete life from infancy to old age, the book's six main chapters move through infancy and childhood; teenage; adulthood, married life, and divorce; pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood; widowhood; and old age and death. Starting with infancy and childhood means entering unchartered waters in many ways, as the sources describing how these periods were navigated are not numerous, and, moreover, they have rarely been explored in much detail, yet Friðriksdóttir pulls together varied sources to provide a nuanced picture. The sources, and hence the detail, thicken as her account enters teenage life, as does the complexity of the narrative woven. Somewhat interestingly for a book titled Valkyrie and featuring a woman bearing weapons on the cover, however, Friðriksdóttir is less than convinced by the recent debate on the possibility of women warriors. As she does in many other sections of the book, Friðriksdóttir touches on archaeological material, which (as I discuss below), is laudable but not without complications.
As she moves on to adult life, Friðriksdóttir's compelling overview of the source material really comes into its own, weaving different potential life courses into a complex and persuasive whole. Describing the many-faceted roles of a wife, for example, Friðriksdóttir offers a nuanced view that will no doubt provide the basis for many future reconsiderations of a social role often neglected as unimportant in wider scholarship. Reading Friðriksdóttir's account, one must wonder how that neglect has been allowed to happen when so much material points to varied and socially vital roles.
The chapter on widows tells a slightly more familiar story, as the role of widows has traditionally been given somewhat more space in academic narratives. However, Friðriksdóttir's academic authority and nuanced view make this novel reading. Moving on to old age and death, Friðriksdóttir must once more be commended for engaging with a period of life often overlooked, especially regarding women: giving academic consideration to old women is in itself rare, and Friðriksdóttir's careful treatment and multiple sources creates a fascinating and important contribution.
Overall, Friðriksdóttir has woven together a complex body of material into a cohesive and compelling whole. Reading the book from an archaeological perspective does lay bare certain interdisciplinary differences, though I do not intend this as a critique of Friðriksdóttir's authoritative scholarship. It is, however, worthy of comment for an interdisciplinary audience such as this book is bound to attract. Friðriksdóttir's approach is first and foremost through the written sources, using archaeological material for support (in Friðriksdóttir's words “to flesh out the complex and fascinating reality behind the clichés,” [16]), and it is thereby not necessarily the account an archaeologist would have written. When engaging with archaeological material, there is sometimes a lack of in-depth knowledge, meaning that certain debates are represented from a somewhat one-sided view, such as the aforementioned debate about women warriors and weapons. By using archaeology more as a support to written sources than a primary source in its own right, some archaeologists may feel that the complexities of our field are not quite adequately represented. A further consequence is that a few citations of particular sites lack the most up-to-date views. For instance, when the so-called Pagan Lady of Peel burial from the Isle of Man is referred to, the old suggestion that she may just as well have been a local woman as a traveler of Scandinavian origin does not take the most recent isotope analysis into account. Furthermore, a reference to the Oseberg grave goods as highly gendered, when in fact they are largely non-gender-specific, is slightly misleading. A second quibble, albeit a minor one, is the use of language that sometimes crosses into presentist terminology. Talking of elite women who “might not have shown solidarity with their sisters across class divides” (14), for instance, while firmly anchoring the book in feminist discourse, implicitly transfers modern motivations for a reader from the archaeological point of view.
Nevertheless, these really are minor points, arising largely from a natural interdisciplinary divide created by different scholarly traditions, which in no way detract from the book as both an impressive scholarly achievement and an undeniably vital contribution to research into past social structures and life courses.
In Friðriksdóttir's own words, “when we look beneath the exterior we see women everywhere . . . In fact, the Viking Age wouldn't have been possible at all without the contribution of women” (115). That half the population at any given point were socially significant ought perhaps to be self-evident, and yet academic focus has consistently neglected this. Valkyrie contributes a weighty redress of this imbalance, providing an accessible, wide-ranging, and not least enjoyable platform for future scholarship into varied life courses and gendered ways of being.
