Viking Women (Radio Edit)

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0:41Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are loading our loom weights and launching our longship as we sail back to medieval Scandinavia to learn all about Viking women. And to help us, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a historian, writer and broadcaster based at Bath Spa University, where her research focuses on the cultures, literatures and languages of the medieval north. You may have read her sensational new book, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.

1:13It's a wonderful book. And you will definitely remember her from our episode on Leif Erikson. It's Dr Eleanor Baraclough. Welcome back, Eleanor. Yay. Thank you so much for having me back. Delighted to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, they're an award winning. Sorry. And in Comedy Corner, they're an award nominated stand up comedian. when it comes to awards I am famously always the bridesmaid never the bride and what you just did your mouth typo just cut deep I'm so sorry Clive there you go and in comedy corner they're an award nominated stand up comedian you might have seen them on TV on Celebrity Pointless Richard Osman's House of Games Jonathan Ross's Comedy Club or commenting on the women's football Euros on the Sky Sports maybe you caught their recent stand up tour How You See Me How You Don't or some supporting Ed Gamble.

1:57It's Chloe Petz. Welcome to the show, Chloe. Thank you so much for having me. Chloe, first time on the pod. Yes. How are you with history? Did you like it at school? Are you comfort zone? I did like it. I think I did it for A-level. Did I do it for A-level? You think you... Did I do it for A-level? You're not that old. What did I... I wasn't there, Chloe. You're the killer that I was like, what are you going to know? Oh my god. Yes, you did it for A-level. I think I must have because I really liked it. Did I do it for A-level? Now I'm going to list my A-levels. I I definitely did English because I did that at uni.

2:27I did maths, history, theatre studies. Oh, and then I did classics as well. The area of history that I enjoy the most because I really like consuming history via novels. So I'm a big fan of the Victorian era and the Regents era. Gotcha. Those are kind of my areas of speciality. So if I say to you Vikings, did your brain just go, no? Slightly, yeah. I mean, I don't have any sort of context of really where they're located in history. They seem like kind of vacuum packed in their little section. So, yeah, getting a bit of context of where they're located in human history will be really interesting.

3:06So what do you know now?

3:13This is the So What Do You Know. This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I reckon when you hear Viking, you're probably thinking big, hairy men in historically inaccurate horned helmets. No horns. But today we're honing in on the women. Now, you might be imagining fearsome warriors tossing axes while tossing their immaculate blonde braids. And maybe you're thinking also of the mythological Valkyries, made famous in Wagner's opera and the Marvel Thor movies, of course. You might have seen the TV show Vikings with the scary shield maiden Lagertha and her bloody post-divorce glow up.

3:47Or you've watched Skade, the sinister sorceress in The Last Kingdom. What was life really like for the average Viking gal about town? And how many people can you incinerate and still be made a saint? Let's find out. Eleanor, let's start with the basics because Chloe said vacuum pack them for us. Let's give some dates. So we're talking first raids that we know about. We think of Vikings being sort of really raidy on the British Isles. End of the 8th century, so like 793, classic Radial Lindisfarne, possibly a little bit before then, all right? And then how long the Viking Age goes on for sort of depends on how we're defining it, but let's say kind of up to 1100, except a lot of the evidence actually comes from after that.

4:29Then in terms of where we're talking geographically, the homelands of Scandinavia, so Denmark, Norway and Sweden. That's where it all starts, except a really exciting thing about the Viking Age is that it's all about expansion, colonisation, exploration. You know, people are coming into contact with each other across this vast area. So, you know, they expand across the North Atlantic. They make it all the way to Iceland and Greenland, even to the edge of the North American continent around the year 1000. They go east down the waterways of what's now Russia, Ukraine. They end up in the Byzantine Empire, which is centred on what's now Istanbul in Turkey.

5:08And then they end up further east than that. They end up sort of around Baghdad, that sort of region. So they're really far travelling. And that's a really important part of what they are. But also because it's over several hundred years, there are big changes over that time. So, for example, they start pagan. But then around the year 1000 or so, we see this sort of conversion to Christianity. The fact that you're like the Vikings went to the Byzantine lands, it feels like a Marvel DC kind of crossover. They knew each other. They knew about each other. Like they saw the big hairy ginger men. Yeah.

5:44OK, so Chloe, what do you imagine the Viking women were up to while the lads were on tour? You know, they're off doing all these gallivanting around half the world. What are the women up to? I hope a lot of intense lesbianism, if I'm honest. That must have been what's going on. There's probably some. I mean, let's be honest, there's probably some. Oh, yeah, there's sort of later prohibitions against it, which suggests people are up to things. We're trying to reframe the picture, because I think it's quite easy to think of men in their longboats going off to pillage and to plunder and to settle.

6:16How do the women... What is their life like? How does it sort of fit into that story? Well, there's no Viking Age without the women, for a start. But, you know, so if you, if you say for starters, things like that sound a little bit tedious or worthy if you're into Vikings because they're glittery and cool and fun and dramatic. Things like textile production, you need clothes. But you also need sails to if you're going to go across the ocean, if you're looking to trade or to raid or to settle or to colonize, find new lands. You need wind power to actually get across that ocean. Without the women, you don't have sails.

6:47You don't have clothes. You also don't have children and that's because obviously some people are having the children, but other people are also helping bring up the children. So you need that next generation. So on a very, very basic level, take away the women and you've got nothing. Also, they're doing most of the food preparation. They're looking after the houses or the long houses and the farms when the men might be on there hunting or their raiding expeditions, whatever it is. and so take away the women and you've got some hungry naked men in a rowing boat which is a Channel 4 documentary that I would watch we need to start I suppose with the life of women let's start with girlhood what would you expect of a Viking girl's upbringing Chloe?

7:31she's probably getting taught just to do the classic stuff the food making skateboarding yeah a couple of ollies yeah yeah i think probably skateboarding yeah you took the words out of my mouth sorry i'm sorry i ruined it you're making a very sensible point and i ruined it no i think it's important i think it's important that we allow intrusive thoughts to win on this podcast um it's really important to say up top there's no such thing as an average experience we've got to think you know we've already said the viking age extends over hundreds of years and then within that you've got lots and lots of different social strata and so someone who is say you know a young child who is enslaved is going to have a very different experience growing up compared to someone who is much further up that social pecking order but exactly as you say yeah a lot of it's going to be learning from a young age domestic crafts and sort of textile manufacture was there any culture of play amongst kids that's a really good question well i think there's a very i don't know what you think like children play play is sort of a universal impulse the question is at what point does that stop and i think that certainly compared to today you know at the point where yeah children nowadays might be going out on their skateboards you know these girls are probably in there learning how to weave um there's also slightly less pleasant stuff.

9:01So for example it looks like there's a higher rate of female infanticide. I was wondering whether that might be the case. Yeah, that seems likely. It's really hard to prove it. So just to be clear, that is the deliberate killing of little baby girls because you don't want a girl, you want a boy. Yeah, exactly. Which is horrible. We're a comedy show but we have to talk about this stuff. Does it improve for teenagers? You know the answer to that. I don't know the answer it's not going to improve for teenagers if they're killing girls at birth and then putting them to work at eight I don't think all of a sudden they're going to be like okay off you go into the world now you can go to university when you get to sort of be of childbearing age and pretty young marriage is obviously on the cards and that is an important part of teenagehood as you sort of head towards the latter part of that if you're lucky and do the girls get to pick their hubbies or does dad go I've chosen Sven yeah is exactly what you need.

9:59I think more to the point, exactly what I need. Certainly, once again, when you look at the latest saga evidence, bearing in mind, sagas are not history as we would think of history. They're stories, but they do sort of reflect something of that earlier time and the time in which they're written. But certainly, yes, it's I have picked out you're going to be marrying him whether you like it or not. Can a man divorce a woman easily? You call witnesses and you say, I'm divorced. And it can be all sorts of reasons. And this is true, I think, of the men and the women. But the important thing is that women can do it too.

10:31So the interesting thing about the Viking Age, historians often say that women in the Viking era were better off than anywhere else in the Viking, sorry, anywhere else in the European Christian world. Like they had more rights, more laws, more freedoms. We've heard maybe that's not entirely true. There's quite a lot of pressure and so on. But widowhood kind of is, that's kind of a quite comfortable... It's what you're aiming for, basically. That's the ideal, right? But you have really, I mean, so for example, we mentioned Iceland being settled second part of the ninth century some of the first settlers the big settlers are women there's one in particular she's called Eider or Una the Deep-Minded and it's only once she's a widow she able she's she sort of gathers her her family and her followers and her and her sort of like slaves at that point around her and takes them off to Iceland frees the enslaved people and sort of sets up this sort of matriarchy yeah it's kind of yeah This community of women, right?

11:21She ends up, I think it's her grandchild, on the night of her grandchild's wedding, she dies upright in bed, having basically just sorted everyone out. She's an EastEnders matriarch. Yeah, exactly. Get out of my pub! Long house. Sorry. OK, we should talk about a childbirth, which obviously, you mentioned before, that obviously in order to keep having Vikings going out into the world, you need children that grow up. We need babies. I mean, obviously, childbirth is dangerous at any time in history. In the Viking world, there are kind of rituals, routines, there's magical spells. There's all sorts of ways of trying to protect a woman in childbirth and a baby.

12:02Can you talk us through some of those? Yeah, so I mean, yeah, exactly as you say. So mortality rates were huge, as they always have been. There's a really touching grave from Orkney, Rousey. and it's a woman but she is she's buried with an infant who's full term and so the likelihood is that she she's died in childbirth and so is the child so exactly as you say that there has to be measures in place one of these is called they're called biag runar sort of helping runes runes of protection those seem to have been used we've got like sort of just evidence on the edge often with childbirth with pregnancy everything is on the edge because it's female histories and they don't You know, they just don't get recorded.

12:44But we have sort of a few little runic inscriptions that might sort of back that up. There's an amazing, again, it's later, it's very much within a Christian context, but it's a rune stick. And it looks like basically the baby's gone over term and is still, you know, inside. And this runic inscription is to the baby. And it ends and it says, come out, hairless one, the Lord calls you into the light. That's kind of beautiful. It is beautiful. I love that one. But let's get back to a woman's work, you know, the kind of daily domestic. She's not just obviously giving birth to the next generation.

13:19There's a lot she's got to look after in the house. Yes, definitely. So they're very much in charge of the household. The household isn't just sort of immediate family or relatives. You've got quite a community, depending on how big this farmstead is. You've got responsibilities for making sure everyone stays alive throughout the winters. You've got to be able to cook, but you've got to be able to store food. You're going to be looking after the farmstead. as I said before you're going to be textile production medicine exactly so that's the other and again yeah so there's a really interesting episode from Hames Kringler which is sort of a big group of king sagas essentially where there's a battle someone's injured and they go into the tent and there's a healing woman there and she basically feeds them this mixture of sort of garlic and herbs and nasty stuff because the idea is that once you eat it if you can sort of smell the garlic from the wound you know it's gone through and it's sort of a fatal wound, essentially.

14:10That's one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life. I think I'd rather just not know. But that is actually... I think I'd rather just die not stinking a garlic. That's what the character says. He's like, no, I'm cool. Thanks very much. Nah, you keep your garlic soup. But the fact is there's women in there doing that. There's also sort of religious aspect. There's a type of sort of magic called seyther. And again, we're back in sort of more pagan context here. That a woman is particularly meant to practice. the Old Norse word for a female practitioner of magic or cirrus is a vulva. So there you go.

14:42Yes. So is that where we get that? It's spelled differently. And then, of course, there's sort of textile production, which is just like, I know it sounds boring to keep on going on, but it's so important. It's like, if we didn't have textile production, we would all be sitting here naked, right? It's like, we would, nothing happens. And we get a strongly worded email from HR, wouldn't we? But yeah, but there's a special sort of women's quarters called a dynja. And the Dynia, it's not necessarily just for textile production, but in the archaeological record all over the Norse world, so Greenland is a really good example of this, you see these sort of textile production spaces where you have women, where you have children.

15:17The sagas, again, have episodes where, you know, women sit there talking about, for example, their former lovers, in one case, where one of the husbands hears doesn't go well. Oh, OK. And in terms of weaving, it's not just humans who are doing the weaving, the gods weave too. do you know what the gods would weave with when they were determining people's futures? Oh, the clouds. Oh, that's charming. That's beautiful. I mean, you're so wrong. No, I'm going to say you're not so wrong, right? Because you've got these supernatural beings called the Norns, the Nornia. There's these three. And they're responsible for weaving the fates of humans, essentially.

15:55I like to think, yeah, they're basically just like pulling down threads from the clouds. So I'm like totally with you there. But there is a nastier one. Yeah, come on. Let's have the gory one. So the gory one, it's Valkyries this time. You know, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Right, that's how we know Valkyries, on their horses, coming down, blah, blah, blah. Right, and there is an episode from, again, it's in Njau Saga. Essentially, on the night before a battle, someone sees these women going into one of these dinghyo, one of these weaving rooms. He peeps inside, and he sees them, and they're singing as they weave on this big loom.

16:27But what it is, is the entrails of the dead, and there's like kind of heads hanging from. So the loom weights are severed heads. Exactly. The loom weights are severed. Yeah. And the thread is just guts. Yeah. Just Viking guts. Yeah. Do women go out on the ships, right? So we've heard them at home. They're doing the farming. They're doing the medicine. They're doing the weaving. They're looking after the kids. But like, do they get on long ships and go and settle Iceland and Greenland? Yeah. Absolutely. They do. This is really important. So Iceland, we've already talked about this matriarch at the beginning, one of the widows who goes out there under the deep minded.

17:00Greenland is a really interesting... So Greenland gets settled, first of all, from Iceland, in sort of Eric the Red, it's kind of 985 or something. And there are women absolutely going out there to settle. There's a rune stick that they found in one of the graveyards from Greenland. And it's not got a body in it, but it says, you know, this woman, she died on the Greenland Sea. So basically she died on the journey over. Very much part of that cultural sphere. Let's talk about the lives of the rich Viking women, the elite. I've got a favourite here okay so this is Norway Osseberg so sort of southern Norway oh my god the classic the classic but there's a reason it's an oldie and it's a goodie right so this is one of the the most sumptuous burials it's a ship burial it hasn't been burnt but these two a what burial a ship a ship thank you what did you hear a really bad burial it's an absolutely rubbish burial terrible burial one of the worst I've ever seen these two women have been placed in it one of them is really quite old sort of over 70 The other sort of late middle age, kind of maybe in her 50s.

18:01But there's nothing like it. You know, there's wagons all beautifully carved with cats and faces and possibly the cats. You know, that's sort of classically linked to Freya, one of the goddesses. There's wagons. There's beautiful things like sort of buckets and like sacrificed horses. and all sorts, I mean, there is nothing like it in terms of the amount of stuff that has been placed into it. They can even tell exactly what time of year this initial... Yeah, crab apples have been found. Oh, beautiful. Which is just... But also, talking of this sort of organic material, henbane seeds, I think, either henbane or cannabis.

18:41There's also this incredible tapestry. You think, beautiful. Look closely, you see the trees are full of hanging bodies. Right? So, sorry. These ladies sound terrifying. I know, yes! You think you're a lovely granny. Hang on a minute. Dead bodies? What? This is the woman I want to meet from the Viking Age. I'm like, I could have fun with you, right? But they're so elite high status. It used to be thought that one of them was a queen, the other one maybe her, we could say, handmaiden. She could be an enslaved person. But so it's very much this sense of these high status women, possibly with some sort of magical position in society.

19:14Yeah, the seether thing maybe, or the hallucinogenic medicine. Exactly, yeah. I mean, obviously we have rich Christian widows who leave money to the church. They found nunneries and churches and monasteries and they build bridges and churches and roads. You know, they're kind of putting back into the community, which is amazing, too. But we need to talk about Olga of Kiev. Of course we do. It's really important that we do our Olga of Kiev. She's one of the most. I was getting antsy. You were thinking, when are we getting to Olga of Kiev? I mean, again, listeners might be thinking, Kiev's in Ukraine.

19:43Yes. I mean, the Vikings really get very far afield. Olga of Kiev. Chloe, how did she get revenge on the men who killed her husband? I guess she killed him back. I'm thinking of a sort of John Wick's Man Army kind of scenario where I think she's gathered up all of her weapons. Like Ballerina? Yeah, exactly like Ballerina. Maybe she kills someone. What did John Wick kill in John Wick 3? He kills them with books or something like that. I mean, it's not far off. I mean, if anything, she's more badass than that. Olga, by the way, sounds like a very Slavic name. It's actually Old North. Olga is Helga.

20:21yeah right 10th century and she is it's sort of her husband is called igor again very norse name doesn't sound it but ingvar norse name right yeah he is killed by sort of a local tribe called the drevlians they've got beef with them right so olga then says oh ambassadors please come see me did she bake a pie did she bake a pie there are pies in not this one there are norse there are there are women who bake their children okay we're not even going to go there i'm still going to get No, no, stick with Olga. She's cool, right? Okay, so the first lot, yeah, she basically buries the ambassadors alive.

20:57Okay. How? Well, it's all there in, I think, sources from the sort of the 12th century. So it's maybe slightly exaggerated. But then the next lot, she lures the noblemen. She's like, oh, please come, please come. Have a bath. Yeah, have a sauna, isn't it? Have a sauna. Come have a nice biking sauna. And then she locks them in the sauna and then she sets fire to him. Yep. Yep. So that's the next lot. And then she just, for good measure, burns the whole settlement to the ground. Yeah. In revenge. It's giving John Wick. Yes. It's giving John Wick. And then she converts to Christianity and is made a saint.

21:32Well, you know, if you're going to get forgiven, like, if you're going to, if you're going to convert to Christianity and get forgiven for all your sins, then I think I would just, like, really sin. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm not just doing, like, you know, I've worn mixed fabrics. I'm doing, like, I've killed I've killed all of my husband's murderers. Yes, okay so all this bloody revenge leads us nicely to the warrior women who we would have seen in TV shows, so I mentioned Vikings, I mentioned The Last Kingdom, it's a bit of a trope, a kind of shield maiden thing. Is that pure Hollywood?

22:05Do we have any evidence for women going into battle? Yeah, it's not pure Hollywood so there's a skeleton found on the island of Birka in Sweden, very important sort of trading settlement in that period people always thought, oh well that's a man because it was buried with weapons. It was found in the 19th century. Exactly. So for well over 100 years, we were like, that's a bloke. Yeah, exactly. Then, 2017, they look at the DNA and it's female DNA. They're like, oh, OK. But the question is then... That's mental that no one checked. Well, to be fair, I don't think they had DNA sampling in the 19th century.

22:37To be fair to them. But it's the fact that, yeah, you see one thing and you assume that's what it must be. Now, that doesn't mean that she was a practising warrior. There's all sorts of possibilities. Because she's buried with swords and all the kind of accoutrement of a warrior. Exactly, exactly. And it's possible that she, what we would call, the terms don't really apply, but we need to sort of find, she was sort of non-binary or she kind of presented as more male than, you know, there's sort of possibilities there. There's also the possibility that, yes, she was a warrior, but it's like there's no evidence of sort of healed injuries and there's no evidence of, you know, you often see sort of one arm is bigger than the other because they're used to wielding weapons.

23:15so you don't have that it's possible that say her father was a warrior and she's the only surviving child or something and so therefore she becomes the encapsulation of that warrior lineage, there's all sorts of possibilities, it doesn't make it I think it makes it more exciting we don't know, we have this fascinating burial and science has gone it's not what you think and now we've got question marks and question marks are exciting but we can't pin it down, there could be multiple identities to this person or one But it's really interesting. And that's how archaeological science is changing quite a lot of what we think of the Vikings in some ways.

23:51I guess what's so interesting also about history is like we're always reading it through our own very partial lens. And I think we're in a moment now where like we probably want to go the other way and have women as like these like total independent badasses. Because a we're sort of like in a feminist rewriting of history. but also I think there's also an element of like men find hot Viking women wielding swords titillating. Yeah, it's definitely a niche corner of the internet that's dedicated to that. Yeah, so it is simultaneously like a feminist reading of history but also quite a patriarchal one.

24:31Yeah, the lads want blunt warriors. Yeah, with like sort of like shells over their boobs or something. Yeah, but I think what we've learned so far, But women could be all sorts of different things. Yeah, exactly. And the evidence points in different directions. And we like that place on record that women can be all sorts of things. The Nuance Window!

24:57Time now for the Nuance Window. This is the part of the show where Chloe and I weave in the dinghyak for two minutes while Dr. Eleanor spins us a yarn about something we need to know about Viking women. My stopwatch is ready. You have two minutes. Take it away, Dr. Eleanor. I think Chloe's pretty much done it for me because I want to pick up on exactly that last point that you've been talking about. And it ties us back also to the images that, you know, Greg, you conjured up at the beginning. It's sort of like Valkyrie shield maidens, hotness or not so hot. You know, it's like it's feminist and it's also sort of quite reductive.