Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World (2024)

Not a subject I knew a lot about going into this non fiction. The audiobook was greatly narrated and intensely interesting and emersive to listen to. Find it very informative without feeling info dumping which is a huge plus when it comes to non fiction. Definitely a subject I want to read more about

Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir's Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World provides an overview of the lives of women in the Viking Age. There are few books out there which concentrate on this topic, and so this is a welcome update of Judith Jesch's Women in the Viking Age, which is now about 30 years old. Friðriksdóttir uses a woman's life cycle—from childhood to old age and death—to structure the book, and grounds her argument throughout in extensive engagement with the saga literature, as even the most cursory glance through the end notes would make clear.

Yet such a glance would also show a slightly puzzling lack of engagement with work on the history of medieval women other than that of Jesch or Jenny Jochens. There has been so much good scholarship produced on medieval women and their engagement with power, authority, artistic patronage, religion, etc, over the past thirty years. Even if much of that work isn't directly on the Viking Age, I think it would have provided a useful set of comparatives—something against which to test Friðriksdóttir's assertions about the gendered limits of women's power in this time and place. She appears to take a more minimalist view of such things than scholars of other elite medieval women—which would be fine, if it were clearer to me whether that's because she disagrees with them or because she does not have much grounding in their work. I've also got a couple of question marks about Friðriksdóttir's framing of the archaeological evidence.

I think this will be useful to refer back to when looking for moments in the sagas which have a particular thematic relevance in relation to women, but as a general overview it's not as authoritative as I was hoping for.

I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Full review to come.

You can find my review on my blog: http://allthebookblognamesaretaken.bl...

It somehow seemed fitting that while I was reading Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman, I was offered an Advance Review Copy of this. It almost seemed like fate. Perhaps the Norns were at work!

This is an impressively scholarly treatise about a fascinating topic. The author begins with the same mythological sources that Gaiman's tales are based on: the Elder (or Poetic) Edda and the Younger (or Prose) Edda. She draws from them what they have to tell us about the way the writers viewed the women of the viking age, via their portrayal of Valkyries and goddesses. Later, she mines the sagas and the archaeological evidence to give a picture of the position and lives of women of various social strata.

Much of this is necessarily speculation, as we have no writings from the point of view of the women themselves, but it's thorough and intelligent speculation.

Parts of this book were definitely 5-star, but I've dropped the rating to 4 simply because there is a lot of repetition, which made some sections a bit hard to get through. But overall, it's excellent, and I recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

Vraiment très instructif et intéressant tout en restant prudent car comme l'autrice le précise, on ne peut que s'appuyer sur les sagas (qui sont donc fantaisistes) et les quelques fouilles archéologiques.
C'est très bien raconté et expliqué, avec une façon de voir moderne... sans être TROP moderne.
De quoi se faire une meilleure (et réaliste) idée sur ces femmes du Nord qui ont, elle aussi à leur époque, souffert du patriarcat tout en ayant pourtant une place majeure voire même fondamentale au sein de la civilisation viking.

For the most part, the author carefully marshals and weighs evidence and notes how little we know for certain. She tries to observe the limits of what we can know from archaeology, runestones, and myth and sagas reduced to writing much later, by Christian scholars.

She also regularly speculates that Viking women must have been just like us and felt or done or experienced X - often something a bit simplistic and obvious.

So ultimately, while it was fun to see discussion of familiar characters and scenes from various sagas, the overall effect, for me, was not deeply satisfying.

As a side note, I was a little disappointed not to see, in the discussion of old age and death, any discussion of one of my favorite passages from Laxdæla Saga. Olaf Hoskuldsson is his father's illegitimate son by a very favored slave-girl/concubine, Melkorka, who happens to have been an Irish princess by birth. Olaf confirms his mother’s royal lineage and then accompanies his maternal grandfather to Dublin. Inevitably, “the news that the king was accompanied by his grandson, the son of his daughter who had been taken prisoner at the age of fifteen years, caused great stir. No one was more affected by the news than Melkorka’s nurse. Despite being bedridden with old age and illness she rose and went, without the aid of her stick, to meet Olaf. [...] Olaf received her with open arms, set her upon his lap and told her that her former charge was living in comfort in Iceland.” (Laxdæla Saga 309-10). “Tears of joy came to her eyes” on recognizing Melkorka’s tokens, and “her happiness was doubled by seeing this outstanding young son” (310). Moreover, even though Olaf and the king do not remain in Dublin, but go off fighting, “The old woman enjoyed good health for the rest of that winter” (id.).

In this regard, I'd note Friðriksdóttir does, in fact, discuss Olaf's mother Melkorka (who is certainly worth discussing!). While I don't fault her for not including Melkorka's unnamed old nurse, I do think it's a lovely story that shows a tender relationship between a promising young warrior and an ailing old woman he has never met, a woman surely of little importance socially, who are united in their mutual affection for his mother.

‘The Women of the Viking World’

This book examines the roles that women played in the Viking world. Ms Friðriksdóttir writes about Valkyries: the female supernatural beings that have the power to choose who lives and dies on the battlefield. Viking myths about Valkyries seek to make the pain and suffering of war worthwhile. In these myths, death is not futile, it is divine destiny.

But who were the women of the Viking world? What were their roles, and how can we learn more about them?

‘This book will introduce readers to the diverse and fascinating texts recorded in medieval Iceland. A culture able to imagine women in all kinds of role carrying power, not just in this world, but as we have already seen, as pulling the strings in the otherworld as well.’

Ms Friðriksdóttir draws on historical and archaeological evidence to shed light on the different roles women might have played. There was more to the ‘Viking Age’ than battle and plunder. I enjoyed reading about the different sagas and the different archaeological finds, about the diversity of life. Ms Friðriksdóttir writes a history of women, with chapters reflecting different stages of life. There are six chapters (as well as an introduction and an epilogue):

1. Infancy and Childhood
2. Between Two Worlds: Teenage Girls
3. Adulthood
4. Pregnancy and Childbirth
5. Widows
6. Old Age and Death

And, for those who want more, there is an extensive bibliography and several illustrations.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in women’s history, as well as anyone with an interest in the ‘Viking Age’.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Une véritable mine d’or. Un ouvrage d’une érudition folle mais qui parvient à garder la dimension didactique nécessaire à une lecture fluide et passionnante. Les divers épisodes décrits sont contextualisés et résumés pour permettre la compréhension facilitée des néophytes tandis que les différentes thèses avancées sont corroborées par des relevés historiques (archéologiques ou topographiques). Cette lecture, qui m’a pris du temps parce qu’elle a été une lecture active, nécessitant prise de notes et lectures annexes, a été véritablement passionnante du début à la fin. Je recommande à toute personne qui s’interrogerait sur la place (réelle, et non fantasmée) de la femme à l’ère viking.

What an informative look into what life was like for women in the Viking Age. I was enthralled by Johanna's writing style and really enjoyed getting to know the myths vs realities of living in this society.

Anyone with an interest in the experience of women in the Viking Age may have already come across a book on the subject by Judith Jesch which really broke the focus on Men during this era of history.
Well this book is a worthy Successor to the same goal and it is a remarkable achievement.
Johanna takes the rather logical route of exploring the lives of Norse Women (across the whole of Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland) from their childhood and adolescence, into the role of wife and mothers, and ending with their role as the Elderly of the community and household and how they were treated and respected in death.
It is an astounding peice of research, done with passion, written clear and concise and FULL of so many stories found in sagas, poetry, based on archeological finds and even mythology too.
I implore anyone with a feminist interest in history, especially the Viking Age, to read this book.
You will not regret it. Bravo Johanna, Bravo!

Sentimientos encontrados con este libro. Por una parte, tiene detrás mucho trabajo de documentación y aporta muchísima bibliografía. Por otra, no aporta nada que no esté ya en los libros de Cat Jarman o Neil Price. El principal defecto es que las fuentes que utiliza la autora son mayoritariamente literarias y no arqueológicas. El 90% de ejemplos son textuales y a menudo se convierte en un compendio de paráfrasis de las sagas nórdicas. El problema es que la autora trata de usarlas para reforzar sus hipótesis dejando de lado los ejemplos que harían lo contrario. Utilizar a personajes literarios para extrapolar cómo eran las personas doscientos años antes de que se escribieran esas sagas es... complicado. La autora no obvia este hecho, advierte que las sagas no son fuentes históricas fiables, pero saca conclusiones de ellas de todas maneras.

Me da mucha rabia, porque estoy de acuerdo con la autora, incluso cuando hace juicios de valor. Creo que las mujeres nórdicas tenían más libertad que en otros lugares y que debía haber muchas que lucharan por mejorar su situación. El problema es que no tenemos pruebas de ello y no podemos darlo como cosa hecha en una investigación sin aportar esas pruebas. Especular acerca de cómo se sentían las personas del pasado es bastante complicado. Quiero decir que no podemos saber si quienes construyeron las pirámides estaban felices de honrar al faraón o pensaban que había que comerse a los ricos.

Qué es este libro:

Una recopilación de escenas en las sagas en las que las mujeres tienen una especial relevancia. Como tal, es completo y aporta muchísima información valiosa, especialmente sobre sagas que no tienen traducción al castellano.

Qué no es:

Un estudio detallado de cómo vivían las mujeres en la época vikinga.

En resumen: es un buen complemento a otros libros sobre la materia, pero gran parte de las conclusiones hay que cogerlas con pinzas.

This is a fantastic examination of the sources from literature and archaeology about the life and role of Viking Age women. My one criticism is that some passages verbatim retell sagas, useful in context, but laborious to read when trying to get to the analysis.

The author looks at the lives of women in the Viking era from cradle to the grave. She mostly uses the various sagas to glean information and to compare and contrast how women were represented in the stories. An interesting book.

This book busts into the myth of the valkyrie, the mythological women selected by the gods to usher only the bravest warriors to the afterlife, were they battle all day and feast all night. Many of these legends are rooted in the real lives of Viking women. This was a fascinating exploration of the intersection of archeology and literature to examine the true experiences that shaped these stories.

An interesting introduction to the Viking world through the eyes of women. I would love to read some saga's now

Interesting look at the social expectations and identities of Viking women as portrayed in the sagas and mythology. I had been hoping for more of a practical exploration of how women of different classes would have spent their days, but the book focuses primarily on written sources without much archaeological information.

It was a fascinating and informative read that made me discover new things about the women in the Viking world and made me think.
It's well researched, well written and it's an engrossing read.
An excellent book highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Thoroughly enjoyed this read. I have been wanting to read more Norse related fiction or non fiction for some time. This is a beautiful rendition of various real world facts and sagas from the past mainly highlighting the plight and tales of viking women from both the revolutionary new religion of Christianity and the heavy Heath/pagan days.

I found this incredibly insightful as to how viking folk potentially lived and breathed in their time. The way this book is written with its little sub chapters on various categories from children, marriage and death really broke down what life could have been like for the women of its time. The writing i found was not at all dull and was quite fresh to read something factual that was not going to make me fall asleep or loose interest entirely. The references to some modern day, films, tv shows, plays, operas and books really showed how we still relate to the vikings of old.

I was wow'ed by the lengths some of the females discussed in this , would go to for vengeance, blood feuds, power, sex, love and family. I believe we can relate to some of the tales told in this more than we realize especially given our ever fluctuating society, much like the vikings exploring and plying trade from around the world !

If you’re familiar with the (mostly fictional) Sagas you will not gain any new knowledge from this sleep fest.

Sometime during the second half of the 11th century, a Swedish woman named Gerlög went to Torbjörn the Skald and asked him to do something for her. Gerlög’s daughter Inga had recently died, and as Inga’s only living relative, Gerlög came to inherit her own daughter. To avoid any accusations of having come into her inheritance by unlawful means, Gerlög needed to make a public statement of the course of events that led up to her inheriting Inga. Torbjörn the Skald was knowledgeable in runes, and this is the message that Gerlög hired him to carve into the bedrock.

Interpret, you! Germund was given Gerlög as his wife when she was a maiden. Then they had a son, before he (Germund) drowned. And the son died after. Then she was given Gudrik as her husband. He… this… Then they had children. But only one girl survived; her name was Inga. Her Ragnfast in Snottsta was given as his wife. Soon after he died and then the son. And the mother (Inga) came to inherit her son. Then she was given Erik as her husband. Soon after she died. Then Gerlög came to inherit Inga, her daughter. Torbjörn the Skald carved the runes.

This inscription is known as the Hillersjö Hill (Hillersjöhällen) and is included in Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s new book Valkyrie. The Women of the Viking World (Bloomsbury, 2020). Valkyrie is a history of the Viking Age that places the women of the time at the center of the story.

The Viking Age is commonly viewed as a time dominated by men where women are barely visible, but Viking society couldn’t function without a tight relationship between men and women. To run a farm, both men and women were needed, which means that women participated in those supposedly all-male Viking expeditions that invaded and settled all the way from Newfoundland in North America to the shores of the Caspian Sea in Central Asia. Because without both men and women working together, those settlements wouldn’t have survived and the iconic Viking ships wouldn’t have been able to set sail.

Jóhanna’s contribution to the study of Viking history and society is immense. In her book, she successfully views the Viking Age from the point of view of its women and in doing so, she refreshingly and unapologetically pushes Viking men to the side.

Her use of source material is broad. In addition to using the sagas, she also uses rune carvings, grave goods, and other archaeological artifacts. Personally, I appreciate the inclusion of the rune carvings seeing as they are the only texts where the Vikings speak to us directly, many of them women like Gerlög. Rune carvings are mainly found in Sweden and using them as source material broadens the view of the Viking world, which all too often ends up focused on the British Isles, France, and Iceland in translation.

Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s Valkyrie. The Women of the Viking World provides a new perspective on old knowledge by letting Viking Age women take center stage and speak to us in their own voices.

This is a well-researched, informative book on the role of women in Viking society. With plenty of evidence from the sagas, the author provides a complete picture from birth to death of the various roles women performed in the Viking age. The only things that prevented me from giving it 5 stars are:
1. The book is a bit short. It only has 200 pages of text. (Not including index and bibliography) I felt that in many instances the book could have gained from a bit more length. In particular, I would have loved to have had more of the sagas themselves represented. In many instances the author will say "In XYZ saga, this happened", without actually giving us the lines from the saga. I felt the actual lines of the sagas could have been added.
2. The book has a slightly scholarly feel to it. Considering that the author drew from the sagas for her sources, I found that the writing was not lofty or prosaic like the sagas--it was more clinical.
3. The book is a bit jumpy in its references. There are a lot of instances where the author will mention someone or an incident, and then provide a reference to a previous or future chapter.

Overall though, an excellent book.

This was a well-written, carefully researched book on the role of women during the Viking Age. Whether supernatural Valkyrie or goddess, human wife or crone, women played as essential role in ensuring a successful society- although what we may think of when we hear 'Viking Age' is only men in battle. Through close examinations of ancient sagas, archaeological finds, and more, Jóhanna Katrin Fridriksdóttir weaves a fascinating history of women, from birth to death, and the various roles the would have (or might have) played in Viking society. Despite the clearly scholarly research done, the book is written in a way that the average person can access it- understandable and not in an overly scholarly manner. A book I would recommend to any history lover, those fascinated with Viking history, or women's history in society.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

I think the topic is very cool but was very difficult to follow the stories since we jumped around from story to story. It may have been easier for me to follow if the stories were told wholly in the beginning and referenced later.

“Revenge is more important to her than the life of her children. Such an utterly uncompromising view, where your own flesh and blood is collateral damage in the zero sum game of honor…”

“This ecstatic reception of the study [of a woman warrior] is a story of the present as much as the past, emblematic of a contemporary shift to recover strong women who have often been unjustly erased from the history books. Our culture has a tendency to understand being powerful with being physically strong and able to subjugate others at least in a context like the viking age. So rather than adjusting and expanding our understanding of power in its many forms we get excited about women warriors who are strong like men.”

Really good book if you’re solely looking for a textual analysis of late medieval Icelandic Christian fiction and it’s views on women. But this isn’t what the book promises and the author shows a lack of knowledge of, or at least disregard for, non-Icelandic late-Iron Age and early Medieval sources, which would’ve been helpful, and probably altered several arguments. She also demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the Viking Age archaeological record. While criticism of the archaeological record is fine and at times necessary, this is done to an extreme while there is little to no source criticism of (and a clear over reliance on) Icelandic Christian texts for information on attitudes extant several centuries before they were written. When there is such source criticism, it is highly skewed, applied mostly to episodes that show female agency, while other texts are taken at face value. This clear bias is academically questionable, at best.

Friðriksdóttir's title uses Nordic sagas and mythology to extrapolate snippets of Scandinavian women from the eight to eleventh centuries. Topics such as work, marriage, war, death and child-rearing are analyzed with frequent reference to medieval texts and archaeological evidence. Friðriksdóttir is a realist by illustrating the agency of women in these affairs while acknowledging the intense focus on masculinity in the regional culture. Casual readers may have few reference points without first exploring various sagas, but efforts are made to introduce readers to these stories throughout the text. As a result, Valkyrie straddles the line between an accessible and academic work. It's best read an introductory book on the era before picking up this title. For those with a base knowledge, Valkyrie successfully sheds light on the dynamic roles of women during this fascinating period.

Valkyrie

This is very well-written and meticulously researched.....all the evidence is produced and discussed before conclusione are drawn. It is a very detailed analysis of what women's lives would have been like in the Viking Age. One particularly fascinating section was the discussion of exactly what the process of making a sail for a Viking longship entailed.....a very labour-intensive process. Textiles were entirely the province of women, and making sails was as essential as making cloth. The illustrations are well-chosen and beautifully riproduce.
One correction: THE RIDE OF THE VALKRIES is the opening of ACT III of Wagner's DIE WALKUERE, not the opening of the opera. Apart from that: well done!

Valkyria är en mycket spännande och intressant feministisk skildring av kvinnornas liv under vikingatiden och i de fornnordiska sagorna och myterna.

Boken lyfter fram berättelser och exempel ur hela livscykeln, från födelse, barndom och uppväxt, via giftermål, hushåll och moderskap, till änkeliv och död, men även ensamstående kvinnor finns omnämnda liksom trollkunniga, sejdkvinnor, hjältinnor, och självklart även livet efter döden.

En sak jag funderar på är det återkommande användandet av samma karaktärer från samma sagor i så många olika kapitel. Först kan man tro att det beror på ett smalt tillgängligt faktaunderlag, men referenslistan i slu*tet är bara den på 20 sidor, men det är bara en liten detalj och förtar inte att detta är en mycket läsvärd bok.

This insightful and authoritative work will make an excellent companion to Women in the Viking Age and Women in Old Norse Society: A Portrait. The author makes extensive use of the mythology, archaeology and sagas to provide a valuable look at how women were perceived in Viking society.

Johanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir provides a well researched scholarly but accessible text on the lives of women in ancient Viking society. The author draws her knowledge from the Sagas and archeological finds and expertly gives the reader a vivid vision of life from birth to death. Covering all aspects of status Friðriksdóttir also includes transgender societal norms and expectations. A fascinating read for fans of Norse mythology, Viking culture and Neil Gaiman fiction.

*eARC provided by the publisher and Netgalley

Actually a 3.5
This is a good book about the lives of women in the Viking era, told through both myths/literarure and history. The (slight) problem I had with it was that in each chapter, the reader is referred to other chapters as people and plots are re-brought up. It makes sense in that the chapters are done by age groups (birth through to death), but it’s still a bit confusing. I was also a bit annoyed by references to Game of Thrones, but those were minor; I just didn’t see the need for them.