In 2017, DNA testing of a tenth century burial from Birka in Sweden showed that a grave long considered to be a man’s belonged to a woman. The grave (Bj 581) contained two shields, a sword, an axe, two lances, twenty-five armour piercing arrows, a fighting knife, two horses and gaming pieces, and two horses with riding gear . While many seized the news with enthusiasm as proof of a historical warrior woman, others reacted with anger or scepticism. The evidence does not fit with many people’s perceptions of a woman’s place in tenth century society. The burial of women with weapons is not unique in the tenth century, although they are very unusual. Impressive arrays of military gear accompanied female burials discovered at Aunvoll and Solør in Norway. Further research will probably yield more examples. Naturally, this raises questions about sex and gender. Could the woman at Birka have lived socially as a man without the knowledge of wider society, like other examples of women who engaged in warfare by adopting a male persona in European history? If so, the discovery that she was a woman in death did not prevent burial with full honour. Another possibility is that the Birka woman was recognised as fulfilling a military role normally associated with men. As grave goods and gender do not always ‘match’ according to our social perceptions (i.e. weapons are not exclusive to men), grave goods may have been selected to reveal more about social status than social gender. So was it possible for women to become military leaders in the tenth century?
Dr Clare Downham, Women and military power in the tenth century (2019)
Artist's sketching of grave Bj 581 in Birka, Sweden
For further explanations on the subject, I highly recommend Adrienne Mayor’s work, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (2014) who speaks a lot about the tendency to determine quickly the gender of a grave’s corpse based on the furniture in it, and so to see males whereas there is in fact women.
