That JORVIK Viking Thing Podcast

Women in the Viking Age with Prof Judith Jesch

February 16, 2021 Miranda Schmeiderer, Judith Jesch
That JORVIK Viking Thing Podcast
Women in the Viking Age with Prof Judith Jesch
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Were women in the Viking Age they're stereotypically medieval subservient housewives, or were they're liberated feminists with land and property running around divorcing their husbands? Where did these two interpretations tend to come from and is either of them accurate?

Learn all this and more as we speak to Professor Judith Jesch, professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, and author of numerous articles and books on the Vikings, including a book called "Women in the Viking Age."

Listen and enjoy, and please consider leaving us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!

Miranda  00:00

Hi, and welcome to That Jorvik Viking Thing Podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Schmeiderer. In Viking times, a Thing was a gathering a place where leaders and warriors could meet and talk. In the 21st century, our Thing is a virtual place where Viking academics and enthusiasts from around the world can come together to share knowledge. So hold on to your helmets as we learn more about Vikings on That Jorvik Viking Thing Podcast. 

Today we're joined by Professor Judith Jesch, professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, and author of numerous articles and books on the Vikings, including a book called "Women in the Viking Age." Today, she's going to be talking with us about just that: Viking women. Hi, Judith, thank you so much for being with us today. 

Prof Judith Jesch  00:59

Hello. 

Miranda  01:00

So I think you're we'll start with something basic. First of all, for a lot of people, the term Viking women may sound a bit like an oxymoron. The image of Vikings in popular culture tends to skew more towards depictions of men. How accurate is that conception of Vikings? And what roles did women typically occupy in the Viking Age?

Prof Judith Jesch  01:20

Okay, well, there's a lot of things to unpick in your question. I mean, the first thing I would say is that actually, in popular culture, there's been an increasing interest in Viking women, exactly as you might call them. So that's something that's changed in the last 10 years or so. But we'll come back to that question in a moment, I think. In terms of the oxymoron, well, a lot depends on what you think the word Viking means. There are different ways of understanding that word. I generally prefer to think either  of Vikings generally without specifying whether they're male or female, and they can be many different things, or just talk about the Viking Age, which is a particular period from the 8th to the 11th century, and then people did things in that historical period that we that we call the Viking Age. So depending on how you define all of those will depend on whether you think liking women are an oxymoron. 

Prof Judith Jesch  02:25

The more specific question you asked, is I think a bit easier to answer - although it depends, again, on how you define Vikings and what you're really talking about. It really is a problem, you know, what exactly do you mean by Vikings, because it's a 300 years of history. Geographically, it could cover from Russia in the eastern North America, and the Western and probably different things went on in different places. But in terms of women's roles, I mean, most people lived either a very agricultural life, or they lived in what we might call towns, or at very least trading centers where they engaged in trade and craft, or they might have been migrating to other places, and women would play a part in all of those enterprises. And I think the way I like to see it is that most of those enterprises were common, you know, people did them in families or in groups. And certainly the families and often the groups would include women. 

Prof Judith Jesch  03:32

Within those families and groups, women might have different roles. So on a farm, women would be more tending to work inside the household. But they did also have to get involved. All hands had to be on deck at harvest time and things like that. In craft and trade, women played a role in might what might be seen as a small family business, perhaps. Even the raiding armies, there is evidence that some of those had women and children with them so that they were kind of mobile communities rather than armies, exactly, as we imagine them. So I think women were involved in most of the things that went on in the Viking Age. But within those, I think the gender roles were very often fairly strictly divided.

Miranda  04:28

Amazing. That's a perfect answer. Thank you. For our next question, there tends to be two opposing images. When people think of women in the Viking Age they're either stereotypically medieval subservient housewives, or they're liberated feminists with land and property running around divorcing their husbands. Where did these two interpretations tend to come from and is either of them accurate?

Prof Judith Jesch  04:52

Where do they come from? I would say the first one comes from the 1950s and the second one from the 1970s. The idea of the subservient housewife is, you know, I don't quite remember the 1950s but we know enough about it to know that that is very much the era of you know women getting new Hoover's and washing machines and things and the housewife was a very specific kind of person. I think being a housewife in the Viking Age was a completely different matter. As a housewife in the Viking Age, you not only had to do the cooking, the cleaning, the bringing up of the children, you also had to produce the food from the animals and plants that were grown on the farm before you could cook it, you had to actually make the clothing that you clothed people in before you had to wash their clothing. So you know, they would have to spin the wool and weave it into cloth, they would have to make linen from flax, which is very, very demanding, physically demanding job. So all of those things had to be done - most of those things were done by women. And depending on the size of the household, I suppose in a very small household, a poor woman would have to do it all by herself. In larger households, the housewife would be the mistress of the household, the person in charge of other women doing all these jobs. So not really a subservient role at all, a really quite fundamental one to the survival of the household. 

Prof Judith Jesch  06:36

The idea of Viking women as liberated feminists who could own land and property and divorce their husbands, certainly, there is evidence that women could own land and property, there is evidence that they could divorce their husbands. How common this was, is not very clear. And I suspect it varied enormously in different places, and different times. And I don't think the idea of being a feminist was just not a concept that people had in the Viking Age, I think it was very definitely a patriarchal society, I think there's no doubt about that. But within that patriarchal society, women did have their role. They did have respect. And I think there were various things they could do. In terms of their possibilities as human beings, I would say that, that the options open to them were at least as much dependent on the social class that they were born into as their gender. So high status women really had quite a lot of possibilities and options, lower status women had none really. So I think you mustn't just see it as a matter of gender, but also as a matter of social class that the society was really quite divided in that way. So the answer to your question, Miranda, is that neither of those interpretations is accurate, and the truth, as usual, I'm afraid is really quite complicated.

Miranda  08:14

Going towards the more liberated feminist side of things, shield maidens have taken on a life of their own in popular culture lately, and a lot of burials have recently been reinterpreted as Viking warrior women. Do you think these burials are evidence of mythological shield maidens? Or is this just a case of people seeing what they want to see?

Prof Judith Jesch  08:35

Okay, I think that there are two different things I want to say in answer to that question. The first one is to do with shield maidens. Actually, I've literally just finished writing an article about shield maidens and I would like to argue that shield maidens is a term we should reserve for what you call mythological, or I would say possibly literary imagined figures. And in this article, which hasn't been published yet, I argue that the shield maidens of much of Old Norse literature are derived from exposure to the idea of Amazons from classical literature. So they're not a real phenomenon in any sense. They're a literary imagined phenomenon. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  09:24

Whereas when archaeologists are interpreting burials, they're not really talking about shield maidens, they're suggesting that the women in those burials were warriors. Now, I'd say two things there. One is that I wouldn't agree that a lot of burials have recently been reinterpreted as Viking warrior women. There's one very well known case in Birka and then there are a few others which are perhaps less clear. So it's not a widespread phenomenon - not yet. Although I know some archaeologists are beavering away on burials see if they can find more warrior women because they think that perhaps we've gone wrong in interpreting any burial with weapons as that of a warrior. Now, of course, I would argue that the difficulty is what do you mean by a warrior? Just because a woman has been buried with weapons, does that necessarily mean she was a warrior, and what is a warrior? I think, in the period we're talking about, a lot of men certainly were armed and able to use weapons without necessarily being full time paid warriors, especially if you were a merchant or something, you have to defend yourself and your wares. So there, there could be other reasons for why women are buried with weapons. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  11:03

And then of course, the identification of the skeletons is female, because the basic problem here is that you have a burial with a skeleton, and then you have grave goods, and it's the grave goods that supposedly tell you something about the person buried there. And then in order to identify that skeleton as male or female, you can use a variety of techniques, osteology or ancient DNA, all of which are good indicators, but not necessarily 100% certain. So then that raises the question, did those items in the grave belong to that person? Or were there other possible reasons for putting them in there? And this is kind of thing archaeologists have been discussing for a long time, and they have a variety of opinions about it. It's a matter of interpretation, I think. I'm not actually an archaeologist. So I wouldn't want to comment on the more technical side of what archaeologists are finding in these graves. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  12:08

But then once you've got the facts, comes the interpretation. And it's the interpretation that I think everyone can get involved in a discussion of - what does it mean if a skeleton that the scientists tell us is female or was female when she was alive, is buried with weapons and what kind of weapons. A sword, I think, is actually quite an unusual feature. And normally, we would, in our traditional interpretations, expect swords to be buried with men, it's the kind of quintessential male weapon, but then there are other kinds of weapons. There's bows and arrows and axes, which might have other purposes than just being a warrior. A bow and arrow might be used in hunting, and we do know that aristocratic women liked to go hunting. An axe might be the housewife's most useful tool when she needed to go out and get firewood to do the cooking. So again, I think there's lots of interesting questions to be discussed about these and I look forward to reading more of the archaeologists' reinterpretations of some of these burials.

Miranda  13:27

Amazing. Thank you. You've done a great deal of work at translating and interpreting sagas, how useful would you say that sagas are as a historical source when discussing the roles of women in the Viking Age?

 Prof Judith Jesch  13:40

The short answer is very useful. But here comes the much longer answer. First of all, there is again, I'm sorry to bang on always about questions of definition, but I think it's quite important there. What do you mean by sagas? Well, sagas are long prose narratives composed mainly in Iceland from the 12th century onwards. And some of them are highly fictional, some of them tend more to seem historical. And there are many subgenres of sagas and many of those subgenres are not really relevant to what we're talking about now. So there was this great flowering of prose narrative literature in medieval Iceland, basically, and Iceland, as you know, came into being as a result of the Viking Age, so people in the Viking Age emigrated to this otherwise uninhabited island. And when they, a couple hundred years, later became Christian and learn to write the Latin alphabet and to write manuscripts, then they developed a very large and complex literature which is one of the glories of World Literature. And many of these texts are just wonderful literary texts. And it's easy, and many people do, just to think of them as literary texts and not worry too much about what they're actually about. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  15:17

However, what I find interesting is that several of the subgenres, particularly what we call the Sagas of Icelanders, and the Sagas of Kings, and there are quite a lot of those. I mean, there are 40 Sagas of Icelanders, and then their associated short stories as well. They're set in the Viking Age. So they're set in a period that, by the time the sagas were written, is in the past. It's history. And yet, that's seems to be what the medieval Icelanders were absolutely fascinated by, their history really. A lot of the sagas of Icelanders start with the main characters arriving in Iceland in the settlement period. The King Sagas tell us about the Viking Age kings of Norway and Denmark. Some of these, particularly the king sagas, are based on poetry that we think was actually composed in an oral context in the Viking Age, and then preserved until the saga writers decided to use it as a kind of source for their sagas. So the exploits of kings were preserved in this poetry, and then the sagas were written around that poetry but also citing that poetry. So in that case, you could distinguish between the poetry, which is, I would argue, a source from the Viking Age itself, and then the sagas which take some information from the poetry but build a narrative around that. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  17:01

And as I said, as well as the sagas, there's also two very fascinating works of history, the Landnamabok , which is the book of settlements, which describes the settlement of Iceland, it's a kind of catalogue of 400+ of the first settlers of Iceland and their family relationships and where they settled. And then there's a very well known book, the Islendingabok, the book of the Icelanders, is one of the earliest works of Icelandic literature which also describes the settlement and earliest history of the island of Iceland. So all of these put together show that there was a lot of knowledge about the Viking Age past in medieval Iceland. Some of it derived from poetry, some of it probably derived from genealogies, the Icelanders are very keen on knowing who their ancestors were. And then there's also this great flowering of writing of sagas and prose narratives. And somehow all this comes together and creates the sagas and somewhere in there, there is what they thought happened in the past. And some of that could be true. I think, you know, I think they had quite good information. But they also were very good at telling stories. And once you start telling a story, then you know, you perhaps move away a little bit from what actually happened. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  18:27

So what I would say, is two things. First of all, I wouldn't ever totally dismiss anything they say in the sagas, because after all, they're a lot closer to the Viking Age than we are. Then I think it's a rather specialist thing, you need to sit down with these texts. And I've previously argued for what I call a kind of archaeology of the text, you need to work out what is the bit that the 13th century author is kind of adding to his sources, what bit might come from his sources? And so you can't just sit down and read a saga in translation and use that as evidence for the Viking Age, as I'm afraid quite a lot of people do. They think oh, yes, well, I've read a saga, so I know what happens in the Viking Age, it's not that simple. I think you need specialist training, you need to know the manuscript background, you need to read the sagas in the original language, you need to have an understanding of how these texts developed, this thing that I've called the archaeology of the text. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  19:38

So having done all that, how does that relate to women? Well, a lot of the sagas do focus on male activity basically, this goes back to what I said earlier about patriarchy. But nevertheless, there are female character in the sagas. Sometimes these female characters seem to be presented in a slightly misogynistic way, which might come down to the authors of the sagas. But at the same time they do exist. And again, just thinking back to Iceland - I mean, Iceland was uninhabited. And if only male Vikings had gone there, then there would be no people living there today. Women are kind of fundamental to the settlement of Iceland. They may or may not have been involved in writing the sagas or reading them, or having them read to them is less clear. Although we kind of imagine, although the sagas are written in manuscripts, people didn't really sit huddled up in the corner with a manuscript and an apple reading the sagas. They probably had them read to them. So one person would read out to a larger group of people, and this might have happened in the larger farmsteads of Iceland, but it could also have happened in monasteries. And we don't know exactly where this happened. So I'm not sure women had much input into what the sagas actually say. But they are there, they're even - when I was talking earlier about poetry, there's even a few poems by or about women, which are really quite interesting. So I think with careful study, and using the right kinds of sagas, you can say things about women in the Viking Age.

Miranda  21:47

Amazing. Thank you. That was a very thorough answer. I really appreciate that. What some of the problems might be with applying our modern understanding of sex and gender to historical men and women?

Prof Judith Jesch  22:03

I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a really interesting question. Certainly, in my lifetime, people's approaches to sex and gender have changed in terms of how we studied the past. I mean, when I published "Women in the Viking Age" exactly 30 years ago, it was very much a case of just trying to persuade people that women actually existed in Viking Age. Whereas the, at the moment, younger scholars in particular, but all kinds of scholars are more interested in "well, what is the nature of sex and gender in the Viking Age?" And I suppose I start from the idea that certainly sex and gender is a fundamental aspect of the human condition that it affects everybody, whether you subscribe to a traditional binary division, or whether you think in a more fluid, kind of non-binary way - either way, you're still thinking about these things. What I would say is that if we think of sex and gender more as a continuum than as a binary, I think that knowledge is something that has come to us with a better scientific understanding of human beings and their bodies.

 Prof Judith Jesch  23:33

I tend to think that the Vikings - two things I mean, the social norms that people subscribe to in the Viking Age, and then there's what people felt and could imagine. And the human imagination is a wonderful thing. People can imagine all kinds of things. So people could imagine non-binary situations and transgressing boundaries of sex and gender. And there's a lot of evidence in some of the poetry, in the stories that they were interested in those matters. Whether that makes the Vikings Queer, as some people are arguing, I think it is bit more difficult to argue, I think there is evidence that the social norms were certainly very binary. And the evidence for that comes in various ways. For example, the naming system. This is something that isn't often mentioned. The Old Norse language is a language that has grammatical gender. So all personal names are grammatically either masculine or feminine. And as far as we can tell, men had names that were grammatically masculine and women had names that were grammatically feminine. And I think that that's such a basic division there that that either reflects or perhaps even creates the social norm, that you're either a man or a woman. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  25:03

But there are other signs, obviously. The laws, for example, this is very interesting, a law in the Icelandic law code. Of course, the trouble with laws, you never know whether they were actually enforced, do they reflect something real? Or is it just somebody's idea of what people ought to be doing? But there seems to be a law against people wearing clothing appropriate to the other gender. And it's kind of described in a curious way. So I don't know what you would do if you saw a man wearing a dress or a woman wearing trousers or something, did you rush off to the assembly and bring a case against that person for wearing the wrong kind of clothing? And what archaeology shows us is that there are two different kinds of clothing, which we then assume are male clothing and female clothing. So I think there's a lot of evidence for the social norm being a binary division. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  26:01

Human imagination, though, could, as in the case of the shield maidens I was talking about earlier, but also in the case of some of the gods. The Norse gods like Odin and Loki do seem to transgress gender boundaries - Loki very spectacularly so. But he also transgresses other boundaries, he becomes a horse. And in having transformed himself into a mare, actually then ultimately gives birth to Odin's eight legged horse Sleipnir. So there's all kinds of things going on beyond just kind of gender boundaries being transgressed. Plus, of course, there would have been individuals who might, from a medical point of view, been slightly indeterminate, or people who might have chosen to live the life of another gender, but without the advantages of modern trans people who can have all kinds of medical interventions to enable that. So it's a different, it's both different and the same as today. I mean, I think human beings are human beings, and always have been so. 

 Prof Judith Jesch  27:19

But I think, in terms of how people conceptualize the world, I think their everyday world, they saw pretty much in a binary sort of way, but in the imaginary world of mythology, and the gods and so on, perhaps they were able to indulge these ideas of looser boundaries. So I think in terms of how we study the past, I think, you know, our new ways of thinking in the present, also shed light on the past, but I also think we have to recognize that human beings and life generally has changed over the last thousand years. So I don't think we should assume that everything was how we would like it to be. And this comes back to your question about feminism, and so on. I do think life was very different in those days that underneath it, human beings, had some of the same ideas and desires and imagined similar things, but the way it actually happened in everyday life, kind of varies enormously throughout history. And the interesting thing about studying the past is trying to pin down how it was in that particular period.

Miranda  28:36

Wow, amazing. Well, thank you so much for helping us to have a better understanding of women in the Viking Age. We really appreciate it.

Prof Judith Jesch  28:44

Thank you. It's great to talk to you. Bye, you too.

Miranda  28:47

Bye. Thanks again, Judith. It was wonderful to have you. You can find Judith Jesch on Twitter @JudithJesch and you can find her book, "Women in the Viking Age" in all good bookstores. 

Speaking of books, That Jorvik Viking Thing podcast is an Audible Associate. If you sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial using the code VikingThing-21, you'll get a free audiobook download, and you'll also be supporting your favourite Viking podcast. Even better, the audio book is yours to keep forever, no strings attached. This time we recommend "Gudrun: Series 1-4" by Lucy Katherine. A full cast BBC Viking epic inspired by the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga, starring Kate Phillips as Gudrun, a young woman in 11th century Iceland, who must forge her own path through a world of unearthly beauty yet uncompromising harshness. 

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That Jorvik Viking Thing Podcast is a production of the Jorvik Group and York Archaeological Trust. Researched by Miranda Schmeiderer and Ashley Fisher with research support from Bede Rogerson and Philip Roebuck. Produced by Ashley Fisher. Sound designed and edited by Miranda Schmeiderer.

Introduction
Beginning of Interview
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Conclusion