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Vikings

Women

Women had a relatively free status in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, illustrated in the Icelandic Grágás and the Norwegian Frostating laws and Gulating laws. The paternal aunt, paternal niece and paternal granddaughter, referred to as odalkvinna, all had the right to inherit property from a deceased man. In the absence of male relatives, an unmarried woman with no son could inherit not only property but also the position as head of the family from a deceased father or brother. Such a woman was referred to as Baugrygr, and she exercised all the rights afforded to the head of a family clan—such as the right to demand and receive fines for the slaughter of a family member—until she married, by which her rights were transferred to her new husband.

After the age of 20, an unmarried woman, referred to as maer and mey, reached legal majority and had the right to decide her place of residence and was regarded as her own person before the law. An exception to her independence was the right to choose a marriage partner, as marriages were normally arranged by the family. Examinations of Viking Age burials suggests that women lived longer, and nearly all well past the age of 35, as compared to previous times. Female graves from before the Viking Age in Scandinavia holds a proportional large number of remains from women aged 20 to 35, presumably due to complications of childbirth.

Widows enjoyed the same independent status as unmarried women. A married woman could divorce her husband and remarry. It was also socially acceptable for a free woman to cohabit with a man and have children with him without marrying him, even if that man was married; a woman in such a position was called frilla.

There was no distinction made between children born inside or outside marriage: both had the right to inherit property after their parents, and there were no "legitimate" or "illegitimate" children. Women had religious authority and were active as priestesses (gydja) and oracles (sejdkvinna). They were active within art as poets (skalder) and rune masters, and as merchants and medicine women. They may also have been active within military office: the stories about shieldmaidens are unconfirmed, but some archaeological finds such as the Birka female Viking warrior may indicate that at least some women in military authority existed. These liberties gradually disappeared after the introduction of Christianity.

Quote 1: "The high‐status grave Bj 581 on Birka was the burial of a high ranking female Viking warrior—suggest that women, indeed, were able to be full members of male dominated spheres.” (Hedenstierna-Jonson, Charlotte, and Anna Kjellström “A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 164, no. 4, 2017, pp. 853-860. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23308.)

Quote 2: "The documentary sources, dating as they do from the Christian period, are notoriously slippery, but no reader of them can escape the impression that the new order entailed a radical remapping of gender in the north. More particularly, one has the impression that femaleness became more sharply defined and contained (the emergence of women-only religious orders is symptomatic of the new sensibility), and it seems indisputable the case that Norse culture assimilated notions . . . “masculinity” was rezoned, as it were, into territories previously occupied by “effeminacy” (and other category B traits). (This expansion of the masculine was presumably predicated on the fixing of the female and her relocation at a safe distance.)” (Clover, Carol J. “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe.” Speculum, vol. 68, no. 2, 1993, pp. 363-387. JSTOR. DOI: 10.2307/2864557.)