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Phase One & Two

Vikings

Fact: During the Viking Age the Norse homelands were gradually consolidated from smaller kingdoms into three larger kingdoms: Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

MLA Citation: Bagge, Sverre. “The Origins of the Scandinavian Kingdoms.” Cross and Scepter, Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. Cross and Scepter, 2016–02-09.

ISBN: 9780691169088

Quote: In absolute numbers, the population of Denmark has been estimated at more than 1 million, perhaps nearly 2 mil-lion in the early fourteenth century, that of Norway at between 350,00 and 500,000, and the Swedish population at somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000.

Phase Three

Clover, Carol J. “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe.” Speculum, vol.68, no. 2, 1993, pp. 363–387. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2864557?sid=primo&origin=crossref&seq=13#metadata_info_tab_contents

This scholarly article offers a look at the changing roles of women from pre-Christian to post-Christian Northern Europe. It covers the decay of female power in the face of Christianity. This work builds upon the perspectives of both gender and religion as it relates to Western History.

Hedenstierna-Jonson, et al. “A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol.164, no. 4, 2017. Pp. 853-860. Wiley Online Library, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23308

This scholarly article describes the finding of a female Viking warrior known as the Birka site. This discovery provided new evidence that women were recognized as valued soldiers and held positions of honor and leadership. This broadens the tradition view of gender in Western European History.

Phase Four

Fact 1 Paragraph: "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 indisputably the case that as Norse culture assimilated notions of weeping monks and fainting knights, "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"

Fact 1 Summary: Liberties of the viking women gradually disappeared after the introduction of Christianity.

Fact 2 Paragraph: A first osteological analysis done in the 1970ies identified the skeleton as a female, but this could not generate further discussion as the skeleton could not securely be associated to a context. When the sex identification and a proper contextualisation was made, and set in relation to the objects (Kjellström, 2016), questions were still raised if the martial objects in the grave mirrored the identity of the deceased. Similar associations of women buried with weapons have been dismissed, arguing that the armaments could have been heirlooms, carriers of symbolic meaning or grave goods reflecting the status and role of the family rather than the individual (Gardeła, 2013). Male individuals in burials with a similar material record are not questioned in the same way. Furthermore, an argument can be put forward that the grave originally may have held a second, now missing, individual. In which case, the weaponry could have been a part of that individual's grave furnishings, while the remaining female was buried without any objects. However, the distribution of the grave goods within the grave, their spatial relation to the female individual and the total lack of any typically female attributed grave artifacts disputes this possibility.

Fact 2 Summary: Some archaeological finds such as the Birka female Viking warrior may indicate that at least some women in military authority existed.

Article Section:

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. There may also have been female entrepreneurs, who worked in textile production. Women may also have been active within military office: the tales 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 of the viking women gradually disappeared after the introduction of Christianity.