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Post by legacyofthesword on Feb 25, 2019 19:44:32 GMT
The Norse peoples of the Viking age didn't really do cavalry (like, at all), so... I'm gonna put my bet on not a cavalry commander. As for female warrior: sure, seems like there's enough evidence to assume she was. Obviously we need to extensively check facts, gather more data, etc., etc.; but there's enough female warriors mentioned in the Sagas to at least show the idea existed in Norse society.
"Adding to these clues are the inclusion of a full gaming set, complete with three antler dice and 28 playing pieces, and the assumed warrior’s attire. As the authors write, complete game sets are often found in relation to Viking military leaders, while the textiles and tasseled cap worn by the individual are suggestive of cavalry commanders “under the immediate authority of a royal war-leader.”"
Uh... Hmm. I've studied Viking society for quite a while, and have yet to come across any evidence that tasseled hats and games were associated with commander status. Could be wrong, of course. And again, cavalry? Doesn't fit with any research I've ever seen. Again, could be wrong. It's an odd grave for sure - bows weren't used for war much either, and this article specifically mentions "armor piecing arrows". Maybe she's not even a Norse(wo)man at all: maybe a traveling steppe warrior?
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Post by MOK on Feb 25, 2019 20:56:18 GMT
Bows were used for war (as well as sport) among the Norse, they were just rarely a decisive factor and not fashionable with the warrior elite. There are enough mentions in period and later sources of not only archers but entire archer units from certain regions (often in the context of proving their worth after being looked down upon by the rest of the soldiery; e.g. Ubbi's death at Brávellir) to show that archery in warfare was clearly not unknown nor even all that uncommon. It just wasn't generally seen as particularly prestigious or noteworthy.
PS. And while cavalry in the sense of mounted combat wasn't a thing, indeed, horses were bred and reared for work and riding as well as a form of prizefighting, and good ones were highly prized. So I think in the Norse context being buried with horses should be taken not so much as an indication of warlike profession or high military rank as of great wealth and status in general.
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Post by Gunnar Wolfgard on Feb 25, 2019 21:08:27 GMT
The horses probably have nothing to do with her being a warrior. They put a variety of things in the grave with them for their use in the after life even money. The horses could have been just horses she used for transportation.
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Post by Timo Nieminen on Feb 25, 2019 21:40:21 GMT
This is exactly the danger I was speaking of. No, it does not mean that if she was in fact a warrior, then it means there were more. It ONLY means that we have ONE female warrior. It could also mean that she was unique, and there were no others. We don't have enough data to determine this. We have more data, if you're willing to include historical sources. Saxo Grammaticus and John Skylitzes (a Byzantine historian) both report women fighters, including commanders and members of royal bodyguards (so professionals rather than women fighting in an emergency). There are other graves known where women were buried with weapons (axes, swords, seaxes). Some are reported in MCLEOD, S. (2011), Warriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 ad. Early Medieval Europe, 19: 332-353. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0254.2011.00323.x This paper also discusses some ambiguous burials, where the grave goods included women's dress items (brooches) and weapons (similar in this to the Suontaka burial). Also some cremation burials classified as male solely on the basis of grave goods (no osteology or genetic testing here!). The burial is the OP differs from those in that it was of a high-status woman - horse sacrifice for burial is a marker of prestige.
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Post by zabazagobo on Feb 25, 2019 21:54:44 GMT
RufusScorpius My short chime-in is check out the documents supplied by Timo. Norse culture was not synonymous with Roman or Gothic culture, attitudes regarding women and their roles in war was different. There's records out there of female warriors. I forget the exact text (been awhile and Norse history isn't one of my main areas of study), but I do recall one author being somewhat fascinated by this finding relative to other societies in Europe.
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Post by bebut on Feb 25, 2019 22:34:02 GMT
An interesting tidbit of history which cannot be rapidly investigated for the lack of burial sites. But don't talk it up too much or we will end up with a Netflix movie of a Viking warrior queen staring James Earl Jones or somebody in drag.
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Post by theophilus736 on Feb 25, 2019 23:32:46 GMT
Yeah I think TV and Hollywood are starting to over do it but I still have no problem with believing there were some. Not all women are made for house keeping and putting diapers on the baby. I mean, they're the only ones with breasts for feeding the baby. Anyways, I think it's much more likely that instead of people saying there were no female fighter pilots in the Middle East, we'll have people saying there were corps of female soldiers in WWI and WWII. It's already starting.. that's what happens when you approach history with an agenda.
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Post by Cosmoline on Feb 26, 2019 0:20:45 GMT
What is a "warrior"? The meaning has changed even in my lifetime. Certainly very few soldiers when I was young would have called themselves "warriors." Now the term is frequently used by veterans and those in some branches of service. So what does it mean to apply this shifting term to bodies of either sex? If it's suggesting the person was a professional soldier as his or her main role in life, it probably would not apply to very many people--even vikings. It seems to me the term is being used whenever a weapon is associated with the person. But there's a considerable difference between sword fighting and being a "warrior." We have many sources from the late medieval on sword fighting, but only references to professional soldiers--to the extent such people even existed.
It's better to be cautious about imposing modern terms like this on ANYONE from the past. Men or women. The viking "warriors" may have been closer to land pirates or bandits in modern terms. What we can say is that we don't know. Physically, there's no reason a woman can't fight with a sword or spear. We don't know that being buried with one meant she fought with it in combat, carried it as a status symbol or something else. Same thing with the male skelingtons for that matter.
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Post by RufusScorpius on Feb 26, 2019 1:06:56 GMT
That is the point I am trying to make. We can't simply find something, then make up an entire world around one piece of evidence. Nor can we judge the past, or look at it in any way, with the eyes of our modern society. Introducing our personal or social bias into what happened a thousand years ago is simply wrong. We have to look at history within the context of when it happened and how the people that were living in those times looked at the world and what their societal norms were.
As far as a female Viking warrior/soldier, I reserve judgement on what it means in the larger context of Viking society. Have females fought wars as battlefield soldiers in the past? Yes, of course. Have females been successful commanders/rulers of warrior societies? Also yes. Was it common enough to say past societies were inclusive and gender neutral where all inhabitants were co-equals? No, of course not. How much was "common" and how much was not remains to be seen. But the broader brush of history shows that women as warriors was not very common at all as can be seen in artwork and mass graves of the times.
Let's just try to avoid forcing the past to fit our expectations of the present.
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Post by RufusScorpius on Feb 26, 2019 1:19:31 GMT
Here are some possible explanations to the burial:
1. She was a great commander and was well respected. She won several battles and was buried with military honors 2. She was the leader of a cult of Valkyrie worshipers and was buried as they believed she would be in the afterlife 3. She was the widow of a chieftain and wealthy, but a bit crazy like Sarah Winchester. She believed herself to be a general or a Valkyrie and paid big money to have a nice burial. 4. She was a slave that was just chucked in a grave because the real owner was a coward or something so they did that to embarrass him in the afterlife.
As I stated earlier, we have facts, but not necessarily truth. More work needs to be done to find out the context of the burial. And it may be that we will never know for sure and it will all remain conjecture.
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Post by legacyofthesword on Feb 26, 2019 2:21:58 GMT
Bows were used for war (as well as sport) among the Norse, they were just rarely a decisive factor and not fashionable with the warrior elite. There are enough mentions in period and later sources of not only archers but entire archer units from certain regions (often in the context of proving their worth after being looked down upon by the rest of the soldiery; e.g. Ubbi's death at Brávellir) to show that archery in warfare was clearly not unknown nor even all that uncommon. It just wasn't generally seen as particularly prestigious or noteworthy. PS. And while cavalry in the sense of mounted combat wasn't a thing, indeed, horses were bred and reared for work and riding as well as a form of prizefighting, and good ones were highly prized. So I think in the Norse context being buried with horses should be taken not so much as an indication of warlike profession or high military rank as of great wealth and status in general. The horses probably have nothing to do with her being a warrior. They put a variety of things in the grave with them for their use in the after life even money. The horses could have been just horses she used for transportation.
Right - bows were used, but not by high status warriors as battle weapons (at least, not usually). The arrows being described as "armor piercing" (maybe very hard points, or narrow bodkin type tips for getting through mail?) suggests that they would have been used for war though, which I find odd. Unless, of course, the writers of the article have no idea what the difference between an armor piercing arrow and a hunting arrow are. My point was, the article claims that the woman was probably a cavalry commander and horse archer, which she almost certainly was not - unless she was from another culture (and therefore, not Norse).
"The weapons left in the tomb—specifically, a sword, axe, fighting knife, lances, shields and 25 armor-piercing arrows—are present in an “unusual profusion and variety,” pointing toward the deceased’s likely career as an experienced mounted archer."
Now, foot combat commander, quite possibly.
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Post by Timo Nieminen on Feb 26, 2019 4:39:25 GMT
The arrows are Wegraeus Type D1, tri-blade step-tang bodkins. This kind of thing: www.vikingage.org/wiki/wiki/File:R546.jpgThe weapons found were, apart from the 25 arrowheads: a Petersen Type E sword with welded steel edges (in scabbard), a Petersen Type M axe, a seax (perhaps about 14-16" blade, estimating from the drawings of the find), 2 spears and 2 shields. One of the spears was a large-headed thing, blade perhaps 10", the total head length about 20". The other was a lighter spear, perhaps a specialised throwing spear/javelin. It's possible that the javelin wasn't hers, but was thrown into the wall of the burial chamber as part of the burial ritual (perhaps an Odinnic dedication). One of the horses was bridled for riding. The actual research paper (as opposed to the journalism it inspired) is open-access, so you can read the whole thing. See also the supplementary material (and the cool picture on pg 17 of the supplementary). www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/viking-warrior-women-reassessing-birka-chamber-grave-bj581/7CC691F69FAE51DDE905D27E049FADCD
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Post by Jordan Williams on Feb 26, 2019 5:08:43 GMT
It's kinda incredible how fanatically contrite some people get when it's suggested that icky cootie-ridden girls might have been buried with a sword I'm not sure of how many others think this way; but I am more wary of this being more based in politics, or to prove an agenda or a point than in wanting to find the truth of the matter. Going from "female, maybe warrior" to "definitely female cavalry commander and very competent battlefield commander" is just a very large jump to me. We know she is a woman, and that she was buried with lots and lots of war like objects, the same number of which we would relate high status male warriors with. I'm not against the idea of female warriors in history and am very aware of their existence, but I would rather have facts over speculation passed as law. Referring mostly to the journalism btw. Haven't read what Timo linked to.
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Post by Jordan Williams on Feb 26, 2019 5:21:24 GMT
I have to wonder if a thousand years from now men will say, there were no female fighter pilots or fighting and dying on the ground in the middle east. If the Romans trained woman as gladiators to fight in the arena why wouldn't they let them fight in battle ? There was also one woman who became very successful as a chariot racer. There are reports of women even fighting in the American Revolution. None of these in large numbers but still there. When you're fighting for your life and the survival of your country you would be a fool to turn down a capable warrior just because she a woman. Like these days if a woman becomes successful in business men will say she slept her way to the top. You won't hear a lot about women warriors until men start deflating their egos a little. Well, we have black confederate from CS sympathisers, woman soldiers and black Germans in large numbers in both world wars from video games (in one case actually writing the men out of their own mission they took part in, and the latter two were pretty politically driven (BF1, BFV). I think it's more likely that in a thousand years people may say that equal numbers of men and women fought in the middle East. From "New scientist .com" "Only men could join the Roman army, and during his reign from 27 BC to AD 14, the emperor Augustus forbade rank and file soldiers from marrying, a ban that lasted nearly two centuries. Classical texts on the Roman army have little to say about women". Pretty good article, talks on woman being in the same camp in a refutation of some apparant classical historians. Was wondering if we had records of women serving in the Roman army in any large capacity, so I googled it.
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Post by legacyofthesword on Feb 26, 2019 5:48:57 GMT
The arrows are Wegraeus Type D1, tri-blade step-tang bodkins. This kind of thing: www.vikingage.org/wiki/wiki/File:R546.jpgThe weapons found were, apart from the 25 arrowheads: a Petersen Type E sword with welded steel edges (in scabbard), a Petersen Type M axe, a seax (perhaps about 14-16" blade, estimating from the drawings of the find), 2 spears and 2 shields. One of the spears was a large-headed thing, blade perhaps 10", the total head length about 20". The other was a lighter spear, perhaps a specialised throwing spear/javelin. It's possible that the javelin wasn't hers, but was thrown into the wall of the burial chamber as part of the burial ritual (perhaps an Odinnic dedication). One of the horses was bridled for riding. The actual research paper (as opposed to the journalism it inspired) is open-access, so you can read the whole thing. See also the supplementary material (and the cool picture on pg 17 of the supplementary). www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/viking-warrior-women-reassessing-birka-chamber-grave-bj581/7CC691F69FAE51DDE905D27E049FADCD
"In an underground wooden chamber, a body had been interred, dressed in clothing with details evoking the fashions of the Eurasian Steppe...."
Interesting. Maybe she was from Russia?
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Post by RufusScorpius on Feb 26, 2019 10:04:28 GMT
I was waiting for somebody to bring up the Romans and gladiators. Yes, we have specific historical evidence that irrefutably shows that women were in fact gladiators. Of this there is no debate with historians. We also have zero evidence of any kind whatsoever that women were in the Roman army in a capacity outside that of a camp follower. How is this possible? Simple, gladiators were a completely different profession than soldiering.
Gladiators were entertainers, soldiers fought wars. To say that because there were female gladiators means there were female soldiers also is a silly as to say in two thousand years from now that because there were female pro wrestlers, there were also female amphibious assault troops during WWII. That is the kind of speculative leap that can lead to a false view of history which is not based in fact, but rather grounded in bias and emotion. Just because we want something to have been true does not mean it actually happened. Gladiators were gladiators, and soldiers were soldiers.
So what if this Viking funeral turns out to be exactly what people want it to be; some kind of Viking queen or warrior general? Good, then that is very interesting and people should accept it at face value, if that is what the facts show it to be. And if not? There is no need to be disappointed either. It is then something else that is probably as equally interesting to see.
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Post by MOK on Feb 26, 2019 11:38:23 GMT
"In an underground wooden chamber, a body had been interred, dressed in clothing with details evoking the fashions of the Eurasian Steppe...." Interesting. Maybe she was from Russia? Or had "merely" traveled extensively thereabouts, perhaps. East-bound river vikings did a lot of that, largely due to the exceptionally profitable trade in furs, to the point that the state that became Russia was likely founded by and is still named after them.
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Post by MOK on Feb 26, 2019 11:49:26 GMT
It's kinda incredible how fanatically contrite some people get when it's suggested that icky cootie-ridden girls might have been buried with a sword I'm not sure of how many others think this way; but I am more wary of this being more based in politics, or to prove an agenda or a point than in wanting to find the truth of the matter. Frankly, I just expect all science reporting to be based on sensationalism and varying levels of misunderstanding of the source material. It's all written on a ridiculously tight schedule and "shocking" "discoveries" sell, simple as that. Always read the actual studies and ignore what the articles claim they say or imply.
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Post by nerdthenord on Feb 26, 2019 11:54:13 GMT
I have to wonder if a thousand years from now men will say, there were no female fighter pilots or fighting and dying on the ground in the middle east. If the Romans trained woman as gladiators to fight in the arena why wouldn't they let them fight in battle ? There was also one woman who became very successful as a chariot racer. There are reports of women even fighting in the American Revolution. None of these in large numbers but still there. When you're fighting for your life and the survival of your country you would be a fool to turn down a capable warrior just because she a woman. Like these days if a woman becomes successful in business men will say she slept her way to the top. You won't hear a lot about women warriors until men start deflating their egos a little. Well, we have black confederate from CS sympathisers, woman soldiers and black Germans in large numbers in both world wars from video games (in one case actually writing the men out of their own mission they took part in, and the latter two were pretty politically driven (BF1, BFV). I think it's more likely that in a thousand years people may say that equal numbers of men and women fought in the middle East. From "New scientist .com" "Only men could join the Roman army, and during his reign from 27 BC to AD 14, the emperor Augustus forbade rank and file soldiers from marrying, a ban that lasted nearly two centuries. Classical texts on the Roman army have little to say about women". Pretty good article, talks on woman being in the same camp in a refutation of some apparant classical historians. Was wondering if we had records of women serving in the Roman army in any large capacity, so I googled it. Just to clarify, I’ve sunk easily 100+ hours into BF1 and over 40 into BFV. No, there are not extensive numbers of female soldiers in BF1. There is the Russian sniper class who is based on an actual female military unit of the Russian Empire that actually saw combat, so it’s both low in number and only inaccurate in that she is with different units all mixed together. As for black Germans in WW2, only the reused allied paratroopers used by both sides have black Germans. Every one of the actual playable German skins is white.
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Post by nerdthenord on Feb 26, 2019 11:56:19 GMT
I didn’t intend to seriously start a debate, but I’m actually glad we are discussing this with different viewpoints without attacking each other.
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