Viking Women (Radio Edit)

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner.
I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster.

Speaker 1 And today we are loading our loom weights and launching our longship as we sail back to medieval Scandinavia to learn all about Viking women. And to help us, we have two very special guests.

Speaker 1 In History Corner, she's a historian, writer and broadcaster based at bathspar university where her research focuses on the cultures literatures and languages of the medieval north you may have read her sensational new book embers of the hands hidden histories of the viking age it's a wonderful book and you will definitely remember her from our episode on leaif ericson it's dr eleanor barraclaff welcome back eleana yay thank you so much for having me back delighted to have you back and in comedy corner they're an award-winning sorry and in comedy corner they're an award-nominated stand-up comedian

Speaker 3 when it comes to awards i am famously always the bridesmaid, never the bride. And what you just did, your mouth typo just cut deep.
So sorry, Chloe. Okay.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 1 And in Comedy Corner, they're an award-nominated stand-up comedian.

Speaker 1 You might have seen them on TV, on Celebrity Pointless, Richard Osmond's House of Games, Jonathan Ross's Comedy Club, or commenting on the women's football Euros on Sky Sports.

Speaker 1 Maybe you caught their recent stand-up tour, How You See Me, How You Don't. Or someone supporting Ed Gamble.
It's Chloe Pets. Welcome to the show, Chloe.
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 Chloe, first time on the pod. Yeah.
How are you with history? Did you like it at school? Are you comfort zone?

Speaker 3 I did like it. I think I did it for A level.
Did I do it for A level? I think you did. Did I do it for A level? You're not that old.

Speaker 3 What did I?

Speaker 3 Are you killing the house?

Speaker 3 Oh my god. Yes, you did it for A level.
I think I must have because I really liked it. Did I do it for A level?

Speaker 3 Now I'm going to list my A levels. I definitely did English because I did that at uni.
I did maths. Oh.
History, theatre studies. Oh, and then I did classics as well.

Speaker 3 The area of history that I enjoy the most because I really like consuming history via novels so I'm a big fan of like the Victorian era and the region's gotcha

Speaker 1 my areas of specialty. So if I say to you Vikings did your brain just go no

Speaker 3 slightly yeah I mean I don't have any sort of context of really where they're located in history. They seem like kind of vacuum packed in their little

Speaker 3 in their little section. so get yeah getting a bit of like context of where they're located in human history will be really interesting so what do you know now

Speaker 1 this is the so what do you know this is where i have a go at guessing what you our lovely listener might know about today's subject and i reckon when you hear viking you're probably thinking big hairy men in historically inaccurate horned helmets no horns but today we're horning ah sorry honing in on the women now you might be imagining fearsome warriors tossing axes while tossing their immaculate blonde braids.

Speaker 1 And maybe you're thinking also of the mythological Valkyries made famous in Wagner's operas and the Marvel Thor movies, of course.

Speaker 1 You might have seen the TV show Vikings with the scary shield maiden Lagatha and her bloody post-divorce glow-up, or you've watched Skade, the sinister sorceress in The Last Kingdom.

Speaker 1 What was life really like for the average Viking gal about town? And how many people can you incinerate and still be made a saint? Let's find out.

Speaker 1 Eleanor, let's start with the basics, because Chloe said vacuum pack them for it for us.

Speaker 3 Let's give some dates.

Speaker 3 Okay, so we're talking first raids that we know about, we think of Vikings being sort of really raidy on the British Isles, end of the 8th century, so like 793 classic raid on Instfan, possibly a little bit before then, all right?

Speaker 3 And then how long the Viking Age goes on for sort of depends on how we're defining it, but let's say kind of up to 1100, except a lot of the evidence actually comes from after that.

Speaker 3 Then in terms of where we're talking geographically, the homelands are Scandinavia, so Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. That's where it all starts.

Speaker 3 Except, a really exciting thing about the Viking Age is that it's all about expansion, colonization, exploration. You know, people are coming into contact with each other across this vast area.

Speaker 3 So, you know, they expand across the North Atlantic, they make it all the way to Iceland and Greenland, even to the edge of the North American continent around the year 1000.

Speaker 3 They go east down the waterways of what's now Russia, Ukraine. They end up in the Byzantine Empire, which is centered on what's now Istanbul in Turkey.
And then they end up further east than that.

Speaker 3 They end up sort of around Baghdad, that sort of region. So they're really far travelling, and that's a really important part of what they are.

Speaker 3 But also because it's over several hundred years, there are big changes over that time.

Speaker 3 So for example, they start pagan, but then around the year 1000 or so, we see this sort of conversion to Christianity.

Speaker 3 The fact that you're like the Vikings went to the Byzantine lands, it feels like a Marvel DC kind of crossover. We're like, they knew each other,

Speaker 3 like they saw the big, hairy ginger men. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 So, Chloe, what do you imagine the Viking women were up to while the lads were on tour? You know, they're off doing all these gallivanting around half the world. What are the women up to?

Speaker 3 I hope a lot of intense lesbianism, if I'm honest.

Speaker 3 That must have been more.

Speaker 3 There's probably some.

Speaker 1 I mean, let's be honest, there's probably some.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, there's sort of later prohibitions against it, which suggests people are up to things.

Speaker 1 We're trying to reframe the picture because I think it's quite easy to think of men in their longboats going off to pillage and to plunder and to settle. How do the women, what is their life like?

Speaker 1 How does it sort of fit into that story?

Speaker 3 Well, there's no Viking age without the women. For a start, you know, so

Speaker 3 if you, if you, so for a start, it's things like that sound a little bit tedious or worthy if you're into Vikings because they're glittery glittery and cool and fun and dramatic.

Speaker 3 Things like textile production, you need clothes, but you also need sales.

Speaker 3 If you're going to go across the ocean, if you're looking to trade or to raid or to settle or to colonise, find new lands, you need wind power to actually get across that ocean.

Speaker 3 Without the women, you don't have sales, you don't have clothes, you also don't have children.

Speaker 3 And that's because obviously some people are having the children, but other people are also helping bring up the children. You know, so you need that next generation.

Speaker 3 So, on a very, very basic level, take away the women and you've got nothing. Also, they're doing most of the food preparation.

Speaker 3 They're looking after the houses when, when, or the long houses and the farms when sort of the men might be on their hunting or their raiding expeditions, whatever it is.

Speaker 3 And so you take away the women and you've got some hungry naked men in a rowing boat.

Speaker 1 Which is a channel 4 documentary that I would watch.

Speaker 1 We need to start, I suppose, with the life of women. Actually, let's start with girlhood, right? What would you expect of a Viking girl's upbringing, Chloe?

Speaker 3 She's probably getting taught just to do the classic stuff: the food making, skateboarding, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's somewhat a couple of ollies,

Speaker 3 yeah, yeah, I think probably skateboarding.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth. Sorry, is it skateboarding? Yeah, skateboarding.

Speaker 1 Sorry, I ruined it. You're making a very sensible point, and I've ruined it.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, I think it's important. I think it's important that we allow other intrusive thoughts to win on this podcast.

Speaker 3 It's really important to say up top, there's no such thing as an average experience. We've got to think, you know, we've already said the Viking Age extends over hundreds of years.

Speaker 3 And then within that, you've got lots and lots of different social strata.

Speaker 3 And so someone who is very, say, you know, a young child who is enslaved is going to have a very different experience growing up compared to someone who is much further up that social pecking order.

Speaker 3 But exactly as you say, yeah, a lot of it's going to be learning from a young age, domestic crafts, and sort of textile manufacture. Was there any culture of play amongst kids?

Speaker 3 That's a really good question. Well, I think there's a very, I don't know what you think, right?

Speaker 3 Like, children play. Play is sort of a universal impulse.
The question is, at what point does that stop?

Speaker 3 And I think that certainly compared to today, you know, at the point where, yeah, children nowadays might be going out on their skateboards, you know, these girls are probably in there learning how to weave.

Speaker 3 There's also slightly less pleasant stuff. So, for example, it looks like there's a higher rate of female infanticide.
I was wondering whether that might be the case.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that seems likely. It's really hard to prove it.

Speaker 1 So just to be clear, that is the deliberate killing of little baby girls because you don't want a girl, you want a boy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly, exactly. Which is horrible.

Speaker 1 We're a comedy show, but that is, you know, we have to talk about this stuff.

Speaker 1 Does it improve for teenagers?

Speaker 1 Like, you know, is it fun?

Speaker 3 You know the answer to that.

Speaker 3 I don't know the answer. It's not going to improve for teenagers.

Speaker 3 If they're killing girls at birth and then putting them to work at eight, I don't think all of a sudden they're going to be like, okay, off you go into the world now. You can go to university.

Speaker 3 When you get to sort of be of childbearing age and pretty young, marriage is obviously on the cards. And that is an important part of

Speaker 3 teenagehood as you sort of head towards the latter part of that, if you're lucky.

Speaker 1 And do the girls get to pick their hubbies or does dad go, I've chosen Sven.

Speaker 1 He's exactly what you need.

Speaker 3 I think more to the point, exactly what I need. Certainly, once again, when you look at the latest saga evidence, bearing in mind, sagas are not history as we would think of history.

Speaker 3 They're stories, but they do sort of reflect something of that earlier time and the time in which they're written.

Speaker 3 But certainly, yes, it's I have picked out, you're going to be marrying him, whether you like it or not.

Speaker 1 Can a man divorce a woman easily?

Speaker 3 You can, you call witnesses and you say, I'm divorced. And it can be all sorts of reasons.
And this is true, I think, of the men and the women.

Speaker 3 So as far as the, but the important thing is that women can do do it too.

Speaker 1 So, the interesting thing about the Viking Age, historians often say that women in the Viking era were better off than anywhere else in the Viking, sorry, anywhere else in the European Christian world.

Speaker 1 Like, they had more rights, more laws, more freedoms. We've heard maybe that's not entirely true.
There's quite a lot of pressure on, but widowhood kind of is, that's kind of a quite

Speaker 3 aiming for.

Speaker 3 That's the ideal, right? But you have really, I mean, so for example, we mentioned Iceland being settled in the second part of the ninth century.

Speaker 3 Some of the first settlers, the big settlers, are women.

Speaker 3 There's one in particular she's called Oither or Uno the deep-minded and it's only once she's a widow she able she's she sort of gathers her her family and her followers and her and her sort of like slaves at that point around and takes them off to Iceland frees the enslaved people and sort of sets up this sort of matriarchy out there.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 1 this community of women, right?

Speaker 3 She's the, I mean, she ends up, it's, it's on the night, I think it's her grandchild, on the night of her grandchild's wedding, she dies upright in bed, having basically just sorted everyone out.

Speaker 3 She's an East Enders matriarch. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Get out of my pub.

Speaker 3 Lockhouse.

Speaker 3 Sorry.

Speaker 1 Okay, we should talk about a childbirth, which obviously, you know, you mentioned before that obviously, in order to keep having Vikings going out into the world, you need children that grow up.

Speaker 1 We need babies. I mean, obviously, childbirth is dangerous

Speaker 1 at any time in history. In the Viking world, there are...
there are kind of rituals, routines, there's magical spells, there's all sorts of ways of trying to protect a woman in childbirth and a baby.

Speaker 3 Can you talk us through some of those? Yeah, so I mean, yeah, exactly as you say. So mortality rates were huge,

Speaker 3 as they always have been. There's a really touching grave from Orkney, Rousey, and it's a woman, but she is...

Speaker 3 she's buried with an infant who's full term. And so the likelihood is that she's died in childbirth and so is the child.
So exactly as you say, there has to be measures in place.

Speaker 3 One of these is called, they're called Bjagruner, sort of helping runes, runes of protection. Those seem to have been used.
We've got like sort of just evidence on the edge.

Speaker 3 Often with childbirth, with pregnancy, everything is on the edge because it's female histories and they don't, you know, they just don't get recorded.

Speaker 3 But we have sort of a few little runic inscriptions that might

Speaker 3 sort of back that up. There's an amazing, again, it's later, it's very much within a Christian context, but it's a rune stick.

Speaker 3 And it looks like basically the baby's gone over term and is still, you know, inside. And this runic inscription is to the baby.
And it ends and it says, come out, hairless one.

Speaker 3 The Lord calls you into the light. Right?

Speaker 3 It's beautiful.

Speaker 1 I love that one. Yeah.
But let's get back to a woman's work, you know, the kind of daily domestic.

Speaker 1 She's not just obviously giving birth to the next generation. There's a lot she's got to look after in the house.

Speaker 3 Yes, definitely. So they're very much in charge of the household.
The household isn't just sort of immediate family or relatives.

Speaker 3 You know, you've got quite a community, depending on how big this farmstead is. You've got responsibilities for making sure everyone stays alive throughout the winters.

Speaker 3 You've got to be able to cook, but you've got to be able to store food. You're going to be looking after the farmstead.
As I said before, you're going to be textile production.

Speaker 1 Medicine?

Speaker 3 Exactly. So that's the other thing.
And again, yeah, so there's a really interesting episode from Hames Kringler, which is sort of a big group of king sagas, essentially, where there's a battle.

Speaker 3 Someone's injured, and they go into the tent, and there's a healing woman there. And she basically feeds them this mixture of sort of garlic and herbs and nasty stuff.

Speaker 3 Because the idea is that once you eat it, if you can sort of smell the garlic from the wounds, you know it's gone through, and it's sort of a fatal wound, essentially.

Speaker 3 Because that's one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life.

Speaker 3 I'd rather just not know. But that is absolutely.
I think I'd rather just die and not stink in a garlic. That's what the character says.
He's like, no, I'm cool, thanks very much.

Speaker 3 Nah, you keep your garlic soon. But the fact is, there's women in there doing that.
There's also sort of religious aspects. There's a type of sort of magic called sathir.

Speaker 3 And again, we're back in sort of more of a pagan context here that a woman is particularly meant to practice. The Old Norse word for a female practitioner of magic or cirrus is a vulva.

Speaker 3 So there you go.

Speaker 3 Yes. So is that where we get that? It's spelt differently.

Speaker 3 And then, of course, there's sort of textile production, which is just like, I know it sounds boring to keep on going on, but it's so important.

Speaker 3 Like, if we didn't have textile production, we would all be sitting here naked, right? It's like we would, nothing happens.

Speaker 1 And we get a strongly worded email from HR, wouldn't we?

Speaker 3 But yeah, but there's a special sort of women's quarters called the Dingya.

Speaker 3 And the Dingya, it's not necessarily just for textile production, but in the archaeological record, all over the Norse World, so Greenland is a really good example of this, you see these sort of textile production spaces where you have women, where you have children.

Speaker 3 The sagas, again, have episodes where, you know, women sit there talking about, for example, their former lovers. In one case,

Speaker 3 where one of the husbands here doesn't go well. Oh.

Speaker 1 And in terms of weaving, it's not just humans who are doing the weaving. The gods weave too.
Do you know what the gods would weave with when they were determining people's futures?

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 they're affecting. Clouds.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's love. Oh, that's charming.

Speaker 3 That's beautiful.

Speaker 1 I mean, you're so wrong, but it's.

Speaker 3 No, I'm going to say you're not so wrong, right? Because you've got these supernatural beings called the Norns, the Nornia, these three,

Speaker 3 and they're responsible for weaving the fates of humans, essentially. I like to think, yeah, they're basically just like pulling down threads from the clouds.
So I'm like totally with you there.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but that's the one that's that. But there was a nastier one.
Yeah, come on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's have the gory one.

Speaker 3 Right, so the gory one, it's Valkyries this time, you know, did it did do.

Speaker 3 Right, that's how we know Valkyries on their horses.

Speaker 3 Right, and there is an episode from, again, it's in Yao's saga. Essentially, on the night before a battle, someone sees these women going into one of these dingy, one of these weaving rooms.

Speaker 3 He peeps inside,

Speaker 3 and he sees them, and they're singing as they weave on this big loom.

Speaker 3 But what it is, is that the entrails of the dead, and there's like kind of heads hanging from the so that's so the loom weights are severed heads exactly the loom weights are severed yeah

Speaker 3 the thread is just guts yeah just yeah viking guts yeah do women go out on the ships right so we've heard them at home they're doing the farming they're doing the medicine they're doing the weaving they're looking after the kids but like do they get on long ships and go and settle Iceland and Greenland yeah absolutely they do this is really important so Iceland we've already talked about this like matriarch at the beginning one of the widows who goes out there under the deep-minded greenland is a really interesting So, Greenland gets settled, first of all, from Iceland in sort of Eric the Red, it's kind of 985 or something.

Speaker 3 And there are women absolutely going out there to settle.

Speaker 3 There's a rune stick that they found in one of the graveyards from Greenland, and it's not got a body in it, but it says, you know, this woman she died on the Greenland Sea.

Speaker 3 So basically, she died on the journey over. Very much part of that cultural sphere.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about the lives of the rich Viking women, the elite.

Speaker 3 I've got a favourite here.

Speaker 3 Okay, so this is Norway, Norway, Osserberg, so sort of southern Norway. Oh my god.
The classic. The classic, but it's there's a reason.
It's an oldie and it's a goodie, right?

Speaker 3 So this is one of the most sumptuous burials. It's a shit burial.
It hasn't been burnt, but these two... A what burial? Ship.
Ship thank you. What did you hear? Really bad burial.
It's an absolute

Speaker 3 rubbish burial. Terrible burial.
One of the worst I've ever seen.

Speaker 3 These two women have been placed in it. One of them is really quite old, sort of over 70.
The other, sort of late middle age, kind of maybe in her 50s. 50s, but it's there's nothing like it.

Speaker 3 You know, there's, there's wagons all like beautifully carved with cats and faces and possibly the cats, you know, that's that's sort of the classically linked to Freya, one of the goddesses.

Speaker 3 There's there's wagons, there's

Speaker 3 beautiful things like sort of a buckets and like sacrificed horses and all sorts I mean it there is nothing like it in terms of the amount of stuff that has been placed into it.

Speaker 3 They can even tell exactly what time of year this initial bag. Yeah,

Speaker 3 crab apples have been found. Oh, beautiful.
Which is just, but also, talking of this sort of organic material, henbane seeds, I think, either henbane or cannabis.

Speaker 3 One of the, there's, and there's also this incredible tapestry, beautiful. Look closely, you see the trees are full of hanging bodies, right? So, sorry, yeah, we're not.

Speaker 1 These ladies sound terrified.

Speaker 3 I know, yes.

Speaker 1 You think we're a lovely granny? Hang on, dead bodies, what?

Speaker 3 This is the woman I want to meet from the Viking Age. I'm like, I could have fun with you, right? So, but that's it, they're so elite high status.

Speaker 1 it used to be thought that one of them was a queen the other one maybe her we could say handmaiden she could be an enslaved person but so it's very much this sense of these high status women possibly with some sort of magical position in society yeah the sever thing maybe or the you know hallucinogenic medicine exactly um i mean obviously we have rich christian widows who leave money to the church they found nunneries and churches and and monasteries and they build uh bridges and churches and and roads you know they're they're kind of putting back into the community which is amazing too But we need to talk about Olga of Kiev.

Speaker 3 Of course, we do. It's very important that we're going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 She's one of the most.

Speaker 3 I was getting antsy. You were thinking.

Speaker 1 When are we getting to Olga of Kiev?

Speaker 1 I mean, again, listeners might be thinking, Kiev's in Ukraine. Yes.
I mean, the Vikings really get very far afield. Olga of Kiev, Chloe, how did she get revenge on the men who killed her husband?

Speaker 3 I guess she killed him back.

Speaker 3 I'm thinking of a sort of, I'm thinking of a sort of John Wicksman Army kind of scenario where I think she's, yeah, she's gathered up all of her weapons like ballerina, like yeah, that kind of yeah, exactly like ballerina, and maybe she like kills someone.

Speaker 3 What did what did John Wick kill in like John Wick 3? He kills them with books or something like that. I mean, it's not far off.
I mean, if anything, she's more badass than that.

Speaker 3 Olga, by the way, sounds like a very sort of Slavic name. It's actually old Norse.
Olga is Helga, right? 10th century. And she is, it's sort of, her husband is called Igor.

Speaker 3 Again, very Norse name, doesn't sound it, but Ingvar, Norse name, right?

Speaker 3 He is killed by sort of a local tribe called the Drevlians. They've got beef with them, right? So, Olga then says, Oh, ambassadors, please come see me.
Dishi baker pie. Dishibaker pie.

Speaker 3 There are pies in Norse. Not this one.
There are Norse pies. There are women who bake their children in pie.
Okay, we're not even going to go there. I'm just going to go.
No, no, stick with Olga.

Speaker 3 She's cool, right? Okay, so the first lot, yeah, she basically buries the ambassadors alive, okay? How?

Speaker 3 Well, it's all there in, I think, the um, it sources from the sort of the 12th century, so it's maybe slightly exaggerated.

Speaker 3 But then the next lot, she lures the noblemen, she's like, oh, please come, please come, have a bath, yeah, have a sauna, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Come have a sauna, come have a nice spiking sauna.

Speaker 3 And then she locks them in the sauna, and then she sets fire to him. Yep, yep, so that's the next lot.
And then she just, for good measure, burns the whole settlement to the ground. Yes, in Genwick,

Speaker 1 and then she converts to Christianity and is made a saint.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, if you're going to get forgiven,

Speaker 3 if you're going to convert to Christianity and get forgiven for all your sins, then I think I would just like really sin. Yeah.
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Like, I'm not just doing like, you know, I've worn mixed fabrics. I'm doing like...
I've killed. I've killed all of my husband's murderers.

Speaker 1 Yes. Okay, so Olga's Bloody Revenge leads us nicely to the warrior women who we would have seen in TV shows.
So I mentioned Vikings, I mentioned

Speaker 1 the Last Kingdom. It's a bit of a trope, kind of shield maiden thing.

Speaker 1 Is that pure Hollywood? Do we have any evidence for women going into battle?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's not pure Hollywood. So there's a skeleton found on the island of Berke in Sweden, very important sort of trading settlement in that period.

Speaker 3 People always thought, oh, well, that's a man because it was buried with weapons.

Speaker 1 It was found in the 19th century. Exactly.
So for well over 100 years, we were like,

Speaker 3 yeah, exactly. Then, 2017, they look at the DNA and it's female DNA.
They're like, oh, okay. So, but the question is then.
It's mental no one checks.

Speaker 3 Well, to be fair, though, I don't think they had DNA sampling in the 19th century. Yeah, to be fair to them.
But it's the fact that, yeah, you see one thing and you assume that's what it must be.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Now, that doesn't mean that that was a

Speaker 3 she was a practicing warrior. There's all sorts of possibilities.

Speaker 1 She's buried with swords and she's in the future more of a warrior.

Speaker 3 Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 3 And it's possible that she, what we would call, the terms don't really apply, but we need to sort of find she was sort of non-binary, or she kind of presented as more male than, you know,

Speaker 3 there's sort of possibilities there.

Speaker 3 There's also the possibility that, yes, she was a warrior, but it's like there's no evidence of sort of healed injuries, and there's no evidence of, you know, you often see sort of one arm is bigger than the other because they're used to wielding weapons.

Speaker 3 So you don't have that. It's possible that, say, her father was a warrior and she's the only surviving child or something, and so therefore she becomes the encapsulation of that warrior lineage.

Speaker 3 There's all sorts of possibilities.

Speaker 3 It doesn't doesn't make it, I think it makes it more exciting.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 we don't know, right? We have this fascinating burial and we've got, and science has gone, it's not what you think, and now we've got question marks. And question marks are exciting.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 But we can't pin it down. There could be multiple identities for this person or, you know, one.
But it's really interesting.

Speaker 1 And that's how archaeological science is changing quite a lot of what we think of the Vikings in some ways.

Speaker 3 I guess what's so interesting also about history is like we're always reading it through our own very partial lens.

Speaker 3 And I think we're in a moment now now where, like, we probably want to go the other way and have women as, like, these total independent badasses because, A, we're sort of like in a feminist rewriting of history, but also, I think there's also an element of like, men find

Speaker 3 hot Viking women wielding swords, titillating. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's definitely a niche corner of the internet that's dedicated to that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So it is simultaneously like

Speaker 3 a feminist reading of history, but also quite a patriarchal reading. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, lads want blunt warriors.

Speaker 3 Yes, exactly, yeah. Yeah, with like sort of like shells over their boobs or something.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I think what we've learned so far, you know,

Speaker 1 women could be all sorts of different things. Yeah, and the evidence points in different directions.

Speaker 3 And we'd like that place on record that women can be all sorts of things.

Speaker 3 The nuance window!

Speaker 1 Time now for the nuance window. This is the part of the show where Chloe and I weave in the dingy art for two minutes while Dr.

Speaker 1 Eleanor spins us a yarn about something we need to know about Viking women. My stopwatch is ready.
You have two minutes. Take it away, Dr.
Eleanor.

Speaker 3 I think Chloe's pretty much done it for me because I want to pick up on exactly that last point that you've been talking about.

Speaker 3 And it ties us back also to the images that, you know, Greg, you conjured up at the beginning. It's sort of like Valkyrie's Shield Maidens, hotness or not so hot.

Speaker 3 You know, it's like it's feminist and it's also sort of quite reductive. And that's,

Speaker 3 it's a really

Speaker 3 tricky thing because there's a reason we love that, right? They're badass. I didn't go into Viking Age history because I want to sort of look at textile production all this time.

Speaker 3 I mean, don't get me wrong, plenty of people do, but I didn't. I like the badass stuff, right?

Speaker 3 But there is an issue there, which is when we look back in time, especially at this sort of like stereotypical, hyper-masculine era, such as the Viking Age, it's that idea that almost women are only exciting or interesting or worth talking about if they're aping male role models and sort of quite extreme ones at that and what I'm trying to do in Embers of the Hands this book it's like meet ordinary humans on their own terms and that's particularly true of the women it's it's a way to find

Speaker 3 you know it's how to bring their stories to life not by shoving swords or axes in their hands but you know although that does happen in fact there's one saga where a woman actually says put an axe in my hand okay so that that does happen there but I think historically speaking women actually deserve better than that because their lives are so much more nuanced and multi-dimensional, more varied than these cartoon stereotypes.

Speaker 3 And so, for me, that is my nuance window: that women themselves are nuanced.

Speaker 3 And when we look back in history and these hyper-masculine periods of history from our perspectives, it's even more important. Meet them on their own terms.
Brilliantly.

Speaker 1 Any final thoughts on that?

Speaker 3 Oh, applause. You've got to clap.

Speaker 3 I can see you've got 25 seconds left, so I'm going to do quite a long one. Can't be doing any long one.
Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 3 I want those 25 seconds of clapping. 25 seconds, like a standing evasion at Can, where it's like, very good, very good nuance window.

Speaker 1 Thanks so much, Chloe. And also, of course, thank you, Dr.
Eleanor Barraclough. Listener, if you want more Vikings, check out our episode on Leif Erikson.

Speaker 1 Also, we have one on Norse literature, which is lots of fun. K-Curd.
And for more warrior women, why not listen to our episode on Njinko Mindombo and Matamba, which is good fun as well.

Speaker 1 And remember, if you enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to get the episodes 28 days earlier than on any other app.

Speaker 1 Switch on your notifications so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner.
We have the excellent Dr. Eleanor Barraclough from Bathspa University.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Eleanor.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 1 And in Comedy Corner, we have the incredible Chloe Petts. Thank you, Chloe.

Speaker 3 That was amazing. Thank you so much to you both.

Speaker 1 And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we unearth more buried historical secrets. But for now, I'm off the gun and suggest entrail weaving as a fun craft activity for my daughter's school.

Speaker 3 Bye!

Speaker 1 Yours it to me to BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 3 Hello, my name is Alex von Tunselmann and I want to introduce you to History's Heroes, the BBC's breathtaking, high-stakes, story-led podcast shining a light on extraordinary people and ordinary people who become extraordinary, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers.

Speaker 3 You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Speaker 3 And the woman who created the international charity, Save the Children. Subscribe to History's Heroes on BBC Sounds.

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