While some women likely fought (as women have always done), Viking societies had fairly strict gender divisions, and the vast majority of women did not wield weapons. We have an image today of Viking women as warriors, fighting alongside their men, an image that owes more to propaganda than to history.
Their trade network was wide and even intersected with the Silk Road. During that time, Viking men and women traveled all over Europe and the North Atlantic, sailing as far west as North America, around the Mediterranean and to Constantinople, and through the Russian river system to Kiev. The Viking Age began in 793 CE with the Viking attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne and ended in 1066 with the Norman conquest of England, when one Viking-founded kingdom, Normandy, conquered another, Anglo-Saxon and Danish England. Their voyages did change the world, but they would not have been possible without the women making ships’ sails, warm garments, and cloth for trading. The popular image of Vikings is sword-wielding men, sailing forth to pillage and conquer. 793–1066 CE), I became interested in women who picked up swords and performed stereotypically male tasks and women who exercised their power from the more traditional position of wife and housekeeper. Though the names of most of the women who did this work were never recorded, their labor has been critical, to not only the functioning of societies but also the course of history.Īs I was writing a trilogy of books about Norway during the Viking age of exploration (ca. From the Silk Road, built by trading the work of Han Dynasty–era Chinese women, to the dawn of the industrial revolution, when women working spinning machines were the first people to toil in factories, women’s textile work has been *work* that has driven societies’ economic engines.
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