New Light On the Viking "Valkyrie" Figures

Reconstruction of Birka grave 581
(image from Neil Price's
April 2016 presentation)

One thing that I find frustrating about my study of Viking costume is the lack of useful detail in Viking period art.  Of course, in every period artists suppress or distort certain details while clearly rendering others in order to achieve various artistic effects.  But Viking art is not representational in the way that late medieval or early modern art is, and it can be difficult to tell what types of features the lines, circles, and zigzags that appear on the clothing worn by the figures in brooches and pendants are meant to depict.

Of interest with regard to the interpretation of female figures in Viking Age art in general and the "valkyrie" figures in particular is the lecture in the embedded video by Neil Price, Ph.D. (The conference took place in Spain last April, and the introduction is in Spanish, but the lecture itself is in English.) Dr. Price is with the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University in Sweden.

The lecture recorded in the video at the right is about Viking Age depictions of women, including but not limited to women wielding or carrying weapons. In his lecture, Dr. Price compares three different types of female figures that appear in Viking Age jewelry and carvings--all of which are typically called "valkyries".  The types are: 1) figures in long robes with knotted ponytail hairstyles, usually holding out a drinking horn; 2) figures in long robes with ambiguous hairstyles, holding a big round shield and a sword; and 3) brooches showing two figures--one on a horse with long hair and weapons and one standing in front of the horse with a shield. Dr. Price observed that we do not know that all of these figure types were intended or understood by the Vikings to depict "valkyries".  He also observed that in Old Norse, the names given to valkyries in the sagas are words for the horror and chaos of battle, suggesting that valkyries were seen primarily as terrible goddesses of battle and not as brave shieldmaidens or horn-bearing women welcoming the brave dead to Valhalla.

Silver terminal for cap found in Birka grave 581.
Photo from the Historiska Museet, Stockholm.

The most interesting part of the lecture (starts at approximately 28:19) involves a very recent re-analysis of the skeletal remains of Birka grave 581. Four different osteologists independently concluded that the skeletal remains in grave 581 are those of a woman, which suggests that that grave is the final resting place of a woman who was not only buried with many weapons, but was dressed like a Viking man, complete with a hat with a dangling point ornamented with a silver terminal (see the image to the left) and "poofy pants".

Detail from the Oseberg cart.  Wikimedia Commons
 (photo by Annie Dalbéra, Paris, France)

Dr. Price is convinced that the woman in grave 581 was a warrior and was buried dressed as a man.  From listening to his lecture, I received the impression that his conclusion was not based upon fabric remains (he does not mention that there were any, and in any event the study of textile remains is not his specialty) but from the other contents of the grave.  Most of the grave goods of Birka 581 are war equipment: they include a sword, a shield, a spear, an axe, a long fighting knife, a bow (with a full quiver of arrows) and, significantly, two horses.  Dr. Price found the presence of the two horses particularly important because professional warriors needed to have multiple horses, in the event one horse was too exhausted for battle when it was time to fight. In addition, grave 581 contains a silver cone-shaped object typically interpreted as the terminal of a "Santa Claus" style cap, which has been associated by scholars and reenactors with men. (A copy of the grave reconstruction image that Dr. Price used in his lecture is reproduced at the top on the left.)

Although Dr. Price's conclusions arise from art analysis and skeletal analysis, they have a number of implications for Viking Age clothing, including, I think, the following:

• Some women--possibly not many, but we have no way to tell how many--were professional fighters who dressed as men.
• The different types of female images in Viking Age art may represent women with different societal roles, and cannot be assumed to represent a single style of female costume.
• The figure with the long necklace and the short skirt/tunic/kilt on the Oseberg cart (shown above--see the figure on the far left) may well be a woman.  I had been skeptical about this interpretation before, but the osteological findings from Grave 581 tend to support it.
• The common practice of sexing graves by examining the grave goods alone (e.g., presuming graves with tortoise brooches and bead strings are female and grave containing weapons are male) needs to be reexamined.  Dr. Price commented to this effect in his lecture.

It will be difficult to abandon the practice of using jewelry and weapons to sex graves because many Scandinavian Viking Age graves simply do not contain sufficient skeletal remains to allow a determination of sex, but if we are to determine how women and men lived and dressed during the Viking Age, we need to obtain as much information from the evidence we have as possible, and seek not to rely upon easy assumptions.  In any event, the grave 581 skeleton reminds us that we have far to go in our attempts to reconstruct Viking culture.

Revisiting the Historiska Museet's Reconstruction

Most costumers who are genuinely interested in Viking era costume are familiar with the reconstructed costumes displayed on the website of the Historiska Museet in Stockholm.

Of particular interest to me is the Historiska Museet's reconstruction of Viking women's costume, which is featured on this page. (There used to be an English version of this page, but it was moved and then I lost track of it, while the original Swedish page remains easy to find.)

In this connection, I recently re-read an old comment by Carolyn Priest-Dorman from the old Norsefolk list on Yahoo that critiques this reconstruction. The main thrust of Ms. Priest-Dorman's comments is that the Historiska Museet's reconstruction uses components based upon artifacts found at different places and times. For example, the reconstruction's fitted apron dress and underdress with curved arm-openings are based on finds from tenth-century Hedeby, but the trimming on the underdress is based upon Grave 735 from Birka (which is a male grave), the  pleated shift and caftan are based upon other Birka finds, and the triangular headscarf has no apparent provenance whatsoever.

Re-reading Ms. Priest-Dorman's comments now, after I've learned much more than I used to know about Viking clothing and the evidence for its form, is making me re-think one of my projects, which was going to be to do my own version of the Historiska Museet reconstruction.  Even when I first formed the idea, I realized that the headscarf featured in this reconstruction has no evidentiary basis, and planned to omit it from my effort.  But for some reason, I hadn't focused upon the fact that this reconstruction includes an apron dress design based upon the Hedeby fragment, an underdress based upon a different Hedeby fragment, but details and a shift based upon earlier, Birka finds.

For a while, I had the vague idea that I could manage to use the components of this project in other costumes, based upon comments in Eva Andersson's book, "Tools for Textile Production from Birka and Hedeby," and a sketch which shows a woman in a caftan.  But taking that approach, I've finally realized, undercuts my original object for undertaking the project--to make a Viking-era outfit that is defensibly from a particular place and period during the Viking era.

So now I'm thinking of ways to depart from the Historiska Museet's design that would result in a defensibly single-period outfit.  That may not be too difficult.  I can continue with my idea of attempting to make a pleated shift, and follow up with an overdress *without* curved armholes, that is trimmed in the same manner of fragments in one of the Birka finds.  (I already have a unpleated, keyhole-necked shift, that could also be worn with such an overdress, and a small silver penannular brooch to close the neckline with.)

The problem is the apron dress.  All of the Birka evidence is for the very top edge of the apron dress.  There is no real evidence as to whether the dress was wrapped, tube-shaped, or fitted, though most people who have considered the Birka apron dress finds seem to believe that they were not fitted.  However, I have an aesthetic problem with wearing an unfitted apron dress with a decorated underdress and pleated shift--it just seems like too much of a contrast with the most sophisticated garments that would be worn beneath it.

What to try?

It occurred to me that my idea for a semifitted wrapped apron dress might make an interesting experiment to add to a prospective Birka costume.  That would not necessarily be inconsistent with the Birka evidence, but could yield a wrapped garment just fitted enough to look very elegant.

So maybe that's what I should plan for my "Birka" outfit.  Now I have even more reason to proceed with my experimental semi-fitted wrapped apron dress--if the concept works in linen, I will be making one from my good, rose herringbone wool, for the Birka outfit.

EDIT: I was wrong. The Birka fragments do offer some evidence that the wool apron dresses, at least, were not of a wrapped style, in that we don't find one layer of apron dress wool over another. Hilde Thunem points this out in her essay on the evidence for apron dress construction, still in progress, which she has recently updated. Thunem comments:

In addition surviving fragments from woollen smokkrs lie in a single layer around the body, instead of the double layer one should expect from a pair of overlapping wraparound woollen smokkrs. Based on this, Inga Hägg proposes that the woollen smokkr consisted of a front piece and a back piece sewn together at the sides. She points out that this closed tube would be a natural continuation of the woollen peplos that seems to have been in use during the Iron Age (as evidenced by the Huldremose find).

So a wrapped woolen apron dress would not be consistent with the archaeological evidence from Birka. That suggests that my wool apron dress should be a simple tube, like my favorite blue wool apron dress. Maybe that's all for the best. It would be simple to make, and I can give it straps consistent in fiber and type with the relevant find.