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.

More About The Hårby Valkyrie

About a month ago, I blogged about a new find in Denmark, a small metal Valkyrie figurine that appears to have been a pendant. Though the figure is broken off at about hip-level, it displays some wonderful details of hairstyle and costume. 

One of my readers, Jakob, pointed me to this article from the Odense Bys Museer's website that includes more details about the find and a number of additional clear photographs. Although the article is in Danish, Google Translate has enabled me to glean the following additional information:

• The figurine in its present broken condition is 3.4 cm tall.
• It is made from solid silver which was then gilded.
• The gilded figure was also treated with niello,"a black mixture of copper, silver and lead sulphides" (see this Wikipedia article).

Most interesting of all, one of the photographs shows a clear frontal view of the figure. This view appears to show (at least to me) that the figure is wearing a garment with narrow straps and a deep, v-shaped neckline. This garment does not greatly resemble any of the proposed apron dress reconstructions.  The straps are ornamented with little circles that resemble punch work, but the figurine does not show any beads, tortoise brooches or other brooches.  Perhaps this garment is meant to be some kind of breastplate or armor of some kind.

Perhaps the Valkyrie figurines cannot and should not be taken literally as depictions of Viking era women's clothing. Consider a work of art from much nearer to our own time--Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Guiding The People.

La liberté guidant le peuple (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Look at the figure of the woman in the foreground, the woman in yellow holding the French tricolor.  The way she is dressed carries obvious symbolism to people familiar with French history and the art of the period.  For example, she wears a red Phyrigian cap, a known symbol of liberty and freedom. But can Madam Liberty's attire be taken as depicting the ordinary clothing of French women in 1789, even in a stylized manner? No. We know it cannot, because we have other art showing actual French women of the period, as well as a number of surviving garments, that tell us that Liberty's clothing in the Delacroix painting is purely symbolic.

Now consider our Valkyrie.  We know that she is a figure from Norse mythology--a kind of warrior spirit sent by Odin to choose brave warriors slain on the field of battle for an afterlife of eternal glory in Valhalla.  What we don't know is whether Scandinavians of the Viking period had a set of symbolic garments or other conventions that told them "this figure is a figure of a Valkyrie."  We assume that a figure like the Hårby figure is a Valkyrie because she is armed with sword and shield. But maybe we should consider that the rest of her clothing may also be symbolic of her peculiar mission as a Chooser of the Slain, and not just of the fact that she is female.

Like the other Valkyrie figures that have been found, the Hårby Valkyrie so far provokes more questions than it provides answers. That's not a bad thing. Further study, and future finds, may help provide answers and expand the base of available information from which inferences about Viking era costume can be made.

EDIT: To eliminate my original comments about the article's statement that the figure is "polychrome"; see Jakob's comment below.

EDIT: (3/4/2013) Apparently the figurine is going to London to be exhibited at the British Museum with other Viking age finds. See this article. EDIT: (3/6/2013) Jakob has found an even better series of close-ups of the figurine, from all angles, including the bottom. Look here.

A New Valkyrie

Today, in his blog Aardvarchaeology, Martin Rundkvist features a good-quality photograph of yet another "Valkyrie" figure. This one, according to Rundkvist, was found late last year by a metal detectorist at Hårby on Funen.  His post, which you can read here, includes three close-up photographs of the figure from different angles, along with photographs of other, similar figures from other finds.  

The Hårby figure, which is a small sculpture in the round, is being held in a human hand in the photographs.  If you compare the person's thumbnail with the figure, it seems clear that the figure can't be more than about 5 cm tall. Rundkvist notes that the figure almost certainly belongs to the Vendel or Viking era, and that seems clear from the style of the figure.

Rundkvist also notes that "[s]he wears a floor-length dress and has her hair in the typical knot we’ve seen for instance on the Lady of Sättuna, and she’s armed with sword and shield." On this figure, unlike many of the Valkyrie figures, it is clear that we are seeing hair pulled back with a knot--lines indicate where the hair on the top of her head has been parted in the middle, in front, and then pulled back, away from her face and into a long pony tail.

Unfortunately, the angle of the photographs and the shadows on the figure make any other details of her clothing difficult to discern. The center bottom of her clothing falls into numerous narrow folds or pleats, suggesting the pleated linen underdresses of Birka or possibly the pleated apron dresses of Denmark, and there appears to be a strap going over the shoulder of the arm that is holding the shield, but the other details on the figure are ambiguous, at least from this photograph.  

If any of you see clear costume details on the figure, please say so in the comments!

EDIT (1/9/2013):  Jennifer Bray (Rannveig, from the Norsefolk_2 list on Yahoo) posted the following additional information on the list about this figure:

• "It was found in the same field in Funen as some gold jewellery. 
• [The] [o]ther finds are from Germanic Iron Age and Viking Age. 
• The figure is solid at the top but the skirt is hollow at the bottom. 
• There is a hole behind the hair so it could be used as a pendant. 
• There is little sign of wear on the back, so the finder believes it was lost when quite new. 
• The finder believes the damage seems to come from its time in the ground: the field it was found in was newly ploughed." 

Most of this information doesn't help much with deducing costume details from the figure.  However, the fact that the figure is hollow in the skirt suggests that the dress depicted is meant to be floor-length, though that can't be confirmed because the bottom part of the figure is broken off irregularly.   Hopefully information dating the other finds from the same field will help pinpoint the age of the figure more closely.

EDIT:  (1/12/2013):  Edited to correct my incorrect identification of the country in which the find was made, as per Jakob's comment below.