Women In The Viking Age Summary

On June 8th 793ce foreign ships brought an unexpected surprise to the Lindisfarne monastery, the Northmen had arrived. This attack marked the beginning of the Viking Age, an era of raids that shook the western world until its end at the battle of Hastings in 1066. These Northmen arrived and promptly the “heathen miserably destroyed God's church by rapine and slaughter .” It is important to note that the Vikings had an oral tradition and no known sources exist depicting events from their perspective. “We see the attack through the eyes of the victims, who spread the word that the Vikings were bloody and violent. In fact, they were violent, but no more than anyone else at the time. Compared to Charlemagne’s armies, the Vikings were amateurs.
Jesch uses archaeological evidence, runic inscriptions, foreign chronicles, art of the time period, and various eddic and skaldic works. The book appeared to have an orderly format at first in which Jesch presents her evidence, from the most reliable to least until she states that “there is certainly a continuum and the different sources give different types of information about the Viking Age, but I do not necessarily subscribe to the view that ‘only archaeology can reveal the truth.” Jesch begins with an explanation as to how grave goods and burial sites are used to help determine the gender of the individual buried within in cases where the remains are incomplete, missing, or physical remains are degraded. She states that it was common practice to determine the sex of the individual on the basis of their grave goods. Often designating graves “with weapons and certain tools as male and those buried with jewelry and domestic implements as female.” In the rare cases where both the skeletal remains and grave goods are present it was determined that “about the only implements found exclusively in the graves of one sex are blacksmith’s tools in male graves.” Weapons such as spears, axes and arrowheads, while often associated with a male grave, have been found in female graves. This is not enough evidence to verify the presence of warrior women, as grave goods often served as practical tools to send with the individual to aid them in the next life. With this being the case, “even burial with a real weapon does not necessarily imply that the woman knew how to use it in real life.” A common symbol of female identity within the Norse culture in the Viking Age, the paired oval