10 September, 2017
"The grave goods include a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, one mare and one stallion; thus, the complete equipment of a professional warrior".
"You can't reach such a high (military) position without having warrior experience, so it's reasonable to believe that she took part in battles", Hedenstierna-Jonson told The Local.
The study was conducted on one of the most iconic graves from the Viking Age. Illustration by Evald Hansen based on Hjalmar Stolpe's excavations at Birka in the 19th century (Stolpe 1889).
The researchers say that in addition to looking into the female Birka warrior's DNA, they attempted to analyze the chemical isotopes in the bones to determine her "mobility" - a technique that relies on the fact that different environments leave different chemical signatures in people, hinting at where they came from and whether they moved around.
The town of Birka was an important trading centre for Vikings, and is now home to more than 3000 warrior graves, The Independent reported. The study examines grave Bj 581, which was originally thought of as an example of an elaborate burial for a high-status male warrior, and no one questioned the gender.
The unidentified Viking warrior was likely to "stay" a man forever if it hadn't been for Anna Kjellström, who several years ago realized the remains did not appear to be those of a man.
The hips were typical of a woman and the cheekbones were thinner than what a man's are expected to be like.
"This is the first formal and genetic confirmation of a female Viking warrior", said professor of biology Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University. That sort of test can be conducive, according to Maja Krezwinska, who also worked on the research.
"The Viking warrior female showed genetic affinity to present-day inhabitants of the British Islands (England and Scotland), the North Atlantic Islands (Iceland and the Orkneys), Scandinavia (Denmark and Norway) and to lesser extent Eastern Baltic Europe (Lithuania and Latvia)", the study reads.
The study also states that while some Viking women buried with weapons are already known, a female warrior of such importance had never been determined and Viking scholars "have been reluctant to acknowledge the agency of women with weapons".
These latest findings, the researchers write, "provide a new understanding of the Viking society, the social constructions and also norms in the Viking Age". Maja was thus able to confirm the morphological sex identification with the presence of X chromosomes but the lack of a Y chromosome.
Hedenstierna-Jonson described it as a fantastic find, but said it is unlikely to completely up-end historians' view of the Viking society as being patriarchal, mainly constituting of male warriors.
"What we have studied was not a Valkyrie from the sagas but a real life military leader, that happens to have been a woman", study leader Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, from Stockholm University said in the statement. Osteological study backed up the theory that the warrior was a woman, but it was met with skepticism.
