DNA Proves Viking Warriors Were Women, Scientists Say

A DNA analysis has proven that there were female Viking warriors, so people shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the roles of men and women in ancient societies, scientists say.

Experts had previously assumed a “well-furnished warrior grave” from the Viking era in Sweden was the burial site of a man, according to a study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, but a new genetic analysis on the skeletal remains inside suggest the warrior was a woman. The researchers say the warrior’s DNA did not have a Y-chromosome, thus marking a female because all women carry two X-chromosomes while men carry one of each. The finding confirms a previous and controversial study of the bones’ structure that had suggested the dead warrior was female and backs up unsubstantiated narratives from hundreds of years ago that describe male and female Vikings fighting together.

The grave is in southeastern Sweden, just outside of Stockholm. During the Viking Age, which ran from the late 8th century to the mid-11th century, the island town Birka where this warrior was buried was a key trading center for the Scandinavians, a cultural and economic hub for those people from modern-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden. That urban center was home to hundreds of people and it was a popular burial site, with more than 3,000 known graves surrounding the town, about a third of which have been excavated.

In the case of this female warrior, the study explained, her grave was “prominently placed on an elevated terrace between the town and a hillfort,” right near Birka’s defensive fortress. It was excavated in the 1880s. “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. Furthermore, a full set of gaming pieces indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy, stressing the buried individual’s role as a high-ranking officer.”

There were Viking-era women whose graves contained weapons, but there was a debate about whether the weapons were simply buried with the deceased as heirlooms or if their male skeletons associated with the weapons were missing. This is the first confirmation of an important female warrior from that time.

“Written sources mention female warriors occasionally, but this is the first time that we’ve really found convincing archaeological evidence for their existence,” researcher Neil Price said in a statement from Uppsala University.

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 skeleton’s genetic material shows the female warrior is closely related to today’s northern Europeans, particularly southern Swedes, but the results of the chemical analysis could not conclusively say whether she was local to her burial site during her life, although the scientists were leaning toward a mobile person who had moved to Birka later in life.

“The identification of a female Viking warrior provides a unique insight into the Viking society, social constructions, and exceptions to the norm in the Viking time-period,” according to the study. “The results call for caution against generalizations regarding social orders in past societies.”

While being buried with weapons doesn’t necessarily mean the person was a warrior, the researchers argue in their study that all people buried in this manner should be viewed in the same way, regardless of sex.

“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.