Since 1878, Birka’s grave Bj 581 had been the textbook example of a high-status Viking warrior – the „ultimate Viking". In 2017 a DNA analysis showed: the buried person was biologically female. Few graves have ever sparked so much debate.
The trading town of Birka on the island of Björkö was the first urban centre in present-day Sweden. Of the 1,100-plus graves excavated there, only 75 contain weapons at all – and Bj 581 is one of only two with a complete weapon set. Even its excavator, Hjalmar Stolpe, was struck by it.
“Perhaps the most remarkable of all the graves in this field.”— Hjalmar Stolpe on Bj 581, 1879 (after Price et al.)
In an underground timber chamber lay the deceased, surrounded by a sword, an axe, a fighting knife, two spears, two shields and 25 armour-piercing arrows. Two horses were included, one bridled for riding. On the lap lay a bag of gaming pieces, a board beside it – a sign associated with military command. The grave lies prominently at the westernmost point of Birka, right beside the garrison.
From the start Bj 581 was read as the grave of a mounted elite warrior, perhaps a cavalry commander. From the 1960s it became an archetype in the scholarly literature, an icon of the 10th-century warrior. That it was a man’s burial was never questioned – the weapons were taken as proof enough.
In 2017 Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Neil Price and colleagues published the genomic data in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology: the person had two X chromosomes – biologically female. Doubts about whether the right skeleton had been analysed, or whether a second body lay in the grave, were laid to rest. The finding is secure.
Here the researchers themselves grow cautious – and that is the study’s real strength. Grave goods are not automatic proof of how a person lived: weapons are found even with children who could never have wielded them. Perhaps the burial was symbolic. Yet the context – full of functional weapons, beside the garrison, with a command gaming set – points, by Occam’s razor, to the obvious reading: a woman who lived and was buried as a professional warrior.
Bj 581 does not prove there were armies of shield-maidens. But it shows that at least one woman of the Viking Age led a warrior’s life – and probably not alone. The literary figure of the warrior woman, from valkyries to shield-maidens, has gained a real anchor in the archaeological record.
Valkyries · Women of the Viking Age · The Shield Wall · Hedeby.
Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics (AJPA 164, 2017). Price, Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581 (Antiquity 93, 2019). H. Arbman, Birka I (1940/43); A.-S. Gräslund, Birka IV (1980).