The Roman Tacitus praised Germanic women as chaste, honoured and even brave at the edge of battle. But above all he was holding up a mirror to his own people. What is really true – and how did it stand later among the Vikings? An honest comparison.
Our most important source for the Germanic women of antiquity is the Germania of Tacitus (c. 98 AD). It is magnificent – and to be read with care: Tacitus wrote no neutral report but a mirror of morals, to criticise what he saw as decadent Rome. He idealises the Germanic peoples where it serves his message.
Well attested is the high regard for prophesying women: Veleda of the Bructeri was honoured almost as a deity, her name virtually standing for „seeress"; Tacitus also names Albruna. Women were held to be close to the divine – no Roman invention, but a thread running all the way to the Norse Norns and völvas.
“Indeed they believe there is something holy and prophetic in women, and neither scorn their counsel nor ignore their answers.”— Tacitus, Germania 8 (public domain)
Striking: according to Tacitus the man brings the dowry to the woman, not the other way round – a „world upside down" for Roman readers. He probably confused the Germanic bride-price (a compensatory gift to the bride’s family) with the Roman dos. In return the woman gave a weapon – a symbol of mutual bond. The Germanic peoples were mostly monogamous, which Tacitus sets approvingly apart from other „barbarians".
Some thousand years later, the North shows a similar but better-documented picture. The Viking woman carried the keys to house and stores – a symbol of power – could inherit and divorce, and ran the farm while the men were away for months. The richly armed grave Bj 581 of Birka belonged to a biologically female person – a real anchor for the idea of the warrior woman. Public power (the Thing, rulership), however, remained largely a male affair.
Germanic and Norse women alike were highly respected, influential in the home and the spiritual sphere, and endowed with real rights – but they were not equal in the public and political realm. That is no contradiction but the pattern of a society that recognised female strength without dissolving gender roles. The dream of a Germanic „matriarchy" is a 19th-century myth.
Women of the Viking Age · The Warrior Woman of Birka · Valkyries · The Norns.
Tacitus, Germania & Histories. Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (1991); Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995); Rudolf Much, Die Germania des Tacitus; Uwe Wesel, Der Mythos vom Matriarchat. On Bj 581: Hedenstierna-Jonson/Price (2017/2019).