The Hidden Lives of Viking Women: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives

This edited volume brings together an international group of scholars to address the lives, roles, myths, mythology, and lived experiences of Viking women as well as the impacts of change on women during the turbulent period of the Viking Age. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, this is a book dedicated to the lesser-known aspects of women’s lives as active members of society. It provides an innovative way of bringing together work from archaeological, anthropological, historical, and literary perspectives to address questions about women in trade, in war, in magic, in the household and activities that provided women with power and respect in their communities.

Highlights:
Investigates the concepts of gendered work and space of the Viking Age and Norse period, critically examining the traditional reliance on idealised, separate gender roles within subsistence farming households and examines how whole households (husbands, wives, blood and other relatives, hired hands and slaves) worked together for their joint survival. Demonstrates that while textile work was a distinctly female activity within a strongly patriarchal society, even when textiles became the basis of the Icelandic economy, their production provided women with a say in economic matters and strong political, even magical, powers that brought the bargaining and negotiations of power down to the household level. Reviews evidence for Viking women in Britain, demonstrating that women were present with the armies that won new lands for settlement and were thus part of the conquest and early acculturation processes, playing varied roles outside the stereotyped ones of wives and mothers, such as bearers of weapons, sorceresses and rune carvers.