No book to review tonight. A friend pointed the video above out to me recently, and I watched it with interest. It’s by Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, a Scandinavian living historian and video blogger. I’ve watched several of his videos before and found him very sensible – that is to say, he often agrees with me.
Except on religion. He’s a strong heathen, so I imagine we probably couldn’t be great friends. Which speaks well for both of us (I think) when we agree in spite of that.
This video is about the famous “woman warrior” grave at Birka in Sweden. As Bull-Hansen explains, early excavators assumed the excavated skeleton to be male, because of the rich finds of weapons and armor buried with it. But more recently, DNA analysis has shown that the occupant was in fact a woman.
This, of course, set off fireworks and celebrations among feminist historians and Lagertha groupies. It also had the effect of muting (somewhat) my own position, where I insist that there might be other reasons for armor in a grave than identifying the occupant as a warrior. Inheritance law is one possibility that comes to mind. Family graves had legal importance in regard to property rights – a man who died at sea or abroad might require a surrogate in a grave as a sort of proxy. (I don’t know that to be true – I’m purely speculating.)
Bull-Hansen answers one question I’d wondered about – there are no signs of any healed wounds on the skeleton. That seems to me significant.
Anyway, I find this an excellent discussion of the matter, and thank Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen for it.
