Did shieldmaidens really exist? History and legend

We write a whole series about a shieldmaiden, so this is a question we get asked a lot, and one we’ve had to think about carefully. Did women really take up arms and fight in the Viking age? The honest answer is: it’s complicated, and the complicated version is more interesting than a simple yes or no.

The shieldmaiden of story

The idea is old and it is everywhere in the literature. The Norse word is skjaldmær, shield-maiden. Saxo Grammaticus, a medieval Danish historian, wrote of women who fought like men, Lagertha chief among them. The sagas and the older poems are full of armed, formidable women, and behind them stand the valkyries, Odin’s warrior-women who choose the slain.

The catch is that almost all of this was written down centuries after the Viking age itself, by men, some of it clearly as legend rather than record. So the shieldmaiden as a powerful idea is beyond doubt. The shieldmaiden as an everyday battlefield reality is a harder thing to pin down.

The grave in the ground

Then there’s the archaeology, and one grave in particular. In Birka, a great Viking-age trading town in Sweden, there is a chamber grave known as Bj 581. It was excavated in the nineteenth century and long assumed to belong to a man, because it held a warrior’s full kit: sword, axe, spear, arrows, two horses, and a set of gaming pieces of the sort you’d expect for someone who commanded others.

In 2017, a DNA study confirmed the body was biologically female. It made headlines around the world, and you can see why.

What it does and doesn’t prove

Here’s where a historian has to be careful, and where the fun really starts. A woman buried with weapons is not quite the same as a woman who fought. Grave goods can signal status, family, or symbolism as much as occupation. Some scholars see Bj 581 as strong evidence for a female warrior of real rank. Others caution that a burial is a statement made by the living, and doesn’t hand us a biography.

Both can be true at once: the grave is genuinely remarkable, and it doesn’t single-handedly settle the question. That tension is honest, and I’d rather sit in it than pretend it isn’t there.

Why it matters to us

What isn’t in doubt is that Norse women held real power. They ran farms, held property, could divorce, and the völva, the seeress, was a figure men feared and courted. A society like that is fertile ground for a woman who picks up a sword, whether she was common or rare.

So when we write Tora, we’re not inventing something out of nothing, and we’re not claiming every hall had a shieldmaiden in it either. We’re writing in the space between the legend and the evidence, which is exactly where the best historical fiction lives.

You can follow Tora, who carries thunder in her name, in Shieldmaiden. And if names like hers interest you, we wrote about how the Vikings chose them here.