Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Shieldmaidens and Feminism

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Sept. 4, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:49

Shieldmaidens and Feminism

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	What's wrong with this picture?
	Take your time, study the details, you'll see it.
	Have you figured it out yet?
	That's right.
	The consistency of the paint on this guy's shield clearly shows it to be modern acrylic.
	Utterly ahistorical.
	Invented hundreds of years after the Viking invasions.
	Three years ago, Science Fair magazine put an article up entitled Invasion of the Viking Women Unearthed.
	So much for Hager the Horrible and his stay-at-home wife Helga.
	Viking women may have equalled men moving to England in medieval invasions.
	Suggests a look at ancient burials.
	And in their desperate quest for legitimacy, feminist bloggers and article writers across the woman sphere have taken this and run with it.
	Such as this article on the globe.
	Half of Viking invaders may have been women, says study.
	Turns out that smoky-eyed shield maidens such as Lagurtha, wife of mighty Ragnar, aren't just a feminist fantasy.
	In fact, Norse invaders in eastern England may have included as many women as men.
	Because if half of them are women, then half of them must have been shield maidens.
	It's not like Vikings brought their families over to settle in England after they'd conquered the Danelaw.
	This article from the geniuses of Tor.com goes one better.
	Better identification of Viking corpses reveals half of the warriors were female.
	Jesus, really?
	Shield maidens are not a myth.
	A recent archaeological discovery has shattered the stereotype of exclusively male Viking warriors, sailing out to war while their long-suffering wives wait at home with baby Vikings.
	We knew it!
	We always knew it!
	Oh my god, confirmation!
	Nature World News confirms this.
	More than Thor, half of Viking warriors were female.
	Thor apparently isn't the only Viking warrior who's allowed to be a woman, even though it's not about being allowed and Thor wasn't a Viking warrior.
	A close examination of Norse remains revealed that a good half of the invading party that tour through eastern England in the 800s and 900s AD was female, and evidently centenarians.
	These results, six female Norse migrants and seven male, should caution against assuming that the great majority of Norse migrants are male, despite other forms of evidence suggesting the contrary, the authors of the study wrote.
	Note they say migrants are not warriors, but the result of an almost 50-50 ratio between Norse female migrants to Norse males is particularly significant when some of the problems with osteological sexing of the skeletons are taken into account.
	It has long been thought that Norse females had accompanied the invaders who eventually founded the Dane Law, but it was assumed that the women were heavily outnumbered by the men and stayed back at the camp or eventual settlements while the men went to war, even though none of these this evidence proves that they weren't doing that.
	It's now revealed that Norse culture, full of mythology with shield maidens, fierce goddesses and winged Valkyries, may not have judged a warrior by their sex.
	Jeez.
	Study author Shane McLeod from the Centre of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia added that this could also indicate that Vikings arrived in England less so as bloodthirsty ravagers and more as colonists looking to get hitched, who just happened to really like their swords.
	Which is doubtless why the English chroniclers of the time reported them to effectively be bloodthirsty pagan demons who raped and pillaged and murdered their way across most of England.
	They doubtless did this because they were a bunch of fucking misogynists and the ranks of Norse warriors coming against them were almost half female.
	The Tor article says, It's been so difficult for people to envision women's historical contributions as solely getting married and dying in childbirth, but you can't argue with numbers, and fifty-fifty is pretty damn good.
	Wait, what?
	Hang on, why has that been difficult for envision that women didn't just get married and then die in childbirth?
	But the presence of female warriors has research as researchers now wondering how accurate the stereotypes of raping and pillaging actually are.
	I mean, if we check, say, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 793, This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully.
	These were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament.
	These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine, and not long after, on the sixth day of the Ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the Church of God in Holy Island by rapine and slaughter.
	I presume it was just, I don't know, that time of the month or something, and the women stayed home that day, and, you know, I mean, it's there were loads of shield maidens.
	Which didn't turn up for that one, I mean...
	Or in 835 A.D. Hear heathen men raided across the Sheppie.
	I don't know, maybe they'd had an argument with the shield maidens and they were like, look, I just need some time to go raiding on my own.
	In fact, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle goes on to talk about heathen men a lot, but we know that that's because they were misogynists.
	I mean, it's not like they were even gonna write about heathen women if they encountered them, they were just so unimportant.
	And we all know that men throughout the ages who weren't the very enlightened and progressive Vikings absolutely despised women.
	I mean, if we actually look at the historical accounts, there are a few times where Viking women did take part in warfare, such as the siege of Dorostolon, where the Byzantine army besieged Dorostolon and despite being outnumbered by the enemy by two to one almost, managed to win a fantastic victory.
	When the Varangians had suffered the devastating defeat, the victors were stunned at discovering armed women amongst the fallen warriors.
	Or when Leif Erikson, discoverer of the Americas, incidentally, when his pregnant half-sister, Freydis was in Vinland, she is reported to have taken up a sword and, bare-breasted, scared away the attacking Native Americans by beating her chest with it, incidentally.
	The fight is recounted in the Greenland saga, although she's not explicitly referred to as a shield maiden, probably because she wasn't.
	The third and final historical account of Viking women in battle out of all the hundreds of battles the Vikings waged was from the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus.
	Shield maidens fought on the Danish side at the Battle of Bravala in the year 750.
	And in all fairness, this is an absolutely thrilling heroic account of this woman, which is brilliant.
	Now out of the town of Slayer, the captains Heather, Held, and Wisner, with Hakon Cut Cheek, came Toomi, the sailmaker.
	On these captains, who had the bodies of women, nature bestowed the souls of men.
	Weiborg was also inspired with the same spirit, and was attended by Bo Brahmanson and Brat the Jute.
	I love these names.
	Thirsting for war.
	The same man witnesses that the maiden Weyblorg fought against the enemy and felled Soth the champion.
	While she was threatening to slay more champions, she was pierced through by an arrow from the bowstring of Thorkil, a native of Telemark.
	A consistent feature of these battles that these shield maidens took part in was that they were invariably on the losing side.
	It would seem that they were not really the first choice of people to send off to war, with the exception of the last example.
	I don't mean to downplay the heroism of the women who took part in this, and indeed the sexual dimorphism present in humans actually, in my opinion, makes their efforts all the more heroic.
	Aggregated data of absolute strength indicates that females have, on average, 40 to 60 percent of the upper body strength of males, and 70 to 75 percent of the lower body strength.
	The difference in strength relative to body mass is less pronounced in trained individuals.
	In Olympic weightlifting, male records vary from 5.5 times body mass in the lowest weight category to 4.2 in the highest, while female records vary from 4.4 to 3.8.
	This can be seen when we have a look at, say, the strongest woman in the world arm wrestling against some pretty average men.
	Hi, I'm Jill Mills.
	I'm the world's strongest woman.
	Ready, set, go!
	You're such a...
	Put the ball on the table.
	Having some trouble.
	Are you guys ready?
	Yeah, give that one, go!
	Despite the fact that the world's strongest woman has got noticeably bigger muscles than the men she's arm wrestling with, she loses two out of three matches.
	And these are not the world's strongest guys.
	So where did this come from?
	Well, there is some archaeological evidence for the early Norse female settlement, obviously in the form of oval brooches.
	But this evidence is minimal.
	The more difficult to date evidence of places names, personal names, DNA samples derived from modern populations suggests that Norse women did migrate to England at some stage, but probably in far fewer numbers than Norse men.
	Begins the study.
	However, MacLeod recently notes that burials of female Norse immigrants have started to turn up in eastern England.
	An increased number of finds of Norse-style jewellery in the last two decades has led some scholars to suggest a larger number of female settlers.
	That's it.
	Female settlers.
	That's all they thought they were.
	Which is why scholarly sites such as Medievalist.net are printing articles titled, Why is This 2011 Article on Viking Women now getting mainstream media attention?
	I know why, you know why, but they don't know.
	Because they don't deal with the cackling, hysterical, feminist propaganda of the internet.
	The feminist journalists are running wild with this.
	Because thanks to modern genetic testing, he and his team were able to determine that six out of the fourteen burial sites were for women, seven were for men, and one was indeterminable.
	And some of those grave sites were found with swords and shields in them.
	And the feminists are using this as absolutely conclusive proof that half of Viking warriors were female.
	And as Medievalists.net point out, because they are actually real journalists, it seems likely that all the media reports currently circulating are simply re-reporting the news that they're seeing on other blogs, in a magnificent example of circular sourcing, and not actually looking at McLeod's original article, which would be difficult for one to access as it is available only behind a paywall at the Wiley Online Library.
	I don't think that's a good enough excuse.
	I think that if you are a journalist and that is your job, you buy the fucking article.
	I'd really like to give Tor credit here, but they say that commenter Andrew W. gives a wonderfully precise and informative look at the findings, adding some context to the idea of female Viking warriors.
	The bad news first.
	While many women have been found buried with weapons, the evidence doesn't support the claim made in the title of Equal Gender Representation on the Battlefield.
	The 2011 study that the article cites concludes, although the results presented here cannot be used to determine the number of female settlers, they do suggest that the ratio of females to males may have been somewhere between a third to roughly equal.
	The key thing to note is the word settlers.
	The article is arguing that women migrated from Scandinavia to England with the invading Viking army in the 9th century.
	Several of these women, the article notes, were buried with weapons, but they are still far outnumbered by the armed men.
	And that is assuming that these women were warriors and this wasn't in any way a symbolic gesture.

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