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A Woman Warrior
Viking women led men into battle.
Move over Daenerys—there’s a new warrior princess in town. Researchers have concluded that a Viking warrior buried with full military honors in the 10th century wasn’t a man as previously thought, but a woman. When the grave was first unearthed in Birka, Sweden, in 1889, it contained horses, weapons, and other items of high social and military standing. Because the Vikings were a patriarchal society, everyone assumed the warrior was male. But scientists recently re-examined the bones using DNA testing and confirmed the fighter’s gender as female. “She was an elite,” says researcher Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who worked on the project, “a high-ranking military officer, like a general.” The discovery sheds new light on female roles in Viking society. “This shows that Viking society was more complex than we thought,” says Hedenstierna-Jonson, “and that there have always been people willing to go outside gender norms.”