Ed West has a post up about the pervasiveness of shield-maidens in modern dramatizations of the Viking culture: The hunt for the kick-ass Viking girlboss. In terms of how it is depicted, there is a ludicrousness to it all. At least in Game of Thrones Gwendoline Christie is 6’3 and not particularly delicate of build. West points out how unrealistic it is that Scarlett Johansson’s “Black Widow” character can take down men far larger than her, but Johannssen is aware of how stupid it all is. When asked by a fawning late-night talk show host (I believe it was Steven Colbert) how she did all those things, she stated plainly that they made it seem like she could do all those things. At 5’3 Johannssen must be conscious of the physical differences between men and women.
Here’s a paper on arm strength differences between men and women:
I got the impression from Arthur Herman’s book The Viking Heart that Scandinavian women, though not the butt-kicking babes of modern fantasy literature/comic book movies/video games, were generally pretty formidable.
This is where superhero with magical strength actually works. If the woman has magical strength for some superhero reason, it’s more consistently plausible.
Black widow doesn’t have special powers. Wonder Woman is a minor deity, so works better when she overpowers men.
Scarlett Johannson made her first appearance as Natalie Rushman / Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow in the 2010 film Ironman 2 (unashamed fan boy here). After that film was released I watched Scarlett on David Letterman’s show talking about how she did most of her own stunts in the film, something she was proud of, and how hard she had to train for that, including martial arts training. Letterman said: “So now you know how to take care of yourself.” Scarlett immediately countered with: “Now I know how to *look* like I know how to take care of myself.” Her meaning was clear – it was all very obviously just choreography. In the real world she would have been crushed, and she had absolutely no illusions about that.
That was when she was at her physical peak in athletic terms (trust me, I’m an expert on Scarlett’s physical condition, having watched all of her Marvel films multiple times, and a lot of her other films as well, because I think she is a fine actress), and she was clearly fully aware that it was pure fantasy, better than anyone because she had to stage those fights herself. (In my opinion, as a Black Widow fan boy, they left it far too late to let the Black Widow have her own film (ironically after she had died in the previous Avengers movie) and she was frankly past it and very unconvincing in the fight scenes, and was upstaged badly by the younger Florence Pugh. When it finally came, the film was hugely disappointing to me, and it is a good thing that Scarlett, after her successful legal fight with Disney, will never make another film playing the role.)
@Max – There is virtually zero archaeological evidence of that. Of all of the female inhumations from that period of history that have been excavated, only one of the graves was furnished with any weapons at all as grave goods, and they might have been purely symbolic of high status; maybe she was the daughter of an important chief or some such. All of the other graves of presumably high ranking females were furnished solely with womanly things, in stark contrast to male inhumations which were all furnished with multiple weapons. I got that from practising Scandinavian archaeologists who are experts on the Vendel and Viking Periods. BTW, Herman’s book does not have good reviews as an historical work.
So no, Scandinavian shield maidens were only ever mythical.
I can’t read West’s post because I’m not a subscriber, but anyone who goes looking for evidence that female Scandinavian fighters were real is not going to find any.
A footnote on Gwendoline Christie: she was bullied when she was younger because she was so tall. That should tell you something.
“Are women ‘the equal’ of men? This is an embarrassing subject.
Women are certainly physically inferior to men and if this were not the case the whole history of the world would be different. No comradely socialist legislation on women’s behalf could accomplish a millionth of what a bit more muscle tissue, gratuitously offered by nature, might do for this ‘second’ being.”
Elizabeth Hardwick, 1962.
@John
My comment was saying:
“Norse women [not just in the Viking era] have generally been strong-willed and accomplished, despite not actually being combat warriors.”
Not:
“Norse women were warriors, just not as fearsome as they’re portrayed as in fiction.”
Herman himself wrote:
“[E]vidence of women actually fighting alongside men in their raids or expeditions is scanty at best.”
Which he follows with a skeptical discussion of the medieval sources (e.g. Grammaticus) alleging otherwise.
Medieval sources written not all that long after the Viking Age do mention “shield-maidens”, and I’ve seen accounts of occasional archeological finds that suggest that the idea of female warriors wasn’t completely foreign to the Vikings themselves (or to others, like the Scythians), so it wouldn’t totally shock me if there were some reality to it; maybe ritual, or maybe even for real. But the Vikings TV show has entire female battalions, which is just ludicrous.
For the record, if Scarlett Johansson, tries to overpower me, she will win. Actually all she would have to do is smile at me and I would be a quivering bowl of jello.
@Reese: ““Are women ‘the equal’ of men? This is an embarrassing subject.”
No actually, they are our superiors, and, if we (men) are wise, we will recognize it and learn to appreciate it. For, they have the keys to the ultimate treasure, and we can only have it if they give it to us of their own accord.
Frank Loesser explains it all:
@Max – My apology; I misconstrued what you were saying.
@jb – Scythians fought as mounted archers, in which case the idea of some women mixed in with men fighting against male opponents becomes considerably less ridiculous.
Which he follows with a skeptical discussion of the medieval sources (e.g. Grammaticus) alleging otherwise.
Maybe Grammaticus saw long-haired fighting men and thought they were women?
I guess on this topic, it’s interesting to me that… although these women almost certainly didn’t exist… the myths that made them up, gave them a symbolic role, did exist in societies that were well aware of the differences between men and women through hard experience.
So it’s like, why did this happen? I guess that it was because the figure of the warrior was just powerful in these societies that it naturally led to these ideas, even though these people did not really exist in actual practice.
I was thinking of this earlier when reading this piece on the finding of a female interred in the pre-Indo-European neolithic in the Cerny burials in France (4600-4300 BCE, so about 2000 years earlier) – https://www.livescience.com/neolithic-woman-warrior-burial-france
Weapon burial, with arrowheads, which is a male-gendered form of burial common among the Cerny cemeteries (“Earlier studies of Cerny cemeteries in the Paris Basin distinguish one particular category of “individuals of power” by burying them with arrows, quivers and possibly bows — perhaps thereby identifying them as “hunters.” Those studies showed that such hunters were always men, with stress markers on their bones that were consistent with drawing bows, the researchers of the new study noted, writing that. “Together, the recognition given to the masculine, to archery or to hunting, or even more broadly, to the wild world, characterizes the Cerny ideology in the Paris Basin.” . Not necessarily a warrior burial as indicated in the link, but perhaps a “hunter” burial).
So perhaps this shows some indication of how pervasive these ideas can become when a society really treats it as important to have these qualities of strength, of being able to hunt and fight, and such. Even of course they know that this is not really reflected in real physical abilities.
@Matt – That link you provided sent me down a rabbit hole and I arrived at this, which makes for entertaining reading, both the blog post and the appended comments.
http://norseandviking.blogspot.com/2017/09/lets-debate-female-viking-warriors-yet.html
It’s about the discovery in 2017 that one of the inhumations in the Birka burial place, in a grave richly furnished with weapons and two horses, was unquestionably female. XX. This is the case I referred to above.
She died between the ages of 30 and 40. She was reported to have “slim bones” (so not a very robust individual). There were no cut marks or other signs of trauma on the skeletal remains to suggest wounds that had healed. And there were no signs on the skeletal remains that she had frequently engaged in very vigorous activity such as fighting. Despite that, mayhem in the various media ensued and she was hailed as a “powerful and high ranking female Viking warrior”, and of course the usual suspects all dived in claiming it was proof that she was transgender (in which case she would have had to be transitioning from female to male, without the benefit of testosterone injections, so I think we can dismiss that as ridiculous – maybe she was just a wannabe, but we can’t know).
My conclusion – either she was so adept at combat with minimal effort that it left not a single telling mark on her skeletal remains (extremely unlikely), or simply that she never engaged in combat, against either males or other females. She wasn’t a warrior. Why then was she buried with so may weapons (sword, seax, battle axe, two spears, bow and 25 armour piercing arrows – that’s pretty much the full suite) and no female stuff? I have no idea.
It set me off thinking about why so many people in the 20th/21st Century so desperately want to believe that fierce female Viking warriors were a real thing. And did the makers of TV series about Vikings prompt this by depicting hordes of ferocious female fighters, or were they just responding to what a lot of viewers wanted to see? Either way, I think that is probably understandable enough. Millions of people just watched two women beating the snot out of each other at Madison Square Garden, and female MMA and whatever is a fairly big thing – but that is all female on female, and in weight classes. But a lot of people clearly like to see women being ferocious and violent.
What is more difficult to comprehend are Early Medieval accounts (but tellingly not from any Nordic sources) of fierce female Viking warriors (so non-comtemporaneous, because the Viking Period preceded the Early Medieval Period, by which time the Scandies had been Christianised, and not tales told by the Scandies themselves, but by the Others) when in fact they didn’t ever exist – or if they did, there is zero evidence that they did. Was it just story telling, like Roman mothers scaring their children into going to bed to sleep or Boudicca would come to get them? (I don’t know of any evidence that she actually did any fighting herself either – she survived the Battle of Watling Street and escaped from the battle scene, but then committed suicide, but there is no mention in the sources that she personally engaged in the fighting that I know of – and she was alleged to be big and scary).
But then the Greeks were convinced that there were tribes of Amazons which, aside from maybe some female Scythian horseback archers (who did not find it necessary to cut off one of their breasts, just like modern girls who practise archery don’t need to) mixed in with males, not all-female troops, were equally pure fiction. There is even an account, I believe in the Iliad which I read when I was 12, where Achilles fights with and kills the head woman of a tribe of Amazons.
I don’t have an answer.
I have taught my daughter some martial arts for her own protection, and she has enjoyed practising Muay Thai, but not because she deludes herself that she could successfully beat any decent sized male in a real fight. If she was ever attacked, about the best she could hope for would be either to land a lucky kick to her attacker’s genitals or gouge his eyes, or in other ways prove to be too much trouble, in the hope that her attacker would go off looking for easier prey.
The answer (if it isn’t just made up) is class: not a woman beating a man but a well-fed, well-bred, well-equipped, equestrian aristocratic woman, allowed to receive decent training by fatherly indulgence, beating a vertically challenged, malnourished and horseless peasant. There are actually modern examples of this, during the “Arab Spring” there were Gulf noblewomen who participated in pacifying rebels, but it seems safe to speculate that this never happened in a context where the fight could go the wrong way.
I don’t know whether someone else commented on this or not, but drawing a powerful recurved composite bow takes a lot of upper body strength, which is beyond the vast majority of women. Most wouldn’t even be able to string one.
If you have the skill to make a recurved composite bow, you have the skill to make them with different draw weights.
Next you will tell me that women don’t have the leg strength to ride horses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Toshi-ya.JPG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Archery_contest_at_CNE,_1931.tif
Twinkie, not to protract this, but the genetic and archaeological evidence for female Scythian warriors is irrefutable, and citations can easily be found by Googling.
Fully one third of female Scythian graves excavated have contained weapons, including collections of arrows. Often the coffins were so tightly sealed that the remains were partly mummified, and many have been found to have suffered injuries typical of battle injuries, some including having arrow heads still embedded in them. Estimated ages have ranged from 12 to 40, suggesting that Scythian girls were trained to fight from an early age. So they weren’t just randomly getting involved. Scythians lived in small family groups, and the evidence suggests that everyone in the group fought, once they were old enough.
Yes. You make weak ones for women and children. The kind that can’t bring down an armored man from a distance. “You wield a woman’s bow” was probably a grave insult among the Mongols. 😉
They don’t have the leg strength to ride large, powerful warhorses while dressed in panoply and then manipulate weapons while standing on the stirrup. And do all that for an extended period of time.
Mongol women (indeed most women of pastoral cultures) also fought in extremis (and were wounded or killed), but that doesn’t mean they were warriors de rigeur. For that matter, while only males fought in field battles in much of human history, during sieges, everyone pitched in, including women and children (remember how Pyrrhus of Epirus was killed).
Do you really think that 13 year-old girls can be warriors, just because they were buried with weapons?
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.com/2022/02/01/dna-shows-scythian-warrior-mummy-was-a-13-year-old-girl/
Weapons were extremely expensive in pre-industrial times and indicated status.
And what “genetic” evidence would you summon to prove that women somewhere were warriors once?
What? We seem to be talking at cross purposes. I am talking *only* about the nomadic Scythians who dominated the Pontic Steppe from circa 7th to 3rd BCE.
They did not use stirrups, or saddles, did not wear panoply (no helmets, breast plates or whatever) and did not ride large, powerful warhorses. It is known what they looked like and wore from contemporaneous images and descriptions, and from well preserved remains in graves.
You seem to be talking about some other very different people.
My reference to genetics was in reference to the fact that fully one third of Scythian remains buried with weapons have been found from DNA to be female. Females found buried with weapons are normally a real rarity in archaeology. Some of these female remains show evidence of wounds typical of wounds sustained in battle, including some with arrow heads still embedded in them – that is not a slam dunk, but it is at least suggestive.
@John Massey – I learned in karate NOT to attempt to disable a man by kicking his genitals. It makes him mad and the pain can be “shaken off” for 60 seconds or so. Better to knock the wind out of him. Doesn’t sound nearly as bad but is more effective.
That doesn’t change the fact that warring on horseback with a bow is more muscle-intensive than you seem to think. Women don’t have the strength to string and wield a powerful bow (or throw a javelin far). Bows meant for women and children aren’t going to have the range or the penetrative power to be used for warring.
“Suggestive” isn’t evidence.
Nothing wrong with kicking the genitals in a fight. There are two issues with it though. 1) You fight like you train. Unless you are kicking sparring partners in the groin, you aren’t going to do it (well) in a real fight. I would imagine that kind of sparring wouldn’t last long. 2) Groin is a relatively small target and easily blocked (esp. in a bladed stance). Worse still, a kick to that area can be scooped easily.
60 seconds is a lifetime in a fight, by the way (I say that as someone who has been knocked out in the first 5 seconds of a fight as well as someone who has put people in hospitals).
One of the reasons why people who practice “combat sports” (e.g. boxing, Judo/BJJ, wrestling, etc.) can generally fight a heck of a lot better than those who practice “combatives” (e.g. Krav Maga), let alone fantasy, choreographed partner dancing such as Aikido is that those combat sports have you spar day-in and day-out with full-force against 100% resisting opponents who are trying to punch you in the face or throw you over your head. So while the techniques in the combat sports have to be relatively “safe” (e.g. no eye-gouging or groin-kicking), the flipside is that you get very good at being able to pull off techniques under pressure against a live opponent.
Being able to actually fight requires more than physical attributes of strength, speed, etc. and knowledge of techniques – it requires subtle and intangible, but enormously vital abilities such as distance-management and timing that can only be gained from sparring/force-on-force training. It also requires the ability to handle the pressure of a chaotic situation in which the actions of your opponents are unpredictable and can have highly negative consequences. Again, this requires “pressure-testing,” aka sparring.
I can teach someone to throw a check hook in a few minutes, but that someone is going to have to put in hours of sparring to be able to use it effectively without getting dropped.