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The ornate burials of two women within the Oseberg ship reveals the prominent status that women could achieve in the Viking Age.
Imagine a Viking ship burial and you probably think of a fearsome warrior killed in battle and sent on his journey to Valhöll. However, the grandest ship burial ever discovered-the Oseberg burial near Oslo-is not a monument to a man but rather to two women who were buried with more wealth and honour than any known warrior burial. Since the burial was uncovered more than a century ago, historians and archaeologists have tried to answer key questions: who were these women, how did they achieve such prominence, and what do they tell us about women's lives in this time? This article will explore current understandings of the lives and deaths of the Oseberg women, and the privileged position they held in their society.
Women of the Viking Age seem to be reinvented every few decades to meet the current demands of pop culture. The busty Wagnerian Valkyries belting out the Ring Cycle gradually gave way to a 'Barbie' Viking Princess aesthetic that has now been replaced by leather-clad warrior women with extreme eye-makeup. These various stereotypes obscure the complex picture that emerges from the manuscripts, runestones, artefacts, homesteads and burials that tell the stories of the real women of the Viking Age. The Oseberg burial, which richly documents the lives of two unnamed but storied women, lets us glimpse the real world of these women, not the imaginings of medieval chroniclers or modern film-makers.
The Ship Burial
Dotted around Scandinavia are hundreds of earth mounds, mostly unexcavated and mainly presumed to be burials. The Oseberg mound was excavated in 1904, revealing that the site's unusual blue clay had perfectly preserved wood, textiles, metal and bone. Within the mound, archaeologists found a carved oak ship carrying a tent-like wooden burial chamber containing the remains of two richly dressed women accompanied by an extensive collection of goods. Within a few decades of its burial it had been disturbed by grave robbers, an act dated by dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) of the wooden shovels they left behind to between 953 and 990 CE.1 The robbers disturbed the women's skeletal remains and likely removed jewellery and precious...