Book Review of The Real Valkyrie by Nancy Marie Brown

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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336 pages, published on August 31, 2021 (I received an advanced copy of this book through the publisher on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)

YOU MAY ENJOY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE:

Non-fiction * Scandinavian History * Viking History * Gender Studies

TRAVEL INSPIRATION:

Norway, Sweden, and Iceland are perhaps the most prominent modern-day countries whose Viking past is expounded upon in this fascinating book, but Ireland, the Scottish Orkney Islands, Kyiv/Kiev in Ukraine, and other places throughout today’s north Europe to east Asia play a role in the vast territories where Vikings lived, fought, and traded. Because of the way that Brown tells this tale, the land, waterways, and essence of the north come to life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nancy marie brown

After a decades-long career as a university-based science writer, Brown decided to try her hand at combining her knowledge and love of Scandinavian culture and history with her non-fiction writing skills. Brown’s own educational background includes graduate level comparative literature studies, and she has long held an interest in the Icelandic sagas. In fact, she spends chunks of the year living in Iceland, where she gives tours and history lessons, and the rest of the year as a resident of Vermont in the United States, where she keeps Icelandic horses. (As an aside: We had the good fortune of meeting some beautiful horses while in Iceland. Their lineage dates to the 800s-900s when Vikings brought them to Iceland, and the country has held strict requirements to prevent their line from changing.)

In addition to a young adult novel, Brown has written six works that heavily rest in the world of the Vikings and Icelandic sagas: Ivory Vikings (2015), The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler (2015), Song of the Vikings (2012), The Abacus and the Cross (2010), The Far Traveler (2007), Mendel in the Kitchen (2004), and A Good Horse Has No Color (2001).

REVIEW OF the real valkyrie BY nancy marie brown

In the 1800s, a Viking burial site was unearthed in Birka, Sweden. The burial included a Viking ship, weaponry, game pieces, horses and riding accessories, and other tools. The grave was documented as that of a Viking warrior, as evidenced by the contents of the burial. As Brown shares in her book, most “sexing” (that is, determination of whether a skeleton is male or female) throughout the history of archaeology has been sexing by metal. That is to say, where weapons are found, it is deemed to be a male, where jewelry is found, female. There are a number of reasons why the field of archaeology has used this approach even as DNA testing has emerged, and Brown provides an interesting overview of this process.

In 2017, DNA analysis was performed on the bones found in Birka and led to an unexpected and shocking discovery: they were bones of a female. The Real Valkyrie explores what this means, what has been hidden in plain sight all along, and imagines the possibilities of the life lived so long ago.

Using her history of the Icelandic sagas, Brown takes an innovative approach to her book. Taking real life stories, cultural knowledge, and details from the Viking past, she creates a potential life story for this woman, who she names Hervor, after a character in a saga. There are real details folded in. Evaluation of the skeleton provided information on where the Viking woman lived at various points in her life. Aging of the bones placed her within a relatively narrow window of time, and her age at death was 30-40 years old. Melding all of that together, Brown paints a reality-based, fictional story that brings the life of a 10th century Viking woman to life. The start of each chapter includes this fictionalized story of Hervor before shifting into a more common non-fiction exploration of the society at the time, spanning politics, warfare, burial mechanisms, clothing, and more.

Throughout the entire book, the undercurrent is an exploration of the gender roles during the time of the Vikings, roles that we learn were not nearly defined as they would be in more modern times. Brown also seeks out information concerning when the story changed, when Vikings started to be portrayed as gender-divided with men as warriors and women as housebound stereotypes. Two major milestones in this evolution can be laid at the feet of Christianity, which morphed the social roles to fit religious requirements, and also during the Victorian Era, when defined gender roles were at their peak.

In her books, Brown is interested in exploring what we think we know of history and how it compares to what may have been the true story before future centuries created myths and tales to reinforce their own views. There was so much in this book that was eye-opening. For example, there was gender fluidity - beyond just the blurred gender roles (blurred, that is, by modern standards) - where some women were referred to as “king” instead of “queen” and where some women took on male names and personas for periods of time in their lives. Homosexuality was also acceptable, as long as it was not part of an act of adultery, which was not acceptable for anyone.

What was also eye-opening to me is the significant role modern bias has played in how Vikings have been viewed; how, for example, graves were assumed to contain men if they met certain qualifications. It was assumed that women would not have been warriors in spite of ample evidence to the contrary, for example, in the sagas. And, lending the title to the book itself, archaeologists have assumed that the women warriors depicted in Viking artwork and stories must have been supernatural Valkyries because that seemed more likely than the fact that they immortalized actual warrior women.

Brown’s book is well-researched and based in cultural documents; she also uses literary license to explore the ‘what if’ of history. How many other ‘facts’ of history are layered upon initial biased perspectives? How much are we a product of our own time and own biases even in spite of having knowledge to the contrary? Nothing Brown said about the Victorian Era or the role of the church in gender definition was new to me, but these perspectives are deeply ingrained in us in a way that makes it harder to see what is staring us right in the face.

For anyone interested in the Vikings and their society at large or the history of women, this is a fascinating read that will make you think about the world a little more critically.