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In the opening scene of the History Channel’s Vikings, Lagertha stands shoulder to shoulder with the men, shield raised, sword ready. It is one of the most enduring images the show gave popular culture — and it raises a question that has divided historians, archaeologists, and Viking enthusiasts for decades: did women in the Viking Age actually fight in battle, or are shield-maidens a romantic invention layered on top of history centuries after the fact?
The honest answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no. It involves a rare Old Norse word, a 140-year-old misidentified skeleton, a DNA test that rewrote a museum label, and a genre of saga literature that loved a good warrior woman a little too much to be taken entirely at face value.
What the Word “Skjaldmær” Actually Meant
The term most people translate as “shield-maiden” is skjaldmær in Old Norse, and it is worth knowing upfront that it appears only a handful of times across the entire surviving body of Old Norse literature. That scarcity matters. If shield-maidens were an unremarkable, everyday feature of Viking society, we would expect the word to turn up constantly in law codes, land records, and throwaway lines in sagas about ordinary farms. Instead, it shows up almost exclusively in legendary sagas — the more fantastical, semi-mythical branch of Old Norse storytelling that also gives us dragons, cursed rings, and gods walking among mortals.
That does not mean the concept was invented from nothing. It means skjaldmær functioned, in the literature we have, more like a legendary archetype than a documented job title — closer to how “knight errant” evokes something specific in medieval romance without describing most actual medieval soldiers.
The Legendary Shield-Maidens
Even if the sagas are not straightforward history, the women they describe are vivid enough to have shaped a thousand years of storytelling.
Lagertha
The historical Lagertha comes from a single source: the 12th-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus and his Gesta Danorum. Saxo describes her fighting alongside the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok with her hair loose, “braver than a man.” Crucially, she does not appear in any surviving Old Norse saga or Eddic poem — only in Saxo’s Latin chronicle, written centuries after any events it claims to describe, and heavily coloured by his own classical and Christian influences.
Hervor
Hervor, from the 13th-century Hervarar saga, is a more textured figure. Raised as a farmhand, she disguises herself as a man, takes up the life of a raider, and travels to a haunted island to claim her dead father’s cursed sword, Tyrfing, from his burial mound. Her story is less about battlefield glory than about reclaiming a birthright in a world that expects her to stay home — a theme that resonates as much with tragedy as with triumph.
Freydís Eiríksdóttir
Freydís appears in the Vinland sagas, the accounts of Norse exploration of North America. According to the Saga of Erik the Red, during a skirmish with Indigenous Skrælingar in Vinland, a heavily pregnant Freydís picked up a fallen sword, bared her chest, and struck it with the blade — a shock display that reportedly sent the attackers fleeing. Whether or not the scene happened exactly as written, it is one of the few “shield-maiden” moments set in something closer to a real historical event rather than a legendary saga.
The Birka Grave That Changed the Conversation
Legends are one thing; skeletons are another. The most significant evidence in this entire debate comes from a 10th-century grave in Birka, Sweden, catalogued in the 1880s as Bj.581.
Birka’s Bj.581 was, for well over a century, treated as the textbook example of an elite Viking warrior burial: a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and — strikingly — two horses complete with riding gear, plus a set of gaming pieces suggesting the deceased understood battlefield tactics. Archaeologists assumed the occupant was male for well over 100 years, largely because that assumption matched the grave goods.
Then, in 2017, a research team led by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson at Stockholm University ran a genomic analysis on the skeletal remains. The result: two X chromosomes, no Y. The celebrated Birka warrior was, biologically, a woman.
The finding triggered a genuinely heated academic debate that is still ongoing. Some archaeologists argued the case was airtight evidence that at least some Viking-Age women held recognised warrior status. Others pushed back hard, questioning whether weapons in a grave necessarily prove the occupant used them in life — grave goods can signal rank, family status, or symbolic authority rather than a documented combat record. A few researchers even suggested the burial might represent a blended or reassigned grave, though follow-up analysis has largely reinforced the original sex identification. What almost everyone agrees on is that Bj.581 permanently changed the terms of the argument: it is no longer possible to dismiss armed Viking women as pure fiction.
Not an Isolated Case
Bj.581 is the most famous example, but it is not alone. Archaeologists have identified several dozen graves across Scandinavia containing female skeletons buried with weapons — swords, spears, arrowheads, and shields — spanning sites in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not every weapon-burial proves a fighter, and the debate over interpretation is far from settled for any single grave. But taken together, the pattern is difficult to explain away entirely as coincidence or symbolism, and it lines up with something the sagas and law codes independently suggest: Norse women, especially those of high status, held more legal and social autonomy than most of their counterparts elsewhere in medieval Europe, including the right to own property, initiate divorce, and in some cases inherit and manage substantial estates.
So, Did Viking Women Really Fight?
The most defensible answer, based on where the evidence currently stands, is a careful “some did, but it was the exception rather than the rule.” The overwhelming majority of Viking-Age women lived lives centred on farms, households, trade, and textile production — work that was itself demanding, essential, and far from passive. But the archaeological record, read alongside (not instead of) the saga tradition, makes a purely mythological explanation increasingly hard to sustain. A society that gave women unusual legal standing, worshipped war goddesses like Freya, and imagined Valkyries choosing who lived and died on the battlefield was, at minimum, culturally comfortable with the idea of women and violence coexisting — even if it remained unusual for a woman to actually pick up a sword.
For a fuller picture of the world these women lived in — the raids, the trade routes, and the settlements that carried Norse influence across Europe and beyond — the wider story is covered in our brief history of the Vikings.
Shield-Maidens in Popular Culture
The modern shield-maiden owes at least as much to television as to Saxo Grammaticus. Vikings made Lagertha one of the most recognisable Norse figures in the world, and its sequel series, Vikings: Valhalla, built an entire arc around Freydís Eiríksdóttir as a warrior in her own right. That popular revival has done more to fuel public fascination with the Bj.581 discovery than any academic journal ever could — a rare case of a TV drama and an archaeology lab pointing, however imperfectly, at the same open question.
The Bottom Line
Shield-maidens were never as common as popular culture suggests, and the sagas that describe them were never intended as historical documentation in the modern sense. But they were not invented from nothing either. Somewhere between the legendary Lagertha and the very real skeleton in grave Bj.581 sits a more complicated, more human truth: that in a society already unusual for the legal freedoms it granted women, a small number genuinely did take up arms — and centuries later, we are still digging up the proof, one grave at a time.
