Yggdrasil · Humankind

Birka Grave Bj 581: A Burial That Challenged an Assumption

A rich tenth-century chamber grave at Birka, long read as a man’s, found to hold a biologically female person.

Myth and literature

The story

Archaeological interpretation: a grave read for over a century as a male warrior’s was shown to hold a biologically female person, and researchers have since argued over what that means.

Birka, on an island in Lake Mälaren in Sweden, was an early trading town. Its largest cemeteries hold thousands of graves. Grave Bj.581, dug in 1878 at the edge of the grave-field near the road to the town, was a wooden chamber of the tenth century. The dead person lay among a sword, an axe, a fighting knife, two lances, two shields and twenty-five armour-piercing arrows, with two horses beside the chamber and a gaming board and pieces. Everyone assumed a man lay there, and the grave became a model of the high-status Viking warrior. Osteology and DNA later showed the skeleton to be biologically female. Price and colleagues argue that she was a professional warrior of rank.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: the grave goods, the chamber’s position, and the finding of biological sex. The authors’ conclusion is that she lived as a professional warrior and was buried as a person of rank in a martial setting, and that she may have been present on a battlefield. That conclusion is theirs and not every scholar has accepted it.

What is not recorded: her name, any battle she fought, or what she called herself. The authors state plainly that they cannot say whether she was a woman in a gendered sense, and that she may have taken a man’s social role or had another sense of self. The grave is one case and cannot settle how Viking Age societies treated women. It offers no link to Valkyries or Valhöll, and nothing in it ties the burial to the myths.

Historical evidence

The evidence

The evidence is the grave as Hjalmar Stolpe recorded it in 1878, the surviving finds, and the analysis published in Antiquity 93 (2019) by Neil Price and nine co-authors, who also cite their 2017 DNA paper. The grave lay outside the hillfort’s northern gate, on a rocky height marked by a boulder. It was among the roughly twenty richest graves at Birka. The finds were weapons in unusual variety, bridled and unbridled horses, a full set of gaming pieces with a board, and clothing with details echoing steppe fashion. There were no domestic tools. The authors report that the genomic analysis showed the individual was female, and that nineteenth-century and later scholars had called it a warrior grave without challenge, because they took the occupant to be male.