The Real Valkyrie
The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women
by Nancy Marie Brown
St. Martin's Press
You Like Them
History | Nonfiction (Adult)
Pub Date 31 Aug 2021 | Archive Date 14 Sep 2021

Great book! I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys history or women's studies. I don't read enough about the Norse and this book proves it. I found this book a fascinating read. I learned so much. Thanks to St, Martin's Press and NetGalley for the ARC. I plan to purchase it for our library.

5 star

I have just read The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, by Author Nancy Marie Brown.

What an intriguing, and interesting book. There was so much detail and research put into this book.

It was fascinating from start to finish. I have already recommended it to several friends who enjoy history.

The detail about the gravesites, and what was discovered, to the attention to detail that was described in their lives, clothing, habits, and armour!

A very enjoyable read about a fascinating topic!

Thank you to NetGalley, Author Nancy Marie Brown , and St. Martin's Press for my advanced copy to read and review.

#TheRealValkyrie #NetGalley

This book follows the journey of Hervor, a girl who became a slave and eventually a Viking Warrior. Brown's examination of our ideas of Viking Warriors challenges the idea that the quintessential warrior was male, or that gender held any bearing in terms of future occupation for the Rus, or Vikings.

By examining a grave found at Birka that was for years assumed to be a male warrior's research now suggests that this warrior was a woman, and female warriors were not uncommon. Brown weaves historical research with sagas and poems from the period in which Hervor lived. Through following historical accounts of trade routes and examining artifacts found in the grave, as well as testing on Hervor's bones, Brown manages to theorize how Hervor's life may have been lived.

The significance of this book is not whether Hervor's speculative life was accurately theorized here, but rather challenging the idea of the Valkyrie as simply mythological creatures. We now know that in Viking culture, Sami culture, and many of the other nomadic eastern cultures Hervor could have encountered that women were valued members of society and often leaders. Victorian mores and the church's influence tainted our view of this powerful historical figures. This book is worth reading. Brown achieves a balance of speculative "fiction" based in historical facts that immerses you in the time in which Hervor lived.

Although I read my share of historical fiction, I do not read much straight history. However, this book looked very intriguing, so I decided to give it a try — and I am glad that I did! It is uniquely presented, well-written work that is immensely engaging.

This book is really an interesting combination of historical and straight fiction, for it focuses on the probable life of a Viking warrior woman, whose remains were found in Birka, Sweden (and whom the author names Hervor), by mixing fictional scenes and Viking literature with credible historical research. I applaud this creative writing style! The result is simply a fascinating look at Viking women and their world in the 10th century — and definitely not dry reading.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

Ms. brown did a great job of weaving known facts into a story that was very likely to have happened to her Valkyrie skeleton. It was a fresh new view on how women might have actually been during the viking era and the new details that have been uncovered are very fascinating. This book was super easy to read and kept you engaged to entire time.

First book by this author and was not disappointed. Very well researched and written. Was very gripping and interesting read. Would definitely recommend this.

The Real Valkyrie by N.M. Brown is a stand-alone non-fiction historical book. After reading the blurb I was intrigued and really wanted to read this book. But sadly it's not what I expected. I expected to be led into the colorful world of the first century with their rich history, the nordic mythology too and was hoping just a bit for something like Lagherta's story from Vikings - just a tiny bit. Nope, that is a bonedeep dry lesson in history, a dustdry scientific lecture where I learned not much. Viking women were warriors?? Gasps - nope, nothing new, I already new this, even learned about it in school. When you like reading about bones and graves, their excavation, DNA testing and results - this is your story. So I really, really wanted to like the book, but this was a dnf for me.

Thank you NetGalley, St. Martin's Press and Author for this widget to The Real Valkyrie by Nancy

I usually tend to not read non-fiction books. So when I was sent this I thought what the heck!.
I'm going to give it a go.
And I'm here to say this read blew me away.

This novel will be interesting for those who enjoy reading about Viking women!
Nancy uses written documents, new tools and evidence to the Viking world of the tenth century that warrior woman were powerful back then and women had equal rights.
This will be great for schools also.
This is a fascinating read, I thought it was powerful, empowering, thought-provoking and just all.around freaking amazing!
The writing was superb, well-written, well-researched, outstanding novel that I couldn't be torn from!

Again I can't thank the lady enough at St. Martin Press for this widget!
You had me read and enjoy a book I would have never read! 😘

I will post to my Goodreads, bookstagram and Facebook accounts closer to pub date!

I found this to be an intriguing work of creative nonfiction. The author alternates between an imagined biography of an individual from a real Viking burial with scholarly explanations based on the archaeological evidence and reading ''between the lines' of the Viking sagas. I found her assumptions compelling and the biography entertaining. The only reason I didn't it a full 5 stars is because I liked the character so much that I would have preferred to read more detail in the imagined biography.

It will surprise no one that everything we think we know about Vikings women dates back to those darn Victorians and their ability to completely Victorian-ize everything.

The island of Birka, not far from Stockholm, is home to a once-busy Viking village, meant to control trade routes around northern Scandinavia. It also happens to be home to hundreds of Viking graves. One grave in particular is of most interest to the author, that of a Viking warrior that was first excavated in 1878. Given the items recovered from the grave and the high-status burial provided, for over one hundred years it has been assumed (by dudes who could not conceive of any other option) that the Birka Warrior was male.

Not so, says the 2017 DNA test.

And from there the author is off and running on a fantastical journey across Europe, imagining what life must have been like for this warrior who lived over hundreds of years ago.

The author does a fantastic job using archaeology, history, and the Norse legends and sagas to bring to light a much more accurate picture of how Vikings women lived, fought, and died. In imagining what life might have been like for this warrior, to whom she gives the name Hervor, the author is able to shed more light on the women of the age who were far more independent than the Victorians would have you believe.

Using the many varieties of sources previously mentioned, the author constructs an example of what life might have been like for young Hervor. Each chapter begins with a segment of Hervor's "story" - a story which sees her cross paths with other formidable women of the age, from Queen Gunnhild to Queen Olga of Kyiv.

While the author has fictionalized what life might have been like for this Birka warrior, each chapter delves deeply into various aspects of life for the real Viking women who lived so long ago. There is extensive research here and the author clearly knows her stuff. The author's knowledge of the sagas and old Norse stories is a wonderful addition to the historical record.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC. I really liked this book! It was informative and yet was written in an engaging way that kept me reading till the end. I will be recommending my library to purchase it. The imagining of the time period I thought was well done and kept my interest. I thought it was engrossing It really made me think about what a woman went through and I am always interested in books that celebrate the contribution of women through history. I remember hearing about the news in 2017 but didn't dig deeper. The combination of history and what it might have been like for a women in that time period. from the perspective of a woman of the time. I used to think that Valkyries were just a character in fantasy books that I had read. I am glad that I read this. There are other books out there that tell the stories of women in history and this is one that must be read. This is a book to include in any Women's History Month display!

Is it history? Is it historical fiction? Whatever the classification, this book is wholly immersive and I cannot praise it enough. From pinpointing the sanitization of Viking women’s history (spoiler alert: it’s those darned Victorians) to spotlighting what the actual history may, in fact, be, this book is the best of both history and historical fiction; it transports the reader to a bygone era.

Highly, highly recommended.

Nancy Marie Brown has done a wonderful job of investigating the mystery of the role that women played in Viking Age warfare. Using the remains of an uncovered warrior whom she names Hervor, Brown takes us through the Viking Age from the lens of this female warrior. In this world we see the standard gender roles that we assume were common for the time debunked as Brown shows almost all were equal in this time when speaking of gender.. Fans of the character Lagertha from The History Channel’s hit series Vikings will find it fascinating to read and see what it may have been like to be a woman and a warrior in the Viking Age and even see an anicdote on the real Lagertha herself. It is even more fascinating to see how the concept of “shield maidens” may have came into existence. Combining fascinating detective work with amazing scholarship I highly praise Brown’s ability to bring the real valkyries to life.

The Real Valkyrie by Nancy M Brown is wonderfully written, the writing is done professional with every being backed up with facts found. Its so interesting to learn about women Vikings and Nancy worked so hard to create these stories off of the scientific data found. The information paints such a different perspective and story from what was previously thought of Viking women in this time period and it is mind blowing all the things they were able to do and the stature they possessed in society. They were respected and even feared. Thank you Nancy for taking the time to gather the research and paint a beautifully and well written story from the past.

Quick: what do you imagine when you think of a Viking? Blond. Ox horns sticking out of metal helmets. Warriors. Male.

Much of that is wrong--at least, that's the case Nancy Marie Brown makes in The Real Vaklyrie, a paradigm-shifting look at late 10th-century Vikings.

The research at the base of Brown's book is surprising but not new. In 2017, archeologists investigating a trove of Viking burials at the site of Birka on an island west of Stockholm, found a remarkably preserved warrior's grave, which they labeled "Bj581."

Among the artifacts inside were a sword, a battle axe, and a gameboard. The surprise came when DNA from the skeleton was tested: the warrior was a Woman! (In fact, genetic testing would go on to identify female remains in about 40% of the warrior burials at Birka.

Brown stretches the word, "real," in her account of the warrior. In each chapter, she focuses on one element of the grave, mixes in research and archaeology, and sprinkles in details from the Nordic sagas to bring to life a warrior named Hervor, placing her at crucial sites of activity, which stretch from Dublin to the Orkney Islands, to mainland Norway and Sweden, then on to Estonia, the land of the Rus (Russia) and Kiev.

Each chapter begins with a fictional account of Hervor and closes with the evidence--both from the sagas and the science--behind Brown's characterization. To be honest, some of the research bogged down the story--I worked to get through the specifics of cloth weaving, for example, or the forging of a sword--but there's a point to the minutiae: total immersion in the life of a warrior woman at the height of the Viking Era.

As Hervor's voyages stretched ever wider, my interest grew: new perspectives on the far corners of Europe, populated by these viking raiders (but I repeat myself--one of my favorite lines of the book was "Vikings weren't a race, they were a job description").

I didn't come to The Real Valkyrie with a great knowledge of the Viking Era. I read the book, thanks to NetGalley, and I looked forward to the review I might write. So here it is: I left the reading of TRV with a wealth of new knowledge about Vikings, and a completely new way of thinking about who it was who really set wooden shields on the sides of ships, wore the funny helmets, and sailed the seas and rivers from Vinland to Kiev.

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<p>Review copy provided by the publisher.</p>
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<p>I found this book both interesting and frustrating.</p>
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<p>Interesting, because there was a lot of good solid information about textiles and trading. Much archaeology, lots of reconstruction! If you want the details of what kinds of paint substrates were being used in the Viking era, Nancy Marie Brown has your back. I do in fact want that. I want that a lot. So this is very useful to me. I expect to some of you also.</p>
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<p>Frustrating, because she is very much willing to make assumptions based on herself personally and go galloping forth with them. There is a little note after the main body of the book where she blithely <em>tells the reader</em> that Neil Price<em> encouraged her</em> to take a complex view of gender and she decided not to do so. <em>Oh really</em>, says this reviewer. <em>Well, isn't that a choice you made</em>.</p>
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<p>In Brown's favor, she is willing to revisit previous positions when there is evidence that they are utter nonsense. Unfortunately this means that there are long sections of this book where the person she is arguing with is not me, not Neil Price, not any of a great number of other people who have been thinking thinky thoughts about the Viking era and gender for decades now (I have restrained myself from listing half a dozen personal friends in this location), but in fact...Previous Version Nancy Marie Brown. For example she says out loud! without prompting! that she personally did not used to believe in women <em>wanting</em> to fight with swords, which was so phenomenally stupid that I nearly shut the book and went off to go reread Neil Price instead. It's always possible to consider other people having preferences unlike oneself, the more so when they are removed from oneself by an entire millennium, sort it out before you visit it upon the rest of us in several published volumes.</p>
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<p>But really there's quite a lot of useful stuff about dyes and paint substrates and that. Even if her "reconstructed" fiction sections demonstrate why she is not a fiction writer. If you're thinking of a project in this era you might well want it just for what furs are common where and so on. If you take it all with a grain of salt about how willing this particular author is to generalize from the particular person she has closest to hand.</p>
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This is a fascinating trip back in time. When watching the Viking TV series, I mostly assumed that the prevalent role that women played was exaggerated for a modern audience. Thanks to The Real Valkyrie, I now know that’s not the case. What we think about Vikings is mostly based on assumptions from the Victorian era, so that’s why female warriors were thought to be ficticious. Thanks to the latest scientific advances, it is now possible to figure out that the bodies in many warrior tombs are women. Using a one such burial, the author imagines what this real person was like, and how she lived. She names her Hervor, and combines the stories from sagas with historical facts to give us a complete idea of these women’s daily lives. From domestic environments to war, Brown writes in an easy-to-follow style. There is mythology, history, art and maybe a little too much detail in some places, like how they weaved their clothing. What an inspiring read for women!
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/ St. Martin's Press!

Awesome, weed read!!! A Great peek into strong female culture of the past hidden or dismissed for a long time. A great read for Viking enthusiasts as well as those interested in the role of women in the past!!

I absolutely loved this book! I’ve always had a fascination with the Viking history and this book is devoted to the Valkyrie... Viking Warrior Women!!! It is truly an enjoyable read and a well researched book for anyone with an interest in Viking history!

** Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review! **

#PamelaReads2021 #100BooksIn2021 #TheValkyrie #VikingWarriorWomen #NetGalley

This is an object lesson in how our own prejudices and shortsightedness impacts our view of the historical record - even in light of compelling evidence to the contrary. This is a well researched and compelling history of the real women warriors of the viking era, whose histories have been effaced by historians of the recent past.