Three Women from Viking Sagas Who Chose Their Own Path

Self-determination—and the question of how much an individual controlled their own destiny—was considered a big deal during the Viking Age. A line from the seventh-century poem “The Wanderer” famously declares, “Fate is wholly inexorable,” and whether in Anglo-Saxon epics or Norse sagas, the hallmark of all great heroes was their cheerful acceptance that death could befall a man at any moment.

But if men were at the mercy of forces beyond their control, then how did women fare during this era of great uncertainty and violence? Compared to their contemporaries in other cultures, Norse women had more rights with regard to property and divorce, but they were undeniably less likely than men to wield political and military power—for example, their voices were excluded from the Althing, Iceland’s early form of democratic government. Of course, this didn’t prevent them suffering the full consequences of the power struggles that convulsed their communities. It seems likely that in such a world a woman would need a healthy dose of fatalism just to keep sane.

But, human nature being the unruly force that it is, there were many women in the Viking Age, as in modern times, who wanted something different than what fate had to offer, and possessed the temerity to go after it. For readers who crave tales of independent-minded Norse women, I’ve combed through the sagas, whether from Iceland, Norway, or elsewhere, and found three examples of women who chose paths that were as varied as human nature itself.

I’m not a historian. And before we go any further, I must give the caveat that the sagas I’m drawing on here are, strictly speaking, not history either. Often written hundreds of years after the events they describe, they are literary creations meant both to captivate and inform. But though they may be unconstrained by realism, my favourite aspect of Norse sagas is that they keep to a human scale. Although they contain supernatural elements, their principal concerns aren’t with deities or royal families, but ordinary neighbourly disputes. I also love their pragmatic disinterest in delivering anything our modern sensibilities would recognize as a moral. The characters are not uncomplicated role models, but real, flawed human beings. Everyday life was difficult on these northern coastlines, where nature was harsh and the rule of law could only be enforced by violence. Despite these challenges, here are three women (only the first of whom comes under the strict definition of a “viking”) who had the skill and resolve to take charge of their own lives, whether for good or for ill.

Hervor, from the Saga of Hervor and Heithrek

Written in the 13^th century

We’ll start with the most spectacular story, and one of the few women to have a saga actually named after them. Hervor was marked early on for a dramatic career. She came from a family of berserkers who possessed a magical sword called Tyrfing, which was cursed so that it must kill a man each time it was drawn. Arguably, though, these were folks who didn’t need magical help to go looking for trouble. Before Hervor’s birth, her father had been nursing a grudge against a former romantic rival, so he left his pregnant wife to go fight him. Hervor’s father and eleven berserker uncles were all killed in this battle on the island of Samsø.

When Hervor was born, her maternal grandfather, the Earl of Bjartmar, faced strong social pressure to expose the baby to be killed by the elements, since everyone said she would grow up as wild as her father. The Earl, who is portrayed as a decent, respectable sort of guy, resisted these suggestions, but despite his kindness Hervor grew up an unhappy rebellious teenager. She ran away to hide out in the woods, where she lived by killing and robbing travellers before her grandfather hauled her home in disgrace. Finally, she was miserable enough to tell the Earl she couldn’t live with him anymore. This time, she left and joined a band of viking sea-raiders, and was apparently so good at piracy that when the group’s leader died, she took charge. But even in her new life, Hervor needed one more thing to be satisfied.

Hervor took her crew to Samsø where her father and eleven uncles were buried. None of her men was willing to land on an island that was so clearly haunted, so they dropped her off and sailed away. As soon as night fell, the burial mounds were crowned with heatless flames, and the ghosts of their inhabitants were standing outside. Hervor found her father’s ghost and demanded he hand over the sword Tyrfing that had been buried with him. Her father tried to take the reasonable path, arguing that it would be a bad idea to give her a cursed sword that would doom her children. Hervor, an adult child frustrated with her parent’s grandchild obsession, retorted that she would rather have a sword than kids, and threatened to lay another curse on him if he wouldn’t yield it up.

After she retrieved Tyrfing, Hervor enjoyed a long and successful career in piracy before returning to her grandfather’s household where, astonishingly, the saga claims that she “behaved like other girls, working at her embroidery and fine needlework.” But the cursed sword continued to exert its malign influence. Hervor married another decent man of a similar stamp to the old earl, and had two sons, but her favourite child was exiled by her husband for maliciously stirring up quarrels. Hervor gifted him with Tyrfing before he left, and he used it to kill her other son, his brother. Ultimately, his possession of Tyrfing meant that he would have a career just as marked by violence as his mother’s had been.

Auda, from the Saga of Gisli the Outlaw

Written in the 13^th century

Auda is a bit different than my other two picks, because the scope of her actions stayed pretty well within the domestic sphere that society had mapped out for her. But the blood-feud culture of medieval Iceland, with a justice system based on masculine honour and revenge, brought the violence right into her home, where Auda would need all her toughness and good judgment to deal with it.

One day, Auda and her sister-in-law were sewing together and talking. Both married women, they joked and teased one another about different bachelors in their social circle for whom they’d nursed youthful crushes. But in the middle of their banter, Auda realized that her brother-in-law Thorkel had been eavesdropping on them. Aware of the trouble this could cause, Auda went to her own husband, Gisli, and told him everything. But Thorkel, without trying to find out anymore, persuaded a friend to kill his wife’s former lover—an act that dragged his brother, Auda’s husband, into a feud that would result in him being outlawed.

It may seem strange, but I often re-read this saga simply for the pleasure of hearing about a truly good marriage. Auda trusted Gisli not to react with the wounded pride that, in Norse sagas, so often leads to tragedy. Whatever the fallout of the incident, they faced it together as partners. And that fallout was pretty rough. Overnight, her husband became a wanted man, unable to stay in any spot for long from fear of his enemies. Despite the danger, Gisli missed Auda so much that he often returned to hide in a cave behind their house. Since these visits fell in summer time, I’m going to charitably assume he was covertly helping her with the farm-work, but for the most part, Auda was left to run their farm with only the assistance of a young foster daughter. Admittedly, this wasn’t uncommon for Icelandic housewives, who had ultimate authority over their households while their husbands were abroad on long raiding expeditions. But Auda also had to contend with visits from Gisli’s enemies, seeking to bribe and threaten her. At one point she made them count out three hundred pieces of silver individually, and then, when the heavy bag was put into her hand, she picked it up and used it to smash the man’s nose. His followers had to hold him back from killing an unarmed woman.

Eventually, people got wise to Gisli hanging around, and he, Auda and their foster daughter had to flee into the forest. They made a last stand on a crag against twelve men, Gisli armed with a sword and the women with cudgels. After killing eight of their enemies in a gruesome fight—which the saga describes in loving detail—Gisli was slain. Now a widow, Auda decided to leave Iceland. At that time, Christianity was spreading through the Scandinavian world, and after travels in Norway and Denmark, Auda eventually moved to Rome and joined a religious order. The saga gives little detail about her inner motivation, but I imagine that among other things, convent life probably seemed restful after the trials she’d been through.

Helga, from the Saga of Barður of Snofell

Available in Icelandic

Written in the 14^th century

Unlike the first two sagas, which were written down in the thirteenth century, this one comes from about a century later, though the setting is roughly the same time period or a little earlier than Gisli the Outlaw. Helga was the oldest of eight sisters, the daughters of Barður Snæfellsass, who was said to have a mix of human, troll and giant blood. Her family was among the early colonists who settled in Iceland, having left Norway to escape the tyranny of Harald Fairhair. The girls had cousins living nearby, two boys with whom they used to go play on the frozen river. This seems an ideal setting for all kinds of childhood games, but I like to imagine they were playing knattleikr, which was a bit like stick hockey, and also played a key role in stoking the blood-feud in the Saga of Gisli the Outlaw. In any case, the competition between cousins was fierce, and one day, one of the boys pushed Helga out to sea on an ice floe. When Helga’s sisters told their father what had happened, he lost his mind with grief and rage. Going to his brother’s house, he took his two nephews—only eleven and twelve years old—and tossed them into a glacial ravine, where they were killed instantly. After this Barður disappeared to live on the ice cap. Based on the saga’s description, he seemed to become a kind of guardian spirit of the ice.

Meanwhile, Helga spent seven days on the ice floe before it drifted ashore in Greenland, where Erik the Red had recently founded a colony. The colonists could tell that she was part-troll, but they respected and admired her, and she began a romantic relationship with a man named Skegga. In wintertime, when trolls and monsters (malicious ones this time) came into the settlement to attack people and destroy the colonists’ ships, Helga joined in fighting them off and even saved Skegga’s life. Helga and Skegga eventually left Greenland and ended up back in Iceland. But Barður, still living on the ice cap, heard that his daughter had returned, and that she was living with a man without being married to him—and worse, that Skegga already had a wife and children. He forced Helga to separate from Skegga, but like Hervor, she felt little inclination to return to living under her parent’s control as an adult woman. Instead, she lived in remote areas, avoiding other people. You might think it would be dangerous to be a single woman roaming the wilds of Iceland, but Helga was more than capable of defending herself, and it’s possible her giant heritage made her particularly intimidating. In the one story we have about a man trying to harass her, he ended up getting both an arm and a leg lopped off.

Neither Helga nor her father were considered fully human by their society, and Barður’s actions often seem particularly alienating. The story has a sad, disturbing coda in which he came out of his icy fastness one more time and disguised himself to join Skegga’s household. There, he seduced Skegga’s teenage daughter, and got her pregnant. When Helga heard that the daughter of her former lover had a baby, she reappeared to take her little half-brother away and raise him herself. We can certainly hope that he got an idyllic childhood among the mountain crags, and away from the macho nonsense that had made his older sister’s life so difficult.

The women of the Viking Age lived with danger, violence and uncertainty, but that didn’t mean they were helpless or simply at the mercy of the more powerful men. The sagas give us a window into the lives of these formidable women who, though not many of them got happy endings, chose their own unique path in life, and backed up that choice with the courage to fight.

Do you want to read more about indomitable viking women? Check out my verse novella Ulfhildr, about a queen who leads her kingdom into war — and finds she may need to sacrifice everything along the way.