The Viking Sisters: Rusla & Stikla
“If one man taking one step on the moon can prove that humankind is capable of space travel, then why can’t over 7 000 years of history and thousands of women in combat prove that women can fight.”
Rusla, nicknamed the "red maiden", was a Norwegian skjaldmö warrior in the tenth century that is mentioned in Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus and Irish annals. Rusla was the daughter of a Viking king of Telemark (a county in Norway) called Rieg, and sister of Tesandus (Thrond), who was dispossessed of his throne by a Danish king named Omund. Rusla formed a Viking fleet to attack all Danish ships as revenge for the affront to her brother. Rusla was always accompanied by another woman (sources cite her as sister) Stikla, who was her deputy in all raids. Stikla turned to piracy to avoid marriage.
Rusla indiscriminately attacked ships and coastal towns in Iceland, Denmark, Ireland and the British Isles. According to Irish Cogad Gaedel re Gallaib ("The War of the Irish with the Foreigners", a medieval Irish text that tells of the depredations of the Vikings from 967 to 1014) she had a reputation as bloodthirsty and custom of taking no prisoners. The Irish annals also cite Rusla and Stickla's as the cruelest and bravest of all warrior Norse women.
There are historic attestations that Viking women took part in warfare, such as the Byzantine historian John Skylitzes who records that women fought in battle when Sviatoslav I of Kiev attacked the Byzantines in Bulgaria in 971. Another source tells that the Varangians (name given by Greeks and Ruthenians to Vikings) had suffered a devastating defeat in the Siege of Dorostolon, the victors were stunned at discovering armed women among the fallen warriors.
When Leif Erikson's pregnant half-sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir was in Vinland (the area of coastal North America explored by Norse Vikings), where Leif Erikson first landed circa 1000, she is reported to have taken up a sword, and, bare-breasted, scared away the attacking Skrælings (local Indians). The fight is recounted in the Greenland saga, and refers to Shieldmaiden as in Saxo Grammaticus where it is reported that shieldmaidens fought on the side of the Danes at the Battle of Brávellir in the year 750.
In UK several graves of female settlers containing weapons have been uncovered. Norse immigrant graves in England and chemical analysis of the remains suggested a somewhat equal distribution of men and women, while some of the women were buried with weapons.
Women warriors and/or Valkyries and/or shield maidens (they are all often mixed up) are not just 'mythological phenomena' but relate to a whole complex of ideas and historical clues that pervade literature, mythology and ideology.A shieldmaiden in Scandinavian folklore and mythology was a female warrior. They are often mentioned in sagas such as Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks and in Gesta Danorum. Shieldmaidens also appear in stories of other Germanic peoples: Goths, Cimbri, and Marcomanni. The mythical Valkyries may have been based on the shieldmaidens.
DNA analysis confirmed that the human remains found in a well-furnished warrior grave in Birka, Sweden, was female. This finding was first mentioned by TV series Vikings Neil Price who showed that a 10th Century Birka-burial excavated in the 1970s containing a large number of weapons and the bones of two horses turned out to be the grave of woman warrior.
In 2017, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, and her colleagues took DNA samples from the skeleton. They found that the warrior was, unequivocally, a woman, with genetic affinities to modern-day people who currently live in the Orkney Islands, Iceland. The grave goods that were buried with her — such as a sword, an ax, a spear, arrows, a battle knife, two shields and two horses — suggest that the woman was a professional warrior, the researchers wrote in the new study. The grave also included a set of gaming pieces, which suggests a knowledge of tactics or strategy, implying she was a "high-ranking military officer," the researchers wrote.
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