No, The Vikings Were not Some Sort of Proto-Feminists

I can honestly say that I never would have thought that the title of this article would have to exist, and yet, here we are! In the past few years there have been many articles, memes and such which have attempted to pain the Vikings in a more sympathetic way. Maybe they weren’t so bad really? Afterall, most of what we know comes from sources written by their enemies. I’m not one to demonise an ancient culture or judge them by today’s standards, mostly because doing so would be a pointless exercise, however with the recent interest in Viking culture has come the suggestion that they treated women in a way that was far superior to their contemporaries. The claim is made that in many ways women in Viking society were more or less equal to men!

For example, take the article on history.co.uk. In the style of many articles these days, it has an annoying clickbait title: “THE VIKINGS: THE ORIGINAL FEMINISTS?” Now while the article itself is slightly more nuanced than such a title may imply, it still extols the virtues of Vikings and their supposed progressive ways when it comes to viewing women. It states that women were allowed to divorce their husbands, falling pregnant out of wedlock was not a problem and, despite dubious evidence, that women sometimes fought as shieldmaidens. I’m not sure how women being allowed to die in battle is progress, but I digress. There’s also the point made that women would be in charge of the home, farm etc. if their men were away. Well yes, I mean if the men aren’t their then who else could be in charge? One of the final line in the article states: “So, then. It seems as though the Vikings may well have been secret feminists”.

Let’s assume that all of the points brought up in the article are fully correct. Women could get divorces etc. Certainly that is an anomaly for the time. There’s a problem though. While free Viking women may well have enjoyed these provisions we must also consider the Thrall class, or slaves as we would now call them. One of the main purposes behind Viking raids was the capture of slaves, from the British Isles often, and in Europe. According to Professor Neil Price “The Vikings were not only slavers, but the kidnapping, sale and forced exploitation of human beings was always a central pillar of their culture.” They moved huge amounts of slaves throughout Europe, sometimes the raiders held them for themselves while others they simply sold. They created huge slave trading hubs in cities like Dublin.

Now while I’m sure we’ll all agree that chattel slavery isn’t exactly the marker of a progressive society, many may argue that this has little to do with how the Vikings treated women. Maybe they were equally opportunity slavers and treated male and female thralls the same? Firstly, we need to look at the phenomenon of polygamy in Viking societies. There is evidence that Viking men would have multiple partners or concubines. Now this creates a problem for the male population, namely there aren’t enough women to go around. With powerful men taking a huge share of women as partners, other men had to look elsewhere. An article on livescience.com suggests that this need for female partners was the driving force behind Viking raids. The reasoning is twofold, firstly you can simply take women directly as slaves and make them your partner and secondly the riches and plunder gained from these raids would raise one’s status and make it more likely they could attract a partner. There is evidence from evolutionary biology that polygynous societies lead to men competing more aggressively for women and as a result more die in warfare. Some species of moose have the males fight each other with their antlers and the winner gets to mate with a group of females. It seems like raids may have been the Viking evolutionary equivalent of these antler fights. Essentially, young Viking men would slaughter innocent people en masse in raids as a way to attract attention from women, something that in contemporary society would be referred to as “toxic masculinity”!

But what of the slaves? Women were particular targets for raiders and were either taken as concubines or sold at market. On the selling aspect, women may have been worth more if there was a high demand for concubines due to the system of polygyny in place. Let’s quickly clarify what all this means. Vikings raided settlements either to gain wealth to impress women or to kidnap women and force them into sexual slavery. Essentially the Vikings ran the largest human trafficking ring in Europe. Studies show that two thirds of the female founding population of Iceland, settled by Vikings, were of Scottish/Irish origin, while just twenty percent of the men had similar origins. What this implies is that far more women than men were enslaved and trafficked by the Vikings. Doesn’t really paint a picture of a society that was kind to women, does it?

Again, I want to point out that I think judging an ancient society by modern standards of morality is largely pointless. However, when a trend emerges where an ancient society is being falsely lauded for its progressive values, even by modern standards, this false information needs to be countered. Many people, after having read such articles, will have an incorrect view of Vikings and may go around talking about how they were “feminist”. The record needs to be corrected. The Vikings enslaved women in particular and trafficked them into sexual slavery, and to claim that such a society treated women well is bizarre and borderline offensive. Of course such articles were written in a way to attract as many clicks as possible, why should the truth get in the way of a profitable story? But historians, academics and journalists have an obligation to do better. The truth matters, and it is intellectually dishonest to take some out of context aspects of the Vikings and announce that they were ancient feminists.