Episode 10: She Held the Keys (Women of the Viking World)

For over a century, the story of the Viking Age was a story of men. Warriors, kings, and raiders. Women were afterthoughts.

But the ground tells a different story.

In this episode, we excavate the truth. We begin with a grave that sat misidentified for 140 years, a Birka burial filled with swords, axes, two horses, and a king’s gaming set. In 1878, archaeologists assumed the body was male. In 2017, DNA proved them wrong. The warrior was a woman.

From there, we travel across the Viking world. We visit the Oseberg ship, the most lavish Viking grave ever found, where two high-status women were buried with a longship and the tools of sorcery. We meet Thyra, called "Denmark’s salvation," and Aud the Deep-Minded, a chieftain’s daughter who led her people to Iceland.

But this isn’t just about queens and warriors. We trace the everyday women who held the keys: symbols of authority over farms and households. The women who wove the sails that powered the Viking Age. The women who raised runestones, built bridges, and led the conversion to Christianity.

And we ask the question that haunts this history: what else have we misread? How many weapon burials are waiting for DNA reanalysis? How many runestones raised by women have been dismissed as anomalies? How much of Viking history needs to be rewritten?

Finally, I turn to my own genetic matches. Using ancient DNA, I’ve discovered connections to the very women we’re discussing—a 10th-century woman from the Fröjel harbor on Gotland, a wealthy Vendel-era woman buried on the same island, and over a dozen women from the cemetery at Varnhem, where one of Sweden’s first Christian churches was built. I also match with a Viking settler in Greenland and a victim of the St. Brice’s Day Massacre in Oxford.

These are not proven ancestors, but they are threads, connections across a thousand years that make the past feel very close.

This is the story of the women who lived, traveled, fought, traded, ruled, and died in the Viking Age. The ones the postcards forgot. The ones now emerging from the soil, demanding to be seen.

She held the keys. And now, so do we.