Were There Any Queer Vikings?

We are generally not very used to thinking about queerness (identities and sexualities other than cisgender and straight) as something that can be found in the deeper past – meaning the human story spanning back hundreds and thousands of years ago. This is probably because the language and images we use to talk about queerness today are relatively recent inventions. The first Pride March took place in 1970, helping to change the negative connotations of words like queer and gay, and the pride flag was created in 1978.

Since then, thanks to the work of activists around the world, more and more people can talk openly about queerness, being LGBTQIA+ and all the different things this might mean to different people. But to think that this somehow means that queer feelings are no older than the 20th century and not part of longer human experience, from the first humans to the peoples shaping the last two millennia, would be very wrong.

The Vikings, known as everybody’s favourite extremely manly northern vagabonds, did not have the rainbow flag to symbolize different queer identities – but that does not mean that we can assume that nobody felt queer in the Viking Age.

Contradictory to popular belief, Vikings did not wear helmets with horns. Some of them, however, would have been queer. Image from Pexels.

So many of the stories we find from the past are often from the viewpoint of powerful men. One of the most influential texts in Viking Studies, the Norse myths and tales as retold by Snorri Sturluson, was written by one of the most powerful politicians of the time and is probably heavily biased. What little remains of the societies that we study – objects and structures and burials, names, and records – are highly interpretable and say little about the real human thoughts and feelings of the people who left them behind. Instead, archaeologists and historians have to piece together what possibilities there might have been, sometimes based on educated speculation. The personal stories of the vast majority of Vikings are mostly lost to the soil, and the objects that remain are like stage props still on stage after all the actors have left, leaving researchers to figure out the narrative of the play from those alone.

Plenty of past peoples have been subject to wild stereotyping, and in the case of the Vikings, we seem to generally have them pegged down for manly brutes that raided, traded, and died with swords still in their hands – leaving little room in the imagination for the complex individual experiences underneath the armour. The evidence we have, and the superficial hints they give, can make us forget that many people may have played one social role but felt very different on the inside. Some may have felt trapped in their circumstances whilst others really found ways to breathe freer in their queer lives.

But, if the archaeological record is so much up to interpretation, can you really glean things like identity and sexuality from it?

It is actually possible! The key word is “glean,” and whatever you find will always be – to an extent – up to interpretation. But there is good interpretation and bad interpretation, and any good researcher would evaluate every possibility. Studying something as intimate and intangible as identity can be really tricky, but there are openings where, rather than immediately assuming they were straight, it makes sense to confidently suggest that they were queer. Some researchers have argued that research into past queer identities is impossible, due to the fact that the language used today did not exist in Viking society, but not everybody agrees. With more queerness coming into archaeological research, more and more forgotten and ignored queer stories are appearing from Viking evidence. As Neil Price beautifully outlines in his new popular history book, there really were queer Vikings – Vikings who defied expectations and went beyond the gender binary in terms of dress and activity, and Vikings who were romantically and sexually attracted to people they were not supposed to in the eyes of Viking law.

Some of them can be gleaned from the law codes and sagas that really make Viking society appear hugely intolerant of queerness and anything that went against heteronormative social codes. In old Viking law records, there are clear instances in which wives left husbands who had become “too womanly” – whatever that meant – in the way that they dressed, and the other way around. Queer people clearly appear here by implication – if nobody went against those social rules, Viking politicians (who were more or less exclusively men of high rank) would probably not have bothered making this something for the courts.

In the archaeological record, there are burials of persons with biologically male or female bodies (based on their chromosomes or osteological analysis of their bones) who have been put to rest wearing what would have been considered clothing meant for the “other gender.” In England, archaeologists have found Viking individuals with male bodies wearing distinctly “female” dresses and jewellery – evidence that maybe uncomfortably challenges modern notions of the Viking Age and is therefore rarely mentioned. The Vikings themselves certainly seem to have been profoundly uncomfortable with men pushing the gender boundaries into women’s territory. The few Viking men who dared to wear clothing meant for women or take on social roles meant for women – such as sorcery – effectively signed on to be social outcasts. They became known as ergi, an effeminate man, and there was nothing more shameful for the Vikings than unmanliness.   

When investigating these burials in the past, archaeologists have sometimes prematurely gendered them because the grave goods inside were considered socially female or male – erasing the possibility of queer identities. One such example is the famous Viking warrior burial unearthed in Birka, one of the largest trading hubs in the Viking world, which surprised researchers by not playing by the rules when it came to gender and dress. Discovered in 1878, archaeologists assumed without question that the burial was male, because the lavishly brutish items inside appeared to have belonged to an incredible warrior, which in the view of 19th century gender norms could definitely only be somebody male. DNA analysis later confirmed that the body was actually female, raising interesting questions about how the individual may have felt about themselves.  

Whether modern transgender or nonbinary terms would have resonated with these individuals would be impossible to say, but fact remains that they are individuals who clearly deviated from the rigid rules around sex and gender that seem to have been taken so seriously in Viking society that they were brought into law. Perhaps the warrior buried in Birka considered herself to be neither man nor woman, or perhaps she saw herself as a woman who was glad to step on some important manly toes.  The important lessons these discoveries are teaching researchers is to not to forget that gender is socially constructed and not facts of nature – then as now.

There were also – without doubt – gay people amongst the Vikings. Various texts confirm their existence, again indirectly, by showing that there was widespread homophobia in the northern countries during the Viking Age. As told by Neil Price in his book, larger Viking society seems to have spewed hatred towards men who were in relationships with other men, implied by the buckets of homophobic insults found in Norse poetry and law codes. As has often been said to justify homophobia, gay Viking men were thought to be morally corrupt, weak, submissive, characterless, and threatening to erode societies that valued strength, power, and men being domineering over women. This punishing attitude towards homophobia may go back to Tacitus (living some 700 years earlier) who records that northern European Iron Age men convicted of being gay were drowned in bogs, showing an entirely unforgiving view on homosexuality that probably continued on towards the Viking Age. Gay Viking women, on the other hand, are nowhere to be found – in any sources.

Before we admire the Vikings too much, we should really remember how cruel those in power could be, and how difficult LGBTQIA+ individuals in Viking society may have had it. It is hard not to feel sympathy for the gay Viking who had to repress that very important part of themselves – and could only quietly wonder whether the woman weaving cloth next to her liked her back.

People visibly going against the social and cultural norms of the Viking world were rare, but they found ways, and we can still connect with them more than one thousand years later. The fact that they seem so bold by doing so says lots about Viking society and our image of them. Though the straight and manly warrior dominated Viking culture and their politics, and therefore has taken the centre stage in our studies of them, they were not more important as human beings than anyone else, and things would get so much more interesting and rewarding for everyone if more researchers would study diversity and other stories. After all, that best reflects reality, and what has been an entirely natural thing since humans first developed.

If you are more seriously interested in this topic, I can recommend reading the chapter “Border Crossings” in the new popular history book The Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price.