The Hidden Lives of Viking Women: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives

Michèle Hayeur Smith · Alexandra Sanmark

Mar 2025 · Oxbow Books

About this ebook

Analyzes the lives, roles, and experiences of Viking women, highlighting their societal contributions through interdisciplinary perspectives. This edited volume brings together an international group of scholars to address the lives, roles, myths, mythology, and lived experiences of Viking women as well as the impacts of change on women during the turbulent period of the Viking Age. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, this is a book dedicated to the lesser-known aspects of women’s lives as active members of society. It provides an innovative way of bringing together work from archaeological, anthropological, historical, and literary perspectives to address questions about women in trade, in war, in magic, in the household and activities that provided women with power and respect in their communities.

About the author

Michèle Hayeur Smith is a research associate with the Smithsonian Institution, Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow and is an anthropological archaeologist with research interests in gender, textiles, dress, adornment and material culture studies. She is largely known for her work in the North Atlantic and Iceland and has been undertaking National Science Foundation funded research projects focused on gender and the production and circulation of textiles from the Viking Age to the early 19th century. She is also a founding member of Osprey Heritage Consulting. Alexandra Sanmark undertook her undergraduate and postgraduate training at the University of London and obtained her PhD on the Christianisation of Scandinavia from University College London. She was then employed in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Uppsala, where she was Programme Leader for the MA programme Viking and Early Medieval Scandinavia. After two years as Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, she started working for the University in 2009, first in Orkney and currently in Perth.