When King Haakon the Good of Norway met Harald Greycloak on the field of battle in 961, Haakon was outnumbered six to one. He fought hard, and bravely, but it wasn’t enough. The battle turned, and Haakon was killed—not just by an arrow, but by Gunnhild’s dark magic, if you want to believe the legends.

The real force behind the throne of King Harald Greycloak was Queen Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, who ruled Norway as a tyrant for nine dark years. Land and wealth were seized from disloyal jarls, military raids were launched against would-be usurpers, and all who opposed her were wiped out with extreme brutality.

As you can imagine, this sort of thing doesn’t last forever, and Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, was deposed yet again in 970, when another guy named Haakon got mad and raised an army to fight Gunnhild after she set his dad on fire. Supported by the oppressed nobles of Norway, Haakon took his forces into battle with Harald Greycloak, defeated him, and killed the king, and Gunnhild was forced to flee to the Orkneys once again.

Gunnhild went back to work trying to reclaim her throne, but another invasion by her other sons in 971 was defeated by Jarl Haakon. Haakon, not interested in keeping Gunnhild around to thwart him at every turn, made a deal with Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, and Harald sold out his own sister to secure a sweet treaty with Haakon. When Gunnhild returned to Denmark in 974, Harald had his now elderly sister arrested, and sentenced her to death by drowning in a bog.

THE HARALDSKÆR WOMAN

In 1835, the mummified body of a woman floated to the top of a bog in Jutland, Denmark, and was recovered by local villagers. King Frederick VI of Denmark, believing this to be the body of Gunnhild, ordered that an elaborate, expensive sarcophagus be constructed, and had the body laid to rest in a place of honor in a nearby church. Later, radiocarbon dating indicated that this woman had died around 400 BC and wasn’t actually Gunnhild. Interestingly, the really nice glass-and-wood casket helped preserve the body incredibly well despite its age, and it remains one of the best examples of an intact body from ancient times.

CALL ME MR. BLOODAXE

Erik Bloodaxe’s nickname doesn’t just come from his weapon’s being almost always completely soaked in blood—the name was given to him because he took an axe to his own family bloodline, coldheartedly killing his half brothers during his grab for power.

AUD THE DEEP-MINDED

An equally cunning but considerably less evil woman from Norse history was Aud the Deep-Minded, a clever Viking noblewoman who saved her family from ultimate destruction. The daughter of powerful hersir warriors, Aud married Olaf the White, king of Dublin, in the tenth century. When Olaf was killed in battle with the Irish, Aud fled to Scotland with her son Thorstein the Red. Thorstein became a jarl in Scotland, but just as it looked like things were going to be okay, Thorstein was betrayed and murdered by his own bodyguards. When Aud the Deep-Minded heard the news, she took twenty loyal men and a couple of her slaves and fled into the woods, where she organized the construction of a tricked-out Viking longship. Once that was done, she set sail for Iceland. Commanding the voyage across the treacherous sea, Aud the Deep-Minded got her crew there safely. Once she reached land, she immediately freed her slaves, claimed a large tract of land for herself, and got to work building a nice quiet farm where she would spend the rest of her days. Some historians claim that Aud and Olaf were actually Ota and Turgeis the Devil, our friends who plundered Ireland in chapter 3, but this probably isn’t the case.

VIKING WARRIOR WOMEN

There were once women in Denmark who dressed themselves to look like men [and] sought the clash of arms rather than the arms’ embrace.

—Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History

The early history of Denmark is shrouded in mystery and mythology, available to us only through a few unfortunately unreliable sources, but in these early days there are plenty of stories of ultra-intense warrior women who charged screaming into battle, spears, axes, and swords at the ready, seeking either to achieve bloody glory or to die horribly in the process. While few if any of these stories can be verified by trustworthy sources, here are some of the great warrior women from Danish history.

The Shield-Maidens

At the Battle of Bravalla, a legendary battle that probably took place in the early 700s, the Danish king Harald Wartooth (which is such an awesome name) took a massive army into battle against a rival king in one of the largest engagements of pre-Viking Scandinavian history. According to the epic, presumably embellished story, which is basically the Viking version of the Iliad or the Mahabharata (look them up!), the heart of Wartooth’s formation featured a unit of three hundred warrior women known as the shield-maidens. Equipped with long swords and round shields, the shield-maidens were led by a ferocious warrior woman named Wisna, who had one of her hands cut off during the fighting. In the mass destruction and mayhem that ensued, one of her fellow warriors, Veborg, cut a guy’s jaw off and hung his beard from her armor, and then took out a guy named Thorkell the Stubborn “after much arguing.” Shield-maidens, however, weren’t limited to this battle. When the Vikings of Russia attacked Constantinople in the early 900s, the Byzantine Empire’s chroniclers were horrified to report that armored women were found among the ranks of the Viking dead.

Pirates and Raiders

If marriage, home life, and raising kids weren’t your thing, a Viking girl in the 800s could always try piracy. The Norse warrior woman Stikla went pirate to avoid marriage, as did the Swedish noblewoman Alfhild, both of them choosing to don armor and sail the high seas, plundering and raiding as a way of making ends meet. Alfhild actually commanded a crew of bloodthirsty pirate women she’d recruited from England, Germany, and the Viking lands. Rusila, a daughter of a hersir, recruited a band of marauders to help her fight her brother for control of the family’s estate, and when that didn’t work, she just declared war on Denmark as a whole and launched countless attacks up and down the coast. Described by the historian Saxo as having “bodies of women and souls of men,” these Viking sea-queens ravaged the waterways of the North Sea with impunity, plundering and pillaging all they could find.

Lagertha

A Norwegian noblewoman who did battle with the invading Swedes in the early ninth century, Lagertha charged into battle dressed as a man, and stood out on the battlefield because of the long hair coming out the back of her helmet. Her bravery in combat thoroughly impressed semi-legendary Viking hero Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, and the two even ended up being married for a short time. Lagertha became a raider and a pirate, eventually married a powerful jarl, then killed the guy in an argument and seized control of his kingdom.

Hervor

At a time when other girls in her village were learning how to knit and weave and paint pots and do other boring nonsense, the Viking shield-maiden Hervor was practicing horsemanship, archery, and sword fighting, routinely beating the neighbor boys into crumpled heaps or sending them running home to their mommies with black eyes and broken bones. She turned Viking and won honor with her father’s blade, the supposedly dwarf-forged sword Tyrfing, a weapon that had a hilt fashioned of solid gold and was so deadly that just a nick from the blade was universally fatal. However, Tyrfing was also cursed, and every time it was drawn from its scabbard, it consumed a life—sometimes by driving the wielder insane and forcing him to slaughter one of his own friends. Hervor was a scourge of the countryside for many years, but eventually she settled down, had some kids, and raised them to be heroes. Her largely mythological story (she has to talk to ghosts to get the sword) served as an inspiration for the character Eowyn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

KNOW YOUR VIKINGS

NAME:

Gunnhild “Mother of Kings” Gormsdottir

RANK:

Queen of Norway, queen of York

RELIGION:

Pagan

BORN:

Unknown, possibly around 910

DIED:

Murdered by drowning in Denmark, around 977

AREAS OF OPERATION:

Norway, Iceland, England

NOTEWORTHY:

Relentless, powerful queen and wife and mother of Norwegian kings