And both men and women are found under mounds, which are usually interpreted as a sign of ownership and status. Both men and women were buried in boats and chambers, both of which are considered high status forms of burials. Burial material shows that both men and women were buried with cooking and serving implements, with locks, keys and chests, with common tools such as knives and hones, with companion animals including horses and dogs, and with sacrificed domestic animals. However, alongside these marked differences, there is also plentiful evidence of a number of similarities. These manifested differences tell us that dress and other trappings were used to signal certain gendered aspects of identity. Conversely, weapons are found mainly in male burials, which again corresponds with the tale told by written sources. Textile working tools are also mainly associated with female activity, as indicated both in archaeology and in written sources. Several forms of personal ornamentation, such as the famous oval brooches, are strongly associated with women for example. It is worth remembering that the archaeological material does show what we can perceive as gender-based differences in dress, accoutrements and certain tasks and employments. Difference or similarity Photo: Kulturhistorisk museum/UiO. A closer look at what the archaeology tells us, shows instead the likelihood of a more fluid reality. The idea that gender is a dividing category, and that people belong on one side of an absolute divide or another is more a remnant of 19 th century values than a reflection either of modern research or potential social frameworks in the Viking Age.
And yet, it is necessary to ask whether or not this division actually applies to the Viking Age: such a division must in part rest on a binary divide between women and men, and there is ample evidence to indicate that the Viking Age may have had a different understanding of gender altogether.
Women meanwhile, were granted innanstokks, literally translating as within the threshold, and neatly delimiting women’s role to the hearth and home. This particular view rests on an idea of a gendered division of labour, wherein men were envisaged as responsible for utanstokks, meaning everything that took place outside of the farm, as well as the main body of outdoors farm work.
Whilst men are shown as warriors, farmers, traders, crafters and travellers, women are most often shown without any particular role other than generic ‘women’, or at best as housewives. In keeping with how gender is often presented in past societies, many representations of the Viking Age show an image of active men and far less visible women. New research however, indicates that things are likely to have been rather more complex. Gender roles in the Viking Age are often presented as a neatly segregated affair, wherein men and women inhabit different social roles and even spheres.
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