Fleshing Out the Story: About Me
The background image on the database home page, of burial chamber Bj. 581 at Birka, Sweden, is one of the reasons this database exists. I was writing a paper on Hervör, a woman warrior mentioned in Icelandic sagas, and needed background information.
The result of a search on “Viking warrior women” in an academic search engine was pages and pages of articles on the controversy about the human remains from Bj. 581 being identified as biologically female. I fell down that rabbit warren for a few days. When I returned to my project, it took some time and patience to find resources which were not about Bj. 581.
I study historical women warriors. The most challenging aspects of my research are the lack of documentation and the boundaries between academic disciplines: when I can find work on women warriors, it is scattered hither, thither, and yon. Scholars write from within disciplines such as history, post-colonial studies, anthropology (both cultural and physical), archeology, literature, medieval studies, folklore and mythology, various area studies, and so on. Cross-disciplinary communication is not particularly efficient. Along with the general marginalization of women’s studies topics, this makes it hard to find sources.
Articles published in academic journals are not accessible to everyone. Academic books are sometimes prohibitively expensive. Also, there are excellent books and articles on women warriors written outside the academy, as well as websites, blogs, and documentaries.
Since I am slowly collecting these materials, it makes sense to share them We are starting very modestly, with about thirty resources, but more will be added. It is my ambition to build this into something useful to other researchers.
I hope to add works on critical analysis. My interest in women warriors is also about how their narratives are constructed, and by whom, and why. I’m curious about what this reveals about socially sanctioned violence, especially depending on the gender of the person performing the violence. Swords are one of the only objects specifically designed to kill human beings. Why is it exciting to see a woman with a sword in her hand? What makes it so subversive? What makes this violence heroic and that violence abhorrent? I’m interested in how this is leveraged in constructing personal identity, how it relates to nationalist agendas, and about a thousand other things.
These are not only intellectual questions. They have to do with the ways we see the world and the ways we live in the world. These are questions about violence. Women warriors are part of our human heritage: whether they lived in gender egalitarian cultures and were encouraged to be fighters or whether they lived in societies where they had to fight to fight. Like many other people, I feel a kinship with these ancient, sword-bearing women. I want to understand them, as well as I can. I want them to be remembered.
Saumya Arya Haas received her BA in Religious Studies from Harvard Extension School (2016) and Masters of Theological Studies in Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion from Harvard Divinity School (2021). She is also a swordswoman (rapier, longsword, and katana).