The literary tradition, for all its complications as evidence for actual social practice, does preserve memory of powerful women. Not just the martial types of the *Hervarar saga* and the *Gesta Danorum*, but women of political authority — the woman who managed an estate while her husband raided, the widow who arranged her children’s marriages and alliances, the völva whose ritual knowledge commanded respect. These roles required authority, required decision-making capacity, required the kind of strategic intelligence that the gaming-set interpretation attributes to the Bj 581 individual.
None of this proves that the person in grave Bj 581 was a warrior. But it establishes that the broader claim — that a woman in tenth-century Birka could occupy a position of genuine social authority and be buried to signal that authority — is well within the range of what the Viking Age record can support.
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## The Shield Maiden as a Scholarly Problem
The term “shield maiden” appeared in the headlines about the 2017 paper almost immediately. “DNA Proves Viking Shield Maidens Were Real.” “Scientists Confirm Female Viking Warriors Existed.” “The First Real Shield Maiden.”
Judith Jesch’s response to these headlines, both scholarly and public, was careful and persistent: the literary category of the *skjaldmær* is a post-Viking Age literary creation, the evidence for trained female warriors as a social category remains slim, and the existence of one burial is not evidence for a social pattern.
Jesch is the author of *Women in the Viking Age* (1991), a foundational study of what the textual and archaeological record can and cannot establish about women’s lives in the period. Her skepticism about the shield-maiden reading of Bj 581 comes from extensive engagement with both the sources and the risks of what scholars call “presentism” — the tendency to read the past through the lens of contemporary concerns and desires.