Johanne Hildebrandt - Sigrid, Sagan om Valhalla

Sigrid is the fourth book in Johanne Hildebrandt's Sagan om Valhalla series and the first one to take place in the Viking Age. The name of the main character to me is rather special since one of my two middle names is Sigrid. The book does not have anything to do with me though. The Sigrid it is supposed to portray is the "Swedish" queen Sigrid Storråda (Sigrid the Haughty according to Wikipedia) who first married the "Swedish" king Erik Segersäll (Erik Victorious), but who later divorced him and remarried Danish king Svend Tveskæg (Sweyn Forkbeard). The book is about Sigrid Tostesdotter who is forced to marry Erik, but falls in love with Svend instead. The connection to Freja is not entirely clear, but it is said that Sigrid is related to her and there is also talk about what happened to Saga and the geneaology in between the book about Saga (The post was updated 1 september 2016.) and the one about Sigrid.

At first I thought the topic for this book would be, the Christianisation of Scandinavia and/or the changing power structures which that entailed. It is my favourite research topic and I think I have something to say about it. However, as I thought more about the historical Sigrid Storråda I found a more interesting topic would be her power and her marriages. Actually I think you can find out a lot about her character (and also the role of the Viking woman) from how she handled her relationships. This sounds perhaps very much like "a woman is nothing without a man", but I do intend this to be something completly different.

In a time when marriages were much more a matter of politics (Especially in the higher end of the social ladder that Sigrid belonged to.) her choices of husbands do not seem so strange. I think the historical Sigrid was much more practical in this than Hildebrandt's Sigrid. For short I do not think she hated one (Erik) and loved the other (Svend). Instead I think she had a very strict view of both her power and the politics of Scandinavia during this time.

In a way this gives her a connection to what is probably one of the most famous female rulers throughout history: Cleopatra VII of Egypt. I am sure everyone have heard all about her love life, but because of my love for the British children's show Horrible Histories, I will leave a link to their Lady Gaga inspired song so they can tell you the short version:

Cleopatra also had two pretty famous relationships: Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) for which she is actually most famous. It has been pretty easy to rally about Cleopatra and her relationships and lots of people (mostly men) have done so both in the past and in the present. However, I want to put her and Sigrid Storråda together and see if I can say something about them as people beyond their husbands by looking at their relationships to them.

We have already established that marriages for the Viking elite was more about politics than love and the same is true for Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt. Looking at Sigrid's and Cleopatra's relationships they actually both seem to have been pretty politically consious women. Establishing allies with the most powerful men in their world (Erik Segersäll and Svend Tveskæg respectively Caesar and Mark Antony) they seem to both had thought about what would give them most power. They also happened to establish this power by bearing everyone of these four men's children. This was probably the only means women in upper class families could gain influence and power (if their husbands didn't die). What I think is interesting too about this is the fact that Sigrid actually manages to get a divorce from Erik (The Norse written sources are not clear as to why, so I will leave it at that.) and manages to get some power status for herself while "between marriages" (so to speak). When she divorced Erik, she also took away all the new allies she had brought into the marriage.

In my last entry about chess I talked about how the change from vizir to queen in the European version of chess was an excellent way of showing the importance of women in Early Medieval Europe and Sigrid's story supports this. The women seem to have been very important in the political structures of the time and also free to move as they pleased. Sigrid's marriages to both Erik and Svend and her divorce from Erik show to me that she was a very politically consious woman and her children ended up on both the Swedish and Danish thrones at the time. I also think the Christian church's negative attitude towards divorces might have originated from this power that the women had in divorces.

Detail of the Oseberg ship

The story of Cleopatra is far more tragic, but I do not think her society was as open to female power as the Viking one was. Her relationships to two of the most powerful political leaders show, just like Sigrid's that she had a political mind. It was not her fault that she ended up on the losing side.

Last but not least, the Scandinavian archaeological artefact I have chosen for this entry is a picture showing how beautifully decorated the Norwegian Oseberg ship is. The ship burial belongs to my favourites. It was found in Oseberg in Vestfold in Norway and excavated in 1904-05 by Norwegian Haakon Shetelig and Swedish Gabriel Gustafson. It was a burial of two women and included lots of precious artefacts. More information can be found here.


I read the hardcover verison of Sigrid, since that is the one I own myself (and it is really nice), but I think the papercover edition is so wonderfully beautiful, that I just had to include a picture of it. The picture was borrowed from here.
The Youtube clip is owned by CBBC. 
The picture of the Oseberg ship was taken from Wikipedia.