Johanne Hildebrandt - Estrid, Sagan om Valhalla

The fifth installment in the Sagan om Valhalla series is Estrid. I had the great honour of reading it in advance thanks to the author Johanne Hildebrandt.

Estrid is the daughter of Sigrid and Svend (Tveskæg) although everyone except for Sigrid think she is the daughter of Erik (Segersäll). She is also twin sister of Olof (Skötkonung) who will be king of the Swedes. Estrid gets kidnapped, and struggles to get back to her mother.

In the beginning of the book, Estrid belongs to the death goddess Hel (just like Freja eventually did in the first trilogy). I have sort of thought about having death as a theme for one of these entries about the series, because it is an over-arching, ever-present theme throughout all of the books. However, again there is a theme I thought more about as I was reading Estrid, so I will have to postpone it again. It seems fitting also, since Estrid is said to choose life over death as she converts to Christianity.

I somehow find Johanne Hildebrandt's depiction of the convertion in line with all the other supernatural things in the world she builds up and it certainly is quite imaginative. For real, however I think faith had extremely little to do with why people in Scandinavia became Christian. My MA thesis in Archaeology was about how the Christianisation can be shown in burials from the time ca AD 800-1200 in the Mälaren region in easternmost Sweden. (It is in Swedish, but can be found here if someone wants to read it, because much of my thoughts that I will write bellow is further developed there.)

To me the time period had much more to do with changing power structures and identities. It is the time of the centralisation of power, of town establishment and really also the time from which we get our first power figures that can be named and at least to some extent fleshed out from written sources. Traditionally this time period is often thought of as the time of the foundation of the Swedish (and Norwegian and Danish) nation states, but I will say that it is not. That concept was not made up until the 19th century (first and foremost to get the citizens's loyalty) and historical and archaeological research about the past was an important part of the creation of the concept.

So what did really happen then at the end of the time period those same scholars named the Viking Age? There are certainly a change towards a much more centralised power. The picture of this is also coloured by the 19th century and not least by the theory of the male conqueror (which I will probably have the opportunity to get back to in some entry later), but we can say that the power changed from being more localy based to more centralised.

The other major thing that happened  during this time period that we actually can say for certain happened: the Christian (Catholic) church was established with clergy, parish organisation and everything. This is really the aspect of the period which I find so interesting. There are actually great differences in what the different types of resources tell us about the Christianisation. Everyone who has gone to school in Sweden have to have heard the name of the German monk Ansgar. He is said to have been sent to Scandinavia as a missionary and there is a biography written by another German monk called Rimbert about him. This and the history of the Hamburg-Bremen archbishopric written by Adam of Bremen has been very influential on the research perspective of the Christianisation. The archaeological material from this period does not show a cut between the older and the newer traditions as clear as the written sources want. Instead the borders are fluid and there is no clear indication as to what is Christian or Pagan. The discussion, especially in the Contract archaeological sector, tends to end up in more or less stereotypical interpretations. The problem I think is that there seldom are any stereotypes in real life. It is easy to write about them and make life black and white, but the truth is that it really is not. Everything is put in the grey area in between the extremes and that is really what the archaeological material show us. As for who was Christian or Pagan, I think it was based on the social context. If one needed to be Christian, one was, and if one needed to be Pagan, one was. Knud den store (the great) is actually a very good example of this. He ruled as a Christian among the Englishmen and as a Pagan among the Danes. Sigrid Storråda is interesting in this aspect, because she seems to have been content in her Pagan faith. I wrote about her probably having a great political mind in my entry about Sigrid and this might seem to contradict it, but maybe it says more about what power she had. Maybe her power was so well-founded in society that she did not have to turn her coat depending of who she spoke with?

Olof's coin

The historical Olof Skötkonung is mostly famous for having been baptist by the English missionary Saint Sigfrid in Husaby in Västergötland, Sweden and for being the first to mint coins in Sweden with the help of English mint masters at the end of the 10th century. It is most likely that the name Skötkonung means Skattkonung (treasure king) and derives from his minting activities.

Because of the minting happening in my home town Sigtuna and the plot actually involving Olof, the choice for this entry's archaeological find was pretty easy. The text on the coin says OLOF REX SVEVORUM, which means Olof, king of the Swedes on the other side can be read SIDEI which has been interpreted as either a spelling variation of the name Sigtuna or an abbraviation of Situne Dei meaning God's Sigtuna.

Since I read it as a script directly from the author, the cover was borrowed from here and the picture of Olof Skötkonung's coin from here.

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.

Johanne Hildebrandt - Saga från Valhalla

Saga från Valhalla is the third book in Sagan från Valhalla series (All entries can be found here.) and the last one of the books set in the Bronze Age. The title character is Saga, daughter of Idun and Ull and granddaughter of Freja and Tor. She does not have her powers yet, but Freja is sure she will get them in time.

Alfhild, queen of Alfheim, is not as comfortable with the vanírs as she is in earlier books and you can glimpse a theme of xenophobia which is probably more on the agenda today than it was back when the book was published in 2004. There is also the matter of death that has been quite a consistent theme in the books already from the start, but I felt a need to talk about the Norse goddesses, not least Freja.

The goddesses seldom get a good portrayal in books about Norse mythology. Generally they are lumped together into one paragraph with only one sentence describing their character for each one of them. This when each and everyone of the male deities often get whole chapters telling everything about them and their home, animals and relationships to the other deities.

There are a lot of goddesses in Norse mythology and the ones I will talk about here are mainly Freja since Johanne Hildebrandt's books are mostly about her and there is much more information about her than all the rest.

Saga was a present from my mother
for my 20th birthday. Signed by
Johanne Hildebrandt.

Freja is often the exception to the "tradition" of lumping all the together. She mostly gets her own paragraph at least. However, she is still often reduced to "love goddess". She is much more interesting though.

She lives in Folkvang and travels around in a chariot driven by the cats Hogní and Þófnir (Tovner). Like her brother Frej, she is also associated with pigs. She owns one called Hildesvin and one of her many names is Syr which means sow.

Freja belongs to the Vanír family of deities and therefore got the nickname Vanadis. She represents female fertility and female sexuality, which is why the Christians did not look upon her fondly. She however seems to have been a particular favourite of the völvur, best described as Pre-Christian priestesses.

Her husband is called Od, but he disappears and there have been lots of speculations about it being one of the god Odín's many shapes. There are also speculations about her also marrying Frej and the giants always desire her.

Gabriel Hildebrand SHMM 2011-11-08

One of the aspects I enjoy most about Hildebrandt's Freja is how varied she is. Hildebrandt actually explores a lot of the goddess' different roles in her three books about her and her family. As a goddess of death, Freja is generally over-shadowed by Odín in popular culture. Britt-Mari Näsström talks about the problem Freja appeared to the male scholars, authors and artists during the 19th century in her book Nordiska gudinnor. Nytolkningar av den förkristna mytologin (2009). They thought they had been given the task of interpreting the Old Norse Literature for the less educated population. Richard Wagner, Esaias Tegnér and Viktor Rydberg for example either reduce her to a weak character or she is depicted as a fallen woman. This portrayal is more fitting as an example of the ideal woman in the 19th century than as a depiction of what Freja is like in the Old Norse sources.

Freja is so much more than a lovesick fertility goddess. She may be guardian of pregnant women, but she also takes an interest in warfare and death. All three of these subjects are big themes in Johanne Hildebrandt's books. I find it mostly intriguing how Hildebrandt looks upon her with much more interest than Odín in this case, letting her becoming the priestess of Hel (the goddess of the Underworld) in Idun. A role she seems much more comfortable with in Saga. Hildebrandt's books also accentuate how similar Freja is to Odín. Both of them takes care of fallen warriors at the battle field. Odín also has a connection to Saga, however. Odín is the god of poetry and Saga is connected with storytelling.

Because Freja is such a wonderful goddess I find it both strange and sad that Marvel comics wanted to make Thor a woman instead of using Freja as a whole new comic franchise.

Update 2016-09-01: I realised I forgot to include an archaeological find in this post like in the first two. This one is not from the Bronze Age, but from the Viking Age. It is a pendant depicting a woman with a swollen abdomen (due to a pregnancy). She was found in the ancient remain given the name Hagebyhöga 36:1 in Aska in Östergötland, Sweden. It has been interpreted as a portrayal of Freja.

Johanne Hildebrandt - Idun. Sagan om Valhalla

In Norse Mythology, Idun (or Iðunn) is the wife of Brage (who she also marries in the book) and seems to be one of the lesser known deities of the Norse pantheon. She is connected to apples and youth and one myth tells how she is kidnapped by the giant Þjazi (Swedish: Tjatse) after having been tricked to walk outside of Asgard by Loki.

Idun is also the second installment of the Sagan om Valahalla series  by Johanne Hildebrandt. Like with the entry about Freja, I do not intend to do a full review of the book, but rather use this entry to discuss a topic from the book that got me thinking.

Just like with Freja, I was still a teenager when Idun was first published back in 2003 and also like with Freja, my maturity and archaeological training afterwards have made me see the book in a different light.

In the entry about Freja, I talked a little about how Swedes in general lack knowledge and understanding of Scandinavian prehistory. As an archaeologist I feel strongly for this topic and there are much more that I feel to be said about it. However, I refrain from doing so here because there is another aspect of Idun that I want to discuss because it got me thinking even more. But lets start at the beginning!

Idun is the daughter of Freja and Tor and not really anything like her mother. Freja is independent, confident, outspoken and quite fearless. She also has the ability to see and talk to gods and spirits and is a highly ranked priestess. Idun, on the other hand, is scared, timid, shy and introvert. She has not inherit Freja's supernatural powers and is not at all popular among the men during the fertility rituals. Freja sees her as a disappointment and therefore treats her poorly. With this background it might not be so hard to guess why she falls a little too fast and hard for the beautiful youngling Brage when he shows up with Tor and a dying Frej.

Contrary to her mother and aunt Gefjyn, Idun has many traits traditionally ascribed to women. She is caring and nurturing of all living things. Like the goddess, she cares for the apple trees, which makes the fruits taste better according to Freja. She also adores children. She cared for her little sister Hnoss who died before the book started and she is also a favourite to the queen of Alheim, Alfhild's daughters Ingvild and Svea. Her greatest dream seems to be a wish to give birth to daughters so she can show her mother that she is capable of something.

I find the contrast between Freja's and Idun's characters to be really interesting. Not so much because they are mother and daughter and seem to be so different in character, but because it puts a finger on depiction of female characters in popular culture and who's considered "strong" or "weak".

In general, there are two "criteras" for who are considered "good female role models" in popular cultures of today. One is that she is like Freja. She breaks away from the traditional role of the woman, being limited to the home. She is a priestess and does not have time or interest in housework like cooking and cleaning. The other criteria is not so much a trait of Freja, but traits that her sister Gefjyn exhibits. Gefjyn is trained to be a warrior and therefore kind of a female version of the "macho man". Neither of the sisters are especially motherly or loving even though they show empathy towards others from time to time. Idun, on the other hand, shows a lot of the traits traditionally ascribed to females being both of them. She is not the strong, independent priestess Freja has been waiting for and she therefore sees Idun as a shame to the family, something that I also see as common in feminism in general today.

I did touch upon this subject a little in my Heroines entry about my most recent heroine Phryne Fisher from the TV series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. Of course women should not be limited to the home, but I do not think it is wise to patronize women who wants to take care of their family either. In fact I would like to broaden that role so it can be a man who stays home caring for his family. The same goes to the question of characteristics. I cannot see any problems with Idun being motherly and caring. In fact we need more role models to be kind. There is no good that can come to female's situation by forcing traditionally male traits of violence and ignorance upon them. That will not change any patriarchal structures. Quite the contrary! It will only enforce masculinity and crush femininty. Besides, it will also only encourage violent behaviour while at the same time afflict traits like for example kindness. We do need more kind, caring and loving people of all gender, not violent, aloof ones!

Actually Hildebrandt deals with this problem in the book, weaving it into the plot. A dangerous decease is spreading at an alarming speed among both the Æsirs and the Vanírs. Tor seeks Freja's help to fight against the witch who has caused it. Freja refuses and Tor, realising that Idun is his daughter, brings Idun home to Idunvallen. There is a Swedish expression saying that one does not miss the cow until the stall is empty (Man saknar inte kon förrän båset är tomt.) and it is kind of fitting for Freja. Not until Idun has left with Tor does she realise that she has been unfair. Her own daughter therefore forces her to face her prejudices towards women who show traditional female traits and what is considered to be "strong women". This turn of event actually had me liking Freja even more. Hildebrandt lets her be flawed. She makes mistakes, but she also tries to change when she realises this. However it is not as easy to make amends with Idun as Freja thinks...

Egtvedpigen

For the Freja entry, I used a picture of a rock carving as a symbol of the Scandinavian Bronze Age and for Idun, I have chosen a picture of the probably most famous of the Danish oak coffin burials dating to the Bronze Age, Egtvedpigen (The Egtved Girl). I thought she fitted well into the context of Idun, but to not spoil anyone, I will leave the reason a secret. You can read more about the find on the National Museum of Denmark's webpage here.

Johanne Hildebrandt - Freja. Sagan om Valhalla

Freja is probably the most famous among the goddesses in Norse mythology. She belongs to the Vanir family and is the goddess of female fertility and sexuality, but she also has a connection to death. She is the leader of the valkyries, female spirits who walks around the battle field picking up fallen warriors. She then splits them with Odín taking half of them to her home Folkvang.

Johanne Hildebrandt's Freja is however not a goddess but a human being. She is a young priestess in Vanaheim during the Scandinavian Bronze Age. Her mother is Åse, queen of Vanaheim, but Freja has been raised by her aunt Gullveig, the high priestess of Vanaheim. One day they hear of a threat to their world, the Æsirs is pillaging Vanir farms and for the first time ever, Freja gets to leave Vanaheim to mediate in the conflict between them and the Æsirs together with Gullveig and Snotra. At the Æsirs farm Idunvallen, Freja meets Tor. He is the son of Oden, the leader of the Æsirs, and they fall in love. A war however breaks out and Tor is captured by the Vanirs.


Freja was first published in 2002 which was when I first read it. I was only 18 back then and as with so much other literature I read when I was a teenager or in my early twenties I have a somewhat different reaction to it now. In the case of Freja, my choice of profession probably plays a part in this.

Rock Carving of a sun horse from Tanum, Sweden

As a Scandinavian archaeologist, I love the fact that Hildebrandt chose to set her story in the Scandinavian prehistory. Besides the Viking Age, not many un-archaeologists in Sweden knows that much about the first couple of thousands of years after the latest Ice Age. The time before the Viking Age is generally seen as boring and not related to anything we do today. When talking about "ancient history" we generally go all the way down to the Mediterannean with Greeks and Romans taking their cultural heritage more in account than the one present in our own geographical sphere. This is sad, because there are many stories hidden within our own past. We just need to stop measuring societies by marbe temples.

To be completely honest, the Bronze Age is not really my favourite time period. This because I have heard to much about rock carvings during my educations. Do not get me wrong! Rock carvings are very beautiful and mysteriously fun, but if it is the only thing you hear about for three years and your main research interest is elsewhere in the past, you start to feel a little fed up after awhile. But I really enjoy Hildebrandt's Bronze Age. Both the physical and the spiritual. She has turned it into a matriarchy with women being the brain and with both the spiritual and the practical powers while men providing the muscles. Hildebrandt also portrays women as better suited for power than men. This is evident in for example the fact that the patriarchal Æsirs needs help in providing foods for their people. They have abandonned the mother goddess for the war god Tiwatz which might be seen symbolical as to their priorities.

I also enjoyed that Hildebrandt creates a mythological past to Freja's world with mentioning of what seems to be the Ice Age (even if the term is never used). There is a small mentioning of a battle between the Vanirs and what seems to be Stone Age people (maybe hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic and/or Mesolithic eras) in the book called "the old people".

"Det gamla folket undvek människorna. Det sades att när Frejas folk kom seglande till detta land, vägledda av Gudinnan som räddade dem undan den stora katastrofen hade vanerna stridit mot det gamla folket, bronssvärd mot yxor av sten.

Vanerna hade segrat och sedan den dagen var det gamla folket försvunnet."

("The old people avoided the humans. They said that when Freja's people came sailing to this land, guided by the Goddess who saved them from the big catastrophe, the Vanirs had fought against the old people, bronze swords against stone axes.

The Vanirs were victorious and from that on, the old people had disappeared." )

At first I was not entirely sure I enjoyed this depiction of meetings between cultures. It seems very imperialistic. Cultures normally does not clash like that when they meet. However, as I continued on reading, I realised that there might still be a point in this depiction and that it might even be good and telling of the worldview of both Freja's society and our own. It is actually a pretty good description about the Western view of "cultural clashes" and how the West handled other "more primitive" people (not seldom groups of hunter-gatherers) during the European imperialism of later history. Seeing that this is a story about the past in Freja's world it provides a good example of how history is used to emphasize one group's past, making it more victorious and glorious than it might have been. And just like the non-Western groups the European met in the areas they colonized in the more recent past, "the old people" do not disappear completely. Freja thinks she sees them during her journey. This might be reading to much into nothing, but Hildebrandt does not portray the relations between the Vanirs and the Æsirs in this way. There are, of course, frictions between them at first, but none of them destroys the other completely. Instead, they start sorting out differences, creating new ways of living and interacting that is beneficial for all. This, I think, is a much better depiction of what cultural meetings really are in reality as opposed to in historical narratives.

Freja is the first in the series Sagan om Valhalla. There are much more to say about her and the stories, but it will become much clearer in later books. Therefore I will leave my analysis here at the moment and start rereading the book about Freja's daughter Idun.

The four Valhalla-books that have been published until this date (6/6 2016)

PS. Before you ask: YES! Of course my bedspread has skulls on it!!! I am an archaeologist. I see dead people!