I’ve been doing Viking Age living history for close to a decade, and at one of my first events, I had an experience I’ll never forget. It was a lovely spring day, and my group was camped out in a small town park that hosted a yearly Viking-themed festival. A few of us girls had offered to clean up after a great lunch one of the guys had cooked. As we washed out the cauldron and bowls, a patron passed us, looked us up and down, and said derisively, “I guess you had to do the dishes even back then, huh? I thought all Viking women were supposed to be warriors. Where’s Lagertha?”
My friends and I just stared at him, too stunned (and, at the time, too new to this whole “reenactment” thing) to know what to say, and he moved on, chuckling to himself. We finished up and walked back to camp in silence. I found myself getting angrier with every step—first at the fact that doing a necessary task like cleaning dishes was gendered in the first place, and then that I’d passed up a teaching moment, an opportunity to gently correct a common misconception about the Vikings.
At that point I’d graduated with my history degree and had studied the medieval Icelandic family sagas, which tell quasi-historical and often fantastical tales of the Viking Age settlement of the island and beyond. While overwhelmingly concerned with the male characters, the sagas also notably feature fierce, conniving, witty, and determined women—who rarely needed to don armor and pick up a sword in order to get their way.
Granted, I think that Viking warrior women are awesome. What’s more, they mean a lot to women in reenactment especially, and I support my sisters on the fighting field with all my heart. But I decided in that moment that if I was ever going to write a book about Norse women, it wouldn’t be about shield-maidens.
The Weaver and the Witch Queen is the result. It’s a story of friendship and sisterhood, of love and loss and the indomitable spirit of Viking Age women. One of the title characters, Gunnhild, is the hot mess that will become queen of Norway; the other is her sworn sister Oddny, an ordinary woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
Gunnhild is a figure largely vilified by the historical sources, which accuse her of being a witch, among other things. In Weaver, she owns this accusation and then some. I wanted to reimagine her origin story in a way that gives her the rich inner life that medieval authors denied her. I wanted to explore her loves, her losses, and her relationships. Most of all, I wanted to give her what I thought she lacked most in the sagas: a best friend.
I hope you love Gunnhild, Oddny, and the gang as much as I do. Thank you so much for reading.
Sincerely,
Genevieve Gornichec
