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Freydís Eiríksdóttir
(c. 1000 CE)
Sword-Wielding Pregnant Viking
The trip to North America was not going as expected.
Leif Eiriksson and his band of Norsemen had come to the shores of North America (present day Canada, to be precise) in the late 900s, and had made an uneasy truce with the local Native Americans (whom they called skrælingjar). Unfortunately, that peace had fallen apart, and a large war party had the Vikings on the run. But one of them wasn’t about to turn tail. Striding toward the red-painted native warriors, Leif’s extremely pregnant sister Freydís insulted the courage of her fellow Icelanders and proclaimed, “Let me but have a weapon, I think I could fight better than any of you.”
The weapon only came to her after she was totally surrounded by skrælingjar, with nary a live ally in sight. Grabbing a sword off a dead clansman, she bared her chest at her enemies, beating her breasts with the flat of her sword and screaming bloody murder.
The skrælingjar, realizing that their foes had left but a single person to fight all of them — and that this person was a pregnant alien striking herself with a foreign weapon and shrieking indecipherable obscenities at them — decided they weren’t about to stick around and figure out why any of this was happening. They wisely ran the hell away.
And that would basically be the beginning, middle, and end of Freydís Eiríksdóttir’s story. Except historians wanted to hold her up as an example. So things get messy.
The story you just heard comes to us courtesy of the Eirik the Red Saga, and it’s one of only two sources on Freydís’s life. The other source, the Greenlander Saga, tells a tooootally different story. While it ostensibly covers many of the same events as the Eirik the Red Saga, the Greenlander Saga paints Freydís as a conniving, nasty lady who married for money and only went on the Vinland trip for yet more money.
In the Greenlanders version, she convinces two brothers to help lead a private expedition to Vinland with her, but she double crosses them. Lying that the brothers had offended her honor, she orders her husband to avenge her, and threatens to leave him if he doesn’t. Her husband dutifully murders the brothers and the brothers’ men, and Freydís finishes the job by using an axe to kill all the women in the brothers’ party. From there, Freydís takes the brothers’ boat, divvies up their wealth, swears everyone in her party to secrecy, and returns to the main Viking expedition. It does not stay a secret for long, though. Her brother (and expedition leader) Leif senses something amiss and tortures a confession out of some of her men. Once the truth is revealed, Leif does not punish her — she’s his sister! — but the moralistic narrator of the Greenlander Saga notes that “after that, no one thought anything but ill of [Freydis].”
So…. that’s just a smidge different than the previous version. How to reconcile?
Well, historians have done some digging into the stories, and they’ve found some telling information to help flesh things out. The basic consensus is that the Greenlanders Saga was, in some part, Christian propaganda. It refers to Freydís as a heathen who’d refused to conform to Christianity, holding her up as an example of a “bad woman” who wouldn’t obey the rules, a Norse parallel to the biblical Jezebel. Which helps explain some of the details that don’t make sense. Like, why would she ever think mere gifts could keep 35+ people quiet? Why would Eirik have to torture people to get information, when he could have just ordered them to tell him? It has the hallmarks of moralistic revisionism about it, meant to steer people towards a new way of thinking.
Strangely enough, the Eirik the Red Saga, although conclusively proven to be a Norse revision of the Greenlanders Saga, is held up by historians as being a bit more objective. The Eirik the Red Saga was a conscious rewriting of the Vinland expedition events, using the Greenlanders Saga as well as other texts, many of which are now lost to history. While the exact details of Freydís’s story are hard to prove — they distantly echo a number of other shield maiden stories — they were put in there as part of a conscious effort on the part of Norse historians. Almost as if to provide a counter-example, saying, “look what Norse women can be!”
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Art Notes
- It’s a bit difficult to tell which tribe the Vikings actually met when they confronted the skrælingjar. I modeled her foes off of the Beothuk, a now-extinct tribe who lived in the area in the 19th century and was known to have red-painted faces.
- In the background is a viking ship and the long house where they might have lived (her sword is pointing to it). I based it off a modern-day recreation — its grass roof unfortunately made in a little hard to read, even before I added in the atmospheric haze.
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Next Time on Rejected Princesses
Bringing you a traditional Cambodian dish, made of sticky rice, mud, and scheming ministers.
Wow! Who to root for? Who to cheer for? Native Americans or the baddest badass Princess yet? The Norse preggers princess of course!!
bare her chest? 0.o im sure that’s still worked
They made it inland as far as Minnesota. Talk that the kensington runestone is a hoax or forgery is damned lies spread by heathen Wisconsinites and I will cave their slanderous cheeseheads in with a randonee ski if they say otherwise.
“Why would Eirik have to torture people to get information, when he could have just ordered them to tell him?”
In some ancient cultures, torture was a routine part of the interrogation of slaves, and this might have extended to servants, retainers, and other lackeys. The assumption was that the slave would be loyal and refuse to inform on his master. But a little torture (and the implicit threat of more) relieved the slave of blame for talking, giving him blanket immunity from retaliation by his master.
Oh interesting! That makes sense. Do you have a source I could look at to learn more? Thank you!
I lost most of my library in a fire last year. But a quick internet search turned up “New Frontiers: Law and Society in the Roman World”, pp. 58-60, which is available on Google Books. One footnote said the testimony of a slave against his master was considered invalid without torture. I suppose that was intended to prevent slaves from informing on their masters, which could have undermined the whole institution of slavery. Most of the relevant references I found concerned ancient Greek and Roman culture. (Using the word “torture” as a search term turned up some pretty sick non-relevant links.)
Thank you! :D
It’s been a while since I studied Roman Law, but the invalidity of slave testimony obtained without torture was a definite. The big book of Roman Law is the Corpus Iuris Civilis, a compendium of laws and juristic opinions collected under the orders of – top of my head – Justinian, which was rediscovered in about the fifteenth century and became the basis of just about every European civil legal code apart from that of Britain.
I’ve never come across anything similar in Norse civil law, but then the Tripos doesn’t have a Norse Law module.
*Here* is my second vote for the Norse preggers princess :-P
(The Greenlanders saga, however, is not the worst example of Christian propaganda. That “award” goes to the terrifying results you get from image-searching “accelerated christian education propaganda”. Don’t, actually)
Wow! What a story! I am really inspired and I think the original story is the Eirik the Red Saga because it sounds more original and more likely to have happened even thought there is obviously some element of fantasy and folk story like characterization in the plot. Still I am very inspired by the story of a pregnant woman who becomes a fighter, a very beautiful portrait of strong women.
wow that kid had to live up to this