The Viking Warrior Grave That Was Actually a Woman

For nearly a century and a half, everyone who looked at grave Bj 581 in Birka, Sweden, assumed its occupant was a man. The weapons buried with the body made that seem obvious. DNA eventually told a different story.

A Grave Built for a Commander

Archaeologists excavated the grave in 1878, uncovering an ornate 10th-century burial equipped with a sword, axe, fighting knife, spear, shield, and 25 armor-piercing arrows, along with two horses. Out of roughly 1,100 tombs identified at Birka, this was one of only two containing a full set of weaponry. A complete gaming set, including three antler dice and 28 playing pieces, sat alongside the weapons, an object type researchers associate with military leadership and strategic planning. The tomb’s location, at the westernmost edge of the settlement and marked by a large boulder, made it visible from both the sea and the town, a placement befitting someone of high status.

What the DNA Actually Showed

For well over a century, that arsenal was treated as enough evidence on its own to identify the occupant as a male warrior. A team led by archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University tested that assumption directly, extracting mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from the skeleton. Their 2017 study, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, found no Y chromosome anywhere in the remains. Mitochondrial DNA from every bone tested matched, confirming all the remains belonged to a single individual with an XX chromosome pattern, biologically female.

The Backlash

The finding triggered immediate pushback. Critics questioned whether researchers had tested the correct bones, whether a male warrior might be buried in the grave alongside the woman without being accounted for, and whether the individual might have been a transgender man rather than a woman. Some resisted the idea that a weapons-filled grave could belong to a woman at all.

A Follow-Up Study Answers the Critics

Hedenstierna-Jonson and her colleagues addressed these objections directly in a 2019 follow-up study published in the journal Antiquity. The team pointed out that historically, archaeologists had frequently assigned sex to Viking burials based on grave goods rather than skeletal analysis, and that 19th-century excavators had simply conflated biological sex, gender identity, and the assumption that warriorhood was an exclusively masculine role. On the question of transgender identity, the authors noted that the term itself carries modern, Western, and political connotations that are difficult to project onto a thousand-year-old culture, while acknowledging it’s impossible to rule out identities across a wider gender spectrum that may have existed at the time but remain unfamiliar to us today.

What the Grave Doesn’t Tell Us

The study’s authors concluded that the most straightforward reading of the evidence is that the grave belonged to a woman who lived and was buried as a professional warrior. Hedenstierna-Jonson noted that the site had always been read as a warrior grave simply because it looked like one and sat near Birka’s garrison and hillfort, and that the identification was only ever questioned once the skeleton turned out to be female. The researchers stop short of definitively reconstructing the woman’s exact role or identity in life, acknowledging that some uncertainty is unavoidable when interpreting gender and status this far removed in time.

Sources

This report draws on original reporting by Smithsonian Magazine, and the peer-reviewed studies published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2017) and Antiquity (2019).