Talk:Shield-maiden

message: Is there any reference for this?: 
and they were J.R.R. Tolkien's inspiration for Éowyn.
 As it is, Tolkien could have also been inspired by the medieval myths known as "virgo bellatrix", see for instance  and 87.222.26.6 (talk) 21:04, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't have a reference immediately at hand, but it's fairly widely accepted that the Rohirrim were patterned fairly closely after ancient Germanic peoples... AnonMoos (talk) 21:58, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Tolkien

message: Hi,
There is information in the lede wich is not in the article, and vice versa.
So, the lede is not really a summary of the article.
T 85.166.162.8 (talk) 19:47, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lede vs article 

message: I am not sure if English wikipedia is confused by Hollywood, but Shield-Maidens were not female warriors, they were Shield-Maidens! Ha ha. 120.29.109.137 (talk) 03:52, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Female Warriors? 

message: I find the article a bit misleading and not reflecting the actual scholarship. It both exaggerates the positions of Jesch and Price, but also does not reflect the understanding of shieldmaidens as first and foremost a literary archetype. That is, Shieldmaidens occur in post Viking Age literature set during or before the Viking Age. The question, then, is what relation do these literary figures have to the historical facts of the Viking Age. Jesch, an expert in Runes and in Old Norse texts, believes that the word skjaldmær, originates after the Viking Age, and was inspired in part by the Amazons. She similarly believes that Saxo was inspired by Amazons when he wrote about women warriors (Saxo wrote in Latin, so probably didn’t call them shieldmaidens). She also believes that Valkyries inspired shieldmaidens and not the other way around. For example, in Saxo, Lagertha is described as flying. However, Valkyries were not originally described as warriors, although they were sometimes equipped like them. They are hostesses in Valhalla and as psychopomps, it is only after the people stopped believing in them that they became warriors (all the Sagas exist in forms written down by Christians, even if based on earlier works). As far as the lack of evidence Neil Price is also on record as saying there was no evidence (Naturally before he learned about Bj 581 being female).
It is also important to realize that Jesch is not just basing her interpretations on the lack of evidence. There is an association between the idea of Shieldmaiden and women being equal, or at least more free, in the Viking Age. This idea dates to the 19th century, and is based off the problematic textual sources, where the pagan women of an earlier time are depicted as behaving different from contemporary Christian women. Jesch believes that writers such as Saxo were being misogynistic in their depictions of women fighters, and points out that the Sagas that are considered more realistic and reliable tend to have more submissive women. Women also didn’t have the same legal rights as men, and there is no mention of women in Valhalla. Then again, not everything is known about the religion of the vikings.
Finally, there is a question of what being a warrior meant. It is thought that every free adult male owned a sword and would have been expected to help defend the homestead or the province. Some martial training was part of every free man’s upbringing. Does this make every man a warrior? On the other hand, women certainly used violence, sometimes even on the battlefield. The cultural norms are clearly that men fight and women spin. A women warrior would have gone against this norm. That said, the viking age covers a lot of time and a lot of people, it is mathematically probable that this norm was broken. There may however be no connection to actual warrior women in the viking age and the shieldmaiden of literature. As far as I know, no academic believes that it was physically impossible for women to fight, but also most academics believe that most combatants were men. Like 99.9% of warriors were probably men. Tinynanorobots (talk) 10:47, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical vs. Literary Shieldmaidens