A woman steps out in full Viking Age dress and, in the words of archaeologist Vasily Novikov, "looks like a goddess." Every piece she wears is a small book with a small story inside, he says, if you know how to read it. Novikov heads a detachment of the Joint Gnezdovo Archaeological Expedition, and he has handled enough of these finds to say it with a straight face.
He brings her up while talking about ships, and the connection is closer than it looks. A sail, he says, takes many women sitting for a long time, and not only enslaved ones, to cut strips and stitch them together, in any colours you like. A striped sail on the water told everyone who saw it that its owner could afford the work. The ship we picture as a man's machine ran on a household of women.
That is where Novikov turns to what he calls a wrong idea: that a Scandinavian woman was oppressed. Her place in the society, in his words, was "the neck, and sometimes the head." It matters because the Vikings come to us as a world of axes and raids. If he is right, half the story has been told with its engine left out.
He treats it as a quick aside, and his claims are plain ones. A woman could run things. Perhaps she was even a warrior, and he says that part with a "perhaps." Divorce was the opposite of the grim picture. If she disliked something about her husband, she could leave him "in two clicks," and nobody would stop her. There were charges and complications on top of that, he adds, and he waves at them without going into detail.
Then comes the detail that sticks.
Women, for example, practised magic. Men could not practise magic. If a man did, he had to dress in women's clothes.
Женщины, например, там, занимались магией. Мужчины не могли заниматься магией. Если мужчина занимался магией, то он должен был одеваться в женское платье.
— Vasily Novikov, NauchDok, 56:33
Novikov points to a famous insult-trading scene in the myths, where Loki is taunted for dancing at night in a woman's dress. In Novikov's reading, Loki was trying to learn the magical craft and did learn it, but only by taking on the woman's role.
Scholars who study the period describe the same pattern. A study in Scandinavian-Canadian Studies in October 2025 says that women in Viking Age Scandinavia kept track of their homesteads' money and food stores and the efficiency of the farm. It adds that the shamanic practice called seiðr gave them roles as respected spiritual leaders, while men who took it up were seen as deviants because the practice was thought effeminate.
Novikov does not build a theory on this. He mentions it the way you mention something that surprised you once and that other people usually get wrong. Still, the picture is odd enough to keep. In the society famous for its swords, the dangerous craft of magic belonged to women, and a man who wanted it had to put on a dress.
