INLUS Author’s Corner – Nancy Marie Brown

Join us on September 1st.

Please join us on September 1 for another INLUS Author’s Corner presentation with Nancy Marie Brown on her new book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, which will be available on August 31^st, published by St. Martin’s Press!

In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden was actually a woman. In this gripping read Brown weaves together archaeology, history, and literature to imagine her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined.

Brown uses science to link the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines her life intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as The Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor’s short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data, but on 19th-century Victorian biases.

Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, law, saga, poetry, and myth carry weapons. These women brag, “As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone.”

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Nancy Marie Brown is a well-known author of highly praised books of nonfiction, including A Good Horse Has No Color and The Far Traveler:  Voyages of a Viking Woman. She is fluent in Icelandic and spends her summers in Iceland.

She has deep ties to the Scandinavian cultural institutions in the U.S. Brown lives in East Burke, Vermont.

The interview will be conducted by Carrie Kozubal.

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About the Event

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INLUS Webinar

When:  Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Time:  8:00 PM Eastern/7:00 Central/ 6:00 Mountain/ 5:00 Pacific
Where:  Log-in information is located on the INLUS Events Calendar