Shield Maidens: not of Rohan but of real Viking bands

The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women

By Nancy Marie Brown

(author of Ivory Vikings, Song of the Vikings, The Far Traveler)

 

“The first Viking housewife with her keys appeared in a Swedish history book in the 1860s, replacing an earlier historical portrait of Viking women who were strikingly equal to Viking men. The Victorian version of Viking history has been presented ever since as truth but it is only one interpretation.”

If her three previous books on Vikings weren’t sufficient evidence, ‘Valkyries’ seals the deal: this author knows whereof she writes. The language and the history are assured, the detail illuminating. From the grave goods at Burka to the ruins of long-vanished trading ports, the deep-rooted history of Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings to the warrior-woman Hervor’s life constructed from snatches of song and saga, it’s part archaeological report, part history, part legend, part anti-patriarchal commentary, and altogether readable.

Like the old Norse sagas, this book slips easily between fact and fiction; unlike them, it tells you which is which. Keep in mind that the sagas were first written down by Christian monks after being retold & embroidered for possibly hundreds of years first. In at least one known instance those first copyists deliberately rejected the idea that a warrior might be female.

So when the most complete skeleton, with the largest collection of arms, out of over 500 excavated graves at Burka was identified as female by DNA testing, there was some pushback among academics whose whole career had been invested in ‘men = warriors, women = homemakers.’

This unknown female warrior was tall – 5’7 to the largest known king at 5’8 – and her grave goods wouldn’t shame any warrior king. Her two-edged sword & her long thin knife in its ornate sheath both came from the East Way (trading route), toward Byzantium, although it’s impossible to know if she traveled there herself or traded or killed someone who had acquired it. She had two horses, a bow & twenty-five metal-tipped arrows, an axe, two spears, and 2 shields. In short, she was buried with more arms than almost every other known Viking grave in the world.

Small wonder that our author named her Hervor, after the female warrior most often mentioned in the oldest (pre-Christian) sagas.

During Hervor’s lifetime, from about 930 to 970, the whole world of the Vikings changed due to the spreading presence of Christian missionaries. When she was born she was not unusual as a fighter, but by thirty or so years after her death, The Norse pantheon of gods had given way to the Christian monopoly and women had been firmly herded back to hearth and home. Patriarchy was the ruling social structure.

Only in the past 40 years or so has the supremacy of the Viking warrior as male been interrogated. This book makes a great stride toward bringing that knowledge out of dusty academia.

If academia isn’t your thing, here’s a pop-culture twist: If you are a Tolkien or LOTR fan, you will recognize many references in this Norse history as having been reinterpreted by that fantasy writer into Lord of the Rings. Mirkwood and the Vestfold are the first two that struck me. The Riders of Rohan have often been referred to as Vikings of the Grasslands, and King Theoden’s hall is likely based in part on the Shining Hall. After reading ‘The Real Valkyrie’ you may find yourself wondering if Aragorn was thinking of Hervor when he said to Eowyn, “You are the daughter of kings, a shield-maiden of Rohan. I do not think that will be your fate.”

It was not Hervor’s fate, either, to wither in a cage. She died a warrior’s death and was buried in a warrior’s grave with everything she would need to continue her glorious battles in the afterlife:

And hers is only one of the stories of warrior women within these pages. There are tales and histories enough to fire the fighting spirit of any modern woman who reads it, and to give pause to any man who previously assumed all Viking warriors were male.

There’s an excerpt from the book available at

https://crimereads.com/viking-women-real-valkyrie/

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press (Aug. 31 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250200849
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250200846

#TheRealValkyrie #NetGalley #Vikings #WarriorWomen #sword #axe #bow #Iceland #Denmark #DanishHistory #history #VikingHistory #barrow #saga #skald #Hervor #longship #nonfiction #amreading #amreviewing #ILoveBooks #Bookstagram #LOTR #Eowyn #shieldmaiden

A grim yet sympathetic foray into post-WW2 Berlin

 

The Living and the Lost by Ellen Feldman

 

Another winner in the immersive tales of war sequelae that Feldman does so well.

‘The Living and the Lost’ shows us immediate post-war Berlin through the eyes of Meike, a young Jewish woman working for the Allie denazification program while searching for her remaining kin and stumbling—sometimes literally—across her own half-buried past.

Meike (now called Millie) and her brother David were separated from their parents and younger sister when the family was fleeing to America before the war. Fostered by an American family friend of their father’s, they became well-educated, well fed naturalized American adults. Now back in Berlin, Meike is working for the Americans and David is serving with them as an interrogator, both trying to sort the ‘good Germans’ from the ‘bad Nazis’ while not quite believing in the existence of the former. Many of their co-workers are German Jews, the lucky few who escaped Europe and are now back with their hopes, their losses, their terrors. The surroundings—half familiar streets and parks, the other half unrecognizable ruins—mirror their internal landscapes.

The imagery is unsparing but never wallows: gaunt survivors both from the camps and in the bombed and crumbling cities; women raped so many times sex has lost all meaning, willing to trade it to anyone for a bite of food or a chance to sleep warm that night; Allied soldiers well fed and hard-hearted against a population that conspired to actively aid or passively look away from atrocities committed in their name; ‘the licentiousness of those who’d gone so numb to pain and death that only a moment of pleasure, or at least gratification, could light a spark of life.”

The strength of the character Meike is that she is at once a recognizable, fortunate Americanized woman with whom modern readers can readily identify and an internally shattered escapee from the Holocaust that rended families, communities, and countries on a scale never previously documented. She walks in several worlds---her post-war current life, her Berlin childhood, her American adolescence, her life as a Jew in each of those countries, her simultaneous and emotionally fractured existence as a guilt-ridden survivor/refugee, a vengeful victor, and a damaged victim of unimaginable losses—and takes the reader with her every step of the way.

Helping to delineate the many inner and outer conflicts is Meike’s American schooling. She gets into a women’s college on a scholarship specifically for Jewish girls who have a strong academic background and is amazed by the freedom of her American-born roommate to openly identifies as Jewish when Meike has learned for a decade to hide every visible sign of her Jewish heritage out of shame and fear. The Star of David on a gold chain is “Clear as daylight, as blinding in its own way as the maidenhair tree outside the window. And Barbara didn’t even seem to be aware that she was wearing it.”

This was before she and David both learned that in America, even if you escape Nazi Germany, you are still a Jew, and there are still places you are not welcome. David is subjected to schoolboy bullying and discrimination while Meike soon realizes that her peer group of Jewish students is being comfortably ghettoized on this enlightened American campus: only rooming with each other because upstanding American families don’t want their daughters sharing with Jews.   She and David go on holiday with the Bennetts, her American foster family, and they’re asked to leave the resort because the place retains its firm No-Jews policy even while America is sending GIs and materiel to Europe to fight the regime that wants to destroy them.

Having grown up in constant terror, witnessing terrible things and becoming psychologically more hardened on her journey to America, Meike “could never get over the feeling that the Bennett’s were the juveniles in the equation. For all their experience and worldliness, their admirable achievements and considerable success, they were two cosseted babes in the wood, unacquainted with terror, innocent of horror, strangers to guilt, except the generic kind common to well intentioned people of their class.”

But the kindly, clueless Bennetts’ connections get Meike and David good education and eventually help them on their way back to Berlin.

It's a fascinating journey both internally and externally. Post-war Berlin is crowded with angry or sullen or defeated Germans, with many thousands of Displaced Persons both civilian and liberated from concentration camps. Housing is in short supply, food scarce, and every commodity imaginable has a price on the flourishing black markets. Surviving Jews burn with understandable rage against the Germans who went along as much as against those who fomented and committed the atrocities. Arrogance and preconceptions from Allied soldiers and civilian advisors often fuel further misunderstanding and resentment from the conquered, the liberated, the shell-shocked, and all the other human flotsam of the war.

Threads of pregnancy and child-rearing are woven into the fabric. Following years of catastrophic losses of lives, each new one feels like it should be celebrated. Yet so many babies are the result of Soviet mass rape, or the unwelcome price of the struggle for food and shelter, or relics of wartime affairs that are soon forgotten by soldiers on their way back to the lives they left behind. Babies die, Meike learns, almost as easily in the peace as they did in the war. And in the post-war baby boom is laced with both hope for a new start and terror at making more hostages to a Fate so recently proved not only fickle but utterly without mercy.

As I’ve seen in other Feldman novels, the many social and political and personal complexities are captured neatly in vignettes that offer glimpses into the turbulent times and the people wracked and drifting through them, all while supporting the main narrative of Meike’s physical and psychological search. There are both losses and wins along the way, people found and reunited only to face new struggles from which they, or their relationships, may not emerge victorious, or at all.

It's a human-scale look at a turbulent time and place—unsparing yet sympathetic—through the eyes of a traumatized but ultimately hopeful survivor. Highly recommended.

St. Martin's Griffin/ St. Martin's Publishing Group

On Sale: 09/07/2021

ISBN: 9781250821812

#Netgalley #EllenFeldman #StMartinsGriffin #BookReview #Berlin #WW2 #AlliedOccupation #LivingAndLost #Holocaust #hope #survival

Maiden Voyages:

Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them

by

Siân Evans

 

 

 You can almost hear those mighty steam whistles blow as this book sets sail into a lively recounting of the ships that changed history and the women who broke the sea's age-old bad luck superstition by working and/or sailing on them. It's part shipbuilding history, with digressions into major social and political upheavals of the era, but the true heart lies in the women's lives. These women are dynamic, making and breaking and remaking their careers upon the waves or while crossing them, their histories sometimes cautionary and often life-affirming.

The glamorous female passengers--famed for celebrity or notoriety--were deliberately courted by the liners' home offices, and by the author, to attract the eye. They range from the rich and scandalous Thelma Furness, twice divorced mistress of the Prince of Wales, to entertainer Josephine Baker, whose first transatlantic crossing brought her to Paris where she later made her name, and her longtime home. There was even an Olympic swimming champion who talked and taught her way into becoming the world's first ocean liner social activities director.

 

The women who waited upon them I found equally fascinating: crofters' daughters or German frauleins leaving their villages for domestic service afloat, and widows offered jobs by the company their husbands had worked for, who left their children in the care of relatives on shore for the demanding and sometimes dangerous jobs as stewardesses or chaperones on the sea. Those women, especially the stewardesses, were expected to  charm the passengers, be friendly with the officers, keep the lower decks in their place, and be on their feet and on call sixteen or more hours out of the twenty-four. They walked a narrow line between discouraging male advances to keep their reputations and maintaining an approachable air to keep the passengers and their shipmates happy with them.

 

One name you'll become very familiar with is that of Violet Jessop, later known as the Unsinkable. She was 24 years old and had been at sea several years before her first liner hit an iceberg and sunk out from under her feet (yes, that liner!). Surviving in a lifeboat with some women passengers and unaccompanied children, she was taken ashore and, along with the other surviving crew, soon shipped back to England where they all discovered their pay had been stopped the day the Titanic went down. By then they'd already been a few weeks without income, and since there were no unemployment or sick leave benefits available as well as no understanding at all of post-traumatic stress, Violet was back working on another ship within a very few weeks of her first--yes, first--sinking. 

 

The Titanic's iceberg encounter led to a dramatic shift in liner design and safety features, as well as crew training. Stewardesses like Violet had, for the first time, safety duties as well. Those stood her in good stead during WW1, when liner travel became a casualty of the U-boat threat and the demands of the military for shipping capacity, for she retrained as a nurse and was assigned to a hospital ship in the Mediterranean. Again her ship was sunk--fortunately before being loaded up with wounded soldiers. Nor was that the only converted liner to sink. Before the Armistice, more than 50% of the Cunard line's total tonnage of ships was lost. 

 

Post-war building booms brought the liners back into service for another grand period of service to the rich and the immigrant alike, and many's the former nurse who traded uniforms to stay at sea for a long and fulfilling career. This time more jobs were open to them. Not only as domestic staff and passenger attendants, they were hired as stenographers, hair stylists, masseuses, and anything else the competitive liner companies could dream up for the ease and comfort of their richest clientele. One holdout was the radio room. Even women who had been fully trained and certified as telegraphers were considered not responsible enough to man the telegraph rooms for many years longer.

All in all, this book is a fascinating look at the age of ocean liners through the eyes of women, all the way from the luxurious upper decks to the cramped crew quarters at the waterline. The author gives much credit to her great-uncle, a lifelong Cunard employee whose connections to old shipmates gave her an inexhaustible source of anecdotes, memories, and explanations for the ways of the great liners at sea.

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published August 10th 2021 by St. Martin's Press

ISBN

1250246466 (ISBN13: 9781250246462)

#oceanliners #history #WomenAtWork #Netgalley #MaidenVoyages #SianEvans

 

Moonlight and Misadventure - 20 Tales of Mystery & Suspense

Moonlight and Misadventure

20 Tales of Mystery & Suspense

Edited by Judy Penz Sheluk

This third anthology from Superior Shores Press is packed full of quirky characters engaging in crimes and mishaps by the light of the moon. The authors come from across North America, the stories’ settings too, from the swamps of the Deep South to the snowy north of Canada.

Some tales revolve around up-to-the-minute technology while others - such as the quaint innocence of 1921’s Moonset  by Jeanne DuBois and a far from innocent tale, Just Like Pen Entwistle by Robert Weibezahl, stalking Hollywood’s most famous hill in 1932 - trace back decades. Seething starlets make way for bayou ‘boys’, good kids go a little bit – or a lot – bad. Any cop you meet on these pages could be good, indifferent, or rotten to the core.

There are heists gone wrong where characters get redeemed by love gone right, and those gone right at the expense of romance. Thefts range from the usual cash, jewels, Rolexes to an irreplaceable fine art study and all way the back down the value scale to a bit of Elvis tat that nobody but an obsessed collector would pursue.

Whatever the variety of crime story you enjoy, you’re sure to find something to enjoy for an hour in this atmospheric anthology.

 ·         Publisher ‏ : ‎ Superior Shores Press (June 16 2021)

·         Language ‏ : ‎ English

·         Paperback ‏ : ‎ 300 pages

·         ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989495397

·         ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989495391

 https://www.amazon.ca/Moonlight-Misadventure-Stories-Mystery-Suspense/dp/1989495397/

 

 

The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

 This novel would be a chilling read in any year but during the COVID pandemic it’s both a terrifying worst-case and a relief that we – human civilization – dodged even greater disaster. It’s a horrifying tale while not a horror story.

Reminiscent of WORLD WAR Z (the book, not the movie)in style, the story unfolds through flashbacks, emails, snippets from blogs, accounts of meetings, with only a few real-time narrators throughout. The last group are rendered in understated prose that conveys psychological trauma response better than more graphic descriptions or reactions might. This separation of time& distance makes for a less emotionally fraught view of the many horrors but allows for a broader worldview, geographically centered in the UK with glimpses into US and Asian-Pacific government and societal reactions.

A striking feature of this book is the centrality of female perspectives, politics, and coping mechanisms. As the men in positions of power and authority start to drop like flies or go into isolation to try to protect themselves from near-certain death, women adapt, reorganize, step in and step up to keep society functioning. The absence of the male-model single heroic figure beloved of movie directors (the Brad Pitt, in WWZ) and too many novels is stark. Success comes from a small number of women going beyond duty or personal responsibility, but also from the tireless work of thousands in research labs and bureaucracies, of millions of ordinary women running their towns and villages.

The male characters – all but one seen through the eyes of women who work for them, love them, or despise them - are a varied lot,some good, some bad, many mediocre, but all recognizable to most female readers.The women characters are only a bit more thoroughly sketched in. Apart from Catherine, the Plague’s almost accidental recording angel, we don’t get deeply or long into their minds or hearts, and on the whole there’s no need to. Women readers can easily fill in the emotional and psychological underpinnings. As with the men, we’ve all met and worked with and been related to those women, met them at the school gate. We’ve loved and hated them, envied their seemingly perfect lives or been thankful our life, our financial footing, our relationship, is stronger.

While there are valid critiques about the lack of depth regarding LGBTQ2S+ characters and the various regions’ political and militaristic responses, both get mentioned and in ways that admit to the complexity of their specific situations. To add more in those areas would be to distance readers further from the central threat to humanity’s survival, and the mechanisms by which the restructured, women-led states tackle the resulting sex imbalance to preserve the genetic diversity of our own species.

Those mechanisms are not the stuff of hearts-and-flowers,sisters-together anti-male Eutopias some male readers might anticipate. They’re practical and often ruthlessly implemented. Not all women agree. Not all women program heads are approachable or warm. A woman in this fictional universe can be brilliant and ambitious and personally unlikeable and still win accolades, like men can in the real world.While there’s more than enough loss to go around, the book ends on a series of small hopeful notes as characters who have survived the unthinkable gradually let their grief settle and move forward.

If the tale unfolded like WORLD WAR Z (the book), it ends like CHILDREN OF MEN (the movie), with new life, new relationships, raising children in a world unlike anything humanity has ever experienced before.

 #Netgalley #EndOfMen

 Publisher : Doubleday Canada (April 27 2021)

• Paperback : 416 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0385696639
• ISBN-13 : 978-0385696630

THE DAY SHE DIED by S.M. Freedman

 Nothing is ever quite as it seems in Eve Gold's life. Or in her death.

The tale starts on her 27th birthday with a chance accident and elides backwards as well as forward. Grim future is filled with hospital rooms, rehabilitation and a deep dive into traumatic brain injury. The past segments are lyrical, multi-sensory - their Elysian shimmer not-quite shielding our eyes from the ragged, often wretched childhood beneath.

There's more than one mystery being pieced together here, and a touch of paranormal. The writing is sound, and Eve is a character who engages the reader's sympathy. But there's no denying this is a hard read, dealing with tough topics: child abuse, toxic parenting, mental illness, and physical as well as psychological trauma.

A gripping journey that will have you thinking about death, memory, and the fluidity of time.  

 

Read more reviews on Goodreads

Check out the author's other books on Amazon Central

 

 

STARR SIGN by CS O'Cinneide

 
If Crime queen Melodie Campbell‘s mafia-family heroine, Gina Gallo, had a goddaughter, it might well be O'Cinneide's Candace Starr, “a wisecracking former hit woman with a stunning array of ways to kill people“.

In STARR SIGN, 2nd in a new crime series from Dundurn Press, Candace finds herself in charge of a sulky stranger, the 13-year-old sister she never knew she had. Their highly erratic mother is missing. To Candace that's not unusual. What is odd is Mom's last known location: At the mansion of her estranged grandfather, a man she swore she'd never see again. The dying head of the vicious Scarpello mob.

Now Candace will have to choose: become a reluctant foster mom to a bad-tempered tween or try to retrieve their real mom from the clutches of her not-so-loving family.

The first thing that attracted me to this novel was the wise ass narrator's unique voice - as distinctive a hard-boiled lead character as any penned by Chandler. The second was the chaotic wake-up scene. They tell beginning writers never to start with a character waking up but there’s always an exception and this one is a boozy doozy of a hangover scene that flaunts the full chaos of Candace's standard non-business operating procedure.

From there the pace rarely lets up. By the end of the first chapter, not only was I fully grounded in the story and its main players,I didn’t need the exquisitely timed hook to get me flipping immediately to chapter two, and then three, and then reading well into the night. The sulky sister and the hot computer nerd are fun sidekicks if not fully-fleshed characters, and the mobsters, from the lowest goon to the coldly calculating mob wife, are deftly portrayed with a minimum of extraneous detail.

This is assured prose in the hands of a masterful storyteller, taking the reader effortlessly from the mansions of the very rich to the seedy sex-trafficking brothels where gangsters go to let down their guard.

Find out more about the author and her books at

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B07H4VP3GT

#SheKillsLit #StarrSign #Dundurn #thriller

Starr Sign

by C.S. O'Cinneide

Dundurn Press (March 2021)

ISBN 978-1-45974-487-5