Not normally one to care what goes on over there and I normally have a quick nose through boredom but this just takes the piss..
To ban someone for saying that? Is that normal behaviour?
Thats shocking :/
There really weren't '' a lot '' of female Viking fighters. There was this big thing a while back ago about how they had found graves '' proving '' that women in Scandinavia were warriors too but it was just based on a bunch of morons who didn't know shit about Viking culture.
A woman being buried with a weapon ( or a tool. An axe was both a weapon AND a tool ) or armor didn't mean that she was a warrior in life. Even slaves were buried with it because they believed that they'd bring it into the afterlife for their masters or husbands. But people took that as '' they must've been warriors '' because it suited the narrative that they wanted to spin and they didn't know shit about what they were talking about.
Even if they had gotten a warrior burial it could simply have been something like the woman having defended her home from a thug or something, or quite simply a honoring burial for a Jarl's wife or something.
People get hung up on the term '' warrior '' and the modern interpretation of that term, but it was a bit more complicated back then and more about honor and respect.
Women in Scandinavia were probably a lot tougher than in most of Europe, because women did stay at home alone when the men were away going viking. And they did have to defend their homes if they were attacked. And women who did do that were held up in very high regard.
Even foregin women, there was a story about Varangians ( Swedish Vikings ) who were raiding some place I can't remember where. And one of the Varangians tried to rape a village woman and she managed to fend him off somehow and kill him, and instead of killing her in retribution the Varangians celebrated her and gave her all of the killed Varangians belongings and let her go. And then they shamed the dead Varangians body and threw it in a ditch.
Vikings valued strength, and if a woman proved herself to be strong she was definitely respected.
But that also begs the question why there really aren't many if any prominent female vikings that actually have any historical backing whatsoever. People in Scandinavia loved stories and to write down what they or others had done on Runestones, if there really were '' a lot '' of female fighters or vikings in Scandinavia during that time period then why is there basically no real evidence for it?
Even the shieldmaidens are mainly just folklore and have no real historical backing.
But people just accept them as a real historical thing because that's what they desperately want to believe.
I'd like to believe it too because I am Swedish and it's part of my cultural heritage. I think that it'd be pretty badass if shieldmaidens were an actual thing and if women in Scandinavia were that hardcore. But there's no real evidence for it and there really would be a lot of it if it was true.