![]() ![]() I'm afraid too many people will just read the title of the article and not think about it more before endlessly retweeting it (you know who you are!) or making it go viral on Facebook. But I don't think they make a good case, and I would like to take an opportunity to point out some matters which I would like people to take into consideration before jumping to accept the conclusions of the article. I am not even sure yet that I think the authors are necessarily wrong, or that it is my job to counter their arguments if I do. I have not yet spent enough time thinking about this particular problem to be able to offer a well-reasoned, holistic counter-interpretation. My approach below is to work through the article, picking up points that I think are relevant to the quality of the argument. But I think I am qualified to discuss the ways in which the results are interpreted, and I am certainly qualified to comment on the way the authors of the article use textual evidence, and also how they interpret more general cultural historical aspects of the period, which is something I have been thinking about for about four decades. One more caveat - I am not a scientist (in the English sense) and not qualified to comment on the natural scientific experiments carried out for the article I am about to discuss and their results. We are all guilty of these at times, but I believe it is one of the functions of academic debate to point these out to each other, which is why I am writing this, even though I know many of the authors of this article and consider them friends. subject to reasoned analysis and argument). What I am really interested in is the quality of academic discourse - I'm very sensitive to what I consider to be shortcuts in an argument or sloppy use of evidence. ![]() (And here I wish we used the word 'science' in the same way as the Germans do Wissenschaft, which would make all evidence 'scientific', i.e. And academic discourse in which topics that have been of concern to the humanities for decades if not centuries are suddenly somehow 'confirmed' by those gods, the scientists, without giving sufficient consideration of the 'non-scientific' evidence which inevitably raised the questions in the first place. I try to keep an open mind, but I also get very frustrated by what I consider to be academic discourse that seems to be mostly concerned with grabbing attention in order to facilitate further funding and/or claim 'impact'. At the same time, I also think it is interesting to debate these matters and I am happy to do so (although not with the type of people who write UTL words to the effect of 'I just KNOW there were women warriors in the Viking Age'). To put my cards on the table, I will say that I have always thought (and to some extent still do) that the fascination with women warriors, both in popular culture and in academic discourse, is heavily, probably too heavily, influenced by 20th- and 21st-century desires. I would also point out that this is a preview of an article not yet fully published. Don't forget to read the 'Supporting Information' as well. I would however urge you not to read this until you have read the article first - it is open access and available to all, following the link above. Since I do not think this is a matter which can be dealt with in the space of 140 characters, even when 'threaded', and one or two have asked what I think, then I have decided to put a few thoughts down here while the matter is fresh. The Viking Twittersphere is currently alive with tweets about a new article with the arresting title of 'A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics'.* The article concerns the interpretation of a particular burial at Birka, in Sweden. ![]()
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