And speaking of Slavic women warriors
In my last blog post, I mentioned the medieval tradition of Slavic women warriors known as polianitsy: horse-riding, sword wielding female warriors from the steppes. I was frustrated that I didn’t know more. After all, women warriors from across the globe have dominated my intellectual life for the last few years. So I went digging.
The first thing I realized was that I had gone on this particular snipe hunt before. In the early days of working on what would become Women Warriors, I looked at a lot of literary and folk traditions of women warriors. Some, like Viking shield maidens, had an accompanying tradition of scholars arguing for their existence. Others did not—or at least did not have a scholarly tradition that left a trace in languages I can read. The polianitsy were in the second camp and I not only moved on but apparently forgot most of what I knew about them.
In fact, the polianitsy are a recurring feature in Russian folk poems and medieval romances. The term is often translated as knights. Disguised as men, these female knights ride into battle and often fight against the bogatyri , who are the larger-than-life knight-errant heroes of Russian epics.(1) A recurring element in these epics is the moment when a polianitsa is unmasked, usually at sword point, and is transformed from worthy opponent to worthy sexual partner. (2) In one variation on the theme, the unmasked female knight turns out to be the bogatry‘s daughter, born after a previous encounter with an unmasked polianitsa.
In the course of poking around in the subject, I found several scholars who have drawn a long, shaky line between the polianitsy and real life women warriors who fought for Russia in the First and Second World Wars. It’s a bit of a leap. But maybe the polianitsy created a space for women warriors in the Russian imagination. There’s a reason, “see it, be it” is a powerful concept.
(1)It should be pointed out that some scholars have attempted to connect individual bogatyri to historical figures. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time until someone suggests a real-life counterpart for one of the polianitsy. Or for that matter, perhaps someone already has and I didn’t find it. If you have a reference for this type of discussion, let me know.
(2) Shakespeare wasn’t the only author to take advantage of the gender bending possibilities of a girl disguised as a boy.
New Discoveries, Or At Least New Questions, and Women Warriors
Last week a news report from Livescience.com popped up in my Google alerts. (1) Archaeologist Leszek Gardeła has concluded that the remains of a woman buried with an axe on the Danish island of Langeland was not “a Viking”. (2) Both the form of the burial and the style of the axe suggest that she may have been ethnically Slavic.
The news is not the burial itself, which was discovered some time ago, but Gardela’s interpretation. Gardela came across it as part of his efforts to catalog and study female graves throughout Scandinavia from the 8th through the tenth centuries. His willingness to look at these graves from new angles raises all kinds of interesting questions, not only about women warriors in medieval Northern Europe, Viking and otherwise,(3) but about women and long distance travel in the medieval world. (Not only is a seemingly Slavic woman buried with a Slavic axe in Denmark, but she had an Arabic coin.(5) )
All I can say is, “Don’t touch that dial!”
(1) Here’s the link for anyone who is interested: https://www.livescience.com/66023-slavic-warrior-woman.html Here is a another report of the same story: http://scienceinpoland.pap.pl/en/news/news,77881,polish-researcher-identified-possible-grave-slavic-warrior-woman-denmark.html Personally, I’m eager to see Gardela’s paper on his study of Scandinavian and Slavic women, part of a project titled “Amazons of the North”, which is due out in 2020. I read several of his papers when I was researching the Birka woman for Women Warriors —fascinating stuff.
(2) “Viking” has become shorthand in media speak for a medieval era person with a what forensic anthropologists describe as a “genetic affinity” to modern Europeans from what is now Sweden. In fact, the term is more complicated.
(3)Medieval traditions of Slavic women warriors—most notably the race of horse-riding, sword-wielding female warriors from the steppes known as polianitsy (4)—have not caught the western imagination the same way Viking sword maidens have. I have some reading to do.
(4) Amazons, anyone?
(5)There’s a story there for a historical novelist.
In Which I Finally Read a Book by Erik Larson
A few weeks ago I picked up Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Germany. Prior to that I suspect I was one of the few history buggs,(1) at least in the United States, who had never read a book by Larson. This was not a case of misplaced boycotting.(2) It was simply a case of not being the right book at the right time. There is a certain irony in this since Larson is one of my benchmarks of success in writing historical nonfiction for a non-academic audience. More than once I’ve started a sentence with “I’m no Erik Larson, but…”
In case any of you haven’t read In the Garden of the Beasts, here’s a quick review:
Larson looks at Germany’s descent into Nazi control through the eyes of America Ambassador William E. Dodd and his daughter Martha.(3)
Dodd was not an obvious choice for the position from the perspective of the career diplomats who surrounded him. A history professor from the University of Chicago (!!) nearing the end of his career, he was desperate to finish his major scholarly work and thought a nice little diplomatic sinecure would give him time to write. (Any writer with a day job could tell you how hard that balancing act is.) The embassy at Berlin was no sinecure, but having put his name in for diplomatic consideration he reluctantly accepted the position. In part from a sense of duty. In part because of his fond memories of the time he spent as a graduate student in Leipzig. His role as ambassador was difficult beyond all expectation. He found himself at odds regarding his role as ambassador with his superiors in Washington and his staff in Berlin. He was increasingly disturbed by German politics as Hitler rose to power, and by his inability to get Washington to take action.
Martha was a more problematic character from my perspective: it is hard to sympathize with someone who is impressed first by the Nazis and later by Communism under Stalin. As Larson presents her, Martha was politically naive and self-indulgent to the edge of scandal—a difficult quality in a diplomat’s daughter. Basically, I wanted to smack her. But there is no doubt that her accounts provide a useful counterpoint to those of her father.
Larson uses their combined experiences of life and politics in Germany in 1933 and 1934 to demonstrate that the United States government had plenty of warnings of the consequences of Hitler’s rise to power and chose to ignore them in favor of more pleasant reports. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Fabulous book. Chilling story. There is clearly more Larson in my future. Though maybe not immediately. The To-Be-Read piles are large.
(1) For those of you who are new here in the Margins: I mis-type history buff as history bugg so often that I have chosen to embrace it. I’m a proud history bugg. How about you?
(2) Something I’m occasionally guilt of. Josephine Tey’s mystery novels for instance. Or more recently, Stephen King’s On Writing. Both are excellent. And I should be ashamed of myself for not reading them for due to misconceptions created entirely in my own brain.
(3) His wife and son were with them in Germany, but they are basically wallpaper in the book.