Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir's Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World provides an overview of the lives of women in the Viking Age. There are few books out there which concentrate on this topic, and so this is a welcome update of Judith Jesch's Women in the Viking Age, which is now about 30 years old. Friðriksdóttir uses a woman's life cycle—from childhood to old age and death—to structure the book, and grounds her argument throughout in extensive engagement with the saga literature, as even the most cursory glance through the end notes would make clear.

Yet such a glance would also show a slightly puzzling lack of engagement with work on the history of medieval women other than that of Jesch or Jenny Jochens. There has been so much good scholarship produced on medieval women and their engagement with power, authority, artistic patronage, religion, etc, over the past thirty years. Even if much of that work isn't directly on the Viking Age, I think it would have provided a useful set of comparatives—something against which to test Friðriksdóttir's assertions about the gendered limits of women's power in this time and place. She appears to take a more minimalist view of such things than scholars of other elite medieval women—which would be fine, if it were clearer to me whether that's because she disagrees with them or because she does not have much grounding in their work. I've also got a couple of question marks about Friðriksdóttir's framing of the archaeological evidence.

I think this will be useful to refer back to when looking for moments in the sagas which have a particular thematic relevance in relation to women, but as a general overview it's not as authoritative as I was hoping for. ( )

A very readable, multidisciplinary account of women's lives in the Viking Age. Women 's thoughts and feelings are not given much attention in the ultra-male world of the sagas, but both physical and textual evidence is brought together to bring another dimension to women who often had very little control over their lives
One very small quibble - I could have done without Game of Thrones references, but they only appear a couple of times ( )

This insightful and authoritative work will make an excellent companion to Women in the Viking Age and Women in Old Norse Society: A Portrait. The author makes extensive use of the mythology, archaeology and sagas to provide a valuable look at how women were perceived in Viking society. ( )