Viking Woman

Viking women were not allowed to take part in battle, but if they conquered new land, women would have to come so that a permanent settlement could be build up.Women would have taken their children and all their live stock with them, so the voyage over the sea would not have pleasant. Women would only have gone on peaceful immigration trips, rather than raids.
But for example in england, there is evidence(in the form of women's jewelry)that viking women were there by the 10th century.The viking word for woman was Ginna. Pagen graves are wonderful, as they give us insight into the cultur of the vikings. In scotland there were two female graves found, of very diffrent women: the young, stout and wealthy mother of newborn twins from Westness, and the high-status, elderly woman from Scar, buried in a boat along with a younger man and a child, a matriarch, perhaps even a priestess of Freya.
The mythological poem Rígsþula, written down in medieval Iceland, accounts for the divine origin of the three main social classes. But it also gives us a snapshot of daily life in the Viking Age. The woman of the slave-class wears 'old-fashioned clothes' and serves bread that is 'heavy, thick, packed with bran... in the middle of a trencher', with 'broth in a basin'. The woman of the yeoman class wears a cap and a blouse, has a kerchief around her neck and 'brooches at her shoulders', and is busy with her spindle, 'ready for weaving'. The aristocratic woman is just busy preening herself: she wears a blouse of smooth linen, a spreading skirt with a blue bodice, a tall headdress and appropriate jewellery, and has very white skin. She serves silver dishes of pork and poultry on a white linen cloth, washed down with wine.The standard Viking Age house was rectangular and had just one room, in which everything took place around a central hearth. This house type has been found from Sweden in the east to Newfoundland in the west, in both rural settlements and in towns such as York and Dublin. As in most traditional societies, women spent much of their time indoors in such houses, cooking, making clothing and caring for children and the elderly, but they would also have had responsibility for the dairy.
Some women made their mark through exceptional status or achievement. One of the richest burials of Viking Age Scandinavia is that of the Oseberg 'queen', buried in a very grand style with a richly-decorated ship and large numbers of high-quality grave goods in 834. Later in that century, Aud the 'deep-minded' lived a veritable Viking Age odyssey. The daughter of a Norwegian chieftain in the Hebrides, she married a Viking based in Dublin and, when both her husband and son had died, took charge of the family fortunes, organising a ship to take her and her granddaughters to Orkney, Faroe and Iceland. She settled in Iceland, distributing land to her followers, and was remembered as one of its four most important settlers, and as a notable early Christian.( source:BBC )

Yesterday I drew the viking woman above and I just love how she turned out and enjoyed the way in which I drew her. I want to draw one girl like this a day. What I do is take an image from a magazine and draw it using a cheap biropen. I cannot rub any thing out and have to accept the flaws and this really helps me love my drawings. When the image is complete, I have a good look at her and if she looks to me like something, in this case a viking, I add the feature needed to show this, in this case a viking helmet. I use an artists pitt pen to colour in one feature that I want to stand out. I love drawing in biropen!!