Sigrid the Haughty

Drunk Saturday 5 Things About Sigrid the Haughty, 10th/11th century Viking queen

*Pursued by her foster brother and another suitor who both tried to pressure her into marriage, so she held a feast, invited them both, and then set the feast hall on fire and burned them to death because no means no motherfucker

*Courted by the king of Norway, Olaf, who wanted her to convert to Christianity and slapped her when she refused his advances. Sigrid was like oh alright BITCH and married Sven Forkbead, whose sister in turn married Olaf, and ultimately Sigrid goaded Sven into war until Olaf was killed. Long game MOTHERFUCKER

*All of that might be a lie! See, medieval chroniclers were mostly men and for some reason they got super confused when foreign women married into new cultures and took on (or were compelled to take) a name that fit better with their new subjects, so shit gets all tangled. Just like my main gal Emma of Normandy was compelled to take the name Aelfgifu, because that was a familiar Old English name while Emma was weird and Norman, Sigrid may have been born under another name, Swietoslawa. Modern historians argue because some records say that Sven married Sigrid and had Cnut, while others say he married Swietoslawa, while still OTHER records say that Cnut and his brother went to the Slavs and retrieved their unnamed mother after Sven’s death and for some reason nobody can agree that Sigrid and Swietoslawa were the same person just two different names in two different languages? And all the stories could be true if you just accept, as the evidence shows, that women had more than one name?

*But okay let’s accept for a second that Sigrid wasn’t real, or her vengeance arc was exaggerated. Say it with me: EVEN LIES TELL US SOMETHING (lmao my autocomplete was like BITCH I KNOW). Multiple medieval historians, across multiple centuries, wrote the same stories about Sigrid, ostensibly using different sources. They couldn’t agree on her name or her heritage or her marriage or her offspring, but they all agreed on one thing: madam was a force to be reckoned with. And that tells us that women like Sigrid, or who had the Sigrid Factor, struck fear in the hearts of men. They were there the whole time, and the only way to defang them was to muddy the waters, make them mythical, offer them up as an example of What Could Go Wrong.

*Alternatively, we could accept that Sigrid’s exploits were real, as were the exploits of her daughters-in-law Emma of Normandy and Aelfgifu of Northampton (for which we have much more proof), and by that token accept that a) the medieval period is a very different and more interesting story when we look at it through women, and b) the medieval world was super globalized, like, the king of Norway wanted to marry a princess of Poland who was related to the royal family of Rus but the king of Sweden got her instead, how many languages did these people speak?! Or more accurately, how many did the WOMEN speak, ’cause they were the ones doing the traveling for marriages. Also what did they say to each other? A version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles tells us that Aelfgifu of Northampton took Sven’s body back to Denmark, presumably while his sons were off fetching Mom, so did they meet? I like to think so. Emma of Normandy went to Flanders in her exile and stayed with the royal family there, where she got to know a little girl who eventually grew up to be Matilda of Flanders the hardass wife of William the Conqueror, so gosh, maybe Aelfgifu, who was at that time the only wife of Canute, got to meet Sigrid and learned how to not take shit. We don’t know. This is the stuff we can draw lines between but can’t prove because the records just don’t say. How frustrating.

*Oh fuck I think this is more than 5 but whatever if you google Sigrid, which I bet you will, you’ll get so many different things! Which is hella annoying for historians but also kind of awesome because like. We want her. Women. We want her to be real, and we want to tell stories about her, and we want her to be kickass and murdery.  And she comes to us because whoever was writing about her in her own time, man or woman, they loved her or feared her, nobody ever writes shit down in a neutral way, we pretend ‘history’ is objective but it never fucking is no matter how many letters they give us after our names so like. Fuck yes Sigrid. I hope you burned those motherfuckers to death, and I hope you started a war, and I hope you inspired all the monstrous women to be monstrous after you and I hope you made men afraid, even by the very idea of you. Hope is a lie and a better world is a lie and maybe women who hurt men who hit them are a lie but does it matter?

Even lies tell us something.