Appropriation of the medieval period – and especially the history of pre-Christian Scandinavia – for white supremacist ends is well attested. Modern völkisch groups (nationalist and ethnocentric Norse neo-pagans) have also used their own idealized views of the early history of Scandinavia to justify cis-and heteronormative approaches to gender roles in the modern day. Ideas about white supremacy and gender essentialism often go hand-in-hand. One way of disrupting this paradigm is to emphasize the ways in which gender in pre-Christian Scandinavia was far queerer (in all senses of the word) than the traditional narrative acknowledges.

This chapter seeks to challenge the ahistorical idea, still widespread in the popular imagination, that Late Iron Age Scandinavia – the area of modern-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden, in approximately the eighth to the tenth century CE – was a homogenous place where white men lived lives defined by hypermasculine aggression, white women were confined to the domestic sphere, and queer people and people of colour were nowhere to be seen. In recent decades, a number of scholars have attempted to counteract this view, exploring, among other topics, the construction of race in Icelandic sagas, the potential for queer readings of Norse mythology, and the varied forms of masculinity and femininity seen in the written sources.

Focusing on the question of how gender was negotiated in the Late Iron Age, this chapter draws on evidence from four burials from across continental Scandinavia, dated to the ninth and tenth centuries.