#so expect a bunch of quotes in the days to come

“But for all that, the man held the “dominant role in all walks of life”, I was taught. (…) He was the trader, the traveler, the warrior. His symbol was the sword.

The woman’s role, in turn, was symbolized by the keys she carried at her belt.

Except she didn’t. 

(…)

These three are the only mentions of housewives with keys I can come up with: two women and a man in drag. They might reflect a pagan truth from before the year 1000. The might equally reflect the values of the medieval Christian world in which they were written. No one can say for sure.

Women with weapons appear in the same texts much more frequently than women with keys: I can name twenty warrior women from sagas and histories, another fifty-three in poems and myths. The earliest Icelandic law book (dated 1260 to 1280) considers women with weapons a threat to society - which implies they existed. You don’t write laws to control myths.”

The real valkyrie, The hidden history of viking warrior women, Nancy Marie Brown