The Dynna Stone - or, Finding women in history

The Museum of Cultural History in Oslo is currently hosting an exhibition called Vikingr, which serves essentially as a way to satiate the public hunger for things related to Viking history while the Viking ship museum is being expanded and the ships and other grave goods are in storage. The exhibition contains a number of fascinating items, ranging from coins from a hoard, the only surviving Viking era helmet - obviously without horns - and some very well-preserved swords.  

One of my favourite items in the exhibition is a standing stone containing a runic inscription and carved images. The stone is called the Dynna stone, named after Dynna in Oppland north of Oslo where it was found. As is so often the case with rune stones, the Dynna stone was raised to commemorate the building of a bridge, an act that in today's parlance would be called a public good, and which carried great importance in a decentralised rural community where travel over great distances was both cumbersome and dangerous. The carvings have been dated to c.1040-c.1050, and it is one of the oldest recorded Christian monuments in Norway. Its Christian context can be seen in the depiction of the three magi, the star of Bethlehem and the Christ-child.    

The Dynna stone
Kulturhistorisk Museum C9909

My favourite aspect of the Dynna stone, however, is neither its inscription nor its sumptuous pictorial decorations, but the patron whose act of bridge-building was being commemorated. The text of the stone, written in alliterative verse, records that the bridge was built by Gunvor in memory of her daughter, Astrid, who was the handiest maid in Hadeland (which is an area of Oppland). To the best of my knowledge, the scant surviving source material from eleventh-century Norway does not provide any further attestations of either Gunvor or Astrid, but from this stone alone we nonetheless manage to catch a very important glimpse of their places in history. Gunvor must have been a wealthy woman belonging to the elite of Hadeland, since she had the resources to pay for both the building of the bridge as well as the carving of the stone. Gunvor herself is unlikely to have participated in either the building or the carving, not because she was a woman but because she belonged to the elite and was the patron rather than the executioner of these works. Gunvor's role as patron tells us that women in mid-eleventh-century Norway could attain a position in their local community that enabled them to direct local resources and local manpower to such endeavours that we might call public. Moreover, the imagery on the stone tells us that Christianity had spread into this inland community, and that women could be familiar with its iconography and also have internalised the faith and its symbols in such a way that this pictorial language served to frame a memorial for a beloved daughter. In short, the stone is an excellent example of the agency of women in a time period that is often seen today as being completely dominated by men. 

Aside from being a monument to the agency of women, the Dynna stone also points to an important aspect of understanding women's place in history. Traditionally, history has been seen as large-scale politics and the story of battles and great men. Most historians that I know, men as well as women, have increasingly moved away from this vision of the past, but in the public mind this old-fashioned view of history, perhaps especially the Viking Age, retains an unrelenting grip on the imagination. And it is true that if we only consult the most widely available sources, such as chronicles or sagas composed and written in male-dominated milieux of royal or episcopal courts, we will encounter a preponderance of male figures. However, monuments such as the Dynna stone also reminds us that women were not silent, inactive bystanders to the volatile vicissitudes of men, they were also agents in their own right, and the society of eleventh-century Norway clearly had the required space for that agency. There is nothing to suggest that Gunvor's patronage was abnormal or controversial, and we should expect that numerous women in the past had much more agency than the silence of sources will allow us to note. 

The Dynna stone is, therefore, a reminder of a methodological challenge for us as historians. We are hostages to the survival of sources, and also to our ability to read those sources that survive. The absence of female voices in the surviving material is partly a consequence of the male-centered milieux of source production, but also a matter of historical chance. If we take such sources as the Dynna stone as being common rather than abnormal, we broaden our understanding of the potential for women's agency in the past. 

To put it in a different way, when setting out to find women in history, the traces they have left might be scant, but those traces open up for a much wider understanding that can be extracted from the material context. In the case of the Dynna stone, the material context that preserves the names of Gunvor and Astrid have opened up for those interpretations about status and agency mentioned above. Similarly, women whose historical existences survive only as names on charters, letters, inscriptions and lists can be understood in the context of those sources, and we then have to think about all the things that needed to be in place for their names to appear in such contexts. 

In thinking about how to find women in history when so much of the source material is silent about them, I have drawn great inspiration in particular from two Spanish historians, whom I want to mention here as a way of recognition and thanks. First of all, Isabel Mellén, whose book Tierra de damas is an excellent reflection on women as patrons of Romanesque churches in Northern Spain, and who has done an excellent job in reflecting upon, and communicating, the various ways to overcome the silences of the sources. Secondly, the historian Ainoa Castro, whose ERC project 'The Secret Life of Writing: People, Script and Ideas in the Iberian Peninsula (c. 900-1200)' serves to highlight the agency of donours and witnesses, men as well as women, in charters and letters from Spain and Portugal. These are sources that to the modern audience are practically unknown, because these are not the kind of texts that are being translated or taught in schools. I am grateful to both Isabel and Ainoa for how their work has shaped my thinking.       

Like the charters and letters of high-medieval Iberia or the Romanesque churches of Northern Spain, the Dynna stone serves to open up our understanding of women's agency in history, not as something exceptional but as something completely and utterly, utterly ordinary. And as historians we often come to appreciate the ordinary far more than the extraordinary. 

Commemorating Gunvor's building of a bridge in mid-eleventh century Norway