Leszek Gardeła’s book brings to focus recent debates about the existence of Viking warrior women. Among scholars, these debates hinge especially on interpretations of a grave from Birka, Sweden, known as Bj. 581. When excavated in 1878, this grave yielded a skeleton with weapons, and in a study published in 2017, genomic analysis confirmed that the skeleton associated with the grave lacked a Y chromosome. By implication, the person buried with weapons in Bj. 581 was born biologically female.1 These findings have added legitimacy to the prominent role of Viking warrior women in fictional settings, such as Lagertha in the TV series Vikings (2013–2020) and Eivor Varinsdottir in the role-playing game Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (2020; note that Eivor can be played as a male or female character despite the game’s recurring use of feminine gender!). But despite the apparent ubiquity of Viking warrior women in popular media today, Gardeła notes that Viking-Age evidence remains thin. He has gathered this evidence with care, showing the dense but ambiguous connections made between women and weapons in the Viking Age. Gardeła ultimately points to ethnographic parallels that make the existence of Viking warrior women likely but unverifiable. Readers of many stripes will find this study invigorating, as Gardeła reappraises the connections between women and violence in an early-medieval society that has left few texts to guide us.Gardeła’s approach is interdisciplinary but follows a common outline for archaeological work. He begins with chapters on methodology and historiography, examines evidence organized according to typological categories, and offers brief conclusions at the end. This presentation plays to Gardeła’s strengths and the strengths of his publisher Casemate.2 The large-format pages are well illustrated with excavation plans, artifact photographs, and sketches reconstructing burial scenes. A detailed table of contents makes up for the lack of an index, and the book closes with a useful series of tables and plates. Casemate offers this high-quality work at an accessible price. Such choices are well-suited for the controversial topic. Readers can see Gardeła’s analysis laid out in a manner that is both rigorous and clear. The organization, however, also parses evidence based on present-day typologies, which risks masking opportunities for novel synthesis that might tell us new things about the past.The first chapter lays out problems that are essentially archaeological in scope, driven by the historiography of Scandinavian efforts to understand Viking-Age weapon burials. The second chapter offers a more focused look at the historiography of Viking-Age women and gender. Textual evidence of uneven value has played an important role in this work, and the third chapter surveys these texts with a refined eye for intersections of women and weapons. Discussion focuses on Saxo Grammaticus and the Old Norse corpus before moving more tangentially into the figures of Æthelflæd in Insular chronicles and the women described fighting among the Rus in John Skylitzes’s Synopsis of Histories. Gardeła argues that these diverse sources should not be written off as a baseless set of fictions drawn from legends about the Amazons or more fancifully invented by medieval authors. He contends that they instead support the idea that at least some Viking-Age women wielded weapons in a martial way, establishing a suggestive tone for the examination of material evidence that follows.The fourth chapter surveys the Scandinavian graves that Gardeła or others have identified as likely burials of women and weapons. These identifications, he notes, must generally rely on interpretations of gendered grave goods rather than biologically sexed remains, and he parses this evidence with care. Gardeła begins with a balanced reappraisal of Bj. 581, and his survey includes a number of other well-known sites and graves. Particular attention is devoted to the burial from Nordre Kjølen in Norway as well as to the Danish burials BB at Bogøvej and A505 at Trekroner-Grydehøy. The discussions are well-informed and insightful, showing occasional overlaps with Gardeła’s interests in seiðr and magic staffs. An appendix helpfully tabulates the 28 graves identified as being possible female graves furnished with weapons: 13 in Norway, 11 in Sweden, and four in Denmark.This up-to-date survey will make Gardeła’s work a useful reference for many readers, but the fifth chapter is arguably Gardeła’s most innovative contribution, offering a detailed and deliberate analysis of the kinds of weapons and war equipment associated with women. He has divided this chapter into sections on axes, swords, spears, shields, bows and arrows, and riding equipment. Each section is subdivided into the contexts in which associations are found—funerary, iconographic, textual, and so on—ending with conclusions that are characteristically cautious. Gardeła repeats time and again that Viking-Age war equipment was multifunctional, held a broad range of meanings, and should not be taken as a clear marker of identity. This is a valuable chapter in part due to Gardeła’s reticence, while inclusions of miniature items, weaving swords, and riding equipment significantly deepen discussion.The book moves more quickly thereafter. A short sixth chapter catalogs representations of armed women in metalwork and mythology. Then follows an eclectic series of case studies on warrior women in diverse societies, ranging from the Amazons of Greek ethnography through Aztec archaeology to the Amazons of Dahomey and the women fighters of the world wars in Europe. A succinct eighth chapter concludes that Viking-Age women and weapons were bound together in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, and while these findings together with the ethnographic parallels of the seventh chapter make the possibility of female warriors a reasonable expectation for the Viking Age, the evidence suggests that they would have been exceptional figures at best. Gardeła notes that his catalog of 28 possible female weapon burials represents less than 1% of all female-gendered burials from the Viking Age, and in only eight instances are these interpretations supported by genomic or osteological analysis. Thin evidence indeed.This book thus ventures into troubled territory, and despite its provocative subtitle—Amazons of the North—Gardeła’s conclusions remain even-tempered. The opening chapters set out to reveal “how the idea of the warrior woman was understood, conceptualised and verbally and visually expressed and performed in the Norse cultural sphere” (13). Ultimately, however, it appears that this idea is more often a manifestation of present desires than a reflection of past realities. It seems unlikely, in fact, that any single idea guided the 28 idiosyncratic burials at the heart of this study. If so, Gardeła has pointed out numerous ways in which these burials have contacts with eastern material culture, suggesting that we should exercise caution in interpreting these graves as expressions of a particularly Norse phenomenon. Such questions of geography and likewise chronology might therefore bear closer scrutiny. Among the evidence presented, if a Norse idea of warrior women did exist, then its material expression might most directly be encountered through the iconographic metalwork that appears in the sixth chapter. These so-called valkyrie brooches were not actually brooches—they lack a fastening pin—and the 40 examples identified by Gardeła come from areas with few or no cataloged female weapon burials: Denmark, England, Germany, and Poland.As such, Gardeła’s work presents two particular challenges for moving forward. First, it challenges us to recognize that the default frame for researching Viking-Age phenomena need not be Scandinavian or even Norse in its scope. The eastern connections suggested by several of Gardeła’s graves point to a subculture or phenomenon that need not be considered Norse at all. Second, this work reaffirms our need to examine neglected artifact types and develop new questions. While Bj. 581 might be the exceptional grave of a unique individual (perhaps “queer” across a range of meanings), the more pervasive finds of armed woman iconography among artifacts such as the “valkyrie brooches” will likely pose an urgent interpretive problem as new examples arise. These finds are likely to multiply in part due to an intensification of metal detecting in Denmark and elsewhere during the pandemic. Similarly, new work on eastern connections spearheaded by scholars such as Cat Jarman and Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson will undoubtedly figure prominently in future work on women and weapons in the Viking Age. Gardeła’s work thus helps point toward that future, challenging us to see the Viking Age in new ways and setting a high standard for continuing work on women and violence in the post-Roman world.