So side stepping the issue of Norse "warrior women" and their existence entirely, what does the average burial of a woman in Norway or Iceland look like? The good news is that we have a whole lot of burial remains from much of the Norse world, the bad news is that the grand ostentatious burials of elite women (who may or may not have fought [because that's the most important question regarding these women apparently]) suck up most of the scholarly attention and almost all of the popular imagination.

The average Norse woman did not have a whole lot to leave behind truth be told. The overwhelming majority of the population were rural dwelling and likely practicing subsistence agriculture. The material culture of such individuals was poor at the best of times, and in marginal agricultural land like most of Scandinavia (and I'll include Iceland here) meant that very few grave goods were able to be spared. For every brooch and tool that you bury with a person there's one fewer one than your surviving family can use after all.

So what would we expect to find in such burials? Burials of course being the most easily examined, cremations tend to not leave behind a large amount of surviving material in most cases, but in-humation does seem to have been a popular (though not universal) method of disposing of the dead during the Viking Age. As Scandinavia converted to Christianity and entered into the Middle Ages, this method became the most popular due to Christian conventions surrounding burials vs cremations.

But what material goods would likely accompany a rural farm wife? The ostentatious displays of jewelry, cloth, lavish sacrifices, and so on that we see reflected in elite burials are obviously right out, but what might these women have been accompanied by instead? There are two categories of grave goods that we can talk about here those of private or personal value and those of symbolic value, and the two need not necessarily be completely different. In Norse burials of all types it is common for there to be certain artifacts that hint at the role a person held in life (or was expected to hold) but whether or not they actually used them is a separate matter. Among child burials it is common to see household goods for girls and weapons for boys even though they would not have actually used them in life. These can be things like household objects such as scales, cooking equipment, and other sundry items. Women were also commonly buried with jewelry according to their social status. Among the poorest women this would largely have been glass beads or later on after conversion to Christianity, a silver pectoral cross. Simple offerings such as food stuffs were also quite common, even among the poorest in society. This could be anything from cuts of meat to jars of grain and small bits of fruit and bread.

So these were the physical objects a woman usually had with her, but what kind of afterlife might she be facing? For the pre-Christian era we probably will never know the answer. The pre-conversion religious traditions of the Norse were quite heterogenous across the Norse world and there's little indication of what popular understandings of the afterlife were. There was a certain amount of cultural similarity among Norse elites, but how far this trickled down to the broader population is unclear. After conversion the answer becomes significantly clearer, even though it is again unclear how quickly or deeply Christian conceptions of the afterlife penetrated the population.