Who Was Thyra? A Discovery Reveals Viking Queen's Significant Reign

In recent years, archaeologists have increasingly revised long-held beliefs about Vikings and ancient Scandinavian customs with new archaeological discoveries- the most prominent being that Viking burials were not exclusively male, as Viking women were warriors (and buried as such) too. 

A recent discovery that Denmark's Jelling Stones and the Læborg stone from the Bække-Læborg group may have had the same creator suggests that Queen Thyra, an ancient Viking Queen of Denmark, featuring prominently in both runestones is no accident- she must have been a woman who occupied an exalted position of power. 

Who Was Queen Thyra?

Queen Thyra of Denmark reigned in the early medieval period, at around c. AD 936 which is when her husband Gorm ascended the throne, according to the paper by archaeologists Lisbeth M. Imer, Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt and Henrik Zedig in the journal Antiquity. 

Queen Thyra was one of the first queens of Denmark who historians and archaeologists widely believe to have been historical, instead of mythological. Little is known about both Gorm and Thyra, apart from the fact that the royal couple featured prominently on Denmark's famous Jelling stones, built by their son, King Harald, who was the first king of Denmark to bring Christianity to the country and to consolidate the Viking state in one of its earliest forms, according to the paper in Antiquity. 

What Are Jelling Stones?

The Jelling Stones are a pair of stone monuments erected in the Danish town of Jelling in around AD 965, during the reign of King Harald Bluetooth, according to CNN. The larger Jelling stone, with its inscriptions, has been referred to as "Denmark's birth certificate," as it is the first monument to name Denmark and its people as Christian, according to the National Museum of Denmark's website. 

Both Jelling runestones frequently mention Queen Thyra, in a way no other Danish monument from the Viking era has ever mentioned a woman before- she is  described as being "Denmark's strength/salvation/adornment."

In conjunction with another set of four Viking-era monuments, "known collectively as the Bække-Læborg group, two runestones mention a woman named Thyra," according to CNN. Those stones are associated with a carver named Ravnunge-Tue, and for a long time, scholarly discourse has disagreed that the Jelling runestones and the monuments belonging to the Bække-Læborg group were inscribed and carved upon by the same carver- until now. 

New archaeological analysis of the inscriptions (the style of the carvings, their height, etc;), as described in the paper, point to the monuments being created by the same carver during King Harald's reign. This implies that, for her time, Queen Thyra was a force to be contended with, and a woman who wielded immense power- power that has left a concrete trace. 

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