Each February in the UK is LGBT+ History Month; a time to celebrate the contributions of LGBT+ people and a chance to shed new light on the history of ‘queer’ people. Our organization would not exist without the contributions of LGBT+ / ‘queer’ members and we are strongly committed to maintaining an inclusive atmosphere within the group for people of all sexualities, gender identities and expressions, and celebrating the achievements of all members of our team.

​​It’s easy to imagine that diversity of sexuality and gender expression is a modern phenomenon, framed as it is by modern terminology, norms, and ways of defining identity, but such diversity has always existed.​ Folk of ancient cultures would not recognise the ways we define such identities today, but 'Queerness' in its broadest sense (see notes on terminology, below) has always been with us, often accompanied by familiar challenges in navigating a largely heteronormative world, and in finding acceptance, which many of us would recognise and can identify with today.

Notable, oft-cited examples include the well-documented homoromantic relationships of Roman Emperors or certain later medieval kings, the gender-transcending priests of Cybele and Attis, or widespread, celebrated homosexuality in Ancient Greece. Sandwiched between the better-documented Classical and later Medieval period though, the Migration / Early Medieval period which we often cautiously refer to here as the 'Anglo-Saxon Period' is rarely mentioned in the context of historical 'queer' themes and figures. This risks creating the impression that natural diversity in sexuality and gender expression did not exist among the 'Anglo-Saxons', 'Vikings' and related cultures, enabling those hostile to such diversity to falsely identify with and appropriate these cultures, or rather, a mythical and distorted version of them, and to use their example to promote prejudice.

To whatever extent there is a lack of evidence for (broadest sense) 'queerness' in early medieval history this largely reflects a lack of documentary evidence which addresses matters of sexuality at all. The High Medieval blossoming of art and literature celebrating romantic love in NW Europe, for example, had not yet occurred, and aside from bawdy riddles, discussion of sexuality in surviving Anglo-Saxon literature is largely confined to the more or less guarded writings of clerics whose public status as celibate underpinned their acceptance in society as outside dynastic struggles and rivalries, and whose faith celebrated abstinence. That said, there are certainly figures from the period who, were they alive today might be considered 'queer'. To these can be added other exceptional figures who defied gender expectations and norms; trailblazers involved in the huge societal changes of the period, redefining what it meant to be a man or woman, facing challenges which LGBT+ / ‘queer’ people today would identify with. In discussing and remembering these individuals, we also remember the countless people who suffered and died from persecution targeting aspects of sexuality and gender expression in the period and throughout history.

With this in mind, here are some Early Medieval 'queeroes' from Europe; those who today could be thought of as LGBT+ / ‘queer’, and other historical figures from whose lives LGBT+ people might identify with.

Shields were arguably the most crucial and universal tool of the Anglo-Saxon battlefield, and their degraded remains - mainly iron fittings - are fairly frequent finds from early Anglo-Saxon graves. While most shields appear. at least in terms of metal fittings, to have been relatively plain, the famous kingly shield from Sutton Hoo Mound 1 was enormously elaborate and ostentatious, with fierce and glittering golden animal fittings, a bronze rim, and an elaborately decorated shield boss integrating embossed foils and garnets. Between these extremes its fair to assume the visual impact of shields reflected the status of its owner, but what of the shields from the other famous treasure-filled princely burials? Were they similarly impressive? 
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Detailed examination of the remains of these lesser-known 'princely' shields reveals a number of surprises.... 

 ​In the frequently damp environment of early medieval Britain and western Europe sheaths were essential for valuable ferrous blades, including swords, war-seaxes and smaller utility knives. The sophisticated and labour-intensive construction of sword scabbards, formed of animal-hair lined carved wooden plates enclosed in leather or hide (“skin product”) is evidence of the priority given to protecting blades. Well preserved examples of seax sheaths, mainly from productive leatherworking sites of the mid-to-late Anglo-Saxon period, at York and Gloucester (Cameron, 2000) as well as more trace evidence from earlier grave finds, demonstrates the high level of craftsmanship which went into these, usually of a single piece of folded and moulded skin-product, sometimes intricately decorated, as might be expected given that the sheath, and not the blade, was the most visible component of any seax assemblage day to day and therefore an important surface for wealth display. Vastly more common but nevertheless valuable personal possessions and often of sophisticated smithcraft, smaller utility and eating-knives also required tight-fitting sheaths of valuable skin-product, but despite the abundance of such knives in the archaeological record, for a wide range of reasons clues about the sheaths of smaller knives are scarcer than for larger seaxes.  

It might be reasonable, and has been the practice among more detail-oriented living historians and reenactors, to assume that sheaths of smaller knives in, for example, the early Anglo-Saxon period, might be miniature analogues of those of larger seaxes, yet fragmentary sheath remains from a handful of well-studied early Anglo-Saxon sites appear surprisingly crude, with amateurish stitching having unattractively contorted the seams in a way that might disgust a modern leatherworker. There is no reason not to think these examples are not well representative, and indeed, many of the later (Viking-Age) knife-sheath remains from York, though often skilfully decorated, bear the tell-tale marks and contortions of this same rudimentary stitch work.
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It is always tempting to base the sheaths of our knives on the very fanciest, and neatest archaeological examples to hand, and perhaps neaten them up with some more modern handiwork, but this can lead to a creeping departure from what is truly known of the historic craft culture purportedly represented. In contrast, replicating (to our modern eyes) “unbecoming” examples might provide useful, practical insights into why they were made this way.  Such is the case with these apparently crudely stitched knife sheaths – our experiments in replicating them have revealed what might be a cunning Dark Age leatherworker’s “life-hack” which made the tricky shaping of sheaths vastly quicker and more reliable.

There is little doubt that the two-edged sword was the most cherished and doom-laden weapon in the Anglo-Saxon period, always of impressive craftsmanship, laboriously and expensively wrought, often richly decorated, and even sometimes named and personified (Brunning, 2013).

​Given the strategic and cultural importance of these weapons, and the six century duration of the period, we might expect to see an ‘adaptive radiation’ of fundamentally different sword types, with different vocabulary preserved in literature, yet the design of Anglo-Saxon swords appears to have been highly conserved - tweaked and improved gradually over time but not splintering off into substantially different types. While it may always be tempting for weaponologists to introduce technical vocabulary and typology, such as the glossing of all swords from the Migration Age until the Crusades with the exotic and anachronistic term “spatha” (which refers more particularly to the related Roman “long” sword), the lack of coexisting diversity of blade types for most of the Anglo-Saxon period renders this unnecessary; it is perfectly sufficient to refer to all such weapons with the word they themselves used, and handed down to us; “sword”.
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That being said, a variety of terms do occur in Old English texts to refer to these noble double-edged weapons. While most can be interpreted merely as kennings - figurative circumlocutions or euphemisms used in the place of the word “sword” in poetry to add colour, variation and/or to better fit the metre - one example; the word  “mēċe” shows up surprisingly frequently and has its own set of compounds alongside “sword”. Could “mēċe” actually represent a distinct form of blade? Did the Anglo-Saxons use two different types of swords after all?