The fight is recounted in the Greenland saga, which does not explicitly refer to Freydís as a shield-maiden. When Leif Erikson's pregnant half-sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir was in Vinland, she is reported to have taken up a sword and, bare-breasted, scared away the attacking Skrælings. When the Varangians (not to be confused with the Byzantine Varangian Guard) had suffered a devastating defeat in the Siege of Dorostolon, the victors were stunned to discover armed women among the fallen warriors. The Byzantine historian John Skylitzes records that women fought in battle when Sviatoslav I of Kiev attacked the Byzantines in Bulgaria in 971. There are historical attestations that Viking Age women took part in warfare. In 2017, DNA analysis confirmed that the person was female, the so-called Birka female Viking warrior.
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In a tie-in special to the TV series Vikings, Neil Price showed that a 10th-century Birka-burial excavated in the 1870s containing many weapons and the bones of two horses turned out to be the grave of a woman upon bone analysis by Anna Kjellström. Norse immigrant graves in England and chemical analysis of the remains suggested a somewhat equal distribution of men and women, suggesting husbands took wives, while some of the women were under the burial. Graves of female settlers containing weapons have been uncovered, but scholars do not agree how these should be interpreted.
Some scholars, such as professor Judith Jesch, have cited a lack of evidence for trained or regular female warriors. The most recent scholarship, including that of archaeologist Neil Price, argues that they existed. The historical existence of shield-maidens has been debated.
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