One of the go-to gifts for women, both today and in the Viking Age, is a necklace. This necklet was found in Orkney and dates back to the 9th century. It is made of iron and was bent into a round loop. It was found as a burial good in a woman’s grave in the Broch of Gurness.¹ A broch was a semi-fortified tower building within a slightly larger village or community in Scotland during the Viking Age. This kind of structure might have been the last line of defense against enemies and likely housed the prominent family of the community.² Thus, it is easy to imagine that this woman was of a somewhat higher status, simply based on where her grave was found. However, the necklet itself gives conflicting stories about this woman’s status because it is made of iron. A surviving tale from Ibn Fadlan about his encounter with the Rus people tells us that during the Viking Age, it was not uncommon for women to be given silver neck rings as symbols of their husbands wealth.³ It would not be unreasonable to think that this woman might have been gifted with this necklet as a way of showing her prosperity and then been buried with it as one of her grave goods, if only this necklet was not made of iron.
Iron was a common metal and would not have signified the same kind of status as a silver ring. This contradiction between the woman’s higher status burial location and her lower status necklet forces us to look for new explanations. It may have been that the woman’s family was the most prominent family in the area, but not nearly on the level of those who had silver necklets. By wearing an iron necklet, the woman could have been copying that higher status style in an attempt to boost her own status in the eyes of the surrounding people. The other possibility is that this woman was a slave and that the necklet was a slave collar. In order to be buried in that location, this woman would probably have had to be the slave of one of the more prosperous people who actually lived in the broch.
Either way, the necklet buried with this woman and her burial location can tell us a lot about the significance of social status. If wearing the necklet was the woman’s way of boosting her own status, then putting herself above others must have been very important. Similarly, if the woman was a slave, the necklet symbolizes the social stratification that was present in the Viking Age and documents one of those specific class levels.

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