The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Who was this Hervor, buried in grave Bj581 outside the Swedish town of Birka sometime between 913 and 980? What might her life have been like? To tell her story, all I have are her bones, but bones can be eloquent. If complete, a skeleton speaks not only of its sex; it whispers of its life and death. Diseases—if they don’t kill quickly—can mark bones, as can repeated motions like rowing or riding or stringing a bow. Injuries and accidents are recorded in bones.

  Yet to read cut marks as killing blows—the edges of the wound “sharp and splintery,” not the smooth, rounded traces of earlier, healed injuries—the surface of the bones must be pristine. Bones buried for a thousand-plus years are rarely pristine. Like wood, cloth, leather, food, and other biodegradable objects placed in Viking Age graves, bodies rot—that’s the point of burial, after all, to return to earth. It takes less than twenty-five years (sometimes much less) for a buried body to be reduced to bones. How long those bones last depends on the chemistry of the soil they’re set in.

  Hervor’s bones, the bones in grave Bj581, are too degraded for any signs of action, illness, or battle trauma to be seen. Bone preservation at Birka is generally poor. The soil is too acidic. The mineral constituent of the bones simply breaks down into calcium and phosphorus salts that leach away. Microbes and fungi carve fissures and tunnels. The bones break into bits and dissolve into dust.

  In many of Birka’s eleven hundred excavated graves, all that remained by the time they were opened in the late 1800s were loose teeth. In Bj581, by contrast, were bones from all parts of Hervor’s body. Compared to her neighbors, she is remarkably well preserved. She is one of the few Birka skeletons to have a complete backbone. She has two ribs, bones from each arm and each leg, part of her pelvis, and her lower jaw. Her bones are characteristically female—as osteologists pointed out at least twice (and were ignored) before the DNA test confirmed her sex.

  When she was dug up in 1878, her skull was also recovered; it has since gone missing. Anatomical collections were in fashion in the late 1800s, and archaeologists often lent or traded bones with their friends. Skulls were particularly popular: Their shape was thought to reflect race, intelligence, and even criminal tendencies. Archaeologists still use the shape of the skull to sex a skeleton. Women’s skulls are thought to be smoother and more rounded, while men’s have a more prominent brow ridge and a more muscular jaw, though hormone fluxes can cause older women’s skulls to resemble men’s.

  DNA sexing leaves less room for doubt. If DNA can be extracted at all, it can usually be sexed. In Hervor’s case, university researchers from Stockholm and Uppsala extracted DNA from one tooth and one arm bone recovered from grave Bj581. They sequenced the DNA and searched for Y chromosomes, the genetic signal of maleness. Their results fell far to the female end of the spectrum.

  The mature appearance of certain bones and the level of wear on her molars say Hervor was at least thirty when she died—she could have been as old as forty. Her bones tell us, too, that Hervor ate well all her life, which means she came from a rich family, if not a royal one. At over five foot seven, she was taller than most people around her: Five foot five was the average man’s height in tenth-century Scandinavia; King Gorm the Old, who ruled Denmark during Hervor’s lifetime, was considered tall at five foot eight.

  The chemistry of her teeth tells us Hervor was not a native of Birka, where she was buried, on an island in Lake Malaren a short boat ride from present-day Stockholm. She came from away. As teeth develop, they pick up isotopes of strontium (which mimics calcium) from the local water. The strontium signature of a tooth will thus match that of the bedrock where the child lived when the tooth’s enamel formed. Hervor’s first molars (mineralized before she was three) reveal that she was born somewhere in the western part of the Viking world, in what is now southern Sweden or Norway. Her second molars say she sailed from there, before she was eight, to somewhere else in the west. She did not arrive in Birka until she was over sixteen.

  * * *

  Where did she travel between her birthplace and her tomb? If all I had were her bones, I could only wonder. But I can also study what was buried with her. She was seated in her grave surrounded by weapons. None of them are overly fancy. None are simply for show. They are sturdy weapons, crafted for killing.

  The two-edged sword beside her left hip is an uncommon type, rare in Norway and Sweden, but more often found along the Vikings’ East Way, the trade route through what is now Russia and Ukraine to Byzantium, Baghdad, and beyond.

  Birka grave Bj581, as imagined by artist Þórhallur Þráinsson based on archaeologists’ interpretations.

  Her long, thin-bladed sax-knife, or scramasax, in its elaborate bronze-and-silver ornamented sheath, is also Eastern, a rare and prestigious weapon—some say a status symbol—inspired by the equipment of the Magyar horse archers who haunted the steppes and harassed the Viking traders along the East Way.

  Hervor was an archer, too, and may have shot from horseback. Hers is one of only eighteen graves at Birka—out of the eleven hundred excavated—to contain a horse, and hers are clearly riding horses. One of them was bridled with an iron bit; a second bit was found nearby. A pair of iron stirrups are all that remain of her wood-and-leather saddle. By her side were twenty-five spike-headed, armor-piercing arrows with elegant silver accents. Between the arrows and her scramasax was a bare spot, a gap, the right shape for a bow, which had disintegrated.

  It may have been a Magyar bow. Though not preserved in her own grave, the distinctive metal rings and fittings of Magyar bow cases and quivers were recovered from other Birka graves of Hervor’s generation, as well as from the remains of the town’s fortress, which burned down a few years after she was buried and wasn’t rebuilt. Magyar bows, sometimes called horn bows, were composites of wood, sinew, and horn, bent into a reflex shape. Small and handy on horseback, they were equally suited to fighting on shipboard or defending a hillfort like the one that guarded Birka: They shot twice as far as an ordinary wooden bow. At close range they offered the skilled archer greater accuracy, speed, and penetration.

  But Hervor was not solely a mounted archer. An archer’s weapon kit consisted of bow, arrows, spear, and shield. Hervor was buried with almost every Viking weapon known: sword, scramasax, arrows and bow, axe, two spears, and two shields. She was buried with more weapons than any other warrior in Birka; more than almost every Viking in the world. Of those Vikings found buried with any weapons at all, 61 percent have one weapon; only 15 percent have three or more.

  Hervor’s grave is remarkable not only for its complete weapon set and sacrificed horses. Its location is equally impressive. From the main gate of the hillfort that crowned the island, an avenue led north or south. North, it passed between two groups of elite graves. South, it went to the Warriors’ Hall, where Birka’s garrison lived. Hervor’s grave lay west of the road, beside the hall. It was hard to miss: It was the only grave marked with a tall standing stone. It was also the grave set farthest west, perched to look down over the harbor and town, and out across the waters of Lake Malaren to the royal manor on the neighboring island of Adelso. From Hervor’s grave you could see everyone who came or went, to or from the busy town of Birka. Whoever Hervor was, the warriors of Birka honored her memory. They wanted her near to keep watch.

  The prominent location of her grave, her panoply of weapons, the double sacrifice of valuable horses—these mark Hervor as a warrior of high status. A final touch elevates her rank to war leader: the full set of pieces for the board game hnefatafl, or Viking chess, that was placed in her lap. From the Roman Iron Age through the high medieval era, from Iceland to Africa to Japan, the combination of game pieces, weapons, and horses in a grave has indicated a war leader. Game pieces symbolize authority and a “flair for strategic thinking.” They express “the idea that success in warfare is not dependent on physical strength and dexterity alone but also on intelligence and the ability to foresee the actions of one’s opponents,” scholars say. In Viking terms, particularl
y, they attest to the warrior’s good luck.

  Until the bones in Bj581 were determined to be female, no one doubted the warrior in the grave was a war leader. She was buried as a war leader—her gender seems not to have been worth mentioning. Individuality was not highly prized in the Viking Age. What mattered was not your unique and special self but your role in life. If you had the required qualities, physical and mental, you could fill any role; you became that role.

  One role Hervor may not have filled is mother. Viking women are often found buried with two large oval or box-shaped metal brooches by their collarbones. These brooches, experts think, clasped the shoulder straps of a wool dress, cut like an apron or pinafore, worn over a low-necked linen shift. It was a practical design that made breastfeeding easy. Hervor did not wear an apron-dress; there are no brooches in her grave.

  Based on what little does remain of her clothing, she dressed like the other Birka warriors. They affected an urban style, distinctive to the fortress towns along the East Way; it was a mixture of Viking, Slavic, steppe-nomadic, and Byzantine fashions. Under a classic Viking cloak, clasped with a ring-shaped iron pin at one shoulder, Hervor wore a nomad’s kaftan, a riding coat that wrapped in the front and was closed by a belt or buttons. It might have been made of Byzantine silk; in her grave was a scrap of fabric woven from silk and silver threads. It might have been decorated with mirrored sequins, a scattering of which were also found in her grave.

  On her head she wore a close-fitting silk cap with earflaps that could be fastened up with silver buttons. It was topped by a filigreed silver cone that might have stuck up straight like a spike or flopped over like a tassel, depending on the cut of the cap. Only the buttons and cone and a scrap of silk remain of Hervor’s cap, but a silk cap perhaps like it was found in a fabric-rich grave in the Caucasus. An exact match for her cap’s filigreed silver cone was buried with another Birka warrior. A third matching cone was buried with a warrior near Kyiv.

  * * *

  Who was this valkyrie buried in grave Bj581? What might her life have been like? To tell Hervor’s story, I have to use my imagination. I have to make assumptions. I have to connect the dots.

  Her bones say she lived to be thirty or forty. Archaeologists can rarely date their finds within a span of thirty years. Historians have a similar difficulty. The medieval sources are chronologically confused. Most were written down well after the events they record, and the accounts in different texts simply do not sync. Like anyone else studying the Viking Age, I’ll have to approximate. In Hervor’s case, the items in her grave suggest she died around the middle of the tenth century, when Birka was at its height and its connections to the East Way were strongest. The location of her grave implies she was buried after the Warriors’ Hall was built, around 930 or 950, but well before it burned down, between 965 and 985. To tell the best story, I’ll guess she was buried a little after 960 and born around 930.

  Where exactly was she born? Science tells me only that she came from southern Sweden or Norway. Looking at the Viking world from a warrior woman’s point of view, I’ve opted for the kingdom of Vestfold, on the west side of the Oslo Fjord. Here, a hundred years before Hervor’s birth, two powerful women were buried in the most lavish Viking grave ever uncovered, the Oseberg ship mound. Here, when Hervor was a child, the great hall guarding the cosmopolitan trading port of Kaupang was destroyed—perhaps by Eirik Bloodaxe and Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, who conquered Vestfold around that time.

  Where would a small girl, born in the town of Kaupang to a rich family, if not royal, end up? Science suggests she went west, possibly to the British Isles—as did Eirik and Gunnhild sometime between 935 and 946, having lost Norway’s throne. From their base in the Orkney Islands, the royal pair meddled in the politics of the main Viking towns in the west, Dublin and York. Ruthless, ambitious, and fiercely intelligent, Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings makes a fine role model for a young valkyrie. Another role model is the Viking chieftain known as the Red Girl, active in the Irish Sea at that time.

  When Eirik Bloodaxe was killed in England in 954, Gunnhild sought allies in Denmark. When the Danish king Harald Bluetooth helped put her sons on Norway’s throne in 961, Gunnhild ruled beside them for fourteen years: One medieval historian called it the “Age of Gunnhild.” Long before then, however, Hervor had quit Gunnhild’s court and become a Viking. She was already in Birka, defending the town, if she died there as war leader before the Warriors’ Hall burned down.

  Yet, before her death, Hervor traveled on the East Way to Kyiv and back, if Kyiv is where she got the silver cone for her silk cap. If so, she met Queen Olga, who ruled the Vikings, or Rus, in Kyiv from about 945 until 957, when her son, Sviatoslav, came of age. In 971 Sviatoslav took the Rus south to challenge Byzantium, a raid that ended in disaster on a Bulgarian battlefield, where the Byzantine victors found warrior women among the Viking dead. Hervor was not among them; she had already been buried in Birka.

  Besides this conjectural outline of Hervor’s life, what links Dublin and York to Kaupang, Birka, and Kyiv? The Viking slave trade, through which young men and women were exchanged for Byzantine silk and Arab silver. The Viking slave route passed the Danish island of Samsey, where perhaps Hervor stopped to plunder her father’s grave and retrieve his sword, as did her namesake in the poem Hervor’s Song. Let’s begin by imagining her there.

  1

  HERVOR’S SONG

  Sunset on the isle of Samsey. A cold mist rolls in off the Kattegat. A shepherd gathering his flock for the night pauses on the dunes, alert, always alert on this small island famed as a meeting place of Vikings. And indeed, those sounds he hears, that rhythmic splashing, that groan and creak of oars, mean a ship is nearing—one or more. He throws himself flat in the long grass and listens.

  He hears his sheep bleating as they trot homeward down the forest path, the bellwether leading. He wishes he were with them. He isn’t sure which is worse to meet here after dark: the Vikings in the approaching ships, or those buried under the mounds. Twenty years ago, two rival bands met here and fought: Angantyr and his eleven brothers against Arrow-Odd and his companions. All died except Arrow-Odd—people say he used magic. The dead haunt the shoreline still.

  Beneath the raucous chatter of gulls, he listens to the breeze worrying the grass. An owl hoots, and the forest birds fall silent. The sun sinks lower; the mist thickens.

  Now he hears voices, raised, and the rattle of weapons. A knocking of ships’ hulls, one bright and empty, the other weighty and dark. More oar splash. He is ready to run.

  But what comes out of the mist is only a small boat rowed by a single warrior. The boat grounds and the warrior leaps out, drawing the vessel higher on the stony shingle. In spite of himself, the shepherd is curious. He lifts his head.

  Immediately, the warrior spots him. You! she calls. Come down.

  He rises to his feet, brushes off his bare knees, and slides down the dune to the beach. You’re crazy, coming here alone at nightfall, he says. Get to shelter before it’s too late.

  The warrior gathers her gear from her boat. There’s no shelter for me here, she replies. I know no one living on this island.

  When she turns toward him, he instinctively steps back. She is taller than he is, and much more muscular. Much wealthier, too. She wears a ringmail byrnie—he knows how heavy those are—but moves as if it were weightless. Beneath it she wears a good wool tunic, padded and embroidered, over wide wool pants, cross-gaitered below the knee. Silver glints at her throat. Her long hair is knotted at her nape.

  Get back to your ship, he says. You can’t stay on the beach, not at night. It’s not safe to be alone here.

  She claps a battered helm on her head, slips a hand axe into her belt. She picks up her shield and spear. You’re here with me, she says. Carry those. She points the spear tip at the rest of the pile: a broad axe, a shovel, a coil of rope.

  The shepherd laughs. Only fools walk by the barrows at night. He gestures west, where the land is rippled by
rows and clusters of grave mounds, some marked with tall upright stones, others shadowed by brush and trees. Two mounds stand higher than the rest, one by the shore, the other a little inland, on the edge of the salt marsh. Already he sees fires flickering in the mist as the sunset paints the sky red.

  They’re scared too, she says, glancing over her shoulder at the invisible Viking ship. She turns back toward the mounds. Which is Angantyr’s?

  We shouldn’t be standing here talking, he says. We should be heading home as fast as we can.

  She unlinks a silver arm-ring and dangles it from a finger. I’ll give you this if you tell me where to dig.

  The shepherd snatches it. He points to the nearer of the big mounds. Arrow-Odd buried his friends there in their boat, he says, and over there he buried his enemies, Angantyr and his brothers, in a wood-walled chamber. He claimed he did it alone, but of course we islanders helped him. We covered both graves with wood and turf and heaped sand over them. We left the dead with all their weapons, I swear it. But still they walk. At night, their graves open. This whole point of land bursts into flames.

  It’s her turn to laugh, a scoffing laugh. I don’t faint at the crackling of a fire, she says.

  Tossing her shield on the sand, she picks up the shovel and sets off for the barrow. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t see the shepherd disappear down the forest path.