The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Framed by the sunset, the barrow is on fire. Mist swirls around its base like smoke. She wades through it, unafraid. Circling the mound, she prods it with her spear. The turf and sand are not deep—you can’t expect much of a monument when your enemies bury you. Her spear tip touches wood and in one place pokes into it; the timbers are rotten. She won’t need the rope. She strips off her gear and starts digging at ground level. She takes her hand axe to the wood. Soon she breaks through.

  When the tunnel is wide enough, she arms herself again and slips into the barrow—and only then realizes what she’s forgotten: light.

  The grave is darker than night. She waits for her eyes to adjust, but not a glimmer from the sunset sky seeps in. Death surrounds her.

  I will not tremble before you, Father, she says. Speak to me.

  She closes her eyes but hears only silence and the wind in the world outside. One hand on the damp wooden wall of the tomb, she shifts forward until she can stand.

  Awake, Angantyr! Angantyr, awake! she calls out. I am Hervor, Svava’s daughter, your only child. Give me your sword, the great sword Tyrfing, the Flaming Sword the dwarfs forged in their halls of stone.

  Again, no answer. She takes another step forward and stumbles to one knee. She steadies her balance with her spear shaft, but one hand still comes down upon bones. She jerks her hand away.

  May you writhe within your ribs, she curses. May your barrow be an anthill in which you rot. May you never feast with Odin in Valhalla, unless you let me wield that sword. Why should dead hands hold such a weapon?

  And this time she thinks she hears an answer. You do wrong to call down evils upon me. No dead hands hold that sword. My enemies built this barrow. They took Tyrfing.

  It could be true, though the shepherd swore not. She calls out again into the darkness: Would you cheat your only child? Tell the truth! Let Odin accept you only if the Flaming Sword is not here, in the tomb.

  Silence. She opens her eyes and now flames do flash and flicker about her. She reaches for them, but they dance away.

  Not for all your fires will I fear you, Father. It takes more than a dead man to frighten me.

  You must be mad. Go back to your ships! No woman in the world would wield that cursed sword.

  She knows of the curse: Once drawn, the sword must kill before it can be sheathed again. If not, it will doom her sons, destroy her family line—but what does she care about that? She has no sons, and no intention of marrying. She is a shield-maid. A warrior woman. A valkyrie.

  People thought me man enough, she quips, before I came here.

  Twelve bodies were buried in this barrow, her father and his eleven brothers. Angantyr, she reasons, was laid on top. Using her spear as a probe, she finds the edges of the pile, then its highest point. She pokes and prods until something falls to the floor that is not bone.

  She shimmies out through the tunnel, her treasure tight in her fist: It is her father’s sword, gold-hilted Tyrfing, the Flaming Sword.

  The mist has disappeared. The starlight seems so bright.

  You’ve done well, Father, to give me your sword, Hervor says. I’d rather have it than rule all Norway.

  * * *

  Hervor’s Song was the first Old Norse poem to be translated into English, in 1703. As such, it crafted the image we hold today of the fearless Viking warrior who laughs in the face of danger—and that warrior is a woman.

  My dramatization isn’t exact: The original includes no shovel. Instead, I’ve described what might have happened if Hervor’s Song reflected a real event—if, let’s say, this Hervor was the real warrior woman buried in grave Bj581 beside the Swedish town of Birka.

  In the poem, the flames are real. The grave magically opens; the dead rise like smoke. Hervor conjures up her ghostly father and demands he hand over the family heirloom, the famous Flaming Sword. When he refuses, fearing the sword’s curse will destroy his family line, she scoffs and finally bends him to her will. “Now,” she brags, brandishing the sword, “I have walked between worlds.” The poem is eerie and otherworldly and has been popular, in English, for hundreds of years. Some say this poem inspired the first Gothic novel.

  But the prose Saga of Hervor, which quotes the poem—and so preserved it for us to read—confounds modern readers. We like our genres clear-cut. Is it history? Is it fantasy? Is it true?

  Medieval Iceland’s writers made no such distinctions. Those few sagas that do not mention dragons or ghosts, witches or werewolves, prophetic dreams or dire omens, dwell instead on the miracles of saints. The name “saga” implies neither fiction nor fact; it derives from the Old Norse verb segja, “to say.” A good saga seamlessly integrates the two. Some saga authors were witnesses to the events they relate; others retell stories from hundreds of years in their past. Some list their sources: folktales, poems, genealogies, or interviews with wise grandmothers. Others don’t. Some mimic foreign tales of chivalry; others focus on Icelandic farmers and their petty feuds.

  All I can say for certain about the sagas is that they were first written down, in prose, after Christian missionaries created an Old Norse alphabet soon after the year 1000—no sagas are written in the ancient Norse runes—and that the copies we have were created in Iceland in the 1200s, 1300s, or even later.

  A manuscript can be dated by what it’s written on (skin or paper), by the chemistry of its ink, by the shape of its letters and the abbreviations used, and by its vocabulary (though an ancient word hoard can be faked). Dating the stories and poems a manuscript contains is trickier. They are older than the parchment or ink, for sure. But how much older? For Hervor’s Song, I have a few clues.

  The oldest copy of the Saga of Hervor was penned by an Icelandic lawyer named Haukur Erlendsson, as he tells us in letters from 1302 and 1310, though he only copied down the bits he liked. A longer (but much later) manuscript suggests the Saga of Hervor was first composed around 1120 for Queen Ingigerd of Sweden, whose mother was a princess from Kyiv. This version ends with a long list of kings descended (in spite of the sword’s curse) from Hervor, and the last on the list is Ingigerd’s husband.

  The saga itself is set in a mythic Viking past that is impossible to date. Its story ranges from Norway east through Russia to the Black Sea and, as sagas go, it is not particularly well written. It could use “a ruthless rewriting” to smooth out its “many inconsistencies” and tie up its “loose ends,” according to its modern translator, and I have to agree. But it was apparently quite popular in the Middle Ages: Many manuscripts include a copy.

  During the general “sorting frenzy” of the Victorian Age, the Saga of Hervor was classified as a Saga of Ancient Times, a genre created to dismiss a group of “mythical” or “romantic” tales “that have little or no historical authenticity,” as the translator put it. Yet, perversely, he prized the Saga of Hervor for its historical elements, which “come down from a very remote antiquity.” Those elements include Hervor’s Song and three other poems quoted in the text.

  Saga scholars since the Middle Ages have deemed poems more authentic than prose. It was common for Viking kings and queens to retain court poets to record their deeds. “People still know their poems,” wrote the Icelandic author Snorri Sturluson in the 1200s. Like sonnets or haiku, Viking Age poetry had elaborate rules for rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration. These rules made poems harder to tinker with—and easier to memorize—than prose. “If a verse is composed correctly,” Snorri asserted, “the words in it will remain the same, even as they are passed down from person to person” for hundreds of years.

  Modern readers tend to agree with him: Most of what we think we know about the Viking mind comes from Viking poetry. Much of Viking history derives from poetry as well. For his Heimskringla (or Orb of the World), a collection of sixteen sagas about Norway’s kings, Snorri expanded upon “what is said in the poems recited before the rulers themselves or their sons.” Of course, he admitted, poets exaggerate: “It is the way of poets to praise most those to whom they are speaking
,” he said (and Snorri was himself a poet). But no one would dare to recite a poem praising the rulers for things that they—and everyone listening—knew were false. “That would be mockery, not praise.” For that reason, Snorri took to be true “all that can be found in those poems about their travels or their wars.”

  * * *

  If I apply Snorri’s rule to the Saga of Hervor, it’s hard not to conclude that some Viking women were warriors.

  The first poem in the saga tells how the Viking warrior Angantyr came to be buried on the Danish isle of Samsey before his only child was born. Hervor, says the prose between the poems, grew up with her grandfather, a chieftain, thinking she was the swineherd’s bastard. A difficult child, she preferred archery and swordplay to sewing and embroidery. As a teen she ran off and lived wild in the woods, robbing and killing passersby before being hauled back to court, where she annoyed everyone with her rudeness. When she finally learned her father was a famous Viking warrior, not a swineherd, she resolved to be like him. She ordered a new shirt and cloak, demanding her mother give her “everything you would give to a son.” She renamed herself Hervard, the masculine form of her name—and the saga author follows suit, referring to her as “he,” not “she.”

  Hervard joined a Viking band and quickly rose to lead it. Raiding in the Kattegat, among the Danish islands, he led his band to Samsey and proposed they break into the grave mounds to reclaim his family treasure. His crew feared waking the dead, so he rowed to the island alone. Here the saga writer inserted Hervor’s Song, in which Hervard reveals himself to be Angantyr’s daughter and declares she would rather have her father’s sword “than rule all Norway.”

  In the saga, this Hervard-Hervor eventually gives up the Viking life, marries, and has two sons. The third poem quoted in the saga is a set of riddles associated with one of them, King Heidrek the Wise. One riddle, aptly, refers to warrior women:

  Around a weaponless

  king, what women

  are fighting?

  The fair attack him,

  the red defend him,

  day after day.

  The answer to the riddle is the board game hnefatafl, or Viking chess. Hervor, the saga says, was an expert player, better than the king under whose banner she fought.

  Her skill explains how she could become a Viking leader: Not only had she trained with weapons since childhood, she displayed that flair for strategic thinking so prized in the Viking Age. Success depended on surprise—a Viking band was often outnumbered. But surprise depended on skill. A good leader took care of logistics: Her band was well fed and rested, and their ship and equipment in good shape before a raid. She could read the weather and water; she didn’t get lost. Her contacts (and spies) kept her well informed of which kings were at war (and so looking elsewhere). She knew her enemies’ tactics, and how to trick them. She knew when fairs were held and harvests brought in, the routes of the tax collectors and traders. She could rouse her fighters to battle frenzy, make them laugh at defeat, and engineer their escape. She had good luck—in a pinch, she could be counted on to make the right choice—and she never gave up. She dressed as a man for practical reasons, not to fool anyone—there’s no privacy on a Viking ship, not even a deck to go below. She announced her sex the first time she pissed. She took a man’s name to announce her role: She was a warrior.

  The final poem in the Saga of Hervor features a second shield-maid named Hervor. In the saga she is the first Hervor’s granddaughter, but scholars think the chronology’s mixed up. This poem, they believe, tells of an ancient war some four hundred years before the Viking Age began. If so, The Battle of the Goths and the Huns may be “the oldest of all the heroic lays preserved in the North.”

  The poem is set beside the forest of Mirkwood, on the border between the Goths, who were ruled by one of this Hervor’s two brothers, and the Huns, from whom her second brother had raised an army to challenge his sibling’s rule. Hervor commanded the border fortress. One morning, from the tower above her fortress gate, she watched as a great cloud of dust rolled out from the shadows under the trees. It glittered as it moved. She called her trumpeter. “Summon the host,” she said, and when her warriors gathered: “Take up your weapons and prepare for battle.” By the time the Huns arrived on their fast horses, glittering in ringmail and helmets and wielding their deadly horn bows, Hervor was ready. She rode out at the head of her army, and the battle began. But she was badly outnumbered. She and her captains were killed, all but one; he rode night and day to bring the news to the king of the Goths. The king took no time to mourn his sister—she had been happier in battle than other women were when chatting with their suitors, the poem says—but set forth at once to avenge her. He met the Huns on the plains of the Danube. The battle raged for days, until the Goths, their ranks constantly reinforced as the news spread, repelled the Hun invaders, leaving so many dead that the rivers were dammed with corpses and overflowed their banks.

  * * *

  If The Battle of the Goths and the Huns is truly the oldest epic song of the north, then the idea of the warrior woman was embedded in Viking culture from its very start.

  A Viking rider and a standing warrior, less than an inch tall, from Tisso, Denmark. Near-identical amulets have been found in England and Poland.

  The Christian writer of the Saga of Hervor, stitching four ancient poems into a tale in twelfth-century Sweden, struggled with that idea and ultimately rejected it. Though the Gothic Hervor who guards the border remains a hero (if a failed one), her grave-robbing namesake in Hervor’s Song is thoroughly undermined. She is cruel, willful, self-centered, greedy, light-minded, and not, in the end, a good leader. Her role in the saga, it seems, is to warn against letting your daughters run wild.

  In the poem, the shepherd on Samsey is not surprised to see a warrior woman, only to see anyone foolhardy enough to face the ghost-fires. Neither is Hervor’s ghostly father, Angantyr, surprised to see her in armor or commanding a fleet of Viking ships. He finds her “not like other people” (another translation is “hardly human”) not because she wants to wield a sword, but because she wants this sword: the cursed sword that will destroy all their kin. Even the saga writer, introducing the poem, matter-of-factly identifies Hervor as the leader of a Viking band. Yet after winning her father’s sword, the saga says, Hervor returned to the shore to find her companions had deserted her.

  It’s unlikely. A Viking band was a team, its success dependent on cooperation and trust. Its members were closer than kin.

  Though fighters from the same families often joined the same bands, Viking bands were notable for their diversity. Bands included men and women, young and old, rich and poor, warriors from the same region and those from far off, even those who spoke different languages and worshipped different gods, all brought together by a leader’s reputation for good luck.

  Viking bands were notable, too, for their loyalty: They swore a binding oath. Elaborate rites and symbols also bound them: They painted their ships or shields with certain colors or patterns, affected a certain style of dress, followed a single banner. They wore or carried amulets or badges fashioned as miniature ships, spearheads, hammers, swords, falcons, dragons, wolves, and people, both men and women, tearing out their hair or bearing weapons, standing or riding or both. These may have been lucky charms or religious totems, or they may have functioned like the challenge coins modern soldiers must produce on demand to prove they belong to a certain unit.

  Most of all, the members of a Viking band were bound by common experiences: the spiritual release of rituals, the trauma of the battlefield, the dangers of sea travel, and the overindulgence that defined a good feast, where boasting and storytelling both created and expressed their shared identity, and oaths were sealed with a drink.

  If the Christian author of the Saga of Hervor had believed in the reality of Viking warrior women, if that writer had known what it meant to be a Viking leader—or had understood Hervor’s meaning when she quipped she was thought “ma
n enough”—her story might have continued like this:

  When Hervor returned from the grave mounds, she found her ship moored in a creek on the lee side of the cape. Her crew had butchered a stolen sheep and were stewing bits of it in an iron pot over their campfire—all but the warriors left guarding the ship. Hervor joined their circle and set to cleaning Tyrfing, the Flaming Sword, scraping away the moldering remains of the wood-and-leather sheath, oiling away the rust and tarnish, and honing the edge with her whetstone. Finished, she raised a horn of beer and recounted—in verse—how she had taken the sword from her ghostly father.

  * * *

  The sword buried with the warrior woman in Birka grave Bj581, the Hervor of this book, was not the gold-hilted Tyrfing. It was a simple, sturdy weapon, of a style most often found in Sweden, Russia, and Ukraine.

  I can only guess how she earned it.

  Perhaps, like her poetic namesake, she took it from a grave. The Persian historian Miskawayh, who chronicled a Viking raid on a town in Azerbaijan in 943, noted that the slain Vikings were buried with their swords. But these swords were in high demand “for their sharpness and excellence,” so as soon as the rest of the Vikings left town, their enemies reopened the graves, picked out the swords, and sold them.

  In the Icelandic sagas, grave robbing is not so simple—or safe. Some attempts involve terrifying confrontations with reanimated corpses, zombies who can only be overcome if their heads are cut off and set between their buttocks. The poetic Hervor’s argument with her ghostly father is tame by comparison. Yet archaeologists have found breaking into Viking barrows to be common—nearly every large grave mound from the Viking Age shows signs of intruders. It may have been the usual practice to retrieve heirlooms like swords.

  Not all Viking swords were buried, even temporarily. Many were passed down from generation to generation. Such was the case with Tyrfing before Hervor’s father, Angantyr, took it to the grave. According to the Saga of Hervor, Tyrfing was made by two dwarfs (under duress) for a Viking chieftain in Russia. He gave it to the Swedish Viking who married his daughter. They took Tyrfing to Sweden, and some twenty years later the Viking gave it to his eldest son, Angantyr, before he and his brothers set off to challenge their enemies on the Danish isle of Samsey. “I think you will have need of good weapons,” their father said. The poetic Hervor was the fourth generation to wield the Flaming Sword; her last act in the saga is to give it to her son.