The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  The hero of Grettir’s Saga had a sword with a similar lineage. He received Jokul’s Gift from his mother, secretly, because his father did not think he deserved a weapon. As Grettir set out from home, his mother “took a sword out from under her cloak; it was her most valuable possession. She said, ‘My grandfather Jokul owned this sword, and other Vatnsdalers before him, and it brought them victory.’” She added, “I think you will have need of it.”

  Swords were won in battles and duels; they were also traded among friends. In Egil’s Saga, Egil gave his friend Arinbjorn two gold arm-rings. In return, Arinbjorn gave Egil a sword named Slicer. Arinbjorn had received Slicer from Egil’s brother, who in turn had received it from Egil’s father; he had it from his brother, who got it from a friend, who got it from his own father—altogether, Slicer had seven owners over three generations.

  The sword’s biography added to its value: It tied its owners together in a web of friendship. “Long friendships follow frequent gifts,” says the Viking creed, Havamal, or The Words of the High One. “If you have a friend you fully trust and want good to come of your friendship, share your thoughts, exchange gifts, and go to visit often.”

  A gift was an invitation—and an obligation. “To your friend, be a friend, matching gift for gift,” the Viking creed continues. The rule concerned not only cloaks and swords, but intangible gifts as well: match laughter with laughter, but lies with lies.

  Most of all, the Vikings’ gift rule concerned whom you fought for or against. Says a poem written for Harald Fairhair, king of Norway when Hervor was born:

  By their gear,

  their gold rings,

  you can see

  they’re the king’s friends.

  They have red cloaks

  and colored shields,

  silver-clad swords

  and ring-woven shirts

  gilded sword belts,

  engraved helmets,

  rings ready to hand,

  that Harald gave them.

  “The king’s friends,” here, means his army. But Harald Fairhair, who died around 932, was one of the last kings to hold power this way, by giving his friends gifts.

  * * *

  By the time Hervor earned her sword in the mid-900s, The Words of the High One, along with other tenets of paganism, were fading in the face of new ideas of kingship coming north from Christian Europe. A Christian king like Harald Bluetooth, who came to power in Denmark in about 958, ruled by divine right. Bluetooth didn’t need to persuade warriors to support him through gifts and acts of friendship—he commanded them. To disobey a Christian king was to disobey God and be damned. And, as the earthly representative of God the Father Almighty, the Christian king was, by definition, a man.

  It wasn’t always so in the Viking world.

  The Viking Age was an age of endings. It was indeed Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, when the ancient pantheon of deities and spirits was exchanged for the Christian one-in-three. It did not come at once, this Change of Ways, as the sagas call it, but in waves. The sun did not darken, nor the earth sink; the sky was not scorched by fire, nor the stars blotted out, as the wisewoman predicts in the poem Song of the Seer, written in Iceland around the year 1000, when converting their subjects to Christianity was the policy of Viking kings. But when the Viking Age began, in the eighth century, the people of the North were pagan. When it ended, three hundred years later, they had abandoned Freyja and Freyr, Odin and Thor, and put their faith in Christ.

  What changed? Their entire way of looking at the world. The roles of women and men were radically altered. What had once been ordinary became taboo. Hervor, our valkyrie, our shield-maid, the skeleton buried in Birka grave Bj581, was a relic by the time she died. By the time the Saga of Hervor was written, religion was a monopoly and patriarchy ruled. A warrior woman was as odd as a dragon.

  But when Hervor was born, around 930, a woman’s opportunities were far wider. “You’ve done well, Father, to give me your sword,” says the warrior woman in Hervor’s Song. “I’d rather have it than rule all Norway”—which implies that for her, as for the Viking Age poet, a woman could rule.

  And, indeed, if Hervor was born around 930 in Vestfold in southern Norway, as I speculate, she would have known a woman who did rule all Norway: Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings.

  2

  GUNNHILD MOTHER-OF-KINGS

  Her earliest memory is of fire. The whoosh and crackle of it overhead, the embers drifting down like brilliant snow to be stamped or swatted out with cloth soaked in whey or stale urine or even beer, the water barrel being already bone dry. The smoke smarting in her eyes and seizing her breath.

  Stand still! barks her mother as she layers clothing onto her. Most are not even Hervor’s clothes but belong to King Bjorn’s daughter, who is already so overdressed she can hardly waddle.

  Quit wriggling! Her mother loops a long string of beads three times around Hervor’s neck and tries to clasp her cloak with an enormous brooch that must be the queen’s.

  There, in the chest, is a knife in a jeweled sheath. Hervor grabs it—and her mother slaps her, her own mother, whom Hervor will never see again after this night. Hervor spins away. Cloak and brooch drop to the floor as she darts for the door, brandishing the knife. Hervor! she hears her mother shriek as she slips between the legs of the warriors guarding the exit and runs into the tumult of the night.

  Smoke and flames all around, horses screaming and cattle bawling as folk herd them away. People filling carts and wagons with plunder from the storehouses: barrels and sacks and chests and tubs, a bloody heap of dead geese.

  A rhythmic chanting and banging mingles with the roar of the fires: Bjorn’s warriors, pinned inside the burning feast hall, have torn down a beam and are ramming a cornerpost, seeking a way out before the roof caves in.

  A trumpet blares. At its sound, a small woman in a glittering robe strides to the center of the courtyard. She signals with one upraised hand, and four warriors race off in four different directions. The line of carts and wagons advances down the hill toward the town, following the herds. Fires flare up behind them as the storehouses are set alight.

  The small woman turns to speak with her companion—a taller woman in a simple shift, her long hair loose, her feet bare. She looks like a slave, Hervor thinks, then startles: It’s the Queen of the Shining Hall herself. She rushed from her bed at the first moment of the attack, to sue for peace for all those whose honor does not require them to fight. Has she been taken captive?

  Hervor runs toward her, clutching her knife in one hand, the sheath in the other. She has nearly reached the two women when a strong arm circles her waist and she is lifted off the ground. She jabs down with her knife—

  The kitten has teeth! the warrior says, laughing. She twists the knife out of Hervor’s grasp and flips her sideways, pinning her securely against one hip, in spite of her efforts to escape. Is this wildcat yours? she asks the Queen of the Shining Hall.

  No, says the queen. Hervor is our guest.

  Then she will become my guest, says a third voice, soft and soothing, yet somehow it takes all the fight out of Hervor. She goes limp—startling the warrior enough that Hervor slips out of her grasp. She falls to the ground and sits there, looking up in awe at the small woman with the voice of power. The woman glances down and meets Hervor’s gaze.

  Give her back her knife, the woman orders. I admire a girl with guts. But tie her up so she can’t use it again. Then bring out the rest of Bjorn’s people so I can choose which others I’ll claim. They’ve had time enough to fetch their things—and that roof is about to fall in.

  She flicks her eyes to the queen. You go in too, she says. You need to dress.

  The small woman returns her gaze to Hervor and drops her voice to a whisper. She won’t fetch much of a bride-price, will she, if she looks like a slave.

  The wedding is held at dawn. The Shining Hall lies in ruins, its roof collapsed, only two walls standing. Scraps of burned tapestries flutter abov
e a smoking pile of broken beams and blackened bodies. The stench is horrible.

  Huddled with the other children the small woman claimed, Hervor watches as the Queen of the Shining Hall is given as wife to one of her attackers.

  A good match, says the small woman with the powerful voice.

  The queen stands tall as a tree beside her, glittering herself, now, with beads and jewels, and swathed in a rich blue cloak. She looks down on the small woman and coldly says, King Bjorn will not come back from Valhalla. As things stand, Gunnhild, what choice do I have but to let you and Eirik have your way?

  A good match, the small woman with the powerful voice repeats. And perhaps your daughter will marry one of my sons.

  She glances at the group of captive children and catches Hervor’s eye. Too bad that wildcat isn’t yours, she adds. She shows promise.

  * * *

  Did it happen like that? Is that how Hervor came to the notice of Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings?

  Perhaps.

  Like Snorri Sturluson writing of Norway’s kings hundreds of years after the events he describes, I’m weaving together poems and sagas and things experts tell me to imagine Hervor’s early days. It’s the only way. The events that shaped the warrior woman buried in Birka grave Bj581 will always be hidden in shadow, a thousand years on. She left no letters, no pictures. No descendants retold her tale. All I have are her bones.

  These tell me she was well fed all her life, so grew up in a rich or royal household. She came from the western side of the Viking world—the kingdom of Vestfold in southern Norway fits the facts—and moved as a child, west again. She died, aged thirty to forty, before 970, and so was a child in the 930s when, archaeologists say, the Shining Hall in Vestfold burned to the ground. It was not rebuilt. By 950, both the hall on the hill and the market town beneath it were abandoned. What happened? Eirik Bloodaxe and Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings arrived in Vestfold, the sagas say, and fought to control it for five—or fifteen—years.

  The story of Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings is told by Snorri Sturluson in the Saga of Harald Fairhair, the third of sixteen sagas about kings in the collection Heimskringla (or Orb of the World). An eloquent and unscrupulous lawyer, Snorri was the wealthiest and most powerful chieftain in thirteenth-century Iceland. He wanted to be Iceland’s king—or at least its earl, under the rule of Norway—and wrote Heimskringla, after two years of travel and research, to gain influence at the Norwegian court. He is a captivating storyteller, and his books are treasures, among the finest literature of the Middle Ages. He is not a historian by modern standards, but he spoke with learned men and women, studied genealogies, and collected stories and poems.

  He had a prodigious memory. In Heimskringla and in his Edda, a handbook on poetry and myths, Snorri quotes apt lines from nearly a thousand poems, most of which had never been written down before. Because he wrote for an audience of one—the young king of Norway, brought to the throne at age fourteen—his tales in these two books skew toward the interests of a boy. Because that boy was brought up by Christian bishops and remained largely under their control, Snorri gilds his Viking lore with Christian values.

  As his books and his biography show, Snorri was also a misogynist. Gunnhild is one of the few women whose stories he tells in Heimskringla. She was too powerful to leave out: In other histories of Norway, the years 961 to 975, when she ruled Norway alongside her sons, are known as the “Age of Gunnhild.”

  But Snorri’s account is not flattering. Gunnhild, he writes, was “intelligent and well-educated, charming, but very deceitful, and the grimmest person,” by which he seems to mean uncompromising or fierce. He does not consider these to be good traits in a queen. She appears, as well, in Egil’s Saga, which Snorri wrote for an Icelandic audience. There, as the villain, Gunnhild attempts to kill the Icelandic hero of the saga, Egil the Poet, several times. She is so malevolent, conniving, and cruel that modern scholars charge Snorri with conducting a “smear campaign.”

  * * *

  An earlier history of Norway identifies Gunnhild as a princess, a daughter of the powerful Danish king Gorm the Old. Snorri explains Gunnhild’s power differently. According to the wild tale he tells, Eirik Bloodaxe and his Viking band had raided east in the Baltic Sea and west among the British Isles, even all the way north along the North Way into the Barents Sea and the northernmost shores of Russia, where breeding walruses crowded the beaches and could be butchered for their valuable ivory tusks and thick skins, the best leather for making ships’ rigging. On his way back south along Norway’s coast, Eirik met the formidable woman who would become his wife—and provide the skills he lacked.

  Gunnhild was so beautiful, the men who found her “had never seen the like of her.” She was also small and delicate, and so had learned to protect herself with her wits. Eirik’s men had found her alone in a Sami hut. They dared not capture her, she warned, speaking sweetly to them, for she was the ward of two sorcerers, who were then out hunting. Like other Sami, these two could follow a track like a dog, even over ice. They skied so fast and were such good shots that nothing escaped them. Nor did they need arrows to kill: With an angry look they could turn the land upside down. Any living thing they glared at fell dead. No, Eirik’s men could not capture her—but they could rescue her, suggested the sweet young girl. Both sorcerers wanted to marry Gunnhild, and she did not plan to waste her life in the snowy woods, far from the halls of power.

  She hid Eirik’s men under some blankets and sprinkled ashes all about, making them invisible. When the Sami sorcerers came home from the hunt, tired and weary, she invited them to lie beside her, one on each side. She put her arms lovingly around their necks and sang them a magical lullaby. They slept so soundly they didn’t even wake when she slipped two sealskin bags over their heads and tied them tight. Then she motioned to Eirik’s men, who rushed out of their hiding place and stabbed the sorcerers to death.

  In the morning, they escorted Gunnhild to Eirik. He took one look at the pretty girl and declared he would marry her. She said he must first ask her father’s permission, so they sailed south to Halogaland, where the chieftain Ozur Toti gave his blessing.

  How did Gunnhild arrive in the far north of Norway? Was Ozur Toti her real father, or her foster father, or the Viking who had captured her previously? Had she gone to the Sami on her own initiative, or was it common to send chieftains’ daughters north to learn magic? Or was she, in fact, Sami herself? Snorri’s tale leaves these questions unanswered.

  Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings appears in many other stories, playing a part in eleven Icelandic sagas and several histories. She is always powerful, and always portrayed as the villain. All the writers were Christian, writing in the twelfth century or later. They picture Queen Gunnhild as proud and ambitious, lecherous and moody, ruthless, calculating, and cold. They also attest to her beauty and small size, her resilience, her ability to manipulate people with her voice, her organizational skill, her generosity, her humor, her knowledge of potions, rituals, poems, and stories, and her belief that the best way to neutralize her enemies was to adopt their children. She was good at raising children. Her own eight sons, unlike Eirik and his brothers, never turned on one another but shared the rule of Norway, when it finally came to them, with one another—and with her. As Snorri himself reports, from 961 to 975 Gunnhild and her sons “often met to talk things over together and to decide how to rule.”

  * * *

  With her husband, Eirik Bloodaxe, Gunnhild was less successful. Eirik was a handsome man, strong and bold, a great warrior “blessed with victory,” Snorri writes. But he was not like his father, King Harald Fairhair. He did not have his father’s easy way around people. He was no charmer, but short of speech, and often sat silent in the feast hall, watching, a frown creasing his broad brow; his eyes in the moonlight “gleamed, dragon-like, terrible to look at,” as Egil the Poet would later say. He had a quick temper.

  He was also rather stupid. Faced with a difficult decision, time and again Eirik threw up hi
s hands and refused to pass judgment, despite Gunnhild’s best efforts to give him good advice. If Bloodaxe could not solve a problem with force, it didn’t get solved.

  And the problem Eirik was trying to solve when Hervor came into his orbit—how to become the sole king of Norway—was not succumbing to brute force.

  Eirik’s father was the first king of all Norway. In the late 800s, he united Norway’s hundreds of chieftains and petty kings under his own rule. It was Harald Fairhair whose “friends” you could recognize, according to the contemporary poet Thorbjorn Horn-Cleaver, by their red cloaks, their “silver-clad swords … rings ready to hand, that Harald gave them.” It was Harald Fairhair who amassed armies through gifts and friendship—and who was one of the last Viking kings to do so.

  But it was tricky to be Harald’s friend—he burned down the feast halls of friends he found too ambitious. When he conquered a district, Snorri writes, Harald gave the landowners and rich farmers “and anyone else who might cause trouble” three choices: They could become his friends, swearing to support him, or they could leave the country. “Otherwise, they could expect the harshest terms, even death.” It was during Harald’s reign, several sagas agree, that Iceland was settled and many Norwegian warriors and their families decamped to the British Isles.