The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Now, in the 930s, Gunnhild likely did not attend the fighting. Her household was then encumbered by many children, both her own—she was pregnant with her seventh—and those she had taken in to foster, like Hervor. The Oseberg grave mound, a mile from the Tunsberg battlefield, seems a likely spot for her to establish her camp. A mere hundred years before, two powerful queens had been buried there in the most lavish Viking funeral known.

  5

  QUEEN ASA’S REVENGE

  It is the largest barrow Hervor has ever seen. Smooth and rounded on every side, it springs from the shallow valley floor like a mountain—like the Holy Mountain behind the Shining Hall, where the rituals were held on the Winter Nights. She slips from the warrior’s side and darts down the ship’s gangplank.

  Ignoring the shouts behind her, dodging the well-dressed dignitaries who, come to greet Queen Gunnhild, try to snag her, she runs to the top of the grave mound and gazes around in awe. The whole world seems to be looking at her: the ship and its bustling crew, the welcoming party with their colorful cloaks and flags flapping in the wind, the farmhouses ranked on the hills all around, even the whispering oaks, the bright streak of the river, and the far-off sparkle of the fjord.

  Who lives here? Hervor asks the warrior when she rushes up after her.

  Treat her with some dignity, or you’ll meet her sooner than you’d like.

  Hervor blinks. There is no laughter in the warrior’s voice this time. She looks—could it be?—afraid. Hervor meekly follows her down the mound, the unanswered question simmering inside her.

  It comes to a boil at the banquet that night. Leaving the other children playing on the floor, Hervor sneaks up behind the seat of honor where Queen Gunnhild sits. She waits for a break in the conversation and, when it comes, taps the queen’s arm. Who lives there, in the mound? she asks.

  The queen turns and stares at the hand that touched her until Hervor self-consciously tucks it behind her back. The queen’s eyes then shift to Hervor’s own, boring into her head as if searching for secrets. Hervor stares back, unblinking.

  Queen Gunnhild smiles. This, she says to the feast hall at large, is the boldest child for her size I’ve ever seen.

  By then the warrior, Hervor’s guardian, has reached them. She takes Hervor’s hand and brusquely tugs her back to her own seat on the warriors’ benches.

  As bold as the queen in the mound, Gunnhild continues. She lifts her horn of beer: I drink to Asa, queen of Agdir, mother of Halfdan, father of Harald, father of Eirik, our king!

  She takes a long draft of drink, then splashes the remainder on the fire.

  But I curse the name, she mutters, her voice turning dark and harsh—though still filling the hall with its power—of the Hunting King, Gudrod the Generous, who killed her kinsmen and took Asa to wife without her consent.

  And then she tells the tale.

  * * *

  Before books, there were stories. In them was distilled the knowledge each generation wished to pass on to the next. Storytelling was (and is) a form of power. It was time binding: It linked then to now. Told eloquently, at the right time to the right listeners, a story shaped the future. Told often enough, in as many ways as possible, a story became indelible. Such a story is the one Gunnhild told of Eirik Bloodaxe’s great-grandmother, Queen Asa.

  The story was still being told when Snorri Sturluson visited Vestfold nearly three hundred years later. As he relays it in Heimskringla, Asa was the only daughter of King Harald Redbeard, who ruled Agdir, Norway’s southernmost kingdom. Gudrod, king of Vestfold and two other kingdoms at the head of Viken, sent messengers to Agdir asking for Asa’s hand. Asa might have preferred to marry Gudrod’s grown son, who was exceedingly handsome and tall, for the Hunting King had already seen one wife to the grave. Or Asa may have been a shield-maid who wished not to marry at all. Whatever the reason, her father refused Gudrod’s suit.

  The Hunting King swept down from the north with many ships. He took Agdir by surprise, surrounded the king’s estate, fired the thatched roofs, and turned his Vikings loose to plunder. Fighting against heavy odds, Asa’s father and brother were killed. Asa herself was captured and raped by her father’s murderer. She kept her dignity and contained her rage. When she became pregnant, he made her his queen. When their son, Halfdan the Black, was a year old, she took her revenge.

  The Hunting King and his queen were on their autumn progress, sailing from one chieftain’s estate to another, enjoying a harvest feast at each one, dispensing justice, attending rituals, witnessing oaths and boasts, and generally reminding their subjects who was in charge. At Stiflu Sound (a place still unidentified by modern historians), Queen Asa saw her chance. At the end of the quay where they’d moored the royal ship she’d noticed a thicket of trees. That night there’d be no moon.

  She posted her errand runner in the thicket. She ran her thumb up the edge of the spear she’d given him and was pleased to see beads of blood well up. He’d whetted it as sharp as her need for vengeance.

  If he survived she’d make him rich. He wouldn’t survive. She couldn’t help that. The king’s bodyguard were berserks—his best fighters. She refilled the king’s mead cup and reentered the tent on the ship, where he slept.

  Late at night the king went on land, looking for a woman, as she knew he would. He was very drunk—she’d seen to that. It was very dark. When he reached the thicket, the boy leaped out and ran him through. The Hunting King fell into the water, dead.

  So far, the story of Queen Asa is what you’d expect of a Viking queen. She is tough, decisive, unbowed—but still helpless. She has, as sociologists say, no agency. She can plot revenge but not execute it. She can provide the spear but not make the thrust. She is reduced to getting her way through “deep-wrought wiles,” in the words of the ninth-century Norwegian poet Thjodolf of Hvin, who preserved Asa’s story for posterity. He called her wicked and the murder foul play.

  Snorri Sturluson didn’t say much more when he expanded on Thjodolf’s poem in Heimskringla. Yet, for me, the few lines he added change everything.

  The next morning the king’s killer, hacked down at the quayside, was seen to be the queen’s errand runner. King Gudrod’s warriors confronted her. Queen Asa, said Snorri, “did not deny it was her plan.” You’d expect her to be executed; instead, Snorri wrote, Asa “at once” took her infant son Halfdan and went south to Agdir. There, she “reigned over the kingdom that her father, Harald Redbeard, had ruled” until Halfdan the Black grew up. “He was eighteen years old when he took over the kingdom.”

  Battle scene carved on the side of the wooden wagon buried with the Oseberg queens in Vestfold, Norway.

  * * *

  Given the length of Snorri’s book, it’s easy to overlook what Queen Asa’s revenge reports about women and power in the Viking Age. At once she proceeded south. She established herself in Agdir as the ruling queen. What does that say about her agency, her ability to act independently?

  It says she needed no help from any man. Her father and brother and most of their warriors were dead—or still south in Agdir if they had escaped the Hunting King’s attack. She alone had been captured and kept captive, though queen in name. Her son was an infant. Alone she faced down her dead husband’s warband. Alone she faced down her son’s tall, handsome half brother. She faced down the chieftain at whose quay they were moored. She not only escaped punishment, she left at once. Regally. Like a warrior queen no one dared cross. She must have taken the royal ship. She must have taken all the ship contained, including its crew, whose sworn oaths she exacted. She returned to the kingdom of her birth and established herself there, ruling Agdir for seventeen years.

  Perhaps her own mother was still alive and ruled alongside her. Perhaps the two queens traveled north with eighteen-year-old Halfdan, when he added Vestfold to his kingdom, as Snorri tells us, reconquering the territories his older half brother had let slip from his grasp. Perhaps Queen Asa fought beside her son. Perhaps she died in battle in Vestfold and wa
s buried there in the most lavish Viking burial known, that of the Oseberg ship mound, up the Slag-Bank River near Tunsberg. Perhaps her mother died at about the same time and was buried in the same barrow—for two women were buried in the Oseberg ship.

  There are many theories about who these two women were. A queen and her slave? A sorceress and her assistant? A king’s mother and her companion? A queen and her mother, herself a queen? No one knows. One woman was between twenty-five and fifty-five, the other fifty to eighty, depending on how their ages are assessed; the higher the age at death, the less reliable are the estimates. One or both of the Oseberg women may have fought in battle: The younger woman had a broken collarbone that had begun to heal, as well as a fractured skull. The older woman badly injured her knee in her youth and had massive arm muscles; she died of cancer. Which one was Queen Asa? Probably neither. Though Asa has been linked to Oseberg since the ship burial was discovered in 1904 (one translation of “Oseberg” is “Asa’s Mound”), the scientific dating of the burial to 834 does not sync with the dates historians have deduced from Snorri’s sagas. DNA tests, likewise, kill the mother-daughter theory: The younger woman seems to have come from Persia.

  Still, like the story of Queen Asa’s revenge, the Oseberg burial underscores for me the power women held in ninth-century Vestfold: They ruled. When the warrior woman in Hervor’s Song says of her father’s sword, “I’d rather have it than rule all Norway,” she was speaking of real options.

  * * *

  The Oseberg grave mound was built to impress. It called for coordinated teams of laborers and the destruction of enormous wealth. The process took months. A deep pit 144 feet long was dug into the heavy blue clay, its bottom below the water table. A dragonship was floated up the narrow river, then portaged over a roadway of logs into the pit—by then a muddy pool—and turned so its high spiral stem faced the fjord, before being moored to a large stone.

  The ship alone was a symbol of wealth and power. It was built in the west of Norway, its keel and strakes shaped of oak from Hordaland, its accents of beech from the forest of Vollom, a beech woods so small and so far north of the species’ natural range that it must have been planted. Hidden in Hordaland’s maze of fjords, in a sheltered bay near the beech woods and with easy access to oak and pine, lay a revolutionary shipyard. Its shipwrights were artists, successfully marrying the north’s swift, sleek rowing boats with the ponderous sailing ships then plying the English Channel. Using two-handed axes with thin, narrow blades to fell the trees, and bearded axes (so called because their long cutting edge made the blade look, side on, like a bearded chin) to shape the boards into ship strakes, they made the famous vessel now known as the Oseberg ship. I think of it as the first Viking ship, but it’s merely the earliest one that’s been recovered in excellent condition. It was long thought unseaworthy—a queen’s pleasure barge, suitable for lakes—after a 1987 reconstruction sank in twenty seconds. But in 2006 an expert boatbuilder saw the pieces from the grave had been put together wrong. She oversaw the building of a new reconstruction, Saga Oseberg; a true warship, it easily sailed from Tunsberg, where it was built, to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, in 2015.

  The original Oseberg ship took a master shipwright and ten smiths, working twelve-hour days, seven months to a year to create. Seventy feet long, it required twelve large oak trees: one giant trunk at least fifty feet long for the keel, and eleven logs, each three feet in diameter by sixteen feet long, to provide the twelve long, horizontal strakes that, laid up from keel to gunwales, created the ship’s curving lines. The inch-thick strakes overlapped, giving the technique its name—lapstrake—and were clinched together with thousands of iron rivets. The ribs that stiffened the lapstrake skin against the pressure of the waves were carved from boughs with a natural bend and tied on with baleen from the jaws of whales. The stem and stern were part oak, part beech. The flooring of the deck was pine, as were the thirty oars and the tall mast. The square sail was woven from wool: It took the fleece of 150 sheep, handspun into more than 120 miles of thread, and handwoven into a thousand square feet of cloth. There was rigging to make too, ropes to plait of horsehair or walrus hide or hemp. And before the ship was coated with black pine tar, Oseberg’s stem and stern down to the keel were carved with beasts and people laced into long scrolls, fantastic, ecstatic, dancing, fighting, and grimacing to warn Ran’s daughters, the waves, away, like the “wave runes” the valkyrie Brynhild knew to carve, according to Volsunga Saga, so “no towering breakers, no waves of blue will fall, but you’ll be safe from the sea.”

  After the beautiful Oseberg ship was moored in the valley floor, beside the narrow Slag-Bank River, a burial chamber of sturdy logs was erected on the ship’s deck behind the mast. Aft of this chamber a complete kitchen was assembled, with iron pots, a frying pan, a dough trough, a quernstone, cups and platters, knives and spoons, and at least one black glass goblet. An ox was butchered and other foods were gathered: Archaeologists have found traces of rye flour, blueberries, apples, plums, and spices, including cumin, horseradish, and mustard.

  The chamber itself was furnished as a royal bedroom. Long, narrow tapestries lined the walls, one showing a battle scene, the other a ritual procession. Carved wooden beds with feather pillows and blankets woven of red and white wool filled most of the floor space. There were iron lamps on long poles, a chair, a stool, and a bast-fiber floor mat. A line of chests along the far wall had once held clothing (scraps of wool and silk showed their fine quality). There were shoes and combs, but no jewelry except for seven glass beads.

  The archaeologists who opened the grave in 1904 were also surprised to find no weapons, except for two hand axes. Instead there was a plethora of textile tools—looms, spindles, scissors, yarn—and other objects that seem to have had ritual use: a leather pouch of cannabis seeds for invoking a shamanistic trance; musical instruments, including a long wooden horn called a lur, whistles and a small bell, and five sets of rattles made of large, linked iron loops. One rattle was attached with rope to a splendidly carved wooden post topped with a snarling animal head. Four similar animal-head posts were found outside the bedroom.

  Once the kitchen and bedroom were prepared, the aft end of the ship was sealed under a mound of turf blocks, laid up in rows like bricks to a height of twenty feet, leaving a sheer wall behind the mast and an A-framed opening into the now-buried bedroom. The prow of the ship remained clear, creating a stage on which the rituals of the burial ceremony were performed. These may not have taken place for months—even years: A king in Snorri’s Heimskringla spends three summers overseeing the building of his own burial mound. Or one or both of the Oseberg queens may have died before the mound was begun and been laid to rest temporarily somewhere else, as was true for the funeral the Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan witnessed a hundred years later along the Vikings’ East Way. But at some point, the bodies of the two Oseberg queens were sealed in the bedroom, hurriedly, haphazardly, by workers drunk on burial ale, it seems, for the carpentry shows none of the skill or care put into the chamber itself or its furniture. The doorway was closed with wood scraps in odd sizes, with bent and broken nails.

  And then the gory spectacle began.

  Equipment for a long journey was tossed on board—some of it literally thrown: barrels and buckets, tents and collapsible beds, a beechwood saddle and harness fittings, dog collars and chains. A gorgeous wagon—a close match to the processional wagon depicted on one of the tapestries in the burial chamber—was drawn on board, along with three similar sleighs, all exuberantly carved with interlaced lines and faces and the goddess Freyja’s totem cats. The wagon and the sleighs were dragged through the traveling goods, smashing things indiscriminately.

  And then the animals were sacrificed. Fifteen horses were beheaded, their heads carried into the middle of the ship, their bodies scattered. Five dogs were killed, one, at least, also beheaded—its head was attached to a horsehead with a long chain. The screams of the animals, the stench of guts and dun
g, must have been overwhelming. Everything was bathed in blood.

  Finally, the beautiful ship and its contents were stoned—an enormous heap of stones was thrown onto the deck, crushing everything to splinters—before more blocks of turf were laid up some days or months later to complete the mound, leaving only the tip of the ship’s mast visible.

  The event would have been unforgettable. But it was not a unique occurrence. An almost identical burial took place at Gokstad, a mile from the Shining Hall, thirty years before Hervor was born. She would have known all about it.

  * * *

  The first people in the North burned their dead, Snorri writes in Heimskringla. They burned their possessions, too, for the god Odin had declared the dead could bring to Valhalla, the “Hall of the Slain,” whatever was with them on their funeral pyres.

  Two poems about the famous valkyrie Brynhild, who was betrayed by Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer and had him killed, describe the ritual in more detail. These poems, in the collection known as the Poetic Edda, may date from the Viking Age or might be later imitations. They were written down in Iceland by someone in Snorri’s circle, perhaps one of his nephews; the earliest manuscript of the Poetic Edda can be dated to about 1270. “Build me a pyre on the plain,” Brynhild says in one of these poems, ordering her own funeral before killing herself, “so broad that all who follow Sigurd to Hel find room beneath it. Cover it over with tents and shields and tapestries and many corpses”—five slave girls and eight slave boys were to be killed, plus her own (free) servant women, “adorned with jewelry,” and two hawks. Sigurd was to burn at her side, a sword placed between them.