The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  They were not all women: In the sagas, an equal number of men are named witches. They are both rich and poor, despised and well thought of. In most cases, their witchcraft is seen as a useful skill, accorded no moral judgment at all. Egil the Poet, the hero of Egil’s Saga, for example, was taught magic by his foster mother. When handed a poisoned drinking horn at a feast, Egil not only detected the danger, he knew what to do: He carved runes onto the horn and gave them power with his blood and his words. He magically shattered the cup, and the poison spilled harmlessly to the floor.

  It was Queen Gunnhild who tried to poison Egil. In this saga she is the chief villain, and her witchcraft—but not Egil’s—is condemned. To Snorri Sturluson, writing for a Christian audience in the mid-1200s, it was beside the point that Egil had rudely disrupted an important ritual: a dísablót led by Gunnhild on Atley Isle during the Winter Nights in the late 930s. Snorri says little about the ritual in this saga, but he paints a fuller picture of the rites in Heimskringla. There he quotes the poem of the Yngling kings. There he describes the altars and the walls of the temple, both inside and out, as reddened with blood. Blood was borne around in a bowl and the people were splattered, too, using bundles of twigs “made like the sprinklers priests use for holy water.” The meat of the sacrificed beasts was stewed in large cauldrons, and everyone was served beer with which to toast the deities. Other sagas describe the singing and soothsaying, the contests and sports that took place during the feasts held on the eve of winter, over three nights around the autumnal equinox. The bloody slaughter of the bull, in my dramatization, was reconstructed by archaeologists based on finds of cattle skulls beside a temple in Iceland, while the ritual procession is best depicted in one of the tapestries buried in the Oseberg ship.

  * * *

  Witch, seer, sorceress, shaman, wisewoman, woman of power, priestess—Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings is all of these, and none of them. I know of no English word that properly describes her role in the ritual. Nor, though I can describe some of what went on, thanks to Snorri, can I know what a dísablót signified in the mid-tenth century, when Hervor, the warrior woman buried in Birka grave Bj581, was growing up. Literally, the term means “a sacrifice,” or blót, to or for the dísir—but no one today knows who the dísir were.

  Reconstruction of the ritual procession shown in the Oseberg tapestry, based on the work of artist Mary Storm.

  Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and good harvests, and Skadi, goddess of winter and the hunt, are both called dís (singular of dísir) by Viking Age poets. The word sometimes seems to be a generic term for “goddess.”

  The norns are dísir: These ancient female spirits rule the fates of both deities and humans; their judgment is law, final and unavoidable. Even the chief god, Odin, must abide by the word of these women.

  Some valkyries are also called dísir—and at least one dís who is named a valkyrie is also called a norn. The valkyries in sagas and songs appear as armed and helmeted horsewomen (maybe mortal, maybe not), and as troll women pouring troughs of blood over a battlefield, and in the form of swans. The valkyries “choose the slain,” as their name literally says, deciding who will die on the battlefield. Some stories say the god Odin tells them whom to choose and punishes them when they disobey; some say they report to Freyja, not Odin; and some stories say the choice of whom to kill is their own.

  The dísir include nature spirits, living in rocks and hills, rivers and trees, or masquerading as humans; they are stewards of the earth’s resources, safeguarding its fertile soils, its forests, its animal life, its salt and ores. Sometimes they are referred to as elves, sometimes as giantesses, and sometimes as fetches, a type of guardian spirit that can take the shape of an animal or a human.

  The dísir have power over life and death, often guarding and guiding certain individuals or families—or even nations. Many place-names in Norway and Sweden refer to the dísir. These spirits, always female, are associated with rituals, assemblies, and marketplaces, but the picture I am left with is mostly a blur. It may be that the different names of the dísir describe not beings, natural or supernatural, but roles.

  That I can discover so little about the dísir I chalk up to the biases of Snorri Sturluson. Author of our two best sources on Norse mythology, Snorri wasted few words on females, human or divine. They did not fit his audience or his purpose. He wrote his Edda in about 1220 for the sixteen-year-old Norwegian king to complete (or counteract) the boy’s education by Christian bishops. Snorri’s Edda—not to be confused with The Poetic Edda—was a handbook of myths and short quotations meant, ostensibly, to teach the young king to appreciate the court poetry of the ancient North, with its many allusions to mythology. Snorri’s real goal was to gain an influential position as court poet himself and to become the king’s counselor. Snorri wrote Heimskringla, his collection of sagas of the kings of Norway, during the same king’s reign, again to impress the younger man. Women in both books are honored mothers or objects of lust, Mary or Eve, as they were in Snorri’s own lifetime. It was the orthodox view of women in medieval Christian society, where even marriage and childbirth were considered matters for churchmen to control.

  But Snorri gives us glimpses of the myths he left out, as do several poems he quotes. One of these is the Norse creation myth. In the beginning two driftwood logs, one elm and one ash, are found on the seashore by three wandering gods. These gods give the wood human shape and bring it to life with blood, breath, and curious minds. Unlike the Christian creation myth, where Eve is an afterthought, fashioned out of Adam’s rib, in the Norse myth Embla (the female) and Ask (the male) are equal: They are made at the same time out of nearly the same stuff. As different as an ash tree and an elm, they make a good team.

  Likewise when the Norse deities gather in council by the Well of Fate, each one sits on a chair or throne, a mark of authority. Portable chairs are scarce in Viking Age sources, but one was found in the Oseberg ship mound; its boxy, throne-like shape is uncannily like that of the tiny silver chair amulets found in some rich female graves in Birka and elsewhere. Sitting on their chairs in the council, the goddesses have an equal say in the issues under discussion. The goddesses are “no less holy” than the gods, Snorri concedes, “and no less powerful.” In council, the gods and goddesses determined the calendar, planning when markets, festivals, and assemblies should be held. They determined the standards of weights and measures that transformed precious metals and lengths of cloth into currency. They determined how oaths should be sworn and when blood money should be paid for a crime.

  Individually, the dísir have other powers. The norns (sometimes three, sometimes more) set down the laws and created the runic alphabet used for writing down ordinary speech—such as records of ownership—as well as for acts of magic and soothsaying. The goddess Eir is “an excellent physician,” Snorri says—and tells us nothing else about her or her art. Likewise, the goddess Vor is so “wise and questioning” that “nothing can be hidden from her.” The goddess Syn watches at the doors of the hall and locks out “those who should not enter”; she is also a lawyer, speaking for the defense “in court cases she wishes to prove untrue.” Hlin guards people the goddess Frigg “wishes to protect from danger,” and Gna rides a horse “over wind and sea” to attend to Frigg’s business. What that business is remains unclear, but Frigg may sit beside her husband, Odin, on the high seat, a kind of watchtower from which they can see “over all the worlds,” marking everyone’s behavior and understanding everything they see. She—not Odin—also knows everyone’s fate, though she chooses not to reveal it. Odin may be known for his wisdom, but his wife, having foresight, is wiser than he and gives better advice. The people of Hervor’s day, in the tenth century, would have known stories of all these goddesses. The people of Snorri’s day, in the thirteenth, knew some stories too—how else were their names remembered through two hundred years of Christian teaching? But Snorri chose not to record those stories. The mythology he bequeathed us is less than half the who
le.

  Snorri does tell an amusing tale about Skadi, the goddess of winter, of skiing, and of the hunt—its adolescent humor was certain to appeal to his adolescent male audience. He describes Skadi as a warrior woman, a shield-maid or valkyrie figure, and daughter of a giant. When her father was killed by the god Loki’s tricks, Skadi “took up her helmet and ringmail byrnie and weapons of war” and set off to avenge him. To avoid a fight, Odin offered her compensation: In lieu of blood money, he would turn her father’s eyes into two stars in the sky and Loki would make her laugh (unforgettably, by tying a rope around the beard of a goat and the other end around his own testicles). Finally, Skadi could choose a husband from among all the gods (by looking only at their feet). Skadi chose the sea god Njord, but their marriage did not work out. He hated the howling of wolves, she despised the cries of gulls, and they agreed to live apart; her realm was in the mountains, his down by the sea.

  Skadi may be the winter face of the fertility goddess Freyja, who in Snorri’s account is beautiful and sad, fond of love songs and gaudy jewelry, with a cat-drawn carriage and a wandering husband for whom she weeps tears of gold. In Snorri’s tales, Freyja exists “primarily as an object of lust for male giants,” notes one expert. It’s easy to overlook Snorri’s own comment, based on an older poem, that “wherever she rides in battle, she claims half of the dead, and half go to Odin,” for Snorri tells us nothing more about Freyja as battle-goddess. Those enormous cats who draw her carriage? Picture them as mountain lions, not house cats.

  The poem Snorri cites makes it clear that the spirits of all warriors slain in battle go first to Freyja: She decides which ones will stay in her roomy hall at Folkvang (Field of Warriors), and which ones she will send on to Odin’s Valhalla (Hall of the Slain). From this it appears that the mythological valkyries must report to the goddess Freyja first—that she, not the god Odin, is the chief of these “choosers of the slain.” These warrior women may originally have been Freyja’s bodyguard or special forces, just as the berserks, those men who “threw off their ringmail and were mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields and were strong as bears or bulls,” as Snorri describes them, were the special troops of Odin. Men who are especially fierce and reckless fighters are called berserks in the sagas, without it meaning that they are truly superhuman. The same may be true of the warrior women called valkyries.

  * * *

  Odin’s position as chief god of the Norse pantheon—the “All-Father,” as Snorri names him—may, in fact, be a late development influenced by Christianity. Before the Viking Age, religion in the North was local. As many Scandinavian place-names reveal, the people in some places worshipped the fertility goddess Freyja and her twin brother, Freyr, while in other places they worshipped Thor the Thunderer or Njord, a god of the sea.

  Odin, the latecomer, was worshipped mostly by chieftains and warrior kings with national ambitions: Fewer places are named after him. These aristocrats saw an advantage in having one high god—a god not linked to any specific place, one whose power lay not in blessing the land or in harnessing nature, but in the intangible rewards of the afterlife. Odin, like Christ, gave little to the living but much to the dead. Once the Norse accepted the notion of one high god, impersonal and remote, whose rewards were long delayed, might they not also accept the idea of a king who lived far away, one they rarely saw and got little good out of, who was chosen by or descended from that one high god and granted his power?

  Though considered a warrior god, wisdom, not strength or courage, is Odin’s chief attribute. He has many features of a shaman, the religious leader of the reindeer-herding Sami in the far north, with whom the Vikings traded for furs and walrus ivory. According to the myths, Odin gave up an eye for a sip from the well of wisdom. He stabbed himself with a spear and hung on a tree, without food, without drink, for nine nights—sacrificing himself to himself, the poet says—to gain access to the wisdom of the runes and other magic lore.

  But Odin was not the first Norse deity to go through such an initiation rite. A goddess named Gullveig also sacrificed herself for knowledge, was stabbed and burned, but defied death and lived, becoming a seer and a practitioner of magic. Her name literally means Golden Drink or Golden Intoxication. She may be the original goddess of beer and of poetry and song, as Odin afterward came to be.

  Gullveig, once initiated into these mysteries, taught them to other women, including the goddess Freyja, who then taught this witchcraft to Odin. A witch knew the battle magic that caused enemies to be blind or deaf or terrified and their swords to bite no better than sticks. She could shape-shift, like a shaman, into a bird or beast, fish or serpent, and travel to distant lands. She could disguise a person as a goat, a horse, a pig, a wooden chest, a distaff, or whatever she liked. She could make herself, or anyone else, invisible. She could carve and read runes, cast lots to tell the future, and interpret dreams. She knew charms to find buried treasure, to bring sickness, misfortune, or death. She brewed love potions and poisons, knew how to keep a woman from conceiving a child and how to ease a birth. She could heal wounds, set bones, and make someone proof against iron weapons. She could extinguish fires, calm the sea, and turn the winds with a word. She could conjure up darkness and mist, blizzards or earthquakes. She could fill the sea with fish.

  As Odin’s teacher, Freyja is the older and more powerful deity. Her name came to mean “lady,” Snorri notes: not as in “wife of the lord” but as in “female ruler.” “She became so famous,” he writes, “that all noble women were called by her name, as they are now, also those women who control their own property or own a farm.” Frau in German and fru in the modern Scandinavian languages are titles derived from Freyja’s name.

  As the original Norse fertility goddess, Freyja is an avatar of the Great Goddess, who is both Mother Earth and the goddess of the sun: In Norse mythology, unlike that of many other cultures, the all-powerful sun is female, while the changeable moon is male. Cult objects from before the Viking Age in Scandinavia prominently feature the sun. As the power of Odin rose, these sun symbols were replaced by images of warriors. Rites and sacrifices that used to be held outdoors, in wooded groves or hills or beside holy lakes, moved indoors, into a chieftain’s hall or into a temple, or “god house,” patterned on Christian basilicas. As the holy space moved from a natural, fixed site to an artificial, movable one, the focus of worship also changed, moving from the natural world to the human one—and from the many goddesses and gods of nature to a male, humanlike god. Power, not fertility, became the ultimate divine gift.

  * * *

  Hervor knew nothing of the waning of the power of Freyja and the presumption of Odin. If she did help Queen Gunnhild perform a dísablót as a girl, she would not have doubted that fertility was power, for Gunnhild herself embodied the goddess. In addition to giving Eirik advice, strengthening his ambition, organizing his traveling household, and taking matters into her own hands, when necessary, Gunnhild bore nine children—nine, that is, who lived past infancy. Five of them shared the title of king, earning her the name Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings.

  What was Eirik’s role as king? “Long ago,” sang the poet, “the sword-bearers bloodied their swords with kings’ blood … in hope of future harvests.” When a king was killed, and his blood mixed into the earth, the famine would lift and a fruitful summer follow. In the oldest Norse texts, a king guaranteed his people’s prosperity by shedding blood: sometimes his own. Prosperity was defined as a good harvest of grain, which in most of the Viking world meant barley. And barley meant beer.

  7

  THE VALKYRIES’ TASK

  Girl. Bring more beer.

  Eirik Bloodaxe is black-haired and handsome, big, bold, and blessed with victory, the poets say, but Hervor finds him grim, glum, and cold. Quick to fly into a rage, he takes ages to reach any kind of a decision, sucking on it like a toothache. He could not be more unlike Queen Gunnhild, whose sharp mind snaps through the knottiest problems with the teeth of a wolf.

  Still, Ei
rik Bloodaxe is king, so Hervor hustles to do his bidding.

  It is the third night of the Winter Nights feast, and everyone is feeling the effects of too much drinking. Hervor’s head pounds. Bard of Atley Isle, preparing to welcome his king and queen, brewed a huge vat of beer—not so huge as the legendary vat King Fjolnir drowned in, but large enough that everyone can drink a full hornful for each toast, instead of sharing one horn between two people, as usual. No one goes thirsty at Bard’s feasts. No one goes clearheaded to bed. It’s a matter of pride.

  Still, by the third night, the beer vat is running low. Hervor has to lean down into it to fill a fresh bucketful. If she weren’t so tall for her age, she’d need help. As it is, her tunic is wet where she bent over the vat’s lip and her sleeve ends are dripping, her hands sticky, as she lugs the heavy bucket through the crowded hall, sidling between lolling bodies, climbing over limp limbs, taking special care not to spill it.

  For the king, for the king, she hisses, when someone tries to stop her.

  They pluck at her arms; they pat her back. She ignores them. All that exists is that tall, carved seat beside the longfire, where Eirik sits wrapped in his festival robes, brooding. All Hervor wants is to get there before Eirik’s angry bellow makes the room ring with sudden silence. Queen Gunnhild is not at his side, and their host, Bard, keeps disappearing from the feast hall. Eirik’s mood is as black as it gets.