The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Hervor knows that could be a problem. But she never expected it to be her problem. She is the queen’s ward. Eirik doesn’t even know who she is—except the girl bringing him beer. He glares at her as she reaches his side, as if to say, What took you so long? She smiles to appease him, though it has no effect, then concentrates on steadying the heavy bucket while he dips his silver-rimmed drinking horn, splashing beer over the side and dribbling it down her already sticky-slick hand.

  Then King Eirik speaks. To her. He grabs her sleeve, sloshing more beer out of the bucket, and growls, Who does Bard have out in the barn? Who is he attending to, when he should be in here with me?

  Hervor doesn’t really know, but she realizes she’d better answer. Quick.

  A boat came, she says. When it was raining. They were hungry and cold.

  From somewhere in her pounding head a name pops out: Olvir?

  Eirik nods. Olvir. His expression eases. Hervor begins to breathe again.

  Tell him to join the feast, Eirik commands.

  The old man, Olvir, comes in disheveled, as if he’s just woken from sleep. His tunic is salt-stained and damp and definitely not festival garb. They landed on Atley Isle by accident, he says. The wind held them back, and by dark they’d rowed only this far. They had not intended to interrupt Eirik’s Winter Nights Feast. They’re headed elsewhere, to collect taxes owed Chieftain Thorir, Eirik’s old foster father, who cared for him when he was three—

  Eirik waves away Olvir’s explanations. Sit and drink, he says.

  The people on the benches across the longfire make room. Bard himself brings beakers of beer for Olvir and the big man who sits down next to him, a young fellow no one bothers to introduce.

  That’s a mistake, Hervor thinks. Though his beard is sparse, the boy is huge—even brawnier than King Eirik. He is uglier, too, with a frown even more menacing than the king’s. He too is damp and disheveled, but while Olvir looks exhausted, this boy looks ready to erupt. He snatches the beer cup out of Bard’s hand and drinks it down, toasting the king. On the next toast, he drinks both his own and Olvir’s cups—the old man looks ready to pass out. Bard waves Hervor over, takes her beer bucket, and refills both cups.

  You look thirsty, boy, Bard says. That won’t do.

  He pointedly hands one cup to Olvir.

  Bard shouldn’t have baited the boy, Hervor thinks. And, indeed, after draining his cup, the boy gets to his feet.

  You told the trolls’ foe

  you were flat out of ale—

  at a Winter Nights feast?

  You foul blasphemer.

  A cheap host it is

  who cheats a guest.

  Your lies, Bard, leave

  a bad taste in my mouth.

  Don’t mock your betters, boy, Bard replies.

  The boy takes Olvir’s cup, drains it, and holds the two cups out again. I’m just thirsty, he says. But you, of course, are all out of beer, like you told us when we arrived—when you served us sour whey and said you wished you could offer us a better welcome.

  When Hervor’s beer bucket is empty, Bard pulls her aside. Go to the queen, he says. Tell her that ugly young man is mocking us, claiming to be thirsty no matter how much he drinks.

  Queen Gunnhild is well aware of what is going on in the hall. She takes a vial of liquid from a pouch at her belt and pours a few drops into a horn of beer. She tells Hervor to take it to the boy.

  Hervor walks straight and tall, her hands still, her face blank. Without the beer bucket, no one pays her any mind. It seems to take forever to squeeze her way through the crowd. When she reaches the boy, he is leaning over the drunken Olvir, trying to slap him awake. Hervor waits until he looks up.

  She hands him the drinking horn. From the queen, she says.

  The ugly boy glares at her, but she knows he will read nothing in her face.

  Then he surprises her. He draws his eating knife and carves runes on the horn. He pricks his palm and reddens the runes with his own blood, then whispers a verse. The horn splits apart, and the poisoned beer spills into the straw. He watches for Hervor to react, and when she doesn’t, he hoists Olvir up and half drags, half carries the old man to the door.

  Vikings in long gowns, including a cup bearer, each less than an inch tall.

  Just as they reach it, Bard rushes up with a new beer horn. Olvir, he says, you must drink a parting toast to the king.

  The boy grabs the horn and throws it on the floor, then draws his sword and thrusts it into Bard’s belly. Bard and Olvir collapse at the same time, and by the time King Eirik has a light brought, he finds the one dead and the other passed out, the floor a pool of vomit and blood.

  Find that boy and bring him to me! King Eirik says.

  They search the island, seize all the boats, but Bard’s killer has escaped.

  * * *

  The figure of a cup bearer appears on several Viking Age amulets and stone carvings. She is said to be a woman because of her long hair and long dress, yet many Viking kings and warriors, like Harald Fairhair, are famous for long hair, and several—including Egil the Poet—owned ceremonial silk gowns so long they dragged on the ground; Egil’s was embroidered with gold and had gold buttons all down the front.

  The cup bearer is often compared to the Lady with the Mead Cup, an archetype based on the character of Queen Wealhtheow in the Old English epic Beowulf. Scholars have written whole books on how Wealhtheow served the mead: Entering the hall with the intoxicating golden drink, she drew all eyes. By offering the cup first to the king, she enacted “an archaic ritual of lordship” that underscored his preeminence. As she brought the cup to the warriors, each in turn, she fixed their status, their rank in the king’s band. By drinking, the warriors accepted that ranking and assented to the king’s rule. “So did the queen act to help achieve cohesion and unity of purpose between lord and follower in the royal hall,” says one scholar.

  And so did Bard—not Queen Gunnhild—at the Winter Nights feast on Atley Isle, according to this scene I’ve retold from Egil’s Saga (and in which I’ve substituted Hervor for the unnamed beer server). It was Bard who brought the ceremonial cup to the newcomers, Olvir and Egil, and Bard who insisted Olvir should not leave the hall without a final toast to King Eirik, assenting to the king’s rule. A ritual of lordship the serving of alcohol may be; it was not necessarily a woman’s task.

  Amulets of a cup bearer are often found in women’s graves. Despite this fact, the figure is commonly said to be a valkyrie welcoming a dead (male) warrior to Valhalla. Snorri Sturluson, once again, is the source of this misinterpretation. It was the valkyries’ task to “serve in Valhalla, bringing drinks and taking care of the cups and beer casks,” Snorri, writing in the thirteenth century, says.

  Yet two tenth-century poems describe dead kings arriving at the doors of Valhalla, and neither one is greeted by a valkyrie with a cup. In one poem, the Christian King Hakon is met by a pair of pagan gods, who promise, “You will receive ale from the Aesir,” a collective term for the male gods Odin, Thor, Tyr, and many others.

  In the second poem, Odin is alarmed to learn that the great Eirik Bloodaxe himself has been killed in battle; the god cries out:

  What did I dream?

  Just before daybreak

  I readied Valhalla,

  or so I imagined,

  for a host of the slain.

  I woke up the Einherjar:

  Get up! Scatter straw

  on all the bare benches,

  wash out the beer cups!

  Valkyries! Bring wine,

  for a war leader arrives!

  At the doors of Valhalla Eirik is met, not by valkyries carrying wine, but by the heroes Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer and his brother Sinfjotli.

  Eirik Bloodaxe’s death song is the earlier of the two poems. It may have sparked the tenth-century fashion for gone-to-Valhalla verses to commemorate Christian kings—for while ruling York in England, both Eirik and Gunnhild converted to the new faith. Eirik’s eulogy, w
ritten after he died in England about 954, may have been composed by Queen Gunnhild, who is known to have been a poet. If so, her sense of humor has been sadly underappreciated. Here the great heroes and berserks of the Einherjar or “Lone-Fighters,” the army of Odin, are “being forced out of bed early, like recalcitrant teenagers, to wash the beer mugs,” as one scholar puts it, while the death-dealing valkyries masquerade as serving wenches. It’s a spoof, a parody of pagan beliefs, not a portrayal by a true believer in Valhalla.

  * * *

  Analyzing those amulets and other images of a cup bearer, most scholars say the woman is offering the cup to someone unseen. It’s not the only possible interpretation. “How close must a drinking horn be next to an (alleged) woman, before the idea comes to mind that she actually could have taken a sip herself?” asks a feminist critic. Couldn’t she be raising her own cup to make a toast or take a vow? “Why is the thought of women drinking so utterly neglected?” The answer, again, is because our understanding of the Viking Age took shape during the Victorian Age, when well-bred ladies were excluded from rowdy drinking parties.

  Yet even the misogynist Snorri gives a more balanced picture. It was the custom in some kings’ halls, he writes in Heimskringla, “that in the evenings they should drink in pairs, two by two, one man and one woman, if possible, and those that were left over should drink all together.” Toasts were drunk to the ancestors and to the gods, and boasts were made. At one feast, “King Ingjald stood up and lifted up a great drinking horn. He made this vow, that he would double the size of his realm in every direction, or else die. Then he drank the horn dry.” At another feast, Hildigunn “took a silver cup, filled it, and took it over to King Hjorvard. ‘All hail to the Ylflings, in memory of Hrolf Kraki,’ she said. She drank off half the cup and handed it to the king.”

  Nor did the women shyly retire after a courteous sip. The widowed queen Sigrid the Strong-Minded invited a potential husband, a king, to a feast. “The king and the queen sat on the high-seat and drank together all evening.… And when the king had taken off his clothes and gone to his rest, the queen came in to him and filled his cup herself. She urged him to drink up—she was most agreeable. The king was completely drunk; both of them were.”

  Egil, whom Queen Gunnhild had failed to poison, attended a feast where people were to drink two by two, the pairs determined by lot. “The people threw their lots onto a square of cloth and the earl picked them out. The earl had a very handsome daughter who had just come of age. The way the lots fell, Egil was to sit beside the earl’s daughter for the evening, but she wandered around the room, enjoying herself. Egil stood up and went to where she had been sitting all day. And when everyone took their seats, she returned to her old seat.” Seeing Egil there, she challenged him in verse:

  Who said this seat was yours, boy?

  Seldom have you drawn sword.

  From you the wolf gets no flesh.

  My flesh likes sitting solo.

  You’ve never seen the crow caw

  on corpses slain at harvest;

  when shell-sharp swords came slashing

  you shied away, and stayed home.

  Egil answered her with a boasting verse—I’ve borne a bloodstained sword—and “they drank together that evening and both had a fine time.”

  * * *

  I imagine Hervor got drunk at feasts like other girls in tenth-century Norway. Nor was she stuck in the kitchen, as the Victorian model of the Viking Age led us to assume. Preparing a feast was a great deal of work, but it wasn’t women’s work. Pots and pans and festival food were found in both the Gokstad (male) and Oseberg (female) royal burials, while at Kaupang kitchen equipment appears in slightly more men’s graves than women’s.

  Hervor would have been taught kitchen skills, of course. Boys and girls needed to know how to grind barley to make bread, for example, though they may not have been called upon to do it often. The tool used was a hand quern: two heavy discs of stone, each about a foot in diameter, the top one with a center hole and a side handle. While the top disc was rotated, seeds were fed into the center hole. The steadier the stream, the lower the friction; with less friction, the millstones lasted longer and the flour was less tainted with stone dust (which wore away the enamel on your teeth). About a pound of grain could be ground at a time. After two passes through the mill, one experimenter found, barleycorns were ground fine enough for porridge. To make bread flour called for another four or five passes, with the flour sieved each time and the coarser grains reground. “The time and effort needed,” he writes, “suggests that one would produce only enough flour to cover the needs of the day.” It was so strenuous that scientists blame habitual grinding when they find skeletons with tears in their shoulder joints.

  It was the kind of work Vikings forced their captives to perform; two poems that mention querns point out that the grinders are enslaved. The warrior Helgi, cornered by his enemies, escaped capture by trading clothes with a slave girl and taking over her task. His enemy remarked, “That’s no farm girl standing by the quern. The stones are cracking. The handle is flying around.” That’s not so surprising, Helgi’s accomplice explained. His slave was a valkyrie: “She dared to fight as a Viking,” before she was captured and put in chains.

  In the second poem, King Frodi bought two strong women to grind his magic millstone, which produced not only flour, but “whatever the grinder wished it to.” Frodi told them to grind out gold, first, and then peace and plenty. The women began their task cheerfully. They sang a working song, the poem says, and made the quernstone whirl around.

  But the king gave them no rest. “Sleep no longer than it takes me to recite a poem!” he ordered.

  The women got angry. “You were not very wise,” they told Frodi, “when you bought your slaves. You chose us for strength and looks and asked nothing about our background.” Before they were captured and enslaved, they had been warrior women: They killed berserks, broke shields, killed one king, and helped another. They said:

  This went on

  for many years:

  As heroes we

  were widely known—

  with keen spears

  we cut

  blood from bone.

  Our blades were red.

  They ordered the quernstone to grind out an army to overthrow Frodi. “Let’s turn the mill-handle harder! We’re not yet covered in corpse-blood.”

  This poem itself is a working song. I can imagine Hervor singing it as she ground the day’s grain. It’s a merciless song, a song to inspire a young warrior woman.

  * * *

  If she was taught to grind barley into bread flour, Hervor would also have learned to brew it into beer and ale. Bread was not essential for a Viking feast, but beer—or some other liquor—was, and most of the barley harvest in the North likely went for brewing. In some versions of the Icelandic law code, written down in the thirteenth century, brewing is a specifically female task. But other copies of the laws, as well as poems and sagas, show that men were just as likely to be brewers. In one poem, Thor the Thunderer ordered Aegir, a god of the sea, to provide a feast for all the deities.

  Aegir disliked Thor’s attitude. He sent Thor on a wild-goose chase: “Bring me a big enough cauldron,” he said, “that I can brew beer for all of you.” Unexpectedly, Thor succeeded, returning with a giant cauldron a mile deep. So Aegir set to work.

  The process the sea-god followed, as Hervor would have learned it, began by turning barley into malt. The grain had already been harvested, then threshed and winnowed to separate the seed from the chaff. Handed a sack of barleycorns, Hervor set it in a stream to soak for several days. Then she spread the seeds in a single layer on the paved floor of a dark, breezy barn and allowed the grain to sprout. When rootlets appeared, she gathered the grain and dried it in an oven, then crushed it and warmed it with water in an iron cauldron, simmering over a fire, or in a wooden vat warmed by dropping in hot rocks heated in a fireplace.

  Once the mash was swe
et enough, Hervor strained it, collecting the malt liquid in a separate vessel. If the liquid was cloudy, she repeated this step—altogether a messy, sticky process—then boiled the sweet barley juice, or wort. After it cooled a bit, if she stirred it with the same stick used for the previous batch, the wort became infected with yeast—a good thing, allowing it, given three or four days in a warm, covered vat, to ferment into beer or ale (depending on the type of yeast).

  But if she did not keep the vat and other tools clean, she introduced bacteria that ruined the batch, so constant fresh water was crucial. She might use ten times more water cleaning than went into her beer. The archaeological signs of a Viking Age brewhouse, like one found on Orkney, thus include a malting floor, a large fireplace, fire-cracked rocks, a drying oven, and a well-planned system of drains. The Orkney brewhouse, set next to the feast hall, was once identified, mistakenly, as a bathhouse.

  At several points in the process, Hervor may have been taught to add herbs to the beer. Some herbs, like hops, which was known to the Vikings but was not widely available, acted as preservatives. Others gave the beer flavor, color, and other properties. Marsh rosemary turned it spicy and red; yarrow made it bitter and astringent. Bog myrtle gave beer a sour taste, balancing out the sweetness of the malt; it also enhanced the brew’s alcoholic effect, acting as a sedative, even a narcotic: Some drinkers describe it as “stupefying.” Overindulged, it produces a “whopping” headache. Psychotropic herbs added to beer might be what caused Viking warriors to go berserk.

  Heavy drinking was standard at a Viking feast, yet drunkenness was frowned upon. When Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer asked the valkyrie Brynhild for advice, she taught him “beer runes” to carve on his drinking horn or on his fingernail or to tattoo onto the back of his hand. These would keep him from making drunken advances to a woman and protect him from beer “blended with poison.” But the best way to stay safe at a feast, she warned, was to keep your wits about you and never fight while drunk. She said: