The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  10

  THE TRAGEDY OF BRYNHILD

  Ragnhild bends beneath a fish-oil lamp, squinting her eyes to count the fine threads of the tapestry loom. She has a deft hand and under her mother’s praise has warmed to the task.

  Hervor hates such fussy work, but today a new skáld is with them, telling a story while plucking a horsetail harp—the same story pictured in the tapestry they’re weaving. It is Hervor’s favorite story: the tragedy of Brynhild.

  High on Hindarfell stood a hall,

  wrapped around in flame.

  Witches lit those fires

  of blazing river-light.

  There on the mountain

  slept a battle-wise warrior.

  The warrior, Hervor knows, was Brynhild. She was a shield-maid, a valkyrie. She fought in wars, killed kings. But now she was being forced to give up her weapons and marry.

  The poet says it was Odin’s punishment: Brynhild killed a king to whom the war god himself had promised victory.

  Hervor thinks that’s nonsense. She suspects Brynhild was badly wounded and could no longer fight well enough. Or she was a princess like Ragnhild, and her family needed her to marry to make an alliance.

  Brynhild, however, resisted. She had no desire to be married or to become a mother. She cried:

  I am a shield-maid.

  I wear a helmet

  among the warrior kings,

  and I wish to remain

  in their warband.

  I was in battle

  with the King of Gardariki

  and our weapons were red

  with blood.

  This is what I desire.

  I want to fight.

  Her kin would not hear of it. They said she must marry. They said it was Odin’s will.

  Where is Gardariki? Hervor interrupts.

  On the East Way, answers Queen Gunnhild. As far from Orkney as you can imagine.

  Remember that name: Gardariki, Hervor tells herself, the Kingdom of Fortresses. Someday she will go there.

  Brynhild swore an oath, the skáld continues, his ringing voice demanding silence.

  Brynhild swore to marry only a man who knew no fear. She called for the fiery wall to be kindled around her hall on high Hindarfell. Only a man without fear could make his horse jump the wall of flame—only that man would she marry. This oath she swore by a ship’s strakes and the circle of a shield, by a mare’s back and a blade’s edge.

  If I break my oath,

  may I be cursed

  and slain

  by my own weapons.

  May my sword not bite

  unless it whistles

  above my own head.

  Brynhild sealed her oath with a toast. But it was not to be.

  Gunnar, it was, who wanted to marry Brynhild. He and his companions rode to her father’s hall. Her father was agreeable, provided Brynhild did not refuse. She is so proud, he said, she will only marry a man of her own choosing.

  They rode on to her foster father’s hall, and he directed them to Brynhild’s own hall on the mountaintop. The only man she will marry, he warned, is the one who rides through the wall of flames.

  Gunnar could not make his horse leap the blazing fire. He took his brother-in-law Sigurd’s stallion, but horses feel their rider’s fear, and Gunnar’s infected his mount: The stallion would not leap. Not until Sigurd took on Gunnar’s likeness, by magic, and rode the stallion himself would the greathearted horse leap the fiery wall.

  The fire flared up,

  the earth quaked.

  Flames leaped high

  into the sky.

  He rode as if

  into oblivion.

  The fire sank down.

  Sigurd dismounted and went into the hall, the skáld continues. He had Gunnar’s appearance and bearing, but his own eloquence and intellect. Brynhild sat on her throne with her sword in her hand, her helmet on her head, wearing a ringmail byrnie. Sigurd called himself Gunnar and asked for her hand. She refused him, until he charged her to remember her oath: She swore to marry the man who rode through the fire.

  Her own oath had trapped her. It was binding and irrevocable.

  Swear no oaths

  you won’t hold to.

  Breaking faith

  brings a terrible fate:

  To be forever outcast,

  cut off like a wolf.

  She took the man who called himself Gunnar to her bed. And though he set between them a ring-hilted sword of sharp-edged iron, a wound-wand braided round with gold, its edges forged in fire and patterned inside with poison drops; though he did not kiss her nor take her into his arms, but lay with her like a sister—still in Brynhild’s eyes it was her wedding night. She had married the man who had no fear. Her oath was fulfilled.

  Her father held a wedding feast, where she clasped Gunnar’s hand (the real Gunnar this time) and shared his wine. She followed him back to his home, where she lived happily, weaving a tapestry with golden threads, until his sister, Gudrun, revealed that it was not, in fact, Gunnar who rode through the wall of flame. It was Gudrun’s own husband, Sigurd, who did so in disguise. It was Sigurd who had no fear.

  Brynhild had been tricked. Her oath had been broken. Her husband had not braved the wall of flame but had sent another man in his stead. Brynhild was married to a fearful man after all, a man who’d gone white as a corpse when he’d faced her magic fire.

  She struck her tapestry so hard it tore apart. She kicked open her chamber door so everyone could hear her anger. Her shouts echoed throughout the fortress. She took to her bed and would neither eat nor drink. Even Sigurd could not console her. She raged at him:

  How dare you come see me!

  No one has behaved worse

  toward me in this trickery!

  What hurts most is I cannot

  find a way to redden

  a sharp blade with your blood.

  She was an oath breaker, an outcast, a wolf, cursed to be killed by her own sword. Gunnar and his brothers, on her orders, killed Sigurd. Then Brynhild turned her sword on herself: She knew her honor could not be repaired unless she and Sigurd, her true husband, shared the same fate.

  And so, says the skáld, the tale of Brynhild comes to its tragic end.

  In the sudden silence, as he wets his lips before launching into a new song, the lines of the poem swirl in Hervor’s head: I am a shield-maid. I wear a helmet among the warrior kings … I was in battle with the King of Gardariki and our weapons were red with blood. This is what I desire.

  This is what I desire.

  This is what I desire.

  I want to fight.

  * * *

  The legend of Brynhild was one of the most popular stories in the North, told and retold for hundreds of years. Episodes were woven into tapestries. They were carved on memorial stones and doorposts and cast as metal badges or amulets. They were alluded to in poetry and prose and worked into myths and genealogies. The later the version, the more romantic the story becomes. Brynhild’s ambition becomes passion; a crisis of honor becomes a case of jealousy. The focus shifts from her internal struggle to honor her oath to the external demands of society.

  At the same time, the hero who betrayed her in the original tale becomes fused with the famous Sigurd who killed the dragon Fafnir with a magic sword and won the dragon’s hoard of gold. Sigurd roasted the dragon’s heart and, tasting the blood, suddenly understood the speech of birds—thus learning of the treachery of his foster father, Regin, the smith who had made the magic sword. Regin was the dragon’s brother. To him, Sigurd was only a tool for fratricide. He lusted after the dragon’s hoard himself and was plotting Sigurd’s death.

  Sigurd killed his foster father and loaded the dragon’s gold on his horse. He had ridden a long way from the dragon’s lair, the story goes, when he saw on a hilltop ahead of him a brilliant light. He spurred his horse. Nearing the site, he saw that the roof and stockade of a hillfort were ablaze, the fire licking the sky, the banner a tongue of flame
. Crossing the ramparts he saw an armed warrior spread-eagled on the ground. He rushed to see if the warrior was dead or alive and, unlacing the helmet, saw she was a woman. She barely breathed.

  Drawing his sword, Sigurd sliced through the leather ties of her ringmail byrnie and slid it off her, then half lifted, half dragged her into the fresh air. She awoke as if from a deep sleep. Rising, she found a cup and a cask of beer. They shared the drink and talked of many things: how to carve victory runes on a sword, how to protect a ship with wave runes, how to heal wounds.

  “I’ve never met anyone as wise as you,” Sigurd said. “What advice can you give me?”

  “Support your kin. Be patient with their failings. Don’t be a flirt or quarrel with drunks. Control your temper. But don’t let anyone call you a coward. And if you’re caught traveling after nightfall, don’t make your camp beside the road. You never know who might come by.”

  Though said to be a valkyrie, Brynhild here seems to be a practical and fully human woman. She falls in love with her rescuer and swears an oath to marry him, though he soon rides off and forgets her.

  Some versions of the tale also give Brynhild a family: Her brother is Attila the Hun. Leaving her fire-damaged fortress, Brynhild is portrayed sewing alongside her sister, a model noblewoman admired not only for her skill at “stitching fine clothes with gold thread,” but also for her intelligence and social graces. Such women were cheerful and made the feast hall a pleasant place. They played board games with their husbands, spoke affectionately to them, but also gave them good advice.

  Brynhild, in this version of her story, was “more skillful with her hands than other women.” She embroidered a tapestry with gold thread, picturing there the great deeds Sigurd had done: slaying the dragon and taking the treasure, as well as killing the treacherous smith. One day when Sigurd was hunting in the woods, his hawk landed on a tower near Brynhild’s window. Climbing up to catch the bird, Sigurd peeked in the window and realized she was sewing his life’s story. Though he failed to recognize the warrior woman he had met earlier on the mountaintop, “both her beauty and her work seemed of great worth.”

  * * *

  As a poet used sound, a weaver used color. Before Hervor and Ragnhild began weaving the tapestry of Brynhild’s tale, Gunnhild would have taught them the art of dyeing. They learned the phrase “dyed in the wool” and when to choose it over “dyed in the yarn” or “dyed in the cloth.” On fine days, Gunnhild sent them out to scrape certain lichens off stones, to gather the leaves of silver birch and bog myrtle, and to harvest the yellow-flowering weed called woad. They learned what other dyestuffs to purchase, such as weld and madder root, which grew in England but not so far north as Orkney, to turn white wool into bright-colored cloth. They learned the tricks of drying and fermenting, of using lant (stale urine) versus lye (wood ash and water) to make acid versus alkaline baths, of when to add club moss and not iron oxide, if alum was unavailable to use as a mordant to make the dye colorfast. There was magic in pulling red, pink, yellow, or orange yarn from the same muddy-brown madder-root bath (the trick was in the timing). There was magic in drawing a white skein from colorless liquid, suffused with woad, and having it dry bright blue.

  It was less magical and more mathematical to use those colors to create patterns and pictures. Like a poet counting syllables, knowing where to alliterate and where to place the stress, a weaver counted threads. A master of either art could wing it, knowing by instinct when the rhythm was right. A beginner, like Ragnhild or Hervor, had to concentrate and count. Weaving a tapestry was even more intellectually taxing than weaving cloth.

  It took mathematical skill to warp a loom for a length of cloth, especially for a fancy ring weave: The amount of thread had to be calculated and cut to length. Then, once it was knitted onto the top beam of the loom and weighted at the bottom, each thread had to be tied to the correct one of four heddle rods to make the pattern. The warping process could take two weeks—even if you didn’t make a mistake in your counting and had to start over. But after the loom was properly warped, the work of cloth making became more physical than mental.

  The standard Viking Age loom was a vertical loom; its two upright posts, taller than a woman’s head, leaned against a wall. The weaver wove from top to bottom, using a wooden or ivory tool called a weaving sword—and often carved with a hilt and a blade to look like an iron sword—to beat the weft firmly upward after every few lines. When the loom was full, she rolled her new cloth around the top beam, lengthened and reweighted her warp threads, and resumed weaving. A woman weaving alone all day might walk twenty-three miles, shuttling the weft back and forth, right to left, left to right, through the warp. Two women working together, passing the weft from hand to hand, could halve that distance. Two together also made lighter work lifting the heddle rods, to change the shed between each pass of the weft.

  In the absence of a skáld, to make the time more enjoyable two weavers working together might sing a working song. One such song is preserved in Njal’s Saga; there it introduces the Battle of Clontarf, when the Vikings were kicked out of Dublin in 1014. It may have been written, though, for a different battle, a Viking victory near Dublin in 919, in which case Hervor might have sung it. It is a song of weavers with magical power: Ones who weave not cloth, but battle. Their weft thread is crimson—blood. Their warp is made

  of spilled intestines,

  the loom-weights

  are severed heads;

  the shafts are

  blood-drenched spears,

  the rods are

  iron-bound arrows;

  with swords we weave

  this victory-web.

  At the song’s end, the weavers identify themselves as valkyries and ride off to join the battle:

  Learn it well

  and tell the others,

  whoever hears

  the valkyries’ song.

  Let’s ride out hard,

  with naked swords

  held high,

  away from here.

  Again, anyone who thinks Viking women were not ruthless should listen to their working songs.

  * * *

  The loom described in The Valkyries’ Song, a warp-weighted loom, could weave any kind of cloth, from sailcloth to tapestries. But the Vikings also had a smaller model, an example of which was found in the Oseberg ship burial. Its two uprights, rather than leaning against a wall, were held in a frame. Along with the upper beam, it had a fixed lower beam, replacing the loom weights to give the warp tension.

  On this loom, you wove from the bottom up, not from the top down, beating the weft down with your weaving sword while sitting in comfort. It was a queen’s loom, a loom of luxury. But weaving a tapestry with it was still hard work—hard mental work.

  It was easier to embroider a tapestry (though it required more thread). The famous Bayeux Tapestry, made in England at the very end of the Viking Age, is an embroidery; the Oseberg tapestries, from ninth-century Vestfold, use a mix of embroidery and weaving techniques. In each case, the colors had to be placed precisely, the threads laid evenly and firmly fixed.

  But when embroidering, you could at least see the picture take shape under your hands. You would outline a figure—a horse, say—with a stem stitch or backstitch before coloring it in, laying the colored threads densely and couching them with cross-threads to hold them in place. When weaving a tapestry, to create the same horse you must depend on your counting more than your eye, because the scene, from your point of view, is turned on its side. What you weave vertically will hang horizontally around the top of the hall, as a long, narrow frieze, each panel about fourteen inches wide and six feet long, like the Overhogdal tapestries, made in northern Sweden and carbon-dated to as early as the ninth century.

  Nor do you start with a plain piece of cloth, as you do when embroidering, on which you can sketch a cartoon in charcoal. When weaving a tapestry, the picture, the story, is not on the cloth, but in the cloth. It took practice (and patience) to le
arn how to weave a simple figure like a person or a horse.

  The technique is called snare weaving, or soumak. Instead of one spindle carrying your weft thread, you had the spindle of your base cloth (linen) and small skeins of eight or more different colors of wool, your pattern threads, to keep track of. Count six or nine warp threads, lay in a line of color, then snare it back to loop around two or three threads before continuing. When you’ve woven the colors into one line, lay down a line of plain linen thread to hold everything in place.

  In one of the Overhogdal tapestries, experts can see that the weaver, at first, was not in command of the technique. The cloth is lumpy. After a few inches it smooths out: “Has the weaver learned the trick,” they ask, “or has another person taken over the job?”

  They also see signs of two or more weavers in how people on these tapestries are depicted. “It is almost as if they were arguing about how femininity, masculinity, and androgyny should be represented.” Of the three hundred–some figures in these weavings, many more are women than men. There are also many more types of women, as revealed by their costumes and actions, while the men are more stereotyped.

  The opposite is true on the famous stone carvings from the isle of Gotland, thought to be the work of men: There the men are varied and the women are stereotyped. Unless, of course, we are reading the images wrong. A long gown and long hair in a twisted ponytail may not signify “woman” throughout the Viking world. Trousers may not signify “man.” Some Viking Age images in silver and bronze seem to show armed, ponytailed people in trousers, as well as armed people in long gowns. One design found in several variations shows a horse and rider meeting a standing figure: Both may be armed. Both may be women. Are they mythological valkyries? Are they real women “transgressing gender boundaries”? Or are these boundaries mostly in modern (Victorian) minds?