The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Finally, the two girls differed in willpower: Ragnhild bowed to her forceful mother’s wishes. Hervor held tight to her own ideas. Hervor was a fighter, and a fighter doesn’t doubt: She may have “the open, inquisitive face of a child,” like another modern female boxer, but in a fight, her childlike expression “hardens into terrifying purposefulness.… She has never lost, and it seems not to occur to her that she could.”

  Hervor’s way was smoothed by her foster brothers. Any girl who grows up with seven brothers surrounding her in age—three older, four younger—may choose their rough-and-tumble sports, at least until biology catches up with her. Ragnhild may have played with the boys too, until the others outgrew her and she found herself the runt, always the loser in games of strength and speed.

  Hervor, as a grown woman, was bigger than most men. Maturing early, as girls do, she may have enjoyed besting the littler boys. As her skills increased, her quickness and stamina and fighting spirit helped her best the big ones often enough as well—especially any who had not reached her level of training. As a strategist, her sex and size had no bearing on her ability. What mattered were her intellect and her instincts: her ability to outwit her opponents, to guess and defuse their attacks, to mentally juggle her options and quickly choose the best. You could call it luck.

  * * *

  It was luck, indeed, that she was born in the tenth century, when to be a warrior woman was merely unusual, and not two hundred years later, when it was deemed unnatural.

  In Hervor’s day, war was a family affair. An army was an impromptu collection of smaller warbands, each loyal to a leader like Eirik Bloodaxe. Eirik’s warriors ate with him and slept in the same hall. They were clothed by Gunnhild’s textile workers and armed by her smiths. They took part in the rituals Gunnhild led and shared in the feasts. They trained at home, in plain sight of youngsters of both sexes; their elders watched too, and criticized. To join Eirik’s warband, Hervor had to prove herself, not to him, but to the men and women she would fight for and beside. Having trained her, they knew her skill. If they accepted her, it was not as a token, but as a warrior.

  The people of York especially knew not to disrespect a warrior woman. In 918, a generation before Hervor arrived in northern England, the city surrendered to Aethelflaed, the warrior queen of Mercia. After the death of King Alfred the Great, it was she, his daughter, who led the effort to reconquer the Danelaw, the half of England controlled by Vikings. Continuing her father’s strategy, Aethelflaed built and garrisoned ten fortresses, some along her border with Wales, the others facing—or even within—the Danelaw. Earthworks topped by formidable stockades, her fortresses gave the locals a refuge and her warriors a base from which to harass Viking raiders, picking off members of their foraging parties and burning any ships left poorly guarded.

  Aethelflaed was a ruthless war leader. When a Mercian abbot traveling in Wales was killed, she leveled a Welsh town in revenge; among the thirty-four captives she took was a Welsh queen. When Vikings besieged her town of Chester, Aethelflaed “gathered a large army about her from the adjoining regions” and lifted the siege: “The pagans were slaughtered by the Queen like that, so that her fame spread in all directions,” the English annals record. She captured the Viking fortress at Derby while her brother, King Edward of Wessex, engaged the main Viking army seventy miles south at Towcester. Hearing news of the savagery of her attack, two more Viking towns surrendered. Aethelflaed “peaceably got into her power, with God’s help,” the annalist wrote, “the fort at Leicester, and the greater part of the army that belonged thereto was subdued.” The second city to surrender was York: “The people of York had promised her, and some had given pledges, some confirmed with oaths, that they would be under her rule. But very soon after they had agreed upon that, she died.”

  Aethelflaed was never crowned queen of York, but Hervor, living in the city, would have known her story in much the same form as it has come down to us today. In the early 900s, the Christian clerics in the English kingdom of Mercia recorded, without making any excuses for her sex, the military accomplishments of the warrior queen who ruled them “with just authority” and divine support. Their annals, listing the noteworthy events of each year, were later incorporated into some versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  By 1200, however, when most accounts of the Viking Age were being written, army training camps had been removed from the domestic sphere—and officially closed to women. A woman’s world, in general, had shrunk, thanks to the Christian Church’s new focus on defining and enforcing social roles. Christian scholars now taught that the male form was “Godlike,” making the female physically inferior. Mentally, she was weaker too. She was naturally more sinful and, when pregnant or menstruating, was considered “unclean”—to the extent that a woman who died while pregnant could be denied a Christian burial.

  Beginning soon after the year 1000, when the world did not end as church leaders predicted, and culminating in the Inquisition two hundred years later, the church turned in this new direction, finding for itself a new source of power in social control. As one historian notes, “The scale of the transformation of European society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries can hardly be exaggerated.” The Mass was revised and new rituals were invented. Priests now, for the first time, were required to baptize infants and sanctify marriages (or refuse to do so, if those children and couplings did not follow the church’s rules). They were required to hear sinners’ confessions and intercede for the dead (though Purgatory, and the ways to escape it, was not invented until later in the 1200s). To enforce these changes, the concept of heresy was redefined: The fourteen heretics burned at the stake in France in 1022 were educated clerics who thought the church should keep its eyes on God, through study and prayer, not on man, through the arts of social control. Christians who wished to avoid their fate learned to root out deviance.

  Gay and bisexual men soon began to be persecuted. As late as 1025, a homosexual act among consenting, unmarried men required no penance at all in Western Europe; if either was married, it was considered adultery. In 1179, homosexuality of any kind was redefined as a sin “against nature” and punished by excommunication.

  Likewise, warrior women were declared abnormal, even wicked. Struggling to explain how Countess Richilde of Hainault could have been captured in battle in 1071, a priest writing around the year 1200 declared her a witch, not a war leader: She was on the battlefield to spew magic powder on her enemies, he said.

  * * *

  Saxo Grammaticus, assigned to write a Gesta Danorum (or History of the Danes) by the archbishop of Lund around the year 1200, struggled as well. Seeing no way to omit warrior women from his book, the good cleric cloaked his astonishment (or horror) in a believe-it-or-not voice, explaining:

  There were once women in Denmark who dressed themselves to look like men and spent almost every minute cultivating soldiers’ skills; they did not want the sinews of their valor to lose tautness and be infected by self-indulgence. Loathing a dainty style of living, they would harden body and mind with toil and endurance, rejecting the fickle pliancy of girls and compelling their womanish spirits to act with a virile ruthlessness. They courted military celebrity so earnestly that one might have guessed they had un-sexed themselves. Those especially who had forceful personalities or were tall and elegant embarked on this way of life. As they were forgetful of their true selves they put toughness before allure, aimed at conflicts instead of kisses, tasted blood, not lips, sought the clash of arms rather than the arm’s embrace, fitted to weapons hands which should have been weaving, desired not the couch but the kill, and those they could have appeased with looks they attacked with lances.

  To un-sex oneself was to go against nature. Shield-maids defied the churchman’s idea of what it meant to be a woman. War is a man’s game, his particular road to glory. For a woman to take part, to be ruthless and to cultivate soldiers’ skills, to court “military celebrity,” was to forget her true self, Saxo thought.r />
  It’s an idea that’s still with us. Since the late 1800s, leaders of the women’s movement have argued that if we ran the world there would be no more war. Some feminists still see “woman” and “warrior” as biologically opposed: Women are natural pacifists, they believe, because we give birth. This argument, writes a historian (and feminist) who has studied warrior women through time and across the map, “is based on a series of assumptions about the relative natures of men and women that is unflattering to both. It is also counterhistorical.” Women have always fought, often professionally.

  Some cultures, indeed, have forbidden women to join armies. These are often the same cultures, like that of ancient Rome, in which women are considered to be property owned by men. It was shameful for a Roman man to be beaten by a warrior woman, but beaten the Romans were—again and again, in Britain, Nubia, Arabia, Egypt, and what is now Turkey.

  From China in 1200 BC to the United States today, archaeological and historical sources attest to thousands of women who have engaged in combat as warriors and war leaders. Yet routinely their witness, their histories and weapon-filled burials and battle-scarred bones, are dismissed. Scholars undercut (or ignore) them. Historians turn them into myths or allot their deeds to a convenient (or imagined) man. They’re presented as anomalies.

  Saxo, for his part, did his best to denigrate them. As one critic notes, “The mirror which Saxo holds up gives a distorted picture: It diminishes and distorts where it is not a downright laughing mirror.” Yet despite his reservations, Saxo found he could not tell some stories from Danish history without praising women who acted with “virile ruthlessness,” instead of being dainty, fickle, pliant, and alluring.

  When recounting the Battle of Bravellir, fought circa 770 between the Danish king Harald Wartooth and his nephew, Sigurd Ring, who ruled in Sweden, Saxo begins “by reviewing the most eminent nobles on either side.” Among those fighting for the Danes were Hetha, Visna, and Vebiorg, three warrior women “whose female bodies Nature had endowed with manly courage.” Each woman led her own warband. Hetha, for example, was followed by the champion Haki Scarface and seven other named warriors, along with a hundred who go unnamed.

  That the women’s military skill was highly respected is revealed by King Harald Wartooth’s battle line. The king’s deputy, Saxo writes, “designed a wedge-shaped front, posting Hetha on the right flank, putting Haki in control of the left, and making Visna the standard-bearer,” which meant Visna led the charge alongside the aging King Harald, who fought from a chariot. Bearing the king’s standard was a key responsibility, assigned to the bravest warrior, for if the flag fell it signaled the king’s death and the army would panic. It also meant the warrior could not carry a shield. Visna was up to the task. She “was a woman hard through and through and a highly expert warrior,” Saxo admits. The Swedish champion Starkather targeted Visna. She did not drop the banner until he cut off her right hand. Starkather himself was forced to leave the field “with a lung protruding from his chest, his neck cut right to the middle, and a hand minus one finger.” The shield-maid Vebiorg, meanwhile, killed another Swedish champion. Afterward, “while she was threatening more of Ring’s warriors with slaughter,” she was brought down by an arrow. Only Hetha leaves the battlefield unscathed; she is rewarded by being named the ruler of Jutland.

  The story of the Battle of Bravellir, Saxo notes, “was handed down by word of mouth rather than in writing.” If the tale lasted more than four hundred years before reaching Saxo’s ears, it must have been told often—with the warrior women included. Did Hervor hear it in Gunnhild’s court at York? We’ll never know. But it’s quite likely she heard the tale of another warrior woman Saxo names, Lagertha, since her story is entwined with that of the Vikings in England.

  * * *

  Lagertha’s first husband was the famous Danish Viking Ragnar Lodbrok, who, the story goes, was captured and killed in a snake pit by none other than the king of York. It was to avenge their father’s death, his saga says, that the sons of Ragnar amassed the Great Heathen Army that invaded England in 865. After taking York and killing its king, Ragnar’s sons “dominated the military scene in the British Isles as a whole for close to twenty years,” says a modern historian, and “shaped the whole later history of England and Scotland.”

  As Saxo tells her tale in the 1200s, none of these heroic sons were Lagertha’s; her story belongs to Ragnar’s youth. When young Ragnar set out to avenge the death of his grandfather, a king in Norway, Lagertha was one of many warrior women who joined his warband. She was “a skilled female fighter, who bore a man’s temper in a girl’s body,” Saxo writes. “With locks flowing loose over her shoulders she would do battle in the forefront of the most valiant warriors. Everyone marvelled at her matchless feats.”

  Ragnar himself was impressed, swearing “he had gained the victory by the might of one woman.”

  After the battle, he asked around. Whose daughter was she? Whose wife?

  Lagertha heard the whispers. “She ordered a bear and a hound to be fastened up in the porch of her house so that these animals might act as a defense,” Saxo writes.

  I can imagine how it went: Lagertha looked Ragnar over and was not impressed. She would rather return to her farm in Norway’s fjords and live life her own way than be shackled to a minor Danish king’s son. Tell him if he’s serious, she said, he should follow me home. Him alone. She was surprised when one day her scouts said he was coming.

  When he entered the courtyard, she stood on her balcony. Release the dog, she said.

  An enormous bearhound burst from a pen; Ragnar grabbed it by the throat and throttled it.

  Is that the best way you know to welcome me? Ragnar shouted.

  Release the bear, said Lagertha.

  An enormous bear burst from a pen.

  You are an exceedingly perverse woman, Ragnar yelled as he held the bear at bay at the end of his spear.

  Lagertha laughed. She raised one hand, and a volley of arrows flew from all sides of the courtyard. The bear fell dead.

  And you are an exceedingly persistent man, Lagertha said—in my imagination, at least—and agreed to marry him.

  Saxo says only, curtly, that Ragnar killed the hound and the bear “by piercing one with his spear and catching hold of the other’s throat.” He and Lagertha stayed together for three years. Long after he had left her and both had remarried, Lagertha learned that Ragnar was losing his grip on his Danish kingdom. He’d armed the young, he’d armed the old, but still the rebels were winning. Lagertha—now a middle-aged mother of three—sailed south to his aid, gathering forces along the way until she led a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships. Her ships flew behind the enemy’s lines. Outmatched by her forces, the rebels fled in panic toward Ragnar, whose warriors, rallying, let few escape.

  Lagertha is the most famous Viking shield-maid today, thanks to her fictionalized portrayal by Katheryn Winnick on the History Channel TV series Vikings. But another warrior woman Saxo mentions, Rusila—or as the Irish called her, Inghen Ruaidh, the Red Girl—may have been better known in Hervor’s time, for she was even then leading a fleet of Vikings in the Irish Sea.

  12

  THE RED GIRL

  News of Eirik’s defeat arrives late at night, as such news always does, but the queen is prepared for it. The queen is always prepared, Hervor is aware—she’s learned more than embroidery in Gunnhild’s skemma. She’s learned that a leader makes her own luck.

  Study your allies as well as your enemies, Gunnhild always says.

  York’s witan is fickle. Rich merchants all, York’s leaders fear the English will fire the town. They’ll surrender their king before chancing that fate—they’ve done it before—or their queen. So when Hervor hears that Archbishop Wulfstan, the witan’s spokesman, has been captured and forced to pledge allegiance to the English, she knows Gunnhild will flee the city before anyone looks on her or her children as battle prizes.

  And before they discover her ships are ball
asted with English silver—both the plunder from Eirik’s successful raids and the taxes paid to the town.

  I’ve been called to join King Eirik, Gunnhild tells the dignitaries who see them off at the quay.

  It’s not really a lie. Everyone knows where Eirik, defeated, is likely to turn up.

  Reaching Orkney, Gunnhild settles once more at Stone Ness, where Thorfinn Skull-Splitter makes them welcome. Eirik Bloodaxe arrives soon after, in convoy with Arinbjorn, their disagreement over Egil the Poet’s ugly head behind them. The Orkney earl’s brothers, still Eirik’s allies, captain a third fleet in their wake.

  They stop ashore only long enough to drop off their wounded, recruit, and restock before sailing south; it’s still raiding season, after all. His older sons will sail with him on this raid, Eirik decides, along with their warband—which means Hervor can claim an oar too.

  Where are you heading this time? Queen Gunnhild asks.

  Dublin, King Eirik replies: That’s where everyone’s going these days.

  They coast along the Headland of Cats, cruise past the Southlands to the Turning Point, cross west to Big Bay to gather more warriors, then follow the Southern Isles, like a giant’s stepping-stones, south to Ireland.

  Dublin is where the previous Viking king of York, Olaf Cuaran, now reigns. Are they sailing there to kill him or to join him? Hervor isn’t sure. Most likely Eirik himself hasn’t decided.