The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

Who cast that stone? the Red Girl asks.

  I did, says Hervor.

  You will captain my brother’s dragonship, she says, and take a captain’s share of the loot.

  * * *

  On the Viking slave route from Dublin to Birka, the greatest peril was meeting rival Vikings. Kings were valued to the extent that they kept trade safe. But in the mid-tenth century, when Hervor joined the Red Girl’s fleet, in my reconstruction of her life, the kings bordering the Irish Sea were weak; the kings of Norway, Denmark, and Gautland were at war; and the king of Sweden was eyeing Birka itself.

  Sailing from Ireland to Orkney in convoy with Eirik Bloodaxe, at the close of the raiding season, Hervor would not have feared attack: Their fleet was too large. But the next stages on her voyage were perilous. Denmark had been trying to take control of Viken ever since Eirik Bloodaxe was exiled from Norway ten or more years before. While Hervor was growing up in Orkney and York, and raiding in the Irish Sea, the Oslo Fjord was filled with Danish Vikings. About the time she sailed east, King Hakon the Good reclaimed Viken for Norway.

  The bustling town of Kaupang, by then, was gone. No Shining Hall gleamed from the hilltop, no high-pitched roof of golden pine broke from the trees. No pilots would have met the Red Girl’s ships at the harbor’s mouth to guide them past the stakes and barricades. The busy harborside of Hervor’s childhood had dwindled to a few wattle huts, a few hammers ringing on anvils, a few shipwrights making repairs. Slave-dealers from Gardariki no longer visited the town, sourcing potential harem girls.

  Perhaps the Red Girl’s fleet sailed on to the mouth of the Gaut Elf River (near the modern Swedish city of Gothenburg), where the borders of Norway, Denmark, and Gautland met. The kings of Scandinavia held assemblies there on Burnt Island every three years, and such assemblies included well-attended markets. At one, the Icelandic chieftain bought the Irish princess Melkorka from the slave-dealer Gilli Gerzkr, who was on his way to Gardariki.

  But when Hervor passed Burnt Island, the kings were at war; there’d be no peaceful assembly that summer.

  From Burnt Island, the slave-dealers had two choices. They could cross the Kattegat west to Danish Jutland, the peninsula that pokes like a thumb into the Oslo Fjord, and head south to the great market town of Hedeby, on the border of Otto the Great’s Saxony. This route took them past the isle of Samsey—where I like to think Hervor stopped to break open her father’s barrow and retrieve his sword. To reach Hedeby required navigating the narrows of the Little Belt along Jutland’s coast or the Great Belt between the islands of Funen and Zealand; both routes were controlled by the Danish king Gorm the Old and his son Harald Bluetooth from their royal estates at Lejre and Jelling.

  Or the slave-dealers could head southeast from Burnt Island, hazarding the Oresund, the strait that today divides Sweden from Denmark (in the tenth century, both banks were Danish), toward the markets on Gotland, a big island in the Baltic Sea, and at Birka in Lake Malaren.

  The Oresund was an excellent place for an ambush, according to Njal’s Saga (from which I borrowed some details in the scene at the beginning of this chapter). Sailing the Oresund in the early 960s, the saga hero Hrut found his four ships blocked by eight. Their commander was Atli the Outlaw, a Viking based in Lake Malaren. Atli had been banished from both Sweden and Denmark, the saga says, for plundering and killing. His father had angered Norway’s king as well, by refusing to pay him tribute, and had holed up on Gotland. Viking hoards on Gotland hold massive amounts of Arab silver—some sixty-seven thousand dirhams have been dug up so far—proving the island was a key node on the East Way, along which Vikings exchanged furs, walrus ivory, iron, and other northern resources, including human captives, for silk and silver coins.

  Atli preyed on ships like Hervor’s going to Birka, which competed with Gotland for the Eastern trade. But Hrut was not trading—he was pursuing a fugitive. His ships were not crowded with cargo, but in fighting trim. He formed a battle line and braved Atli’s trap.

  “Here comes wealth for the winning,” said Atli to his warriors. “Take down the awnings and clear the ships as quick as you can!”

  He closed with Hrut’s fleet and called out a challenge. “Where are your lookouts? Didn’t you see the warships in the sound?”

  Learning Hrut sailed for the sons of Gunnhild, Atli quipped, “My father and I have never been fond of your Norwegian kings.”

  He ended the conversation abruptly, casting a spear at Hrut’s ship. “The warrior in its way fell dead. Then the battle began,” the saga says. Grappling hooks drew the ships close to make two fighting platforms, butting head-to-head. Sword fighters and axe wielders leaped over their own ships’ prows onto their enemies’ decks. Archers and spear throwers shot from beside the masts, over their comrades’ heads. Heroes on both sides were wounded or killed. Then the leaders came face-to-face: “Atli struck Hrut’s shield and split it in two. At that very moment, a stone hit his hand and he dropped his sword. Hrut snatched up the sword and cut off Atli’s leg, then dealt him a death-blow.” The rest of Atli’s forces disengaged. “Hrut and his warriors took a lot of loot off them, along with their best two ships,” but let their enemies slink away in the other six vessels.

  In the early 950s, when Hervor sailed to Birka, the warships to be wary of were those of King Hakon of Norway. After sweeping the Danes out of Viken, Hakon chased them south to Jutland, where he won a great battle, according to Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla. He chased them farther, into the Oresund, where again Hakon “was victorious, disabling all the Vikings’ ships,” writes Snorri. “After that, King Hakon raided throughout Zealand, robbing the people, killing some and taking some captive.” The Norwegian king raided throughout Danish Skania, then sailed into the Baltic Sea, raiding north in Gautland and south in Wendland (now part of Germany). “He accepted ransom-money and tribute on land, but killed every Viking at sea, wherever he found them.”

  King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark vowed revenge, and Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings was the one who gave it to him. After Hervor left Orkney on her way to Birka, saying goodbye to her foster mother for the last time, Eirik Bloodaxe was called back to York to be its king again. He lasted two years. In 954, he and his captains, including the faithful Arinbjorn, were killed in battle.

  Gunnhild led her sons and the rest of Eirik’s army east and offered their services to Harald Bluetooth. In 961, after several attempts and the deaths of two of her sons, they defeated King Hakon. Harald Graycloak (as Gunnhild’s son came to be known to distinguish him from the many other Haralds of the time) was crowned king of Norway, though he shared the throne with his brothers and his mother. As Snorri notes, from 961 to 975, Gunnhild “had a large share in ruling the country”; she and her sons “often met to talk things over together and to decide how to rule.” It was the “Age of Gunnhild.”

  Hervor may never have heard of Gunnhild’s triumph. By 961, she may already have been dead and buried in Birka, a war leader herself. Or word may have reached her as she traveled the East Way, before returning to Birka to be buried, at the very latest, by 970. If so, she may have shared the story of Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings with another reigning queen, Olga of Kyiv.

  * * *

  I don’t know how or when Hervor arrived in Birka. All I know is that she did arrive sometime in the mid-900s and was buried there as a warrior when she was between thirty and forty years old.

  Did she arrive in Birka a victor, with news of the death of a notorious outlaw like Atli? No one knows.

  Did she sneak up on sleeping Vikings and steal their ships and loot? Perhaps. That’s one of Egil the Poet’s deeds in Egil’s Saga. It’s also ascribed to the young Hrolf Gautreksson, husband of the warrior woman Thornbjorg, in the saga that bears his name.

  Did Hervor sail with the Red Girl and earn her own ship in a battle like that? Or were her companions instead well-known traders like Gilli Gerzkr, regulars on the route past Birka to the royal Swedish city of Uppsala or, on the East Way, to the kingdom of Gardariki?
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br />   It was hard to reach the fortified town of Birka, in any case, without proving oneself a friend. Cruising north along the coast of Gautland, keeping the isle of Gotland to starboard (far to starboard if, like Hrut, she’d just killed the son of a chieftain there), Hervor left the Baltic Sea where Sweden’s landmass bulges to the east. Threading through a maze of islands, with side inlets blocked by pile barricades and other defenses, her ship was funneled north into the narrow Himmer Fjord to the site of the modern town of Sodertalje. What is now a canal was, in the mid-900s, a short but heavily defended portage into Lake Malaren, Sweden’s third-largest lake, which stretches almost a hundred miles east to west. Once past the portage, the tiny island on which Birka sat lay dead ahead.

  Approaching from the south, the first thing Hervor saw was Borgberget, the Fortress Rock, rising sheer nearly a hundred feet from the water and capped by a stone rampart and wooden stockades behind which archers lurked. As she rounded the western shore of the island, Hervor passed below a steep hillside bounded by rocky cliffs and buttressed by more ramparts. Its five stone-built terraces held a great hall, its high shingled roof shining in the sun, and some smaller buildings, four of which seemed, from the smoke and ringing of hammers on anvils, to be smithies. This, Birka’s garrison with its Warriors’ Hall, would become Hervor’s home—and here she would eventually be buried, on the westernmost promontory. Above her grave a prominent stone would be raised as a landmark, to be the first thing the next generation of warriors noticed as they approached the island.

  The town itself lay to the north, under the shoulder of the Fortress Rock, in a shoreline depression shaped like a fan. Hervor noticed—and dismissed—its beach, bristling with jetties. Lines of reed-roofed wooden houses and workshops, gable ends to the water. Fenced plots crowded with pigs and chickens and reeking cesspits. Muddy lanes and wooden walkways leading up a slight slope to where a few larger longhouses sat on stone terraces. To Hervor’s eyes, Birka was just another smoky, noisy, damp little market town like Dublin or Kaupang—except for its magnificent defenses. A barricade of pilings, studded with sunken boats, blocked the harbor, leaving only a slender, twisting channel. An earth-and-stone rampart more than twenty feet wide wrapped around the town’s seventeen acres and linked it to the fortress. Above the town’s ramparts rose wooden stockades, with archers’ walks and battlements and towers overlooking each gate. Outside the walls lay vast graveyards. Nearly two thousand barrows and boat-shaped stone settings, along with thousands of flat graves not so easily seen, testified to the might of Birka’s ancestors.

  All in all, Birka’s defenses proclaimed the town’s power and strength, defying anyone who saw it as prey. Combining control of the waterways with armed patrols on horseback and archers on every wall, these defenses were designed to defeat the usual Viking strategy of surprise, siege, threat, and extortion. Nor were the town’s fortifications merely defensive. The walls and barricades were bases from which to launch an attack. They were designed to provoke an enemy into making unwise moves. They were traps.

  “I’ll burn down this town and kill everyone in it, or else die in the attempt,” swore the hero of Hrolf’s Saga, facing a fortified Swedish town that could have been Birka itself.

  Replied the town’s king and war leader, the warrior woman Thornbjorg, “You’ll be goat-herds in Gautland before you get control of this town.” Then she began beating her shield and drowned out the rest of his threats. She had prepared for his coming by hiring smiths to build a rampart around the town, as strong and sturdy as they could make it, and to equip it with devices “so that no one could breach it, either with fire or iron.”

  Hrolf urged his warriors on, but their every assault was repulsed. “They attacked with fire, but water ran from pipes set into the walls. They attacked with weapons and by digging under the walls, but the townsfolk poured burning pitch and boiling water on them, along with huge stones.” When they retreated, “some wounded, the others exhausted,” the townsfolk came out “onto the wall, laughing and mocking them and questioning their courage. They paraded around in silks and furs and other treasures, showing them off, and dared them to try and take them.” Said Hrolf’s second-in-command, “It seems to me this Swedish king pisses rather hot.”

  When they finally did break in, by building wooden platforms to shield the diggers burrowing under the town’s walls, they found no one there, though “food and drink was laid out in every house; clothes and treasures were all bundled up, ready to go.” Said Hrolf’s second-in-command, “Let’s have a drink and something to eat, and then we can divvy up the loot.”

  Answered Hrolf, “Now you’re taking the bait, just as they wanted.” Quickly searching the town, he found the escape tunnel and chased King Thornbjorg into the woods, coming upon her and her warriors before they could regroup for the counterattack. So Hrolf did take the town, in spite of its traps and tricks—though he did not kill its occupants or burn it to the ground, as he had threatened. Instead, he chose to govern it himself, as Birka’s enemies most likely would have done as well.

  * * *

  Some of the enemies Birka’s defenses were aimed at, Hervor soon learned to her surprise, were the royals in the manor across the strait, on the neighboring island of Adelso. When Hervor arrived Birka was ruled, not by the king of Sweden, but by companies of free traders who paid professional warriors like Hervor to protect them, both in the town and along their major trade route: the East Way.

  When Birka was founded in about 750, it was oriented toward the west; its trade partners were the towns of Ribe and Hedeby in Denmark, Norway’s Kaupang, and Frisia’s Dorestad. The king on Adelso may have been the king of the Swedes, whose main seat was at Uppsala, or “The High Halls,” north of Lake Malaren. North of the Swedish kingdom stretched the lands of the Finns and Sami; to the south was the kingdom of the Gauts (also known as Geats or Goths). From the eastern end of Lake Malaren, a well-traveled trade route across the mountains connected Sweden with the Trondheim district of Norway.

  At Uppsala, legend said, the fertility god Freyr established the Yngling dynasty. The kings buried under the great mounds at Borre in Norway’s Vestfold were said to be Ynglings; Harald Fairhair and his son Eirik Bloodaxe claimed descent from them. At Uppsala, pagan rituals, including sacrifices to the dísir, were held at a temple described by the monk Adam of Bremen in the 1070s as “entirely decked out in gold”: “Of every living thing that is male, they offer nine heads, with the blood of which it is customary to placate deities of this sort,” he wrote. “The bodies they hang in the sacred grove that adjoins the temple,” humans alongside dogs and horses and even bears. Music was part of the ritual, too, but Adam could not bring himself to speak of it: “The incantations customarily chanted,” he said, “are manifold and unseemly; therefore, it is better to keep silence about them.” (An Andalusian traveler visiting the Viking town of Hedeby around 950, when Hervor was passing through, had a similar reaction: “I have not heard an uglier singing,” he said. “It is a humming coming from their throats that’s worse than dogs barking.”)

  On the way to Uppsala, wrote Adam, you pass Birka, “a desirable, but to the unwary and those unacquainted with places of this kind a very dangerous, port.” The danger came not only from the Vikings cruising Lake Malaren, but from Birka’s own defenses against such sea raiders: “They have blocked that bight of the restless sea for a hundred or more stadia” (at least twelve miles) “by masses of hidden rocks,” Adam claimed, making the passage perilous but the harbor “the most secure in the maritime regions of Sweden.”

  Birka was desirable to a cleric like Adam for its trade in “strange furs, the odor of which has inoculated our world with the deadly poison of pride.” He added, “We hanker after a martenskin robe as much as for supreme happiness.” Archaeologists have found thousands of pine marten paw bones in Birka’s soil; the animal’s fur was known as “sable.” The paws of squirrels—their fur marketed as “miniver”—along with bones of bears and foxes prove many sk
ins were prepared for sale in the town. These and other furs, such as beaver and otter, came from the dense coniferous forests at the far reaches of Lake Malaren and through the town’s trade with Finn and Sami fur trappers farther north and east.

  But Adam did not mention Birka in his History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen solely for its trade goods: Birka was the site of Sweden’s first church. In 829, the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious sent a Christian missionary named Anskar there. Anskar set off from Denmark in a convoy of merchant ships, following much the same route as Hervor. He did not have a safe passage. As his student Rimbert wrote in the Life of Saint Anskar, “While they were in the midst of their journey they fell into the hands of pirates. The merchants with whom they were traveling defended themselves vigorously and for a time successfully, but eventually they were conquered and overcome.” The pirates—Vikings—took the merchants’ ships and trade goods. They took the royal gifts intended for Birka’s king and Anskar’s “nearly forty books.” But the Vikings did not, strangely, take the missionaries themselves to hold for ransom or sell into slavery. Instead, they put them ashore. “With great difficulty they accomplished their long journey on foot,” Rimbert wrote, “traversing also the intervening seas, where it was possible, by ship.” A trip that should have taken five days took an entire month.

  At Birka they were “kindly received” by the Swedish king. After he “had discussed the matter with his friends” at an assembly and received the townspeople’s consent, the king permitted Anskar to preach. The Word of God was especially welcomed by the Christians held as slaves in Birka, though there were Christian merchants in the town as well. One, a wealthy old woman named Frideburg of Dorestad, was known to keep a flask of wine by her bedside, in case she felt death approaching before a priest came to Birka; dying with wine on her lips, she could pretend she had received the sacraments. Wishing to bequeath her wealth to the needy, she told her daughter to take it back to Dorestad because in Birka “there are here but few poor,” Rimbert reports. Did she mean deserving Christian poor? Or were the people of Birka really so well-off?