The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Anskar was able to convert only one important pagan. Herigar, called the “prefect” of Birka, built a church on his estate outside the city walls, by the sheltered bay he named Cross Haven. But Herigar’s influence was not enough to protect the monks who replaced Anskar, when he was called back south to become archbishop of Hamburg. The people of Birka attacked the Christians’ house “with the object of destroying it.” They killed one of the monks; the others “they bound, and after plundering everything that they could find in their house, they drove them from their territory with insults and abuse.” There was no priest in Birka until Anskar himself came back in 852 and again received permission to set up “a place of prayer.”

  * * *

  Anskar’s efforts had little effect. Of Birka’s thousands of graves, only a few hundred are simple enough to be Christian: While pagans were buried with weapons, food, clothing, tools, furniture, and sacrificed animals or human companions to make their afterlives more pleasant, Christians were buried in simple linen shifts or winding sheets, or at most wearing their Sunday best. Yet in some Christian-looking graves in Birka, both a cross and a Thor’s hammer can be found. Likewise, a woman buried with a witch’s staff wears, among her many beads and amulets, a silver crucifix.

  A hundred years after Anskar’s first mission, when the Warriors’ Hall was built, Birka remained decidedly, even aggressively, pagan. Spearheads were buried at several sites in the hall’s foundation and under its protective rampart. These dedicate the area to Odin, god of war, whose weapon of choice was the spear. Beneath the central roof-bearing posts of the hall, along with more spearheads, were buried an intriguing set of objects: forty comb cases made of deer antler; a Thor’s hammer amulet, also carved from antler; a bronze sword-chape (the decorative metal tip on the end of a sword’s sheath) bearing an image of Christ; and two silver dirhams with their Islamic inscriptions, “Mohammed is the messenger of Allah.” The comb cases—personal objects of no great worth—represent each warrior in the garrison, archaeologists think, imbuing the building with each individual’s spirit and strength. The coins in the mix help date the ritual and the building of the hall: The later coin was struck sometime between 922 and 932.

  Were the warriors dedicating the building to Christ and Allah, through the sword-chape and the coins, as well as to Odin and Thor? The archaeologist who unearthed the deposits thinks not. The number of spearheads smothers the other religious offerings. The design of the hall itself is demonstrably pagan: Its boat-shaped walls and pairs of roof-bearing posts hark back to the chieftains’ halls of an earlier age. The litter of cattle bones, including skulls and jaws, found on its floor speaks of animal sacrifices and ritual feasts.

  The Warriors’ Hall was “a statement of identity,” “a sign of defiance,” and “a response to an external threat.” In the mid-900s, King Hakon of Norway, raised in England, was preaching Christianity and refusing to take part in pagan rituals. King Harald Bluetooth, who controlled the trade routes south and west of the Baltic, bragged of making the Danes Christian. The runestone he raised at Jelling on Jutland in 965 to mark his parents’ grave mounds bears the same image of Christ found on the Birka sword-chape—buried, overwhelmed by Odin’s spears, in the foundation of the Warriors’ Hall. The warriors of Birka were taking sides, turning their backs on the increasingly Christianized Viking West, and reaffirming their ties to their pagan trading partners to the east.

  15

  RED EARTH

  Hervor wanders through Birka’s marketplace, wondering what to spend her earnings on. With a captain’s share of the Red Girl’s loot, she is richer than she’s ever been before—though not as rich, it seems, as all the women around her. For every two men in the marketplace, Hervor notices a woman weighing silver with her folding scales, buying or selling. Their wealth is obvious: They wear it.

  One woman especially catches Hervor’s eye. Edging her silk cap is a showy ribbon woven in several colors, its pattern picked out in silver thread. On this cool day, she has tossed a light shawl across one shoulder, clasping it at her hip with a ring-shaped pin. Her long-sleeved coat is a richly textured weave of wool and linen, trimmed with elaborate silk braids in a style Hervor has never seen before. A large gilded-bronze disc brooch at the woman’s breastbone holds her coat partly closed, while revealing glimpses, as she walks, of a long wool dress in a supple weave, decorated with row upon row of bright silk bands sewn with silver thread. Her pleated linen underdress, the only ordinary garment she wears, peeks out at hem and neck, where it is clasped by a smaller gilded round brooch that is nearly invisible beneath her showy necklace of blue, green, and white glass beads, beads of amber and of silver, silver filigree pendants, mounted silver coins, and lozenges made of gold foil. A leather-sheathed knife, a small pair of scissors, a bronze needle case, and a silver-mounted purse complete her outfit.

  As she notices Hervor staring, this splendidly dressed woman approaches. She tips a small bag to pour raw amber stones and carved amulets into the palm of her hand, including an amber Thor’s hammer.

  Would you care to have one made? she asks.

  They have just agreed on a price when a little girl runs up, a fat little girl wearing another extraordinary necklace of beads—so many beads of blue and yellow glass and gold and silver foil that the string wraps twice around the girl’s neck. She, too, carries a knife and a needle case and wears a coat clasped with a gilded disc brooch at her breastbone.

  Greeting the child, Hervor realizes with surprise that, though so many women walk and work in the town, this is the first child she’s seen.

  Where are the other girls and boys? she asks the amber carver.

  Home with their families, she replies. Birka is not a place to raise children. Here, we work.

  I am an embroiderer, the little girl says proudly, pointing to her needle case.

  And the amber carver is not only an artisan but the manager of a textile workshop, her fine clothes advertising her company’s products.

  Though spread throughout the town, rather than concentrated in a royal hall, Birka’s textile workers are organized into businesses, Hervor learns, with managers who arrange for a steady supply of materials—raw wool and flax, imported silk thread, dyestuffs, and gold and silver wire—and who handle sales to the many traders who come to the island to buy cloth.

  I specialize in silk, as you can see, the woman says. Especially Byzantine silk. When you pick up your Thor’s hammer, I’ll show you what we can do with a warrior’s riding coat.

  She is clearly not Birka’s only silk merchant. As Hervor walks on through the town, she sees so many coats, caps, tunics, and dresses decorated with those dazzling bands of colored silk and metal threads that she soon accepts it as simply the local fashion.

  And not only are the women of Birka exotically dressed. Many of them parade through town with exotic and well-dressed men on their arms—like the couple now approaching. The woman, carrying a belled hunting falcon on her wrist, is dressed in the old-fashioned style Queen Gunnhild wore, with large box-shaped brooches clasping the narrow straps of her apron-dress. But the Birka woman’s brooches shine like bright gold, as do the gilded round brooch at her throat, the golden bands on her dress front, the golden braids on her sleeve ends and hems, and the gold-foil beads that dominate her necklace. The overall impression she gives is of a slender tree draped with gold. But as lovely as she looks, the silver-mounted purse and the folded set of scales at her belt proclaim her a tradeswoman—not a queen.

  Her husband’s profession is equally apparent to Hervor: He is extremely well armed, carrying sword, shield, spear, and axe, as well as a bow and quiver of arrows. He leads a fine saddle horse; its bridle has gilded cheek pieces. But what most intrigues Hervor is the man’s elegant cap: Shaped like a helmet, it is sewn of stiff silk, trimmed with gold and silver braids, and topped by a filigreed silver cone sticking up like a spike.

  Where did your cap come from? Hervor asks the man.

  Kyiv, he replies, al
ong the East Way. He looks her over and nods. She, too, is well armed, with her sword at her waist, her quiver and bow, her axe and shield and spear. You could get one, he says, if you agree to guard the next group of merchants traveling east through Gardariki. Go up to the Warriors’ Hall. They’re always looking for good fighters.

  Gardariki. Hervor nods. That’s where she’ll go next. She has always wanted to go to Gardariki.

  And she’ll get a cap like his.

  * * *

  Before she dies, she will. The filigreed silver cone in her grave in Birka, numbered Bj581, exactly matches one in the double grave numbered Bj644, on whose occupants I’ve patterned the couple Hervor met. A third matching cone was found in a grave near Kyiv, where such Slavic-style filigree work is common.

  This double grave, Bj644, is the only grave in Birka, other than Hervor’s own, to contain a full set of Viking weapons. The warrior was older than his wife and not from Sweden—chemical analyses of the bones and teeth in Birka’s graves show, in fact, that more than half of the town’s thousand inhabitants, both men and women, had, like Hervor, come from away. The warrior’s wife, with her falcon and folding set of scales and silver-mounted purse, so splendidly dressed in gold, may also have been the owner of an iron mine, for when she and her husband were buried, a hammer—not a Thor’s hammer amulet but a full-sized worker’s tool—was included among their grave goods: the symbol of a mine proprietor.

  Where the rivers run red and the water tastes rusty, where a rainbow film forms on stagnant ponds—here is where the making of a warrior’s weapons begins. Nodules of bog ore, like peas, lie in layers under the peat. Crusts of iron collect on pebbles in lake bottoms, easily raked up. Groundwater percolating through some types of rock dissolves out iron molecules that, reaching the surface, react with oxygen—they rust—and with the help of bacteria solidify into reddish sludge. This sludge accumulates, year by year, in floodplains and riverbanks, drying into layers of iron-rich umber or limonite, commonly called “red earth.”

  Much of Middle Sweden sits on red earth. The land’s vast forests provided ample charcoal to smelt the earth into iron bars, the raw material for weaponsmiths. Sweden’s network of waterways made it easy to ship those bars to Lake Malaren, where the town of Birka was ready to receive them and market Swedish iron throughout the Viking world.

  That iron, in fact, helped create the Viking world. Swedish iron production increased dramatically in the 700s. By midcentury, Viking raiders were harassing the shores of the Baltic—what they knew as the East Sea—as is proven by an archaeological find on the Estonian island of Saaremaa: two Viking ships filled with dead Swedish warriors, buried before 750. Birka was founded about 770. By the early 800s, when Vikings were raiding throughout Western Europe, Swedish ironworking was at its peak. Irish annalists insist the superior Irish warriors would have routed the raiders were it not for the Vikings’ “hard, strong, and durable” steel swords. Modern historians surmise the kings of Sweden came to power by controlling access to that iron and, therefore, those swords.

  * * *

  Turning red earth into steel swords was not easy. The technology had many points of possible failure. The skill and effort it took to make a sword explains why so many legendary Viking swords like Tyrfing, the Flaming Sword in the poem Hervor’s Song, were said to have been made by the dwarfs in their halls of stone. It’s understandable that smiths were connected with the earth, the source of their raw materials, and with mythical beings like dwarfs—there’s something magical about metallurgy, about making a weapon of death out of dirt.

  First the red earth was roasted to drive out moisture and crack the ore surface, making it more porous. Then it was mixed with charcoal bits and fed into a furnace, a simple cylinder with walls made of sand, clay, and manure, as small as thirty-two inches tall and twelve wide, banked by earth and stones, with a small hole for a bellows mouth and a larger opening at the bottom for the slag, or waste, to run out. Each firing lasted six hours or more and required constant attention—and a trained ear—to optimize the airflow, add fuel or ore, and tap out the glass-like slag based on the sounds issuing from within the furnace.

  The end result was a “bloom,” a spongy mass of iron like a cauliflower head. Depending on the furnace size it weighed ten to ninety pounds, but only half the bloom was iron. In its pores and pockets hid unmelted slag that had to be pounded out, or the iron would be brittle. While still hot, the bloom was beaten with heavy hammers. It was reheated, pounded thin, folded, pounded thin again, folded again, the process repeated four or five times—it took hours of sweat and a lot of charcoal. Heated, the slag melted and ran out. Pounded, the remaining slag inclusions grew smaller, flatter, and more evenly distributed. The quality of the iron rose; its weight dropped. It took time and patience, muscle and skill, to make good iron. Even a large bloomery could make only enough iron to produce three thousand rivets in a year; a large Viking ship required up to seven thousand rivets.

  The quality of the iron is not only a function of slag. Iron alloyed with a little phosphorus (less than 1 percent) is more resistant to rust; it makes good wire, knives, hooks, and locks and was sold in Viking times in sword-shaped bars. Iron alloyed with carbon, however, becomes steel. Phosphorus content varies with the ore: Bog ore has more phosphorus than red earth. Carbon content varies with temperature: At higher heats, iron incorporates more of the carbon emitted as the charcoal burns. A skillful ironworker can control the heat, and so the carbon uptake, to some extent by adjusting the airflow. Less work with the bellows makes a low-carbon steel easy to shape and good for tools and cooking pots; this iron was sold in spade-shaped bars. More bellows work makes a high-carbon steel excellent for the edges of weapons; it was sold in ring-shaped bars.

  To forge a special sword, like Tyrfing, the Flaming Sword, the smith may have sought a different source of carbon: bone coal. Those bluish chunks of bone left over when a funeral pyre dies out, whether human or animal, become bone coal. Collected from the cooled pyre, bone coal was mixed with the charcoal in the furnace to endow a sword with the strength and spirit of the animal or ancestor whose bones lent their carbon to the steel.

  A good sword is both flexible and strong. Well-balanced, it leaps to the hand. It becomes an extension of the warrior’s arm. It dances around the enemy’s weapon, cutting more quickly and with more control, even in a less experienced hand. In the sagas, a superior sword like this can bend in half, tip to hilt, and the blade will spring back without breaking. A useless sword, by contrast, bends and stays bent: Two saga heroes, in the midst of battle, try to stamp such swords straight again underfoot.

  Low-carbon steel gave the sword its flexibility; high-carbon steel gave it its strength. Bars of each were lengthened into rods, twisted, and welded together, a final layer of high-carbon steel wrapping the twisted bundles to make the cutting edge. The process could result in exquisite patterns—herringbone, star-and-wave—on the surface of the blade, depending on the smith’s art. The dark and light bands of the different alloys were enhanced by etching.

  Shaping a sword takes a trained smith many days of labor—seventy to a hundred hours just hammering. But all can be lost when the sword is quenched, plunged into liquid to quickly cool it, magically fixing the microstructure of the metal so no ordinary pounding—of sword against shield or battle-axe—will break it. Choosing the time to quench is crucial. The steel must glow a steady deep orange. Too soon or too late and the metal will crack. The sword is worthless, the smith’s work wasted. A sword can be quenched in a barrel of water, milk, oil, urine, or blood. Quench it in oil, though, and the blade will ignite as you draw it out: a Flaming Sword. Perhaps that’s how Hervor’s Tyrfing got its name.

  * * *

  Coming upon Hervor’s Song for the first time, as a college student new to Old Norse literature, I wondered not should Hervor wield her father’s Flaming Sword, cursed as it was to destroy her family line, but why would she want to? Wouldn’t a woman rather fight with a bow, stan
ding out of the fray and picking off her targets?

  Now I realize my young imagination was cramped by those Victorian stereotypes that say women lack the ruthlessness to fight. That they are, by nature, too dainty to wield a heavy Viking sword. It took one evening with a group of Viking reenactors to disabuse me of that nonsense: Their best fighter happened to be female.

  Still, the axe that splits kindling can split skulls. The knife that guts a pig can gut a warrior. The spear that fends off a wild boar or bear can fend off a berserk. The arrows that bring down flying geese or fleeing deer can bring down an enemy fighter. Sword fighting mimics no household task. To learn to fight with a sword, the warrior must practice with a sword.

  And a Viking sword is heavy. The blade is two inches wide, two to three feet long, and rounded to a point, both edges sharp. As it was forged, a long, shallow groove called the fuller was formed down the center of both sides to lessen the weight, but a Viking sword with pommel and grip still weighs a bit over two pounds—a little more than a modern baseball bat, a little less than the heaviest golf club, but unlike these it is wielded with one hand. It takes long and careful training to wield a sword well—even longer to wield it in either hand, as some saga heroes could.

  Meanwhile, the warrior was handicapped. A sword wielded poorly is worse than no weapon at all. No one can pick up a sword for the first time, on a battlefield, say, and outface a trained sword fighter. Sword fighting requires balance and timing, as well as strength; the hardest thing to learn is to lead with the strike, not to first step within striking range, plant one’s feet, and then swing.