The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Could Hervor have fought well with a sword? Indeed, she could have. She was taller than most people of her day and well nourished. Because of the way Viking armies were organized in the tenth century, she had ample opportunity to spar with other warriors. Many Viking women may have trained in sword fighting in their youth. When Gudrun in one Viking poem “took up a sword and defended her brothers,” she reveals her valkyrie training: “The fight was not gentle where she set her hand,” the poem says. She felled two warriors. She struck one “such a blow, she cut his leg clean off. She struck another so he never got up again; she sent him to Hel, and her hands never shook.” Though a wife and a mother, Gudrun remained a warrior woman, the poet asserts, with the skill and reflexes needed to target a weak spot (the legs) and to strike hard.

  * * *

  A sword was not the most useful weapon in a pitched battle. It was held in reserve until the enemies had closed and stones, arrows, and throwing spears had all been exhausted. In hand-to-hand fighting, a spear could keep a sword busy, a battle-axe could match it, and both spear and axe could be used two-handed.

  But like most Viking warriors, Hervor longed for a sword. Swords were special. They were jewelry, in a way, decoration, an extension of the warrior’s soul. Recall the dapper warrior Geirmund, who lost his sword, Leg-Biter, to his deserted wife: “He went around in a gray sea-cloak over a fine red tunic, with a bearskin hat on his head and a sword in his hand. It was a good, well-made weapon, with a walrus-ivory hilt. There was nothing fancy about it, but its edge was sharp and it never showed a spot of rust.”

  The weapons from Birka grave Bj581: sword, scramasax, axe, two shields, two spears, and 25 arrows.

  Swords had names: Friend-in-War, Night-Bringer, Long-Tooth, Bloodletter, Wound-Wand, Helmet-Dog, Walrus, Snake. The name Tyrfing, the Flaming One, might be a metaphor too, rather than the result of its being quenched in oil. To Viking poets, if a battle was a “spear clash,” a sword was the “fire of the spear clash,” flickering like a tongue of flame as the warrior fought.

  Swords had personalities. In battle they bickered and sang. They formed friendships, coming alive in certain hands, refusing to fight for others. They were finicky, stubborn, and untrustworthy if not handled right. One sword known to be always victorious broke when borne against its rightful owner. Hervor’s Tyrfing could never be drawn without killing; it had always to be sheathed with blood on it. To wield one famous weapon, the warrior had to first sit alone on the edge of the battlefield, draw the blade, and blow on it: “Then a little dragon will crawl out from under the hilt.” The warrior would turn the sword slowly from side to side until the dragon returned to his hiding place, and the sword was primed.

  Swords had faces. When slung from a waist belt or shoulder baldric, one side of the pommel hung against the warrior’s body—the same side, it seems from archaeological finds that show asymmetrical wear or decorations, meaning the warrior habitually turned the “face” side out. Pommel shapes, and the way pommel and hilt were affixed to the blade, changed over time, styles going in and out of fashion, so old swords, heirlooms, could be identified at a glance. Pommels were gilded or inlaid with silver and embellished with jewels; handgrips were wrapped with gold or silver wire or carved of shining white walrus tusk. Scabbards could be even more elaborate, their ends tipped with decorative metal sword-chapes, whose designs announced the warrior’s loyalties. More than sixty warriors from Birka and other fortress towns along the Vikings’ East Way flaunted sword-chapes in the shape of a stooping falcon. Alternately, sword pommels were plain steel, grips and scabbards a serviceable leather-wrapped wood. Either way, the sword announced something about its owner. Hanging by the warrior’s hip, the sword’s face was a miniature of the warrior’s own.

  The sword buried with Hervor in Birka grave Bj581 is plain. But it is somewhat uncommon. According to the typology devised in 1919 to sort Viking swords by pommel and hilt, it falls into Type E. Only 3 percent of the swords found in Norway and 6 percent of those from Sweden are of this type, and none have been recovered from Denmark. But 13 percent of the Viking swords found in Russia and Ukraine are Type E.

  This fact and the Eastern look of some of the other weapons and items of dress buried with her imply that Hervor did not stay in Birka until she died, nor did she likely return west (with the Red Girl or her own warband). Instead, it seems, she followed the plan the silk-capped warrior suggested in the scene I reconstructed earlier: She went to the Warriors’ Hall and arranged to join a trading run along the East Way.

  16

  A BIRKA WARRIOR

  The butchers’ lane is blocked. She saw the herd of cattle ferried over that morning, but she hadn’t considered where they’d end up, until now, when she finds herself facing a lane mired in blood and manure and offal, headless carcasses on hooks being efficiently jointed, raw skins rolled for tanning, brains in some buckets, blood and tallow and intestines in others, hooves piled for glue, dogs and pigs swarming underfoot snatching whatever they can, and a pen full of bellowing beef on the hoof blocking her way. Rather than backtrack, she slips through the gate in the town wall.

  She can cut through the fields and come back in at the next town gate, she thinks. Or maybe she’ll skip the town altogether and head for the hillfort’s outer gate, reaching the garrison that way. It isn’t far, and the sudden peace and quiet outside of town is refreshing. She has just determined to walk the long way up to the Warriors’ Hall when a horse archer appears, galloping toward her, an arrow on his bow.

  She raises her hands, palm out, and waits.

  He brings his horse to a sharp stop but doesn’t lower his bow. New here? he asks.

  A few days, she replies.

  He is handsome in his silk-trimmed riding coat—she will have to get one, she thinks—though what really intrigues her is his bow. It isn’t bent right. And it is very small.

  Does that thing shoot? she asks.

  He laughs. See that goose?

  The bird is flying low toward the lake. The archer spurs his horse underneath it, shoots, spins, picks the dead goose up off the grass, and returns to where Hervor waits, amazed.

  Where can I get one? she shouts.

  He laughs again. You are new here, aren’t you? He holsters his bow—still strung, she notices—dismounts, and ties the goose to his saddle. First things first, he says. If you leave the town, you leave the town’s law. So don’t leave the town without an escort. If I’d felt like it, I could have shot you, not the goose, and there’s nothing your people could have done to me. Second, where do you think you’re going?

  Warriors’ Hall, she says. I want to join the garrison. And go east.

  Then you’ll need a horn bow, he says. Come on.

  He sets off walking, leading his horse, and since it is the way she wants to go anyway, she follows. Along the way, she quizzes him about his bow—it can shoot any kind of arrow, he says, so long as they are sized right: blunt-tipped for fox hunting, armor-piercing for battle, basket-headed for shooting burning rags.

  His bow case and quiver both hang from his belt, clattering as he walks, and not only does he leave his bow strung, his arrows sit in the quiver pointed end up.

  Don’t you jab your hand? she asks.

  I did when I was a boy. Once or twice.

  The gate guard at the white stone lets them through with a nod.

  We just passed the witch, the archer says.

  The guard? Hervor looks back over her shoulder.

  No, under the stone. He was buried here before the fortress was built, and now he keeps the walls safe for us.

  They are impressive walls, making a wide semicircle around the top of the hill, from cliff to cliff, and rising almost three times her height. Crossing under the gate tower she can see there are two stone walls, inner and outer, tied together with rubble and earth, and topped by wooden stockades with walkways and battlements. A watchful witch is always a plus, of course, but she doesn’t think Birka’s fortress walls need much magica
l help to stay standing.

  The walls enclose a vast grassy slope, most of it open but for a few storehouses and stables, where they leave the archer’s horse. A great whaleback of gray rock breaks from the hilltop. It gives a commanding view over the lake and the nearby islands and all the waterways leading up to the town. From here, Birka’s houses and boats look like ants, the people like lice.

  The Warriors’ Hall, on a terrace backing right up to the cliff edge, outside the main fortress walls, looks little from here as well—and when they reach it, Hervor realizes it is, indeed, small for a Viking feast hall. It is only half as long as the Shining Hall at Kaupang, where she lived as a child, though it fills every bit of level space available. It has two doors, to left and right on its south face.

  The archer leads her through the nearest one into a high-ceilinged room with a central hearth. It is a weapons store: Shields and spears hang on the walls. Beneath them sit forty locked chests, each like a sailor’s rowing bench. He unlocks one and puts away his weapons; she sees other valuables stored there as well, wrapped in cloth. Then he carefully locks everything back up again—but his padlock, and those locking the other chests, is puny. It is a miniature bronze lock, technically elaborate and decorated with concentric circles—but puny.

  What’s the point of a lock so easy to break? she asks.

  You ask a lot of questions, he says. They are seals, not locks. Breaking someone’s seal is a clear sign of robbery. In an emergency, though, it’s good to have quick access without having to fumble with a key. Now, he says, it’s your turn to answer some questions.

  The door on the left leads to the feast hall itself, with a seat of honor for the war leader in its northwest corner, bench space for the garrison’s forty warriors flanking the central hearth, and more weapons hanging on the walls. Taking her arm, the archer leads Hervor through the crowd.

  I found this one wandering outside the town walls, he tells the war leader. She wants to join the garrison and go east.

  * * *

  How was Hervor received when she walked into the Warriors’ Hall? Did she impress the Birka warriors with the quality of her sword, like her namesake in the Saga of Hervor?

  In the saga, Hervor’s warband abandoned her on Samsey island. Seeing the fires rise from her father’s grave and hearing the thunder of his ghostly voice, they took fright and sailed away. After she retrieved her father’s sword, the saga simply says that Hervor “stayed on Samsey until she got a passage away, and nothing is said of her travels” until she came to the hall of a king named Gudmund, where she “behaved like any warrior.” Among other things, she hung out in the king’s hall with the other warriors, checking out one another’s weapons. Of her Flaming Sword, one warrior remarked that “he’d never seen a better blade.” When Hervor abruptly killed him for unsheathing the sword to look at it, the king forbade the man’s friends from seeking revenge: “With the weapon she has, I think it would cost each of you dearly to take her life,” he said.

  Another of the warriors’ pastimes, in the saga, was watching King Gudmund play chess. Once, when the game was not going his way, the king asked if any of the onlookers could give him advice. Hervor “stepped up and studied the board, and after a little while Gudmund was winning.” Chess was the board game of choice when the Saga of Hervor was written. But chess, while ancient, was not known in the North until after our Hervor’s time. The first proof of it being played in Europe is a Latin poem, penned in a Swiss abbey in 997, introducing the rules of this new game.

  Viking chess—Hervor’s game—is hnefatafl. Tafl means “board” or “table.” Hnefi means “fist” or, by analogy, the captain of a warband. Unlike chess, with its even ranks of soldiers lined up on either side, hnefatafl is a peculiarly Viking-style game: The members of a small warband, surrounding their captain as if with a shield-wall, are attacked by a leaderless mob that outnumbers them two to one. It’s practice for the Viking raiding party cut off from its ship. The Vikings win—that is, the “fist” reaches the edge of the board—not by strength, but by strategy.

  Luck is also involved: The answer to a riddle in the Saga of Hervor is “a die in hnefatafl,” and dice are almost always found with the hnefatafl pieces in Viking warriors’ graves. Hervor’s grave in Birka held a complete hnefatafl set: Twenty-eight whalebone game pieces, the “fist” marked by an iron nail, and three dice carved of walrus ivory. These were found clumped together as if contained in an invisible bag on her lap; bits of an ironbound gameboard lay beside her knees.

  Another Birka grave contained hnefatafl pieces of clear and green-striped glass. The sagas mention pieces made of walrus ivory, gold, or wood—the game could even be played with nuts. On shipboard it was played with pieces set on spikes, to hold them steady when stuck into a gameboard with holes. One Icelander regretted playing with his travel set at home—his stepmother, when he was too caught up in the game to answer her question, grabbed a piece and struck him with it. The spike caught him in the eye and ripped it out. (After that, the saga says, “he was very difficult to get along with.”)

  When violence breaks out, it’s not usually instigated by the onlookers. In another saga, when two boys quarreled over a game, Thorgils “swept the pieces off the table, and let them fall into their pouch,” then swung the full pouch at Sam, striking him so hard his ear bled. When a king and an earl had the same sort of quarrel—whether a player should be allowed to take back a move—the earl grew so angry he dumped the gameboard on the floor and stalked out of the room. (The king had him followed and killed.) Sometimes it seems hnefatafl boards were balanced on the players’ knees: One board was upset when a boy farted and the player laughed. In a scene matching the one in the Saga of Hervor, a Norwegian merchant losing a match in Iceland asked a friend for advice. Rather than improving the merchant’s strategy, as Hervor did the king’s, however, the friend noticed the Icelandic player “had a sore foot, with a toe that was swollen and oozing matter.” Using a straw, he teased a kitten into coming near and pouncing on the man’s injured toe. “He jumped up with an exclamation, and the board was upset. They now quarreled about who had won.”

  Like chess, hnefatafl is played on a checkerboard, but the size of hnefatafl’s grid is not fixed. While a modern chessboard is always eight squares wide by eight squares tall, hnefatafl boards range in size. From Viking Age Ireland comes a small board, only seven by seven squares. The number of pieces in Hervor’s grave suggests her preferred board was nine by nine. Two boards found in the Gokstad ship burial in Vestfold, Norway, are eleven by eleven and thirteen by thirteen, while a board found in tenth-century York is huge: fifteen by fifteen. The larger the board, the more pieces involved, and the more complicated the game. Regardless of the board size, though, the rules of the game change to match the skill of the players.

  A beginner plays with the simplest rules. The captain, or hnefi—distinguished by a nail in Hervor’s set—begins in the center square, surrounded by the few dark pieces (the defenders). The white attackers (always twice as many as the defenders) are ranked on the board’s outermost squares. All pieces move like the rook in chess—as many spaces as the players want in a vertical or horizontal line. A piece is captured if sandwiched between two enemies, except for the captain, which must be surrounded on all four sides in the beginner’s game. If your captain is surrounded, you lose. If it reaches any square on an edge, you—playing defense, as a beginner would do—win.

  In this beginner’s setup, the captain’s side has a distinct advantage. The game gets harder if the attackers only need to flank the captain, not surround it, to win. It gets harder still if the captain’s safe squares are limited to the four corners of the board—at this point, the advantage switches to the attacking side. Where the attackers are placed at the beginning of the game can change the odds back. Or some squares can be made off-limits to either attackers or defenders (or both). Or the captain can be weaponless—that is, not permitted to help capture an opposing piece. Or such restrictions ca
n be determined by rolls of the dice. No one knows all the rules by which Vikings played hnefatafl. The game changed from place to place and player to player, making it crucial to agree on your rules before engaging in (or betting on) a game. Did Hervor offer to take on any challengers, play by their rules—and win every match? Was that why she was accepted into Birka’s garrison when she came to the Warriors’ Hall?

  For hnefatafl was not simply a way to pass the time. Mastery of hnefatafl, like that of chess today, was seen as a sign of mathematical intelligence. The game was part of a warrior’s education. It developed your ability to strategize—and to foresee your enemy’s tactics. To play defense, you learned when sacrificing a piece meant victory and when it made you too weak. To attack, you learned where to build your walls and when to begin picking off defenders and closing the trap. When played with dice, it taught you how to deal with the unexpected—how to adapt your plan on the run. To have been buried with a game of hnefatafl on her lap, Hervor must have been an exceptional player and, by analogy, a war leader known for her clever strategies and consistent good luck.

  * * *

  Before being accepted into Birka’s Warriors’ Hall, Hervor was likely tested in other ways. A warrior could excel, not only at board games, but at impromptu poetry contests as well, the sagas say. Teams played tug-of-war and rough ball games similar to hockey or rugby. In one colorful tale, we read about a game in which “everyone suddenly ganged up on Bosi, but he fought back hard and pulled the arm of one of the king’s men out of joint. The next day, he broke the leg of another one. The third day, two men at a time came after him, and many others got in his way. He hit one with the ball and knocked his eye out, and he threw the other down and broke his neck.”