The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  The next forty-five-mile stretch was a nightmare of whitewater. Seven or nine or twelve rapids are listed in various sources. Seven have Swedish names. Translated, they mean Racer, Laughing, Steep Cliff Falls, Ever Dangerous, Roaring, Island Falls, and Don’t Sleep. Along the banks of these rapids, Viking objects have been found, lost by accident or left as sacrifices, including a tenth-century bronze pin decorated in the Borre style, several Viking swords, and a runestone bearing two Vikings’ names.

  Traders from Birka and elsewhere would wait until June to brave the rapids, when the water was high but not rushing with spring runoff. In the right boats, some of the rapids could be run. Others were mandatory portages. The Rus, wrote the emperor,

  lay their boats alongside the bank before this point and make the people go up on shore, though they leave the cargo on board. Then they walk into the water naked, testing the bottom with their feet so as not to stumble over stones; at the same time they thrust the boat forward with poles, many of them at the bows, many amidships, and others at the stern. With all these precautions they wade through the edge of these first rapids, close along the bank; as soon as they have passed them, they take the rest of the crew back on board, and go on their way by boat.

  Nor were the rocks the only hazard of these portages. Among the people put ashore, he points out, were “all those who are appointed to keep watch. Ashore they go, and unsleeping they keep sentry against the Pechenegs.”

  When Queen Olga reached Constantinople after this harrowing journey, the emperor treated her like a head of state. According to his own account, Olga only “nodded her head slightly” upon meeting him, whereas her companions were expected to prostrate themselves full length upon the ground.

  Olga was then invited to share dessert with the emperor. While there’s no record of her impressions, his extravagant banquet hall and after-dinner entertainments must have astonished Olga of Kyiv as much as they did Liudprand of Cremona, who came as an envoy from the Franks in the 940s. Fruit was brought to the table in “golden bowls, which are too heavy for men to lift and come in on carriers covered over with purple cloth,” Liudprand writes. “Through openings in the ceiling hang three ropes covered with gilded leather and furnished with golden rings. These rings are attached to the handles projecting from the bowls, and with four or five men helping from below, they are swung on to the table by means of a moveable device in the ceiling.” As for the entertainment, Liudprand writes,

  A man came in carrying on his head, without using his hands, a wooden pole twenty-four feet or more long, which a foot and a half from the top had a cross piece three feet wide. Then two boys appeared, naked except for loin cloths round their middle, who went up the pole, did various tricks on it, and then came down head first, keeping the pole all the time as steady as though it were rooted in the earth. When one had come down, the other remained on the pole and performed by himself.… I was so bewildered that the emperor himself noticed my astonishment.

  When Olga dined with the emperor, the room’s attention remained on the Rus queen herself. The emperor “wondered at her intellect,” according to the Russian Primary Chronicle. “He conversed with her and remarked that she was worthy to reign with him in his city.” Though she was middle-aged and he was already married, Olga interpreted his comment—correctly, it seems—as a marriage proposal. Protective of her independence—and her kingdom’s sovereignty—she pointed out that she was still pagan. She was willing to be instructed in the Christian faith and to convert, she said, but only if the emperor himself sponsored her.

  He agreed to do so, and eventually Olga and her companions, including thirty-four Rus women, were baptized. The emperor then repeated his marriage proposal. “But she replied, ‘How can you marry me, after yourself baptizing me and calling me your daughter? For among Christians that is unlawful, as you yourself must know.’ Then the emperor said, ‘Olga, you have outwitted me.’”

  In 1547 Olga was declared a saint for her efforts to bring Christianity to the Rus, but she is not known to have proselytized. During her reign, says the Russian Primary Chronicle, “when any man wished to be baptized, he was not hindered, but only mocked.”

  Cross pendants do show up more frequently in Kyivan graves from that period, especially in women’s graves, but they may simply be souvenirs: expressions of fashion, not faith. As one scholar points out, in the emperor’s register of gifts, Olga’s thirty-four “handmaidens” are treated as merchants. Trade, as it had been for her husband, Igor, was the primary reason Olga traveled to the Great City—and the reason she converted.

  Queen Olga may have been sincere in her new faith: She retained a priest until her death and requested a Christian burial, with no funeral feast and no elaborate grave mound.

  But Olga was also a clear-eyed politician. Like her peers Harald Bluetooth of Denmark and Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings and her sons, Olga perceived how the world was shifting. The Christian Church, which did not yet emphasize intolerance and social control, was nevertheless closing down some options, while opening others. The church stymied trade with pagans on principle. But its bureaucracy—with common values, accounting standards, and language—made the logistics of trade run smoother within the Christian world.

  As Christian kings came to power in Viking lands, they readily found new trading partners in their fellow religionists. Coins minted in Western Europe began to outnumber Arab dirhams in Viking hoards. The importance of the East Way was fading.

  * * *

  Olga’s son, Sviatoslav, was not so politically astute. When she urged him to convert to Christianity, he replied, “How shall I alone accept another faith? My followers will laugh at that.”

  Sviatoslav treated with the Byzantines as his father had: with swords. Wrote the Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon, who met Sviatoslav once, “He was hot-headed and bold, and a brave and active man.”

  As the Russian Primary Chronicle puts it, he “stepped light as a leopard.” Identifying less with his Swedish ancestors than with his Eastern steppe-nomadic enemies, on campaign he “carried with him neither wagons nor kettles, and boiled no meat, but cut off small strips of horseflesh, game, or beef, and ate it after roasting it on the coals. Nor did he have a tent, but he spread out a horse-blanket under him, and set his saddle under his head; and all his retinue did likewise.”

  He inspired loyalty, and his warriors proudly followed him. He defeated the Khazars; he defeated the Pechenegs; he defeated the Bulgars. He brought under his control all the routes of the East Way, from the Danube to the Volga, and consolidated the Rus kingdom. He was the Rus equivalent of Norway’s Harald Fairhair. Then, like his father and grandfather before him, he led his forces against the Byzantine Empire—and there his luck ran out.

  Trapped in a town on the Danube, having lost his best warriors, Sviatoslav called his remaining captains together and debated what to do. They were overwhelmed by the Byzantines’ armored cavalry. They were unable to escape by water, since the Byzantines’ triremes, bearing Greek fire, blocked the river.

  But Sviatoslav was not yet ready to sue for terms. He urged his army “to be victorious and live, or to die gloriously,” reported Leo the Deacon. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, Sviatoslav declared, “We must not take to flight, but we will resist boldly, and I will march before you. If my head falls, then look to yourselves.” And his warriors replied, “Wherever your head falls, there we too will lay down our own.”

  So the battle began, “and the carnage was great.” Who won depends on whose account you read.

  The Rus “spiritedly drew up to oppose the Roman forces,” writes Leo the Deacon, who like other Byzantines considered himself the heir to the Roman Empire. The Rus killed the Roman champion. They “shouted loudly and fiercely, and pushed back the Romans.” But just as it seemed the Rus would win the field, “there appeared a man on a white horse” who broke through the Rus lines “in a wondrous fashion, and threw them into disarray.” It was the great martyr Theodore, come from be
yond the grave to save Constantinople. At least, that is the story Leo the Deacon tells. He also mentions that “at the same time a wind and rainstorm broke out, pouring down heavily from the sky, and struck the enemy, and the dust that was stirred up irritated their eyes.”

  That night, Sviatoslav “was distraught and seething with rage” at the destruction of his army. But he knew, Leo reports, that “it was the task of an intelligent general not to fall into despair when caught in dire straits, but to endeavor to save his army in any way possible. And so at dawn he sent envoys to the emperor.”

  Once the terms of the peace treaty had been agreed upon, Sviatoslav demanded to meet the emperor in person. Leo the Deacon himself attended their meeting on the banks of the river. Emperor John Tzimiskes, he reports, arrived on horseback, “clad in armor ornamented in gold, accompanied by a vast squadron of armed horsemen adorned with gold.”

  Sviatoslav arrived by boat, “grasping an oar and rowing with his companions as if he were one of them.” Leo notes his shaved head, except for the lock that hung down on one side, and his long mustaches. His “rather angry and savage appearance,” Leo says, was somewhat ameliorated by the gold earring, “adorned with two pearls and a red gemstone,” that he wore in one ear. His clothing was white, a simple shirt and trousers of linen, and “no different from that of his companions,” Leo writes, “except in cleanliness,” which means Sviatoslav had brought an extra set of clothes in his saddlebags, for in the battle he had just lost, Leo reports, Sviatoslav had been struck on the collarbone and knocked flat, then stricken with many arrows, causing him to lose a lot of blood. He was not the same kind of war leader as the emperor, who stayed behind his lines.

  According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, the emperor agreed to pay Sviatoslav a vast tribute, and the Rus returned north with “great riches and immense booty.”

  According to Leo the Deacon, the Rus gave up the town and released their captives in return for food for the journey home (a measure of grain for each warrior) and free passage through the fire ships. Sviatoslav asked the emperor to guarantee, as well, that the Pechenegs would not attack on his way back, but the Pechenegs refused to be bound.

  At a difficult portage on the Dniepr rapids, the Pechenegs surrounded and killed Sviatoslav. They took his distinctive head, stripped it of its hair and flesh, and turned his polished skull into a gold-plated drinking cup. He was about Hervor’s age when he died.

  22

  DEATH OF A VALKYRIE

  Hervor is patrolling the busy waterfront at Birka, taking a turn at the oar, so to speak, as a good leader should. She recognizes the ship as Irish as soon as it rounds Borgberget: A deep-keeled Western ship of oak, it is gaily painted bright yellow, with its gunwale and waterline strake both a jaunty green, like the Dublin shipwrights favor.

  Its crew rows through the keyhole slot in the harbor wall. They’ll have picked up a Birka pilot in the outer harbor, so they know where to berth. Hervor dismounts and leads her horse toward the dock, squinting to see if she can spot a familiar red head among the crew, but there is none. Instead a dark-haired man with skin burned black by the sun seems to be in charge. He organizes the securing of the ship and the off-loading of its cargo, summoning porters and carters with an air of long experience.

  He is quite a striking man. Hervor wonders if he is not sunburned at all, but rather one of those men born that color, the ones the Dubliners call Blue Men, who come from the southern shores of the Inland Sea. If so, he is probably a follower of Muhammed.

  As he and his people approach the end of the crowded wharf, Hervor racks her brain for the few words of Arabic she learned along the East Way, so as to greet him properly.

  She is so focused on this interesting man that she overreacts when a slave in his party suddenly drops and rolls, rises, spins away, and slams into Hervor’s side. Her scramasax is out and has slit the slave’s throat before Hervor notices she herself is bleeding—the slave somehow snatched her own eating knife and stabbed her in the groin.

  The Blue Man is shouting at her—everyone is shouting. Hervor carefully wipes clean her weapon and resheathes it, waiting for the hubbub to die down.

  I seem to have bought myself a slave, she says to the enraged man. And I suspect, since she obviously had warrior training, she will cost a bit more than usual.

  She mounts her horse—she hopes no one notices how much that motion costs her—and signals to her partner down the beach to take control of the area.

  If you send someone up to the Warriors’ Hall, she says over her shoulder, I’m sure we can agree on a price. Though we’ll need to take into account the scratch she gave me, you understand.

  Her saddle is dyed red by the time she reaches the Warriors’ Hall. In spite of the healer’s best treatment, the bleeding cannot be stopped. By midnight, Birka is without a war leader: Hervor is dead.

  * * *

  At the battle on the Danube in 971, before Sviatoslav sued for peace, there came a black day of defeat for the Rus, when the Byzantine emperor’s cavalry drove the Rus warriors back against the walls of the town and many were “trodden underfoot by others in the narrow defile and slain by the Romans when they were trapped there.” As the victors were “robbing the corpses of their spoils,” wrote John Skylitzes in his Synopsis of Byzantine History a hundred years later, “they found women lying among the fallen, equipped like men; women who had fought against the Romans together with the men.”

  Hervor was not among them.

  Years before Sviatoslav’s disastrous campaign, Hervor had returned to Birka. With her skill at arms and flair for strategy, she rose to a position of esteem among the Birka warriors and was buried with ceremony beside its garrison, overlooking the town.

  Did she die of a wound received in Birka’s marketplace, victim of a vindictive slave? Probably not. That story is told by Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla, about the vengeance taken on a slave-dealer by the future king of Norway, young Olaf Tryggvason.

  I don’t know how Hervor died—no one does—though experts in the language of bones can often tell the cause of death from a skeleton. Swords leave long, straight cuts on the bone, with few secondary stress fractures. Axes both cut and crush. Spears and arrows cause characteristic puncture wounds. Stones, clubs, and morning stars shatter bone. Cuts on the left side of the body or head mean the warrior died fighting face-to-face (most people are right-handed). Cuts on the lower legs, angled from below, mean the warrior was on horseback—or had already fallen. Wounds to the crown of the head mean the warrior was attacked by mounted enemies and likely had no helmet. Punctures to the hands and cuts on the wrist or forearm mean the warrior parried without a weapon.

  Battle wounds need not be fatal: The sagas mention several Vikings, like Onund Tree-Foot and Egil One-Hand, named for their battle scars, while in Norse mythology, the god Tyr had only one hand. Amputations—whether by enemy weapons or a healer’s axe—were cauterized with fire-hot tongs or knives and treated with pine tar or pitch, which have antiseptic properties. If the warrior did not die of blood loss, gangrene, or sepsis, he or she would find some place in Viking society. As The Words of the High One reminds us, “The lame ride horses, the handless herd cattle, the deaf fight bravely. The blind are better than burning corpses. The dead do nothing.”

  Many illnesses also leave their mark on bones, as pits or deformities. Leprosy, syphilis, cancer, and tuberculosis can be diagnosed, for example, as can nonfatal sinus infections, arthritis, and diet-related diseases like anemia, scurvy, and rickets.

  But we do not have all of Hervor’s bones, and the surfaces of those retrieved from grave Bj581 are too degraded to tell us what injuries or illnesses she suffered.

  Most Viking skeletons, in fact, reveal no trauma. Many that do are open to conflicting interpretations, like the warrior buried in the Gokstad ship, who was first thought to have died as a bedridden, spoon-fed, arthritic old man, and later deemed to have been killed in battle by “at least two persons with different weapons.�
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  The bones of a Viking buried in Repton, England, are better preserved. Believed to be a leader of the Great Heathen Army, he was killed “by a massive cut into the head of the left femur,” archaeologists assert. The blow hit an artery, causing him to bleed to death. It also seems to have gelded him: Those burying him carefully set the curved tusk of a wild boar between his thighs, as if to replace his lost penis.

  King Hakon the Good, in the story told by Snorri Sturluson, also bled to death, struck in the brachial artery by an arrow shot by Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings or her errand runner. Snorri also writes of warriors dying (bravely, with a quip on their lips) of deep internal wounds. A healer after one battle brought a wounded warrior a special dish of porridge; she had mixed in “crushed leeks and other herbs and boiled it together and was giving it to the wounded to eat,” Snorri writes. “With it she could learn if they had internal wounds, for, if so, the wound would begin to smell of leeks.” The warrior refused to eat the leek porridge, for a diagnosis of an internal wound was a death sentence. He urged the healer, instead, to pull the arrowhead out of his wound. “She took tongs and tried to pull the arrow out, but it held fast and did not move; there was only a little of it sticking out, for the wound had swollen.” Her patient told her to cut into the wound to free the arrow and he would pull it out himself. He “took the tongs and yanked out the arrowhead. But it had barbs on it, and caught on them were strings of his flesh, some red, some white, and when he saw them, he said: ‘The king has fed us well. I’m still fat around my heart’s roots.’ Then he fell back and was dead.”

  Other Vikings’ deaths were not so heroic—though equally memorable. Among those who besieged cities in France in the ninth century, many died of dysentery. Writes one French cleric, they “discharged their guts with a watery flow through their arses: and so they died.” The great Ragnar Lodbrok himself might have so succumbed. Rather than dying in a snake pit in York, Ragnar was stricken with diarrhea while attacking Paris in 845, claims a French account. Soon after he returned to the Danish court, “all his entrails spilled onto the ground.” Ragnar’s death from dysentery may explain his famous nickname. Lodbrok means “shaggy trousers,” and both modern and medieval readers have struggled to explain exactly what these are. A thirteenth-century saga says Ragnar wore pants of heavy cloth boiled in pitch and rolled in sand to protect against dragons’ breath. “Garments boiled in pitch comes startlingly close,” one scholar writes, to garments soiled by dysentery. Like her, I can imagine someone at court witnessing Ragnar’s collapse and relating later that his breeches “looked black and sticky, as though they had been boiled in pitch.”