The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Heroes in the sagas die from a fall off a horse. They die after stepping on a horse’s skull in which a poisonous adder lies. They are struck overboard by a sail yard—loosed by a storm or a sorcerer—and drown. They tumble off a balcony, dead drunk, and drown in a mead vat. They are swept away by an avalanche. They are skewered by the horns of an escaped bull. They are struck by a pitchfork thrown by a slave. They are burned to death in a feast hall. They die from a spear thrust in the dark. And they die of old age, bemoaning their weakened state, as did Egil the Poet, Queen Gunnhild’s nemesis, in verse:

  My bald head bobbles,

  my balance is gone,

  my dick is soft; it drips,

  my hearing’s dried up.

  My feet are cold,

  frigid as widows …

  When Egil died, his stepdaughter and her husband dressed him in fine clothes, the saga says. They laid him to rest on a headland, his weapons by his side, and raised a burial mound over him. When Iceland became Christian and a church was built on the farm, Egil’s bones were dug up and reburied beneath the altar. They were dug up again some years later, when a new church was built. They were “much bigger than other human bones,” the saga reports. The skull was huge and heavy and covered all over with wavy ridges: It looked like a scallop shell. The priest picked it up and placed it on the churchyard wall. Curious to see just how thick it was, he took up a heavy axe and struck it as hard as he could with the hammer side. The skull didn’t crack. “It wasn’t even dented, where he had whacked it, only a little whiter in color.”

  Egil the Poet may not have suffered merely from old age. A scallop-ridged skull of exceptional hardness, a bobbing head on a swaying neck, blindness, deafness, loss of balance, cold feet—all of Egil’s symptoms, including his celebrated ugliness—could be the result of Paget’s disease, in which bone cells grow out of control; it is the second-most common bone disease after osteoporosis, which is also seen in Viking Age skeletons. In his last years, Egil must have suffered from excruciating headaches. It might have been some consolation to him, if the rumor reached Iceland, that Queen Gunnhild had been lured back to Denmark and there drowned in a bog. A well-preserved corpse fished from a Danish bog in 1835 was known as Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings until 1977, when carbon dating placed the drowned woman’s death in the fifth century BC.

  The 1889 drawing of Birka grave Bj581 by Evald Hansen, based on Hjalmar Stolpe’s site plans.

  * * *

  All I know about how Hervor died is that she did not die of old age. Examining her teeth and bones, osteologists estimate she was thirty or forty. But, if I know nothing about her death, I know a great deal about how she was buried.

  One piece of advice the valkyrie Brynhild gives to Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer concerns the dead: “Care for their corpses,” she says, “wherever you find them, whether they died of sickness, or drowned, or were killed in battle. Bathe them, wash their hands and faces, dry and comb their hair, lay them in a coffin, and bid them sleep well.”

  For a Christian burial, that was about it. Sometimes the bodies were buried naked, wrapped in a linen shroud; sometimes there wasn’t even a coffin.

  For an elaborate pagan burial like Hervor’s, however, the washed body rested first in a temporary grave. Was it pickled? Frozen? Rubbed with oil and herbs? No one knows, but archaeologists routinely find the animal bones in Viking graves to be better preserved than the human ones. In one ninth-century boat grave from Uppsala, for example, the fragile skeleton of a chicken was intact, while the buried woman’s bones were “in remarkably poor condition.” She had started to decay while the time-consuming arrangements for her funeral were made.

  Special clothing might be sewn for the dead to wear. Funeral ale might be brewed and food gathered for a feast. Someone might be chosen to accompany the dead—or someone might volunteer, if what Ibn Fadlan says is true. Traveling from Baghdad on a mission for the caliph in 922, Ibn Fadlan witnessed a Rus funeral on the banks of the Volga River that included all these things. It lasted ten days—ten days of feasting and heavy drinking—and culminated in the gang rape and strangulation of a girl (the volunteer), the killing of horses, cows, chickens, and a dog, and the setting ablaze of the ship in which the dead man sat, all accompanied by the frenzied beating of spears on shields and the spine-tingling chants of the woman Ibn Fadlan called Malak al-Maut, usually translated as “Angel of Death,” though “Valkyrie”—“Chooser of the Slain”—might be a better fit. It is a dramatic send-off much like that given the Oseberg queens in 834, though their ship was not burned.

  The Persian writer Ibn Rustah, who completed his seven-volume encyclopedia in 913, recorded a different burial rite among the Rus. Instead of in a boat, fired or not, this dead man was buried in “a hole as big as a house.” He was “dressed in his clothes and wearing his gold bracelet”—his best clothes, but not specially made funeral garments. Food, wine, and coins were placed in his grave, along with “his favorite woman,” who was shut inside the tomb alive.

  Ibn Rustah believed she died there, but she might have been just visiting, as the valkyrie Sigrun did her dead husband, according to one poem: “Sigrun went into Helgi’s burial mound and said, ‘I am as happy to see you again as Odin’s greedy ravens are to find a still-warm corpse.… I want to kiss you, my dead king, before you take off your bloody ringmail byrnie.’” Likewise, two friends in a saga made a pact “that whichever lived longer would build a grave mound for his friend, placing in it as much wealth as he thought honorable. Then he, the living, would enter the mound with the dead and sit there three nights, after which he could leave if he wanted to.”

  Hervor crossed to the otherworld with no slave or companion by her side. While her body (perhaps pickled) lay in a temporary resting place, they dug her a hole as big as a small house. From the door of the Warriors’ Hall, they marched down the lane between the two graveyards on the terrace north of Borgberget, the Fortress Rock. Reaching the cliff, they turned west, out to the end of the promontory. There, above Birka’s harbor, in plain sight of the royal manor across the strait at Adelso, they lit a bonfire beside another warrior’s grave. Did they drink and feast to her memory? Did they dance and chant or compete at games? I don’t know. I can’t even be sure of the bonfire, though such fires were standard in similar burials along the East Way.

  Once the fire burned out, they began to dig. When the pit was big enough—nearly twelve feet long, six feet wide, and up to six feet deep—they lined the hole with walls of wood and stamped its bottom into a floor. Did they erect a dovetailed log structure, as was done elsewhere, or build a plank house with corner posts? I can’t be sure; only traces of the walls remained. Was the floor, as elsewhere, of beaten clay or solid planking? Nothing so fancy, it seems.

  At one end, where they had not dug quite so deep, they boxed off a cramped stall, less than four feet wide. Into this they coaxed her two horses, a stallion and a mare, and slit their throats (their skulls show no marks of an axe between the eyes). As their blood drained, their knees buckled and they slowly crumpled, as dying horses do. Their heads were turned facing each other, their necks intertwined; one horse was bridled, the other was not.

  Then they carried Hervor into her death house and arranged her, sitting on her saddle: Iron stirrups were found by her now-vanished seat. She was dressed in her riding coat, a splendid kaftan rich with bands of silk embroidered with silver and sparkling with mirrored sequins. On her head they set her gerzkr silk cap, topped by its fancy filigreed silver cone. They fastened a wool cloak at her shoulder with a simple ring-shaped pin of iron.

  At her head and her feet, propped against the walls, they set her two round shields, their bosses facing away so she could jump up and grab a shield’s handgrip. Her long spear was angled into the ground, the spearhead lodged in the horses’ stall wall, as if she were holding the shaft in her hand.

  At her left side, where she would have worn it, assuming she was right-handed, they laid her sword, a serviceable steel-
edged weapon with a leather-wrapped hilt, nothing fancy about it, in its sheath. Beside it they placed a whetstone and her sheathed eating knife.

  To her right, within easy reach, they laid her twenty-inch scramasax, its sheath elaborately decorated in shining bronze. Her horn bow was set there too, strung, in its bow case, with twenty-five armor-piercing arrows, their hafts glittering with silver wire, gathered into a quiver feather side up: She had never mastered the point-up technique of the Magyar closed quiver.

  By her right foot they set her battle-axe, along with a comb and a simple bronze washing bowl, much repaired.

  Against her knee they leaned her gameboard, a handsome one with an iron frame. They placed her pouch of game pieces in her lap: twenty-eight whalebone warriors and three walrus-ivory dice, for playing hnefatafl. There, too, or in a second pouch, were three trader’s weights, a sliver of a silver dirham (dated 913 to 933), and a miniature spearhead amulet.

  When all was arranged to everyone’s satisfaction, a warrior standing on the lip of the grave cast a short spear over Hervor’s shoulders into the pit.

  One archaeologist interprets this act, seen in another Birka burial as well, as dedicating the dead to Odin, god of battle. Whether such was its meaning in Hervor’s case, I will never know. But that there was some meaning in the flight of this spear—and in the placement of everything in her grave—I have no doubt: “Note the detail, the precision, the deliberate choice and positioning of objects,” this expert says. Nothing is accidental about Hervor’s grave or about any of the elite Viking graves that have been excavated. Each one is different. Each one tells a story, or many stories, all mysteries to us now.

  Well-furnished chamber graves like Hervor’s—called “houses of the dead” in Danish—are unusual in Sweden, though they are more common in Kyiv and Gnezdovo, along the East Way. Of the eleven hundred burials excavated at Birka, more than half are cremations, most of them marked by mounds. Throughout Sweden, most people in the Viking Age were buried this way, their bodies and grave goods burned and then crushed. Sometimes all that’s left to study are flakes of bone and bits of metal.

  Another four hundred of Birka’s dead were buried simply, some in coffins, some without, with no grave goods other than items of clothing. They might have been Christians, or they might have been poor. Their graves tell us very little about their lives.

  Only a hundred and eleven of Birka’s dead rated a death house like Hervor’s. Some were warriors. Some were traders. Forty percent were women—a number that might rise, since the graves at Birka were sexed by metal: male for weapons, female for jewelry.

  Now that we know Bj581, long touted as the classic Viking warrior’s grave, housed a warrior woman, we might want to rethink our assumptions about the gender of similar graves with weapons and horses.

  She was a valkyrie and rode on the wind and the sea.

  She practised more with spear and shield and sword than at sewing or embroidery.

  She was a woman hard through and through and a highly expert warrior.

  She would do battle in the forefront of the most valiant warriors. Everyone marvelled at her matchless feats.

  I am a shield-maid. I was in battle with the King of Gardariki and our weapons were red with blood.

  As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone.

  Let’s ride out hard, with naked swords held high, away from here.

  After the spear was tossed over her shoulder, Hervor’s death house was roofed with wooden timbers—probably covered with charcoal, tar, and birchbark to delay their rotting, as in other chamber graves—and sealed under a layer of turf.

  With teams of horses they dragged over a granite boulder and wedged it upright. At thirteen feet high, Hervor’s standing stone was as tall as her grave was long, and the largest monument capping any burial at Birka. Rising from the western edge of the promontory beneath the Fortress Rock, it would be the first thing a traveler noticed when approaching the town: A sign of safety under the watchful eyes of the Birka warriors.

  And so it was the first thing Birka’s unknown conquerors saw when they attacked. They came from the lakeside, scaling the cliff and swarming past Hervor’s grave. With hundreds of flaming arrows, they set the Warriors’ Hall ablaze, trapping the Birka warriors within. They set fire to the smithies and the garrison’s stores. They burned down the stockades, the gate and battlements, and took control of the hillfort. By then, they owned the town.

  Did Hervor’s companions break down the walls of the burning hall, as Thorolf and his friends did when trapped by King Harald Fairhair? Did the Birka warriors make a heroic last stand, as Bjorn the Merchant did when Eirik Bloodaxe set fire to the Shining Hall at Kaupang? From the weapons and articles of dress that archaeologists saw littering the hall when they excavated it in the late 1990s, it appears the warriors did not. They died, terribly, in the flames. The victors removed the bodies and the salvageable weapons but left the rest on the floor, to tell the gruesome tale. It’s here the archaeologists found signs of the Birka warriors’ Eastern dress and Magyar bows, of ringmail and lamellar armor both, of shields on the walls and practical weapons stored under (puny) lock and (falcon) key, of a close-knit cohort of some forty warriors who dedicated their hall to the old ways of Odin, in defiance of Christ.

  Birka’s Warriors’ Hall was never rebuilt, its garrison never re-formed. The hillfort remained in use for a few more years, but after the attack the town fell into a decline from which it never recovered. By 975 Birka ceased to function as a node on the East Way. Its artisans and traders found new homes, perhaps on the isle of Gotland, which became the Baltic Sea’s trading center, or in Sigtuna, about twenty miles up Lake Malaren, where the first Christian king of the Swedes established his official residence before the year 1000. Laid out in a planned grid punctuated by churches, Sigtuna was a new-style town, firmly facing the Christian West and turning its back on the still-pagan eastern shores of the Baltic Sea. It was a town built to service the bureaucracy of Christian kingship, not as a free marketplace of goods and ideas. Sigtuna was a Swedish town, a political center in which trade was regulated by the king and his ministers, not the multicultural, multiethnic mosaic of Birka. In this, Sigtuna mirrored Smolensk, which replaced Gnezdovo, and Schleswig, which replaced Hedeby at about the same time. At Sigtuna, new silver coins were minted. None have been discovered in Birka.

  When Hjalmar Stolpe arrived on Bjorko, or Birch Island, in 1871, the Viking Age town of Birka and its thousand-plus residents were long forgotten. The island was a sleepy place, home to only five or six farm families. An entomologist with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stolpe was drawn to Bjorko by reports of the farmers’ plows turning up quantities of amber; he wondered if some of that amber preserved ants. “His finds,” noted Stolpe’s obituary, “inspired him with a desire for archaeological investigation.”

  By the time he began working on grave Bj581, Hervor’s grave, Stolpe had excavated more than five hundred burials in and around Birka. Trained in stratigraphy, he produced “meticulous” scientific reports; his field drawings on graph paper—a technique he introduced to archaeology—were “exceptional.”

  He had also developed his instincts, learning to recognize hidden graves by the shallow depression left when a chamber collapsed, or simply by the thickness of the grass that grew there. “I have located many graves by striking the ground with a stick and listening for the duller sound made by the somewhat looser soil in the grave filling,” he wrote.

  The dip and the grass both identified Hervor’s grave, but Stolpe was stymied in his first efforts to excavate. The great standing stone marking her burial had toppled over and sunk into the chamber, as the roof beams rotted and the ceiling caved in, capping it nearly completely. But by 1878, Stolpe had mastered a brand-new excavation technique—dynamite. He lit a match and blew the lid off the valkyrie’s grave. We are still hearing echoes of that blast.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In 2012 Ne
il Price, distinguished professor of archaeology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, gave a series of lectures at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; these were subsequently published on the university’s YouTube channel. His focus, he said, was “stories, the power of stories, and the role that narrative played in the life of the Vikings, its influence on their perception of the world.”

  Price’s ideas influenced my discussion of valkyries in Ivory Vikings (St. Martin’s, 2015), though we continue to disagree on a key issue: To Price, a valkyrie is a goddess or demon, a shield-maid is “semi-human,” and Bj581 was the burial of a possible “real” warrior woman. To me, the three ideas are synonymous. In the first of his Cornell lectures, “Children of Ash: Cosmology and the Viking Universe” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJZBqmGLHQ8), Price noted about valkyries: “We don’t know whether we have any Viking Age depictions of them. These things don’t come with labels; we have to try and interpret them.” I would add that we don’t know what the Vikings meant by the words “valkyrie” and “shield-maid” either; we can only try to interpret them.