Valkyrie

On a Good Friday morning in Caithness, a man named Dörruð looked through a gap in the wall of an outbuilding and saw twelve women setting up a loom. The warp and the weft were human entrails. Men’s heads hung from the frame as weights. The shuttle was an arrow, the beaters were swords, and the women sang while they worked, listing the kings who would fall that day across the water at Dublin. Six gave their names into the song: Hildr, Hjörþrimul, Sanngríðr, Svipul, Guðr, Göndul. When the cloth was done they tore it into pieces, each keeping a scrap, mounted, and rode off, six to the north and six to the south. The poem that records this, Darraðarljóð, sits inside chapter 157 of Njáls saga and is tied to the battle fought outside Dublin in 1014.

The loom in Caithness is not a metaphor.

The word is blunt about the work. *Valkyrja* joins *valr*, the slain lying on a field after a battle, to the verb *kjósa*, to choose. Chooser of the slain. Not guardian, not guide, not consolation. Snorri Sturluson, compiling the Prose Edda in Iceland in the 1220s, set out the arrangement without decoration: Odin sends them to every battle, they choose which men are to die, and they decide who holds the field. The choosing comes first. The carrying comes afterwards, and only for the ones the god has an appetite for.

Their oldest datable appearance is a job interview conducted over a battlefield. Around 961 the Norwegian skald Eyvindr Finnsson, nicknamed skáldaspillir, composed Hákonarmál on the death of King Hákon the Good at Fitjar. Odin sends out Göndul and Skögul to pick a king from the line of Yngvi. They wait on the edge of the fighting, leaning on their spear-shafts, discussing the size of the god’s household and remarking that it is due to grow. Hákon, bleeding, overhears them talking about him in the third person. When he objects that the verdict seems unfairly decided, Skögul answers that they let him keep the field and sent his enemies running, which is as much sympathy as the poem offers. Then he rides on to Valhalla, where Bragi and Hermóðr are sent out to meet him at the door.

Inside that hall the same women change function entirely. Grímnismál names thirteen of them who carry ale to the einherjar: Hrist, Mist, Skeggjöld, Skögul, Hildr, Þrúðr, Hlökk, Herfjötur, Göll, Geirahöð, Randgríðr, Ráðgríðr and Reginleif. Picture the low smoky roar of several thousand men who have spent the day killing each other for practice, the smell of spilled ale soaking into trampled straw, and the woman who cut a man’s thread that morning working her way down the bench with a horn, filling it again. Nobody in the poems finds this strange. Odin is not the only claimant on the dead, either: Grímnismál gives Freyja half of everyone killed, and Snorri says she rides to battles and takes her share.

Any physical account of them has to be pieced together from glimpses. The Helgi poems show maidens in mail riding through the air and across the sea, light striking off their weapons, blood dripping from their horses’ manes onto the woods below. Beyond that the poets were mostly interested in what the valkyries did rather than what they looked like, and the description thins out fast. Archaeology has filled some of the silence and complicated it at the same time. A gilded silver figurine 3.4 centimetres tall, turned up by metal detectorists at Hårby in Denmark in 2012 and now in the National Museum of Denmark, shows a woman with her hair gathered in a knot, a double-edged sword in one hand and a shield in the other, the first three-dimensional figure of its kind found. It was announced as a valkyrie, and it may well be one. Leszek Gardeła and colleagues, revisiting the whole class of armed female metalwork, have pointed out that the label was applied before the case was made, and that a small armed woman in cast silver is not self-labelling.

Nobody tells the story of how the valkyries came to be. They arrive already plural, a category rather than a family, with no birth and no parentage, which is part of what makes them unsettling. Rudolf Simek’s reading is that the earliest layer of the idea was closer to a corpse-demon with a claim on the battlefield dead, and that the figures softened as Valhalla itself shifted from a killing ground into a paradise, at which point the poets could let them become human enough to fall in love. That softening is visible in the heroic poems. Sigrdrífumál opens with Sigurd cutting a mail-coat off a sleeping woman on a mountain; she wakes, and explains that she killed a king called Hjálmgunnar whom Odin had promised the victory, and that Odin answered by driving a sleep-thorn into her, barring her from any further victory of her own, and sentencing her to marry. She repays Sigurd for waking her with a long teaching on runes. In Völsunga saga she is Brynhildr, and the marriage sentence eventually destroys everyone involved.

What they can do follows from what they are for. They see the outcome before it happens, and in the weaving poem they make it rather than read it. They travel where armies cannot, over water and through the air. One of their number is called Herfjötur, War-Fetter, a name that carries the idea of a paralysis dropped over a body of fighting men. In the prose framing Völundarkviða three of them are found spinning beside a lake with swan-skins laid on the bank, which links them to the shape-changing swan-women of wider northern folklore.

Their limits are just as consistent. They are servants, and the choosing is Odin’s, not theirs: exercising independent judgement is precisely what gets Sigrdrífa stripped of her rank and put to sleep. The swan-skin cuts both ways, since a garment set down on a lakeshore can be picked up by someone else, and the women in Völundarkviða stay seven years with the men who took them before they get away. Loving a mortal is the worst constraint of all, because they can hand a hero the victory but cannot keep him alive, and Sváva and Sigrún both end up standing over the body of the man they were sent to favour. The winged helmets, incidentally, are not theirs either. Those were designed by Carl Emil Doepler for the first Bayreuth staging of Wagner’s Ring in 1876, along with the horns he gave to Hunding, and they have been welded onto the popular image of the North ever since.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a valkyrie?

A valkyrie is one of a company of armed female figures in Norse mythology who serve Odin by deciding which warriors die in battle and escorting the chosen dead to Valhalla. The Old Norse name *valkyrja* means “chooser of the slain”. They also serve ale to the einherjar, the dead warriors, inside Odin’s hall.

Do valkyries choose who dies, or only carry the dead away?

They choose. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda states that Odin sends them to every battle, that they select which men are to be killed, and that they decide which side holds the field. In Darraðarljóð, the poem embedded in Njáls saga, twelve valkyries weave the outcome of a battle on a loom before it is fought.

Which valkyries are named in the Norse sources?

Grímnismál names thirteen who bear ale in Valhalla, including Hrist, Mist, Skögul, Hildr, Þrúðr, Hlökk, Herfjötur and Reginleif. Darraðarljóð names six of its twelve weavers: Hildr, Hjörþrimul, Sanngríðr, Svipul, Guðr and Göndul. Göndul and Skögul are the pair Odin sends to collect King Hákon the Good in the tenth-century poem Hákonarmál.

Was Brynhildr a valkyrie?

Yes. In Sigrdrífumál she is the sleeping woman Sigurd wakes on a mountain, and she explains that Odin punished her with a sleep-thorn for killing a king he had promised victory to, barring her from further victories and sentencing her to marriage. Völsunga saga gives her the name Brynhildr and follows that sentence through to its ruinous conclusion.

Did valkyries wear winged helmets?

No. No Norse source describes winged helmets, and none have been found archaeologically. The winged helmet was invented by the costume designer Carl Emil Doepler for the 1876 Bayreuth premiere of Wagner’s Ring cycle, in the same designs that gave the character Hunding a horned helmet.

Related Entries

Odin, Einherjar, Norns, Urd, Freyja, Sigurd, Fylgja, Hamingja, Sleipnir, Swan maiden, Morrigan, Banshee, Erinyes (Furies), Psychopomp