Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

3. The Valkyries of Odin

In Snorri’s description of the after-life for warriors, there are certain beings who form a link between Odin and the slain, and between the worlds of the living and the dead. These are the female spirits called Valkyries, who wait on the warriors in Valhalla, and no description of the gods of battle can be complete without them. In the descriptions of the poets they appear as women who wear armour and ride on horseback, passing swiftly over sea and land. They carry out Odin’s commands while the battle rages, giving victory according to his will, and at the close they lead the slaughtered warriors to Valhalla. Sometimes, on the other hand, they are pictured as the wives of living heroes. Human princesses are said to become Valkyries, as though they were the priestesses of some cult.

Valkyrie names occur frequently in the work of ninth- and tenth-century poets. Many, like Hildr, Hlokk, Gu?r, are simply synonyms for ‘battle’. Evidently an elaborate literary picture has been built up by generations of poets and storytellers, in which several different conceptions can be discerned. We recognize something akin to the Norns, spirits who decide the destinies of men; to the seeresses, who could protect men in battle by their spells; to the powerful female guardian spirits attached to certain families, bringing luck to a youth under their protection; even to certain women who armed themselves and fought like men, for whom there is some historical evidence from the regions round the Black Sea. There may be a memory also of the priestesses of the god of war, women who officiated at the sacrificial rites when captives were put to death after battle. The name Valkyrie means, literally, ‘chooser of the slain’, and in the eleventh century an Anglo-Saxon bishop, Wulfstan, included ‘choosers of the slain’ in a black list of sinners, witches, and evildoers in his famous Sermo Lupi. All the other classes whom he mentions are human ones, and it seems unlikely that he has introduced mythological figures as well. In the tenth-century ship-funeral on the Volga (see p. 52), the old woman who organized the killing of the slave-girl was called the Angel of Death, and had two other women, called her daughters, in attendance. She is described as ‘an old Hunnish woman, massive and grim to look upon’. It would hardly be surprising if strange legends grew up about such women, who must have been kept apart from their kind for these gruesome duties. Since it was often decided by lot which prisoners should be killed, the idea that the god ‘chose’ his victims, through the instrument of the priestesses, must have been a familiar one, apart from the obvious assumption that some were chosen to fall in war.

It seems that from early times the heathen Germans believed in fierce female spirits doing the commands of the war god, stirring up disorder, taking part in battle, seizing and perhaps even devouring the slain. Wulfstan used the word w?lcyrge, and the same word occurs some centuries earlier, in a number of Old English word-lists, some of which go back to the eighth century. W?lcyrge, ‘chooser of the slain’, is given as the Old English equivalent for the names of the furies: Erinys, Tisiphone, and Allecto.

Earlier evidence still comes from the north of England. Two votive stones were found at Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall in 1883, one of which reads:

Dedicated to the God Mars Thincsus and to the two Alaisiagae, Bede and Fimmilene.

The other refers to ‘Mars and the two Alaisiagis’. A third fragment was found which may have been associated with either or both these inscriptions, showing a war god with shield and spear, with a bird beside him. In 1920 an altar was discovered at the same fort, and this also bore an inscription dedicated to the Alaisiagae, calling them goddesses, and giving them the names of Baudihillie and Friagabi.¹ These names have been interpreted as ‘ruler of battle’ and ‘giver of freedom’, and they would be suitable ones for Valkyries to bear.

The conception of a company of women associated with battle among the heathen Germans is further implied by two spells which have survived into Christian times. One comes from Merseburg in south Germany, and is a charm for the unloosing of fetters. It describes how certain women called the Idisi (cf. Old Norse disir, ‘goddesses’) sat together, some fastening bonds, some holding back the host, some tugging at fetters. It concludes with the words, ‘Leap forth from the bonds, escape from the enemy’.

With this may be compared an Old English charm against a sudden pain. It seems at first to be a humble and innocuous charm, until the pain is visualized as caused by the spears of certain supernatural women. At this point it suddenly takes on heroic stature:

Loud were they, lo, loud, riding over the hill.

They were of one mind, riding over the land;

Shield thyself now, to escape from this ill.

Out, little spear, if herein thou be.

Under shield of light linden I took up my stand,

When the mighty women made ready their power

And sent out their screaming spears. …

Later in the spell weapons shot by the gods are mentioned, and the impression is that here we have what was originally a battle spell, like the Merseburg one, which has come down in the world until it could be evoked for a prosaic stitch in the side. A second suggestion of supernatural women in another charm is the term sigewif, ‘victory-women’, used of a swarm of bees.

The unbinding and binding of fetters, the hurling of spears, and the power to ride through the air are all activities associated with Odin. In Havamal he utters a spell to provide ‘fetters for my adversaries’. These are not likely to be physical bonds, but rather fetters for the mind, of the kind described in Ynglinga Saga:

Odin knew how to act so that his foes in battle became blind or deaf or panic-stricken, and their weapons pierced no more than wands.

A vivid example of such a state is found in one of the sagas from Iceland, Har?ar Saga (36). The hero Hord was escaping from his enemies when he was suddenly overcome by what is described as ‘the war-fetter’ (herfjoturr). This was due to hostile magic:

The ‘war-fetter’ came upon Hord, and he cut himself free once and a second time. The ‘war-fetter’ came upon him a third time. Then the men managed to hem him in, and surrounded him with a ring of enemies, but he fought his way out of the ring, and slew three men in so doing.

This must not be confused with the onset of panic in battle, for Hord was an exceptionally brave man and a splendid fighter. It seems rather to be a kind of paralysis, like that experienced in a nightmare. Three times he succeeded in shaking it off, but when it overcame him for the fourth time he was surrounded again and killed. It is noteworthy that one of the Valkyrie names is Herfjoturr, ‘war-fetter’, the same word as in the passage above. The suggested interpretation of one of the names of the Alaisiagae, Friagabi, as ‘giver of freedom’, may be relevant in this connexion.

Old Norse literature has left us with a picture of dignified Valkyries riding on horses and armed with spears, but a different, cruder picture of supernatural women connected with blood and slaughter has also survived. Female creatures, sometimes of gigantic size, pour blood over a district where a battle is to take place; they are sometimes described as carrying troughs of blood or riding on wolves, or are seen rowing a boat through a rain of blood falling from the sky. Such figures are usually omens of fighting and death; they sometimes appear to men in dreams, and they are described more than once in skaldic verse of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The most famous example of this kind of dream vision is that said in Njals Saga to have been seen before the Battle of Clontarf, fought at Dublin in 1014. A group of women were seen weaving on a grisly loom formed from men’s entrails and weighted with severed heads. They were filling in a background of grey spears with a weft of crimson. They were called by names of Valkyries. A poem is quoted in the Saga which is said to have been spoken by them, and in the course of this they declare that it is they who decide who is to die in the coming battle:

We weave, we weave the web of the spear,

as on goes the standard of the brave.

We shall not let him lose his life;

the Valkyries have power to choose the slain. …

All is sinister now to see,

a cloud of blood moves over the sky,

the air is red with the blood of men,