The Valkyries

The word valkyrie comes from Old Norse valkyrja, ‘chooser of the slain’. The valr was the heap of dead on a battlefield, and the valkyries were the powers who decided who would join it. Behind them may lie very old Germanic ideas of female spirits of war and fate. The Old English word wælcyrge was used in glosses for the Furies and for Bellona, the Roman war goddess, and Archbishop Wulfstan in 1014 listed wælcyrian among the wicked people afflicting England, perhaps meaning sorceresses. In these early uses the word sounds dark, not romantic.

A difficulty runs through every account of the valkyries. The Norse peoples who believed in them left almost no writing beyond short runic inscriptions. The poems that describe them were composed orally and written down in Iceland in the 13th century, after more than two centuries of Christianity. Some court poems are older: Eiríksmál, from the 950s, and Hákonarmál, from the 960s, both imagine kings arriving at Valhalla. In Hákonarmál the poet Eyvindr describes two valkyries, Göndul and Skögul, sent by Odin ‘to choose among the kings’, who tell the dying Hákon that he will go to the gods.

Archaeology offers a few images. Small silver pendants from the Viking age show women in long dresses holding a drinking horn, and picture stones on the island of Gotland show a woman greeting a rider with a horn. Scholars often interpret these as valkyries welcoming the dead, though the identification cannot be proved.

In the mythological poems valkyries are servants of Odin, the god of war, poetry and the dead. They ride to battles at his command, decide who will fall and bring the chosen warriors, the einherjar, to Valhalla. There the dead feast on boar and mead and fight each day for sport, waiting to fight beside the gods at Ragnarök, the end of the world. The poem Grímnismál adds that Freyja chooses half of the slain for her own hall, Fólkvangr.

In Valhalla the valkyries serve drink to the warriors. Snorri Sturluson, writing around 1220, explains that Odin sends them to every battle, that they award victory, and that three of them, Gunnr, Róta and Skuld, ride out to choose the slain. Poems give long lists of names, many of them simply words for battle: Hildr and Gunnr mean ‘battle’, Göndul perhaps ‘wand-wielder’, Skögul ‘shaker’ or ‘raging one’.

Some sources are far grimmer. In the poem Darraðarljóð, preserved in Njáls saga, a man in Caithness sees twelve valkyries weaving at a loom made from weapons and the remains of the slain, singing of the battle of Clontarf in 1014 and deciding its outcome. Here the valkyries resemble the Norns, who spin human fate. Other passages connect them with ravens and wolves, the animals of the battlefield. The valkyries of early belief may have been as much feared as admired.

In the heroic poems the valkyries become more human. Several fall in love with mortal men. In the lays of Helgi, the valkyrie Sigrún protects the hero Helgi in battle, marries him and, after his death, visits his burial mound to spend a night with him before he rides back to Valhalla. In the Lay of Völundr, three swan maidens, described as valkyries, live for seven years with three brothers before flying away.

The most famous is Brynhildr. In the poem Sigrdrífumál a valkyrie named Sigrdrífa tells the hero Sigurd that Odin has punished her with an endless sleep for giving victory to the wrong king, and that she has vowed to marry only a man who knows no fear. Sigurd rides through the wall of fire around her and wakes her. Later tradition, especially the 13th-century Völsunga saga, identifies her with Brynhildr. Sigurd is tricked into winning her for another man, Gunnar, and when Brynhildr discovers the deception she brings about Sigurd’s death and then takes her own life. The story, also told in the German Nibelungenlied in a different form, became one of medieval Europe’s great tragedies.

These poems were written down by Christians, and scholars debate how much they reflect pre-Christian belief and how much they reflect literary invention. What is clear is that the figure moved from a terrible spirit of slaughter towards a noble, tragic heroine.

The sagas add a few more glimpses. In some, valkyrie-like women appear in dreams to warn a warrior of his coming death, or ride through the sky before a battle. Related figures, the dísir and the fylgjur, female guardian spirits attached to families or individuals, overlap with valkyries in function, and the boundaries between them are not sharp. Scholars such as Rudolf Simek and John Lindow emphasise that Norse tradition did not keep tidy categories: the same names and roles could pass between goddesses, guardian spirits, valkyries and heroic women. Our neat modern definition of the valkyrie is in part a product of the medieval writers and modern editors who arranged these scattered sources.

The modern valkyrie was largely created in the 19th century. Romantic painters such as Peter Nicolai Arbo showed them riding through stormy skies, and Richard Wagner placed Brünnhilde, his version of Brynhildr, at the heart of his four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. Die Walküre was first performed in Munich in 1870, and the full cycle at Bayreuth in 1876. Its ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ is one of the most recognisable pieces of classical music, used famously in the film Apocalypse Now in 1979. The image of the large soprano in a horned or winged helmet comes from stage productions of this period.

Today valkyries appear in comics, films and video games, from Marvel’s Valkyrie to the God of War series, and the word names ships, aircraft and sports teams. Some modern practitioners of revived Norse religion honour Odin and his valkyries, while most people meet them as figures of literature. Behind the many versions stand the old poems, in which the valkyries embody the Norse sense that death in battle was chosen, honoured and governed by fate.