Valkyries

The valkyries ('choosers of the slain') are Odin's agency on the battlefield: armoured women riding through air and over sea, granting victory and death according to the Allfather's ledger. In Valhalla they pour ale for the warriors they harvested — Grímnismál names thirteen doing just that, with names like Hildr ('Battle'), Göndul, Skögul, and Geirskögul ('Spear-Battle').

The poetry gives them two faces. The grand one: in Hákonarmál, Göndul and Skögul come for a dying king 'sitting on horseback, with helmets and shields,' courteous and terrible. The dark one: in Darraðarljóð, twelve valkyries weave the fate of a battle on a loom strung with men's guts, weighted with severed heads, singing as they work. The romantic one came later still: valkyries like Brynhildr and Sigrdrífa are punished by Odin for choosing against his will, put to sleep behind walls of shields or fire, and loved by mortal heroes — the swan-maiden brides of legend.

Between grimness and glamour, they encode a real idea: that battle-luck was a woman's hand on the scales, and that dying well meant being chosen.

What is a valkyrie?

The word explains the job: valr is the corpse-heap on a battlefield, the slain; kjósa is to choose. A valkyrie is a chooser of the slain — a supernatural woman who decides, on Odin's behalf, who falls in a battle and who among the fallen is worth taking. In the Norse imagination, battle-luck was never just skill and numbers. Something rode over the field, invisible or half-glimpsed, tipping spears aside from one man and guiding them into another, and that something wore a woman's face.

Their names read like a battle dismembered into personnel. Grímnismál lists the ones who carry ale to the einherjar: Hrist and Mist ('Shaker' and 'Mist'), Skeggjöld ('Axe-Age'), Skögul, Hildr ('Battle'), Þrúðr, Hlökk ('Noise'), Herfjötur ('Host-Fetter' — the battlefield paralysis that seizes a doomed man), Göll, Geirahöð, Randgríð, Ráðgríð, and Reginleif. Völuspá adds Gunnr ('War') and Geirskögul, 'ready to ride to the gods' people.' These are not personalities; they are the moments of battle given legs and a horse. Snorri, in Gylfaginning, sums up their portfolio: Odin sends them to every battle; they allot death to men and govern victory; and in Valhalla they serve drink and see to the table-service — a job description that runs, without apparent irony, from deciding who dies to keeping the cups full.

Choosers of the slain: the valkyries at work

The oldest and grandest picture of valkyries at work is in the praise-poems for dead kings. In Hákonarmál, composed around 961 for Hákon the Good, Odin sends Göndul and Skögul to a battlefield in Norway 'to choose among kings' — to decide which ruler will join him. The dying Hákon, still bleeding, sees them 'sitting on horseback, with helmets and shields,' and speaks to them with the wariness of a man negotiating with his own death: why did Skögul decide the battle this way? The valkyrie answers, courteously, that he has in fact won the field — and that he now rides to 'the green homes of the gods.' The poem's valkyries are terrible and formal at once, like officers delivering a summons that is also an honour.

The other face has no courtesy in it at all. Darraðarljóð, preserved in Njáls saga and set on the morning of the Battle of Clontarf (1014), shows twelve valkyries seen through the window of an out-building, weaving on a loom. The warp and weft are men's intestines; the weights are severed heads; the shuttles are arrows; the beater is a sword. As they weave they chant the battle's outcome — who will fall, which king will die — and when the cloth is done they tear it apart, each keeping her shred, and ride off six to the north and six to the south. 'It is horrible now to look around,' the poem says, 'as blood-red clouds gather in the sky.' Here the valkyries are not messengers of fate but its manufacturers, working destiny on a loom the way the norns carve it in wood — women's craft-work, weaving, turned into the most nightmarish image in Norse poetry.

Between these poles sits their steady employment: riding through air and over sea (the Helgi poems love the image of their horses shaking dew from their manes into the valleys), bearing mead to the chosen in Valhalla, and enforcing Odin's ledger — which, the sources quietly note, is kept according to his needs for Ragnarök, not according to justice.

Brynhildr, Sigrdrífa, and the valkyrie brides

Somewhere in the tradition, the choosers of the slain acquired love stories, and these became some of the most influential romances in European literature. The pattern is consistent: a valkyrie exercises her own judgment against Odin's, and is punished for it — grounded, in effect, stripped of her office, and made subject to marriage and mortality.

In Sigrdrífumál, the hero Sigurd rides up to a mountain called Hindarfjall, where a fire-glow reaches the sky. Inside a rampart of shields he finds an armoured figure asleep; he cuts the mail-coat away and finds a woman. She is Sigrdrífa, a valkyrie who gave victory to the wrong king — the young Agnarr, against Odin's decision — and whom Odin therefore stabbed with a sleep-thorn, decreeing she would never again decide a victory, and would marry. She awakened hailing day and the sons of day, and then did something wholly in character for her kind: she taught. Most of the poem is her instruction to Sigurd in rune-lore — victory-runes on the sword-hilt, ale-runes against betrayal, speech-runes, healing-runes — the battlefield woman as keeper of dangerous knowledge.

In the Völsung tradition (Völsunga saga and the Sigurd poems of the Poetic Edda), this sleeping valkyrie is or becomes Brynhildr, and the story turns tragic: oaths, a shape-swapped wooing through a wall of flame, rivalry with Guðrún, and finally Brynhildr engineering Sigurd's murder and following him onto the pyre. The Helgi poems add the valkyrie Sigrún, who flies to protect the hero Helgi in battle, marries him against her family, and — in one of the most haunting scenes in the Edda — spends a night in the burial mound embracing her dead husband when he returns as a corpse still wet with 'the dew of grief.' Kára, Sváva, and the swan-maidens of Völundarkviða (valkyries who shed swan-shapes on a lakeshore and are taken as wives) round out the type. In these stories the valkyrie is glamour and doom in one figure: to be loved by one was to be chosen, in every sense.

Were valkyries real women? Shield-maidens and history

The sagas and Saxo Grammaticus tell of human skjaldmeyjar, shield-maidens — women like Hervör of the Tyrfing cycle or Lagertha in Saxo — who took up weapons, and legend blurred them into the valkyrie type; Brynhildr herself is sometimes king's daughter, sometimes supernatural chooser, depending on the text. Archaeology keeps the question alive: small silver figures of armed women bearing drinking horns (like the famous find from Hårby, Denmark) are conventionally called 'valkyrie' amulets, and the tenth-century Birka chamber grave Bj 581, furnished with a full weapon-set, held a body genomically female. Whether such women were warriors, symbols, or something else is honestly contested; what is certain is that the idea of the armed woman deciding battle sat deep in the Norse imagination, deep enough to be worn as jewellery into graves.

In the primary sources

The valkyries are assembled from an unusually wide spread of texts. Grímnismál gives the ale-bearing roster of thirteen names. Völuspá presents a troop 'ready to ride' — Skuld, Skögul, Gunnr, Hildr, Göndul, Geirskögul — and calls them the ladies of the War-lord. Hákonarmál and Eiríksmál stage them receiving dead kings. Sigrdrífumál and the Helgi poems (Helgakviða Hundingsbana I–II, Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar) carry the valkyrie-bride legends, and Völundarkviða the swan-maidens. Snorri's Gylfaginning gives the tidy job description, and his Skáldskaparmál uses valkyrie names throughout the kennings of battle. Darraðarljóð, embedded in Njáls saga, contributes the corpse-loom. Note the seams: the serene cup-bearer of Grímnismál, the gut-weaver of Darraðarljóð, and the tragic lover of the Völsung poems are not one consistent being but layers of an evolving idea — likely from older battle-demons toward the noble, romantic figures the latest poems prefer.

Valkyries in modern culture

Wagner's Die Walküre (1870) fixed the modern image — winged helmets, 'Ride of the Valkyries,' Brünnhilde's fire — and everything since, from comics' Valkyrie to video-game guides who ferry your soul, descends from it. The winged helmet is pure theatre costume; no Norse source gives valkyries wings (they ride horses; only the swan-maidens have feathers, and those are removable). What modern versions most often lose is the older layer: that the valkyrie was not a warrior woman fighting beside you, but the decision itself — the reason the axe found you and not the man beside you.