The Real Valkyrie

The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women

Nancy Marie Brown

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780750997911
• eBook ISBN: 9780750998420
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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

In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden, was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history and literature to reinvent her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined.

Nancy Marie Brown links the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines Hervor's adventures intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as the Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor's short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, the sagas, poetry and myth carry weapons.

In this compelling narrative, Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.

HERVOR’S SONG

Sunset on the isle of Samsey. A cold mist rolls in off the Kattegat. A shepherd gathering his flock for the night pauses on the dunes, alert, always alert on this small island famed as a meeting place of Vikings. And indeed, those sounds he hears, that rhythmic splashing, that groan and creak of oars, mean a ship is nearing—one or more. He throws himself flat in the long grass and listens.

He hears his sheep bleating as they trot homeward down the forest path, the bellwether leading. He wishes he were with them. He isn’t sure which is worse to meet here after dark: the Vikings in the approaching ships, or those buried under the mounds. Twenty years ago, two rival bands met here and fought: Angantyr and his eleven brothers against Arrow-Odd and his companions. All died except Arrow-Odd—people say he used magic. The dead haunt the shoreline still.

Beneath the raucous chatter of gulls, he listens to the breeze worrying the grass. An owl hoots, and the forest birds fall silent. The sun sinks lower; the mist thickens.

Now he hears voices, raised, and the rattle of weapons. A knocking of ships’ hulls, one bright and empty, the other weighty and dark. More oar splash. He is ready to run.

But what comes out of the mist is only a small boat rowed by a single warrior. The boat grounds and the warrior leaps out, drawing the vessel higher on the stony shingle. In spite of himself, the shepherd is curious. He lifts his head.

Immediately, the warrior spots him. You! she calls. Come down.

He rises to his feet, brushes off his bare knees, and slides down the dune to the beach. You’re crazy, coming here alone at nightfall, he says. Get to shelter before it’s too late.

The warrior gathers her gear from her boat. There’s no shelter for me here, she replies. I know no one living on this island.

When she turns toward him, he instinctively steps back. She is taller than he is, and much more muscular. Much wealthier, too. She wears a ringmail byrnie—he knows how heavy those are—but moves as if it were weightless. Beneath it she wears a good wool tunic, padded and embroidered, over wide wool pants, cross-gaitered below the knee. Silver glints at her throat. Her long hair is knotted at her nape.

Get back to your ship, he says. You can’t stay on the beach, not at night. It’s not safe to be alone here.

She claps a battered helm on her head, slips a hand axe into her belt. She picks up her shield and spear. You’re here with me, she says. Carry those. She points the spear tip at the rest of the pile: a broad axe, a shovel, a coil of rope.

The shepherd laughs. Only fools walk by the barrows at night. He gestures west, where the land is rippled by rows and clusters of grave mounds, some marked with tall upright stones, others shadowed by brush and trees. Two mounds stand higher than the rest, one by the shore, the other a little inland, on the edge of the salt marsh. Already he sees fires flickering in the mist as the sunset paints the sky red.

They’re scared too, she says, glancing over her shoulder at the invisible Viking ship. She turns back toward the mounds. Which is Angantyr’s?

We shouldn’t be standing here talking, he says. We should be heading home as fast as we can.

She unlinks a silver arm-ring and dangles it from a finger. I’ll give you this if you tell me where to dig.

The shepherd snatches it. He points to the nearer of the big mounds. Arrow-Odd buried his friends there in their boat, he says, and over there he buried his enemies, Angantyr and his brothers, in a wood-walled chamber. He claimed he did it alone, but of course we islanders helped him. We covered both graves with wood and turf and heaped sand over them. We left the dead with all their weapons, I swear it. But still they walk. At night, their graves open. This whole point of land bursts into flames.

It’s her turn to laugh, a scoffing laugh. I don’t faint at the crackling of a fire, she says.

Tossing her shield on the sand, she picks up the shovel and sets off for the barrow. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t see the shepherd disappear down the forest path.

Framed by the sunset, the barrow is on fire. Mist swirls around its base like smoke. She wades through it, unafraid. Circling the mound, she prods it with her spear. The turf and sand are not deep—you can’t expect much of a monument when your enemies bury you. Her spear tip touches wood and in one place pokes into it; the timbers are rotten. She won’t need the rope. She strips off her gear and starts digging at ground level. She takes her hand axe to the wood. Soon she breaks through.

When the tunnel is wide enough, she arms herself again and slips into the barrow—and only then realizes what she’s forgotten: light.

The grave is darker than night. She waits for her eyes to adjust, but not a glimmer from the sunset sky seeps in. Death surrounds her.

I will not tremble before you, Father, she says. Speak to me.

She closes her eyes but hears only silence and the wind in the world outside. One hand on the damp wooden wall of the tomb, she shifts forward until she can stand.

Awake, Angantyr! Angantyr, awake! she calls out. I am Hervor, Svava’s daughter, your only child. Give me your sword, the great sword Tyrfing, the Flaming Sword the dwarfs forged in their halls of stone.

Again, no answer. She takes another step forward and stumbles to one knee. She steadies her balance with her spear shaft, but one hand still comes down upon bones. She jerks her hand away.

May you writhe within your ribs, she curses. May your barrow be an anthill in which you rot. May you never feast with Odin in Valhalla, unless you let me wield that sword. Why should dead hands hold such a weapon?

And this time she thinks she hears an answer. You do wrong to call down evils upon me. No dead hands hold that sword. My enemies built this barrow. They took Tyrfing.

It could be true, though the shepherd swore not. She calls out again into the darkness: Would you cheat your only child? Tell the truth! Let Odin accept you only if the Flaming Sword is not here, in the tomb.

Silence. She opens her eyes and now flames do flash and flicker about her. She reaches for them, but they dance away.

Not for all your fires will I fear you, Father. It takes more than a dead man to frighten me.

You must be mad. Go back to your ships! No woman in the world would wield that cursed sword.

She knows of the curse: Once drawn, the sword must kill before it can be sheathed again. If not, it will doom her sons, destroy her family line—but what does she care about that? She has no sons, and no intention of marrying. She is a shield-maid. A warrior woman. A valkyrie.

People thought me man enough, she quips, before I came here.

Twelve bodies were buried in this barrow, her father and his eleven brothers. Angantyr, she reasons, was laid on top. Using her spear as a probe, she finds the edges of the pile, then its highest point. She pokes and prods until something falls to the floor that is not bone.

She shimmies out through the tunnel, her treasure tight in her fist: It is her father’s sword, gold-hilted Tyrfing, the Flaming Sword.

The mist has disappeared. The starlight seems so bright.

You’ve done well, Father, to give me your sword, Hervor says. I’d rather have it than rule all Norway.

Hervor’s Song was the first Old Norse poem to be translated into English, in 1703. As such, it crafted the image we hold today of the fearless Viking warrior who laughs in the face of danger—and that warrior is a woman.

My dramatization isn’t exact: The original includes no shovel. Instead, I’ve described what might have happened if Hervor’s Song reflected a real event—if, let’s say, this Hervor was the real warrior woman buried in grave Bj581 beside the Swedish town of Birka.

In the poem, the flames are real. The grave magically opens; the dead rise like smoke. Hervor conjures up her ghostly father and demands he hand over the family heirloom, the famous Flaming Sword. When he refuses, fearing the sword’s curse will destroy his family line, she scoffs and finally bends him to her will. “Now,” she brags, brandishing the sword, “I have walked between worlds.” The poem is eerie and otherworldly and has been popular, in English, for hundreds of years. Some say this poem inspired the first Gothic novel.

But the prose Saga of Hervor, which quotes the poem—and so preserved it for us to read—confounds modern readers. We like our genres clear-cut. Is it history? Is it fantasy? Is it true?

Medieval Iceland’s writers made no such distinctions. Those few sagas that do not mention dragons or ghosts, witches or werewolves, prophetic dreams or dire omens, dwell instead on the miracles of saints. The name “saga” implies neither fiction nor fact; it derives from the Old Norse verb segja, “to say.” A good saga seamlessly integrates the two. Some saga authors were witnesses to the events they relate; others retell stories from hundreds of years in their past. Some list their sources: folktales, poems, genealogies, or interviews with wise grandmothers. Others don’t. Some mimic foreign tales of chivalry; others focus on Icelandic farmers and their petty feuds.

All I can say for certain about the sagas is that they were first written down, in prose, after Christian missionaries created an Old Norse alphabet soon after the year 1000—no sagas are written in the ancient Norse runes—and that the copies we have were created in Iceland in the 1200s, 1300s, or even later.

A manuscript can be dated by what it’s written on (skin or paper), by the chemistry of its ink, by the shape of its letters and the abbreviations used, and by its vocabulary (though an ancient word hoard can be faked). Dating the stories and poems a manuscript contains is trickier. They are older than the parchment or ink, for sure. But how much older? For Hervor’s Song, I have a few clues.

The oldest copy of the Saga of Hervor was penned by an Icelandic lawyer named Haukur Erlendsson, as he tells us in letters from 1302 and 1310, though he only copied down the bits he liked. A longer (but much later) manuscript suggests the Saga of Hervor was first composed around 1120 for Queen Ingigerd of Sweden, whose mother was a princess from Kyiv. This version ends with a long list of kings descended (in spite of the sword’s curse) from Hervor, and the last on the list is Ingigerd’s husband.

The saga itself is set in a mythic Viking past that is impossible to date. Its story ranges from Norway east through Russia to the Black Sea and, as sagas go, it is not particularly well written. It could use “a ruthless rewriting” to smooth out its “many inconsistencies” and tie up its “loose ends,” according to its modern translator, and I have to agree. But it was apparently quite popular in the Middle Ages: Many manuscripts include a copy.

During the general “sorting frenzy” of the Victorian Age, the Saga of Hervor was classified as a Saga of Ancient Times, a genre created to dismiss a group of “mythical” or “romantic” tales “that have little or no historical authenticity,” as the translator put it. Yet, perversely, he prized the Saga of Hervor for its historical elements, which “come down from a very remote antiqui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A note on language
• Introduction
• 1: Hervor’s song
• 2: Gunnhild mother-of-kings
• 3: The town beneath the shining hall
• 4: Little “hel-skins”
• 5: Queen asa’s revenge
• 6: The winter nights feast
• 7: The valkyries’ task
• 8: The feud
• 9: The queen of orkney
• 10: The tragedy of brynhild
• 11: Shield-maids
• 12: The red girl
• 13: Slave girls
• 14: The slave route to birka
• 15: Red earth
• 16: A birka warrior
• 17: The kaftan
• 18: The east way
• 19: At linda’s stone
• 20: “Gerzkr” caps
• 21: Queen olga’s revenge
• 22: Death of a valkyrie
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Further Reading
• Notes