The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  What story the Overhogdal tapestries tell is debated as well. One reading is the legend of Brynhild. If so, the version woven in these pictures precedes the earliest manuscript of the tale by at least two hundred years. It is quite a bit different from the versions recorded in poetry and prose, as well. It focuses not on the male hero, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, but on the female heroes: Brynhild and Gudrun, both of whom were warrior women.

  * * *

  Like Brynhild, the hero of the Saga of Hervor was both “a beautiful girl” and “as strong as a man.” She learned to wield weapons and she learned to weave cloth. She was brought up in an earl’s house, but “as soon as she was able, she practised more with spear and shield and sword than at sewing or embroidery.” She joined a Viking band and became its leader. She retrieved her father’s sword from his barrow, joined a king’s court, killed a king’s man who unsheathed her sword without permission, and resumed the Viking life. She “was out raiding awhile,” the saga says, “and when she grew tired of it,” she went home to the earl’s house “and set herself to learning needlework”—that is, she took up mothers’ work. Soon, in the saga, she has a son.

  Her decision to quit the Viking life, as told, had always seemed absurd to me. It was too abrupt, too out of character. But the more sagas I studied, the more I saw that settling down was a common path for Viking warriors, male or female. They aged out of the sea raider’s role or were injured too badly to continue. In one saga, for example, Onund loses his lower leg in a sea battle against King Harald Fairhair. He fights on as “Tree-Foot” but admits, “I’ve not been glad since we stood in the shield-storm and that witch-cursed axe wounded me.” His friend advises him to find a wife and settle down. He does so, sailing (a bit morosely) to Iceland with his bride:

  They used to call us useful

  in the storm of swords,

  when the blizzard of spears

  screamed, me and Sugandi.

  Now, one-legged and

  leaning on a stick,

  I’m off alone to Iceland.

  Life’s gone downhill.

  Detail from a reconstruction of the Overhogdal tapestries.

  He establishes a large farm beneath a great snowy mountain, with many servants. It prospers, and several quiet years pass before Onund Tree-Foot gets involved in Icelandic politics. (He’d lost his leg, not his fighting spirit.)

  In another saga, young Ulf “went off on Viking raids, harrying and plundering” with his friend Kari. “He was a berserk,” the saga says of Kari, but “when he gave up the Viking life, Kari went home to his farm on Berle Island, a very wealthy man.” He settled down and raised three children. Ulf, who was reputed to be a werewolf as well as a berserk, eventually decided to retire as well. He married Kari’s daughter “and went home to his farm. He was a rich man, both in land and in goods. He claimed the rights his ancestors had held before him, and became a powerful figure. It is also said that he was an excellent farmer. He rose early in the mornings and went out to work in his smithy or look over his livestock and grain fields, sometimes meeting to talk with other farmers who came to consult him. He gave good advice.”

  Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings expected such a future for her foster daughter, Hervor, when she insisted she learn the textile arts. She could not know the girl wouldn’t live long enough to retire from the Viking life. Hervor would never settle down to weave tapestries or run a farm and give her neighbors good advice. Instead, she would be buried as a war leader in Birka before she turned forty.

  But to become Birka’s war leader, Hervor first had to master the martial arts. When Eirik Bloodaxe left the Viking life in 946 to become king of York—or Jorvik, as he called it—sixteen-year-old Hervor had her chance, for Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings brought her household and all Eirik’s children to York as well. There, Hervor and Ragnhild and her seven brothers lived in the midst of an army camp: Tenth-century York saw kings come and go with bewildering speed, as the English strove to reconquer the city, under Viking control since the 860s, and York’s assembly of wealthy citizens, or witan, led by their defiant archbishop, sought to preserve their independence. Hearing of Eirik’s exile, Archbishop Wulfstan offered the former king of Norway York’s throne. Surely a man named Bloodaxe could keep the city free. Especially when he had so many sons.

  11

  SHIELD-MAIDS

  Taut bowstrings make arrows sing. Tossed spears bite, and peace takes flight …

  Hervor marches down the steep streets of Jorvik with her foster brothers, chanting the poem at the top of their lungs.

  Bloody they lay where bright spears play. King Eirik that way wins fame each day …

  Except for its ancient stone walls (some tumbling down) and a few odd free-standing pillars (the remnants of a Roman palace), Jorvik feels like home to Hervor: It is much like Vestfold, where she lived in the Shining Hall above the market town of Kaupang.

  Out one of Jorvik’s gates is a dense forest, home to deer, wild boar, and wolves, alive with birdsong, the oak and hazel coppiced to produce the slender bendable branches needed to weave wattle and daub walls. Ash, yew, and maple trees are managed as well, to produce wood of a certain size: The town’s coopers specialize in lathe-turned bowls and drinking cups.

  Another gate leads to the river, rich with oyster beds. Up the fish-filled tributary streams lie vast sheep meadows spangled with flowers, where skylarks pipe their lyric song. For the summer, the sheep have been herded to uplands of springy heather and squelchy bog, with limestone outcrops shining pale in the sun. Up there peat is cut and lead mined, under the shadow of circling sea eagles, while down below barley, oats, wheat, and rye are sown and apple trees blossom, filled with bees.

  And, like a hive of bees, the city buzzes. Its tall timber houses and smaller thatched huts are crowded with people, ten thousand people, and their carts, horses, dogs, pigs, chickens, and geese. It reeks of pig shit and tanners’ urine, of butchers’ offal and river mud. It is raucous with the noise of hawkers’ cries, the clang of blacksmiths’ hammers, the whine of the cup makers’ lathes, the clacking of looms. All that, as well, brings back Hervor’s childhood, and if Jorvik is a bigger town than Kaupang—ten times bigger, they say—well, Hervor is bigger too.

  At sixteen, she is taller than most people, and when she dresses as a warrior, in linen shirt and trousers and padded leather byrnie, her long hair twisted back, bow and quiver on her shoulder, shield and spear in her hands, and walks, loose-limbed, swaggering, down the street to the army’s training ground by the riverside, men give way before her. Only when she speaks does she see the question dawn in their eyes, and she knows she’ll be fistfighting or arm wrestling by evening to prove her courage.

  Unless her foster brothers are at her side, like today.

  Their swords will crack on shields stained black, chants Gamli.

  Hone’s Saddle! Battle Sun! Two swords beat as one, chants Guthorm.

  Wound Dragon! Blood Dragon! Two swords bite as one, recites Ragnfrod.

  Point and edge play when he enters the fray, says Harald, and Hervor jumps in with the refrain: King Eirik that way wins fame each day.

  No one stands up to the sons of Eirik Bloodaxe.

  They are thugs, complains Ragnhild. Why do you want to train with them instead of weaving our tapestry?

  Hervor’s foster sister doesn’t understand. Her brothers are thuggish, true. They are proud and given to throwing their weight around, like their father, touchy when it comes to honor and rank, like their mother, but they are strong and skillful fighters—just the warriors you want in your warband.

  Hervor especially likes Harald. He is more cheerful and kinder than the others. Though even Harald has a temper. Once, when drunk, he lit into one of his younger brothers for an imagined insult, and it took the rest of them combined to break up the fight. But, in general, Eirik’s sons stick together—and stick up for their foster sister, Hervor, for she is a shield-maid in their Viking band.

  “Bare is back without brothe
r,” the saying goes.

  The best way to win a battle, the brothers teach her, is to break the enemy’s line. The best way to break it is to taunt or trick individual warriors into rushing, enraged, alone, away from the shields of their comrades.

  The shield-wall, a tactic used for both offense and defense when fighting on land against armed foes, depends on teamwork. Locked in formation, your shield overlapping your neighbors’ on both sides, when signaled to push forward you must match strides—and courage—cutting down your enemy and stepping on their bloody corpses, or the wall will break. Likewise, when signaled to stand fast, you must hold steady, strong and stalwart, in the face of terror and brutal death.

  For war is not pretty. It is mental as well as physical. It calls for a certain habit of mind, a fighting spirit that makes your grin as fearsome as your axe.

  “Courage bests the sharpest sword,” the saying goes. “Better to be keen than cowardly when the swordplay starts. Better to be glad than gloomy whatever happens.”

  That’s why Hervor likes Harald best. He is always glad, never gloomy. He laughs even when she bloodies his nose. Especially when she bloodies his nose, for it is Harald, more than anyone, who has taught her to fight.

  In war, he tells her, your fighting moves must be automatic. You’ll become a warrior when your sword or axe is part of your arm. When your spears or arrows fly like your thoughts. When your shield and your shoulder work as one.

  Her own shield bloodied her nose several times, before she learned to hold it properly, bracing it against her shoulder and elbow, not her hip. She learned, too, what weight and breadth of shield worked best. A two-ply shield, its two layers of thin boards set at right angles, covered with linen and rimmed with leather, is lighter but just as strong as a leather-covered shield made of one thickness of heavier boards. It is round, with a cut-out central hand grip; to be most maneuverable, it is just wide enough to cover her elbow. It is painted red, like those of her foster brothers, and the domed metal boss, which protects her hand on the grip, is low and rounded, like theirs, not conical like the shield bosses the Dubliners use.

  Except in a shield-wall, when her shield is braced tight on either side by the shields next to her in the battle line, hiding behind it doesn’t do much good. Nor does pushing it flat at an oncoming stroke. It’s those moves that let her opponent’s sword smash her own shield into her nose.

  Instead, she has learned to use her shield fluidly, turning it at an angle to deflect the energy of an incoming stroke. She has drilled in the shield-wall formation since she was six years old, when she practiced with toy weapons alongside her foster brothers until they all reacted to the commands as a single fighting unit. But the shield-wall leaves your head and legs unprotected. It is good for a charge; but in a looser battle line, or fighting one-on-one, the shield comes into its own as an offensive as well as defensive weapon. Angled forward, Hervor’s shield can both block blows and deliver them, knocking her attackers off-balance, injuring their weapon arms, even disarming them, before she punches the iron shield boss at their faces. Good shield work controls a fight.

  Keep your weight low, your knees bent, your arms tucked close to your body. Use your hips and thighs, your power center, to swivel and shift your weight and add force to your stroke. Your footwork should be light; your blows should not. Cut all the way through your target, as if every swing of your sword will slice off a leg.

  Grunt or squeal or yell—whatever suits you. It increases your power and, more important, distracts your opponent. Martial arts, after all, are mostly mind games. Raw strength is no match for the skill to read your opponent, to anticipate blows and outmaneuver them. Power matters, but so do speed, timing, suppleness, accuracy, daring, and force of will.

  Marching down the steep streets of Jorvik with the elder sons of Eirik Bloodaxe, chanting the poem they heard in the king’s hall the night before, Hervor feels her excitement growing. Soon they will reach the training grounds. Soon she will feel the battle joy, will feel herself come totally alive facing Harald’s sword. Today, he promised, they’ll start sparring with sharpened blades.

  * * *

  King Eirik that way wins fame—and he did, though not in battle. The poem that made Eirik Bloodaxe immortal as the last Viking king of York is so trite and generic in its battle scenes (though they sound wonderful when recited in Old Norse) that it could be describing any fight anywhere in the Viking world.

  Snorri Sturluson recounts the story behind its creation in Egil’s Saga. One night while Eirik and Gunnhild were holding court, he writes, they had an unexpected visitor: Egil the Poet, whose curse may have turned the land spirits of Norway against the royal pair. Egil had been shipwrecked off the English coast near York. (He blamed Gunnhild’s witchcraft for that.) Knowing it pointless to hide, he “gathered up his courage and determined, that very same night, to find himself a horse, and ride straight to the town.”

  “Why not just kill Egil at once,” Gunnhild said to her husband, when the big ugly Icelander presented himself. “Or don’t you recall what he has done, my king? He has killed your friends and your kin. On top of that, he has killed your own son! And slandered you yourself. Has anyone heard of royalty being treated like that?”

  But Eirik Bloodaxe was in a bind. His second-in-command, Arinbjorn, who had given up his lands and titles in Norway to follow Eirik into exile, was Egil’s staunch friend. “Egil and I stand together in this,” Arinbjorn warned. “You will have bought Egil’s life dearly, before we have both fallen. I expected more of you, my king, than to be struck down dead rather than be given a single man’s life when I asked for it.”

  Arinbjorn claimed (falsely) that Egil had come to York expressly to recite a praise poem he had composed—a poem that would make Eirik’s name immortal (and wipe out Egil’s earlier slander). Eirik agreed to listen to the poem the next morning; he would then decide Egil’s fate.

  “We don’t want to hear any poems of his,” Gunnhild cried. “Have Egil taken out and cut off his head. I don’t want to hear his words or see his face.”

  But Arinbjorn’s plan won out—except that Egil had not composed any such poem. He sat in Arinbjorn’s loft that night, struggling to fix praise for his enemy into the combination of rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration known as “court meter.” Outside his window a swallow twittered, blocking his concentration—it was Gunnhild the Witch in bird form, he believed. Arinbjorn climbed to the roof and sat outside the window to ward her off.

  The next morning, Egil faced Eirik again. Remembering the moment years later, he wrote:

  The king reigned

  with rigid mind,

  over rain-swept

  shores at Jorvik.

  That moonlight

  was not mild,

  that flashed

  from Eirik’s eyes.

  They gleamed,

  dragon-like,

  terrible

  to look at.

  To Eirik, Egil gave a battle in words:

  Loud the swords sing,

  on shield-rims they ring!

  War follows the king,

  cruel death does he bring.

  First hear they all

  the arrow-storm fall.

  The king’s battle-call

  sounds loudest of all …

  As the poem continued, the scenes of battle shifted to scenes of generosity (gold, gifts: generic again). The poem may be insincere and ironic. It could be about any king, except for the occasional mention of Eirik’s name in the refrain. Its content is so stereotypical it seems almost a spoof, but its form is magnificent. Ignoring Gunnhild’s advice, Eirik gave Egil a most generous reward: his head. And Egil, through his poem, intentionally or not, gave Eirik Bloodaxe, the last Viking king of York, immortality.

  * * *

  It must have been thrilling for Eirik’s sons to hear that poem. They would have memorized its resounding lines at once—as Hervor did, too, despite Queen Gunnhild’s contempt. As I imagine it, hearing Egil’s prai
se poem in the militant city of York was the final push that sent Hervor on a different path from that of her foster sister, Ragnhild, who ended up as the bitter and childless Queen of Orkney.

  Why did Hervor become a shield-maid when Ragnhild did not?

  Because the two girls differed, it seems to me.

  First, they differed by rank. Ragnhild, as the daughter of a king and queen, was a symbol of their power. She had two likely fates: to marry for politics or be captured by her parents’ enemies and raped to spite them. Hervor, as the daughter of a mere raider, had more options.

  Second, they differed in body type. Ragnhild was probably petite, like her mother. Hervor, as I know from her bones, was unusually tall. The range of weapons she mastered, which were buried with her in Birka, show her strength, coordination, and keen eye.

  LEFT, a Viking warrior, about an inch and a half tall, from Galgebakken, Denmark.

  RIGHT, a very similar Viking warrior of the same size from Wickham Market, Suffolk, England.

  Third, the two girls had different personalities, I think: Ragnhild expressed herself artistically, weaving and embroidering storytelling tapestries. Hervor had no patience for needlework, but she was willing to exhaust herself training with sword, shield, axe, spear, and bow, with riding, rowing, swimming, and sailing. On the practice field, her foster brothers cut her no slack. As a twelfth-century fighting master put it, “No athlete can fight tenaciously who has never received any blows: He must see his blood flow and hear his teeth crack under the fist of his adversary.” If Hervor was to join the shield-wall, she—like anyone else—had to earn her place. And she did. Her joy was a joy of the body, a joy of pushing her physical and mental limits and breaking through to new levels of skill, regardless of the blood, aches, and bruises involved. Regardless of the pain. “It wasn’t even accepting the pain, it was relishing it. Because pain is that connection to your body,” says a modern female boxer.