Gone Medieval - Valkyries

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

In Norse mythology, the Valkyries determine who lived and who died on the battlefield. Translated as “Chooser of the Fallen” in Old Norse, they’re often depicted as supernatural women who guide the souls of deceased soldiers worthy enough of a place in Valhalla, to feast with the god Odin.Today, Dr Cat Jarman is joined by Dr Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, a medievalist and literary researcher based at the National Library of Norway. Together they explore who the Valkyries were, the purpose they served in reassuring Viking soldiers to go to war, and what the myths can tell us about the lives of real Viking women.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. The Valkyries are enigmatic supernatural beings in Norse mythology. They were the choosers of the slain on the battlefield who would make the decision whether you'd go to Valhalla to feast with Odin or not. But how much do we actually know about them. And can the myths and legends about the Valkyries tell us anything about real-life Viking women? To tell me all about this, I have invited the brilliant Dr. Johanna-Katrine

Fiedekh Stotté, who is a medievalist and literary researcher based at the National Library of Norway. She's also the author of the brilliant book Valkyrie, the women of the Viking world, and she's worked as a consultant on the new film The Northman, which will get into it. little bit at the end of this episode. But Johanna, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you about this.

I've got so many questions I want to ask you about this topic, and I think we can probably chat for hours. But I thought maybe when you've got so many brilliant insights into this particular aspect of the Viking and medieval past, but maybe we should go back to basics, first of all. So can you just sort of give a... basic introduction to the Valkyries. Who are they? Yes, the Valkyries, they are so exciting and mysterious and gruesome, but they are basically these female figures in Norse mythology, and they hover

in the air during battle, and they choose who dies and who lives. And then once the battle's over, they take the ones that are chosen by them to Odin's wall, Valhalla, where they will feast and and do all kinds of fun things for the rest of time until Ragnarok. And that's some of them. And do some of them go somewhere else as well? Oh, the Warriors, yes. This is really, really mysterious. But there's a poem in the poetic edda,

which is a medieval compendium of mythological poems. And it says that half of the slain go to Freya, but we don't really know anything much more about that aspect of the mythology. and Freya seems to have some connections with the Valkyries in that she can fly, for example, and she's very powerful, but we don't really know that much about this connection, unfortunately, maybe because many of the male authors who wrote these things down in the 13th century weren't that interested in Freya.

But the Valkyries aren't goddesses, are they? Yeah, I mean, they don't appear in a huge range of roles in the earliest sources. They're very much tied up with the best. and the military aspect of Viking life. And they don't fight, but they are kind of there on the battlefield. But then it seems that later on, poets and all kinds of people start kind of embroidering and making up all sorts of stories. And so there's stories about Valkyrie's being various otherworldly and talking to ravens

and being sort of ethereal. And then there's other stories where they're much more human, and they have love affairs with... human warriors that are successful for a time, but then it doesn't really work out. So, yeah, you start seeing them in other roles, but ultimately this role of them there's to be there, you know, and choose who dies. That seems to be the basic role. And in one of these sources as well, there's quite a sort of graphic description of how this all happens. And it's got to do with weaving. And it's quite sort of,

bloody and gruesome. Can you describe that particular story to us? Yeah, it's just such a gripping story. Maybe not for everyone, not for young children. But it's a poem that's preserved in a longer saga. And there's this man who's out walking in Scotland and he sees all these female figures that are very mysterious going into a building. And so he goes and looks into the building

and tries to see what they're up to. And in the beginning, it seems very normal. They're doing what Viking women did literally all the time, which was textile work. You had to just be working all of the time in order to keep yourself and your family clothed. So he thinks that they're just weaving some kind of normal textile, but then he sees that it's actually guts and entrails

that they're weaving with. And so the textile is very gory. and there's sort of blood splattering all over the place and they're using skulls for the loom weights and they're sort of chanting during this work and the chant starts out sort of quite calm and then it becomes faster and faster as well and then they're chanting about being at this battle

that's happening in Ireland and during the battle they're sort of describing what's happening and then they decide who dies and so on And then in the end, they come out of this building and they tear up the textile that they've woven and each take a piece. And then they just ride off into the air.

So that sort of represents, I suppose, what's happening in that battle somehow, is it? Is that the connection to that choosing of the slain, do you think? Yeah, at least this is how this person or the people who composed and then retold the poem, this is how they see it as happening. And so there is this kind of supernatural, power that is essentially weaving the battle and deciding how it goes.

And the humans, it's not really up to how skillfully they fight or how strong they are. It's just the decision of a superior power. I try to go behind that and see, you know, how, what's the thinking there? I think that when you're in battle and there's all these spears and arrows flying about and you know you've trained and everything but at the end of the day you might not have that much control over what happens and how do you rationalise who dies and who lives and who gets hit maybe standing next to someone and they get hit by an arrow and you don't so I sort of see it as like an attempt to sort of rationalise and justify everything that happens yeah and of course that

probably links to this sort of what happens where they take you as well because they take you to some wonderful places if you get selected, you get picked and you go to maybe Valhalla where you feast and that's quite a positive outcome, isn't it, if that happens to you? So I suppose that's also helping that morale, I suppose, going into battle. Yeah, I mean, how do you get people to sign up for possibly dying and extremely painful and gruesome death? You have to make up things that make it seem really glamorous and worthwhile and desirable and you get to go to this great place where you can feast all day, and then they fight for sport as well. I just see it as propaganda, basically,

that they're just perpetuating this glamorous warrior culture through the Valkyrie and through some of the other beings related to this. I would just talk to you a bit about the sources. So you mentioned a little bit, some is saga, some there's a poem as well. When's that all written down? Does it date to the Viking Age or is it all that little bit later? Yeah, I mean, this is one of the tricky things about, working with written sources that tell us something about the Vikings,

but they are usually not written during the Viking age. So we have these sagas and poems that are mostly written down in the late 12th century and then 13th century. And the sagas quote poems. And what most scholars believe is that the poetry is so complex and it has so many metrical rules that you can't really break them and then when you're retelling the poem through the generations it sort of stays much more static than edict poetry for example which is very sort of fluid and you can change things a lot but

with these poems that are called scaldic poems people use them as sources that get us at least closer to the Viking Age than most other written sources that we have sort of with the exception of runestones which are generally Viking age. So it's sort of the scholar's job is to be aware of these aspects of the written sources and break down how we can use them and what parts of them are more reliable than other parts. But when you sort of see things that are just repeating themselves again and again and again in different sagas and so on, then you can kind of be a little bit more certain that this is something that was a pretty widespread idea than when things are sort of.

sort of a one-off. I mean, so we don't have, as you've just said, that sort of definite written sources specifically from the Viking Age and also religious beliefs in general are always really, really difficult to pick apart from archaeology and from other sort of non-written sources. But we do have some representations in art, so in things like jewelry, tapestries, that sort of thing, of female figures that are quite often interpreted to be Valkyries. And I wonder if you can say something about those, what they are and whether you think that those sort of female figures really are those characters?

Yeah, I mean, we've got some extremely mysterious figures, for example, on the Osberg tapestry where people seem to be wearing maybe masks and some of them have these sort of bird-like faces and because the valkyries not only sort of sit on flying horses but in some of the poems they actually turn themselves into switzerland. ones in some way. So they seem to be able to fly. And so that's been connected to valkyries. And then you've got all of these metal objects like small figurines that people seem to have

had on strings, maybe around their neck or on their person somehow. And they have weapons. And some people think that they represent warrior women, actual human figures that existed in the Viking Age. But other people say that, Well, you've got pendants with Thor's hammers, so you wouldn't have a pendant, you know, that represents a human. You would have it as something that represents something that you believe in that's not of this world.

And so I think it makes a lot of sense maybe that somebody who was really into the cult of Odin and Valkyries and that whole belief system would maybe have a Valkyri pendant. And so you've got these sort of figures that look like women and they have swords or shields or spears, and they might be welcharies, but we don't really know at the end of the day. Sort of related to that, I just have to touch a little bit.

I'm not going to spend the whole time talking about whether women were warriors in the Viking age or not. We can touch a little bit on it, but we'll leave for another discussion. But would you say then that it's more likely that these symbols and these stories represent something more mystical rather than being a reflection of the sort of reality of Viking? you know, because we have all these fighting women involved in warfare in the stories that they are in real life as well. Would you say that it is more likely to be a mythological thing than a reflection of reality? Yes. But I mean, I do think that there's a whole spectrum of interesting, powerful female characters in the myths.

And some of them fight. But the valkyries don't fight. I mean, they're there. And they're sort of being called. all kinds of words related to battle, so like spear women or sword girls. Like the battle itself is called the din of the valkyry or the reign of the valkyry, etc. So it's really tricky to try to relate all of these stories that people are telling each other to real life. And I see this as very much a function of sort of ideology.

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Another thing I wanted to touch on a little bit then is in terms of women's roles, so more in real life, I suppose, to religion and to rituals, especially, because these stories imply that these women are involved in those sort of death rituals in a way because they are essentially picking and taking them on.

And there's various archaeological evidence or suggestions that women may also have had quite important roles in death rituals. Is that something that you think this could be almost a representation of? Well, I think it's very tricky to deal with the evidence. We know that the Vikings had all kinds of rituals and very interesting and elaborate rituals often,

and at least for elite people, they seem to have gone on for days and so on. And so we see the results of them in the burials. And so just taking the Osirut-Burk burial again, we see all of the things that were put into the great, with these two women who were buried there. But I think it's really difficult to know who was leading the ceremony

or participating in the ceremony and people have sometimes speculated whether one woman was sacrificed to accompany the other and so on. And it's just like I find it very tricky to say anything for certain about these things. Let's move away a little bit from this idea of female warriors and the thing that tends to get so much attention.

You worked a lot on women in general and in your book especially, you go into a lot of the sort of roles that women have in society. You mentioned when you were telling that slightly gruesome story earlier on about the weaving. Could you say something about textile works? I know this is going a bit away from the Valkyries here now, but in terms of the sort of important roles that we know from the literary sources, especially and the archaeology, that women had in the Vikingian society, textile work really was one of them, wasn't it?

Well, we think that it was mainly women who did the textile work, although obviously you can't say, it was extremely strictly gender split, but the grave goods, women tend to be buried with textile equipment. And not a lot of male skeletons have been found with textile equipment. So we're fairly certain that it was mainly our women's preoccupation. As I said before, just the job of keeping yourself and your family clothes, that was just an endless job, I think,

because making, you know, a shirt or a garment took weeks from the beginning. So you've got a sheep or you've got a field of flax and you have to get the wool off the sheep or the fibres out of the flax. And then there's just this extremely labour-intensive process, spinning everything and cleaning it and so on. And preparing the loom and very, very skilled work. And then you set about weaving and eventually after many, many weeks, weeks of weaving, you have enough fabric for a garment that you then cut and sew. And so imagine a household of 10 people. This is just endless, endless work. And then in the Viking Age, you suddenly get

all this expansion and many, many more ships being built and going out. And so you need sales for the ships because they're not going to go very far without sales. And you also need warm clothes for the journey and you need all kinds of utility fabric. So there's just this huge demand for textiles in the Viking Age. And I think it's very likely that women come in here into the economy if you look at what's happening. Suddenly there's this demand for wool and highly skilled labor and just a lot of work.

And so I think people who knew how to do this work could capitalize on it if they were shrewd. So I think this is maybe something that needs to be talked about more when we talk about Vikings. I mean, I think I remember reading when I was researching for my own work, the actual man hours or a woman hours, maybe we should say, going into producing a sale are really quite staggering. I mean, we're talking sort of years' worth of work, aren't we, just for a single sale? So that is quite a big, involved and very important for that whole sort of raiding

and travelling and migration and movement outwards, absolutely. And so the other thing is quite interesting, in terms of thinking about this, and thinking about moving and expansion, do we see much in the written sources of travelling women, of women being involved in the raids, or just movements out of the homelands? How much do we actually hear about women taking part in that? We know from archaeological sources, obviously, that women were going all over the place with the men. And then when it comes to the written sources, there are runestones referring to women travelling

and then you've got the evidence from the victims of the Vikings where they're talking about the Great Army, for example. I'm sure you can tell me much more about this from your previous work, but there are written sources from England saying that the Great Army had women with them, and then they would put them away before the battle and keep them in a safe place. But the sagas also talk about women traveling, for example, all the way to North America. We know that there's a spindle well that was found. in Lanzo Meadow in Newfoundland.

So, you know, even if it wasn't the exact woman in the saga, who was called Gwudrither, and another one called Freitis, who's an extremely memorable character, obviously. So they might not have been called Gwurrida and Freitis, but it's very, very likely that women went all the way to North America because they lost their spindle world there. And actually, I do want to ask you about Freidus, actually,

if you could talk about, because as we were talking earlier about women being in these sort of mythological settings involved in quite violent acts and things, and Fradis is quite an interesting story involved in some quite violent acts. Would you mind telling us the story about Fradis because I think it's quite an entertaining one? Well, there's two stories about her, really, and one of them is very touching and in some ways, at least, and she's in North America, and it's called Vineland in the saga. We think of it as North America now. But anyway, so she's there,

and things have been going quite well for these Viking explorers. But then one day they are attacked by the local indigenous people there. And everyone starts running away, which is not the brave Viking thing to do according to Freitius, because she starts upbraiding all of the men and saying, I can't believe how feeble you are. but she's heavily pregnant, so she can't run as fast as the rest. And then there's a dead compatriot of hers who's lying on the floor,

and so she takes his sword and turns to face the attackers and starts slapping the sword on her breast, which is a very scary thing to do, it seems, because the attackers just run away. And that's the main story that we have of her in Edig's saga. But then there's another story in... A saga called Granlandinga saga, or the saga of the Greenlanders. And there's, like, this group of Vikings, and they're in Bindland,

and there's a lot of tension in the group, and things are really, really simmering. And one day she just tells some of the people who are kind of in her faction to go and kill all the other people, and then they can take the spoils back to Greenland of all the stuff that they've been able to acquire. And so the men go and kill the other men and then they say we refuse to kill these women. And she complains about this quite a lot and then she goes and kills the remaining women herself.

So she's quite murderous in that second story. But apart from that... No, I'm kidding. But she's quite unique, though, isn't she, in the saga stories? They're not filled with murderous and vines. and women, really, are they? I mean, normally they don't have that sort of roles. You know, so even if we go back to thinking about this idea

of the sort of female part of that sort of war story as the Valkyries are, that is actually quite unusual. It's not something that we see all the time. No, absolutely not. I mean, most of the time, you know, women are... They are not depicted as taking up weapons in any shape or form in the more realistic sagas, I would say. And so there's lots and lots of sires where women,

men goad men into doing things. And so, I mean, obviously, Freitis, in both of these versions, she's trying to goad the men at first, but then she's kind of on her own. And so she sees that that's not going to work. And then she obviously is a psychopath in one of them and kills all these women. And it's sort of made very clear in the saga

how when she gets back to Greenland, she's really shunned from polite society. And then in the other way, I mean, she's not fighting, so she's taking the sword and she's slapping it on her breast and she's trying to scare them away. I mean, it's just an extremely enigmatic story, really, and like, why do they run away? Why do they think it's so scary? And there's all kinds of explanations to this.

But most of the time, women are sort of cast in either the goading role, telling the men that they need to be brave and they need to go and kill someone, or sometimes they're actually doing the opposite. the man is extremely eager for violence and the woman is actually calming him down and saying, you're an idiot if you think that you can go and win against this other man. And so they kind of mollify their husbands, for example.

And so, I mean, at any rate, they're advising, talking things through and so on and having a lot of opinions. I think what's quite interesting is looking at how this whole topic, so female warriors, of course, but also the Valkyries, have been depicted in dramas, And certainly if we look at any TV show nowadays, so things like Vikings TV show, for example,

it's filled with female warriors and fighters. And looking back over time, how that's come about is also quite interesting. We can, I think, Trace at least the sort of Valkyrie's involvement in dramas all the way back to, I think, in 1870s or something, when Wagner's opera The Ring, one part of that is called The Valkyry. Is that where this interest, do you think, became really popularised in Valkyries and these sort of fighting women.

I mean, I think they tend to pop up sort of in connection with whatever is going on politically. And so they tell us a lot more about the people who are telling stories are new about them rather than necessarily the Viking Age. So, I mean, they keep having an ideological function, really.

And then what happens when it comes to the warrior women than in modern TV shows maybe is that currently we don't have a huge range of ideas about what it means to be powerful. And perhaps we tend to equate being powerful with being strong and being like a man. And I've always tried to argue that in the sagas, there's all kinds of different ways to be powerful, whether you're a man or a woman. And being very cany, maybe manipulative, is a way to achieve power no less than using violence.

But I feel like that hasn't necessarily been what maybe does. TV show producers are interested in and working with. Absolutely. You know, what, what is power? What did power mean in the 9th century or the 10th century? And it's absolutely not necessarily what it means in the 21st century or, you know, our view of the 10th century. So that's, I think that's a really important point.

And I'm just going to sort of move then sort of smoothly onto, as we're talking about film, your own involvement with this, because you also working quite recently as a consultant on the recent film, The Northman, and giving. some of your expertise there. And our listeners may have come across this before. If you listened a few episodes back, I also interviewed Professor Neil Price, who was one of the archaeological consultants on that same programme. So what was your role in consulting on that film specifically? That was a really, really fun project. And I was extremely amazed when I got contacted and realised what talented people were involved in this. So I got contacted and they, I got contacted and they,

asked for my book because it hadn't come out yet. And then I got sent the screenplay and really enjoyed it. And I thought it had so many interesting elements taken from various different sagas and from Norse mythology and history and all kinds of places. But, you know, a little dash of Shakespeare as well. And we just talked about it and I appended, I guess, on lots of different aspects. And then it got developed and they sometimes emailed me or called me and asked, would it be appropriate if Goodron was tablet weaving in this scene or something like that?

And I was extremely pleased when I saw the film and I saw that Goodron is indeed tablet weaving quite early on. And I think maybe for history buffs and textile archaeology nerds like me, you know, that was quite exciting. So, yeah, I did a little advising on the kind of material aspect, but a lot of it was more like about the worldview and the mythology and the, yeah. So we're not going to go into lots of spoilers and things about this story, of course, because people may or may not have watched it already. But if you do look at the promotional material of this online, you will see quite often this image of a woman with a helmet

who is clearly meant to be, or at least looks like, meant to be a Valky or something along those lines. Are you able to say something about that character without giving too much away? Yeah, I think they sort of talk about warrior maidens and valkyries quite early on in the film, and the filmmakers themselves have identified this character as a valkyrie. I was really, really pleased to see that she's very beautiful,

and she's got some similar characteristics to a valky that's in a poem called the Rhefsmal or the words of the raven, in which there's a valkyri who talks to a rave. in and she has this kind of white, blondeish hair. So that Welchery really reminded me of her. And then she, I don't know if you noticed, but she has a swan on the helmet. And that was just a little nod, I guess,

to this other poem, Berlin Peckfeda, that I was talking about, where the welkary has turned themselves into swans. And then she is a bit scary, I think. I mean, she's sort of riding across the sky and shrieking. And I liked that they kept that sort of more, not sinister, but very sort of powerful and that they've made it clear that she isn't just this kind of nice lady who's going to take you to Valhalla.

She is actually someone to be reckoned with. Are there any myths that you come across, things that people get wrong about the Valkyries? So there was a text written in the 13th century called the Erda. It's usually referred to as the pro-exam. and it's a sort of text book in Norse mythology for aspiring poets. And it was probably written by Snodis Thurthlisson, who was this Icelandic politician, antiquarian, etc. And he kind of was gathering together all of these different sources

that he had collected, you know, I guess in some way or another. And then he leaves things out probably, or he sort of tries to streamline everything. into a really neat pantheon and it sort of makes everything very bloodless. And when he talks about the Valkyries, it's literally just a couple of sentences. And he says the barest facts of what they do and then that they take warriors to Valhalla and they serve them ale or something like that. And I think if you just take that description, they seem really boring and anemic and sort of

they're not terribly interesting. And then when you actually start to read the poems about them, one of my favorite poems is the love affair between a human warrior and a valkyrie, and he dies in battle. And she's supposed to take him to Bolhalla, right? But she stays with him a night in his burial mound first, and his corpse is bloody

and it's got all these wounds all over. And she's going, oh, my God, this is so great. I'm here with you. Helgi in the mound. And you think, oh, it's so nice that she's in love with him. But then you remember that he's a corpse. And he's just got all these wounds, and it's quite gruesome. And I think that this less sanitized, as you say,

more severe aspect of them is so much more interesting. And we shouldn't let Norre oversimplify things. And yeah, so I was really encouraged people to go and look at what there is behind the kind of just bare basic story about them. Fantastic. Well, I do love that story as well. It's brilliant. And I'd highly recommend everyone check out your book,

which is called Valkyrie, the Women of the Viking World. And it's not just about Valkyries, but it's very much about women's roles in general and some of these topics we've touched on, like, power and just, you know, what their real lives were like. You're going through all of those things, don't you, in your book? Yeah, I'm sorry about the title, but I sort of, I guess, tried to say that the valkyries decide who dies and who lives,

and in real life women had a lot of agency, and they very much decided on a lot of things, and they also wove like the valkyries. I haven't found any examples of women flying, human women, but yeah, I think the sort of representation of valkyries and human women and goddesses, I mean, there's a lot of connections there. so we can try to flesh out how valkyries are connected to other women in the literary sources and what that tells us about how people thought.

Fantastic. Well, absolutely recommend people check out your book. Johanna, thank you so much for joining me. It's been brilliant. I could happily chat for hours more, but we'll leave it now. So thanks again for taking part today. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. Thank you all for listening as well. this has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget that you can subscribe to our

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