Odin<\/a>. They choose who is to die in battle and bring the chosen ones to Valh\u00f6ll, Odin’s hall of the fallen. There, the dead become einherjar, warriors awaiting the last great battle. The valkyries serve them \u2013 they pour mead and beer. In the poem Gr\u00edmnism\u00e1l, stanza 36, Odin himself lists their names. He names Hrist, the Shaker, and Mist, then eleven more: Skeggj\u00f6ld, Sk\u00f6gul, Hildr, \u00der\u00fa\u00f0r, Hl\u00f6kk, Herfj\u00f6tur, G\u00f6ll, Geirah\u00f6\u00f0, Randgr\u00ed\u00f0r, R\u00e1\u00f0gr\u00ed\u00f0r, and Reginleif. Thirteen names, thirteen faces of a single office.<\/p>\nThe Loom of Clontarf<\/h2>\n
A second image of the valkyries shows them not as servants but as mistresses of fate. The poem Darra\u00f0arlj\u00f3\u00f0, preserved in the Nj\u00e1ls saga, chapter 157, tells in eleven stanzas of a man named D\u00f6rru\u00f0. He sees twelve valkyries sitting at a loom. They weave not with wool but with human entrails. Swords serve as treadles, an arrow as a weaving sword, severed heads as weights. What they weave is the outcome of the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Every thread decides who falls and who survives. The image is cruel and precise at once \u2013 here the valkyries appear as weavers of death itself.<\/p>\n
Between Death and Healing<\/h2>\n
Valkyries are not a uniform group. Some kill warriors without regard. Others protect life \u2013 they keep ships from sinking and stand by heroes instead of destroying them. The sagas call such figures heroic valkyries. Sigrdr\u00edfa from the Sigrdr\u00edfum\u00e1l belongs to this second group: she is linked not only to the battlefield but also to healing. This dual role makes the valkyrie a contradictory figure \u2013 messenger of death and protector in one.<\/p>\n
Norns, D\u00edsir, and a Find Without Proof<\/h2>\n
Scholars have long discussed how closely valkyries are related to other female beings of fate, such as the norns or the d\u00edsir, the ancestral and protective spirits of a kin group. Many of the names from Gr\u00edmnism\u00e1l were probably never independent figures with their own history, but rather poetic circumscriptions of a single function. This same imprecision shows up in the H\u00e5rby find as well: the small silver figure carries weapons, but no epithet, no inscription reveals whom it represents. The interpretation as a valkyrie remains just that \u2013 an interpretation. In popular culture, however, the figure has long been fixed, at the latest since Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” the prelude to the third act of his opera Die Walk\u00fcre, premiered on June 26, 1870, in Munich. To this day, the valkyrie in film marks above all one thing: the moment of male heroic deeds.<\/p>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
The foundation for the image of the valkyries consists chiefly of poetry and narrative literature. Gr\u00edmnism\u00e1l and Sigrdr\u00edfum\u00e1l belong to the Poetic Edda, a collection of mythological and heroic poems that was only fixed in writing in the 13th century, though with an older oral core. The Darra\u00f0arlj\u00f3\u00f0 within the Nj\u00e1ls saga is family saga literature, which processes historical events such as the Battle of Clontarf in literary form, not as a record. Both groups of sources allow insights into contemporary worldviews but are not historical reports. Archaeologically secured is only the H\u00e5rby find as an object and its dating to around 800 \u2013 its interpretation as a valkyrie remains a matter of interpretation. Not substantiated, however, is the widespread equation of valkyries with real female warriors or shield-maidens of the Viking Age; none of the sources named provide sufficient evidence for this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A silver figure 3.4 centimetres tall from Funen, thirteen names in Gr\u00edmnism\u00e1l, a loom strung with entrails: valkyries between death and healing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hrafn_pipeline_status":"","hrafn_quelle":"","hrafn_flags_offen":0,"hrafn_kritik":"","hrafn_master_hash":"","hrafn_notion_id":"","hrafn_bibliothek":"","hrafn_fakten":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2417"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2604,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417\/revisions\/2604"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}