Valkyrie- Germanic GroupCollective"Choosers of the Slain"

The Battlefield

Valkyries ride over the field where men are dying. They choose who falls and who stands. The warriors they select are carried to Wodan's hall, where they will fight and feast until the world ends.

The oldest attestation of these figures comes from the First Merseburg Charm, where they are called Idisi. The charm describes powerful women who "sat here and there" on the battlefield: some bound fetters, some impeded the army, some picked at bonds. They determined the outcome of combat through supernatural intervention, tying and loosing the fates of warriors. The charm survives in a tenth-century manuscript from Merseburg Cathedral, written in Old High German.

On the Tjängvide picture stone from eighth-century Gotland, a rider on an eight-legged horse arrives at a hall where a woman holds out a drinking horn. The stone gives the moment its shape: the warrior's death, the Valkyrie's welcome, the drink that seals his place among the chosen dead.

The Loom of War

In the Darrðarljóð, preserved in Njáls saga, twelve Valkyries sit at a loom before the Battle of Clontarf. The warp is strung with human entrails. The weights are severed heads. They use swords for beaters and an arrow for a shuttle. As they weave, they chant: "Wind we, wind we the web of the spear."

They are weaving the fates of the warriors who will die that day. They name the men who will fall and the men who will survive. When the cloth is finished, they tear it from the loom, each Valkyrie riding away with her piece into the storm. They are not maidens greeting heroes with mead. They are women bent over a loom of body parts, singing as they work.

The Swan-Cloaks

In the Völundarkvida, three Valkyries set aside their swan-feather cloaks by a lake and are taken as wives by three brothers, among them Wayland the Smith. For years they live as mortal wives. Then they find their cloaks and fly away, called back to the battlefields they had left.

Wayland's grief at losing his Valkyrie wife sets the rest of the poem in motion. A Valkyrie could love a mortal man. She could not remain one.