Are Valkyries Real?

In 2012 archaeologist Neil Price of Uppsala University gave a series of lectures at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I missed them. I was at Cornell that November, to lecture on my book Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths and to visit the excellent Fiske Icelandic Collection in Cornell's library to begin researching Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them. I saw a poster for Price's lectures in the hallway: He had spoken in September.

When I caught his lectures on YouTube a few months later, I was struck by Price's focus on "stories, the power of stories, and the role that narrative played in the life of the Vikings, its influence on their perception of the world."

This was a different approach to that of most Viking Age archaeologists, and one I particularly liked.

Price's ideas influenced my discussion of valkyries in my book Ivory Vikings, though we disagree on a key issue: What the word "valkyrie" means.

To Price, a valkyrie is a goddess or demon, a shield-maid is "semi-human," and neither is a "real" warrior woman, though Viking Age burials of female skeletons with weapons suggest those were indeed part of the Viking world.

To me, the three terms--valkyrie, shield-maid, and warrior woman--are synonyms.

In the first of his Cornell lectures, "Children of Ash: Cosmology and the Viking Universe", Price noted about valkyries: "We don't know whether we have any Viking Age depictions of them." Referring to the tiny 3D figurine of a warrior whose image graces the cover of my new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, Price added, "These things don’t come with labels; we have to try and interpret them."

I would add that we don't know what the Vikings meant by the words "valkyrie" and "shield-maid" either; we can only try to interpret them.

In 2015, when I decided to write a book on the concept of the valkyrie in the Viking Age, I reached out to Price for advice. Rather than fly to Uppsala, Sweden, where he teaches, I arranged to meet him at the Society of American Archaeologists' conference in Orlando, Florida, in January 2016. I told him I was looking for a Viking warrior burial to study in depth. From the 2013 survey by his former student, Leszek Gardeła, "'Warrior-women' in Viking Age Scandinavia?," I knew of a handful of graves that would suffice for my purposes. The questions I wanted to answer were (I thought) simple: How do we know a buried warrior was male or female? What stories influence our perception?

I asked Price if he could refer me to an archaeologist, preferably a woman, who was an expert on a Viking Age weapons-grave, preferably the burial of a woman.

He looked at me funny. "I can’t talk about that—yet."

He suggested, very casually, that I meet Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who was also attending the conference in Florida. I listened to her paper, on a topic I wasn't then interested in, and I didn't make the connection—until September 2017 when "A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics" was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, with Hedenstierna-Jonson and Price listed among the coauthors.

Their "female viking warrior" is the skeleton buried with a full set of weapons in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden sometime between 913 and 980. It is her story I bring to life in The Real Valkyrie.

I call her a "valkyrie." Price and his co-authors don't. So even after nine years of research and writing, I can't answer the question I posed in the title of this essay, "Are valkyries real?" It depends on how you define your terms.

For more on my latest book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

I also recommend the new books by Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm, Leszek Gardela, Women and Weapons in the Viking Age, Jóhanna Katrín Fridriksdóttir, Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World, and William R. Short and Reynir A. Óskarson, Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat, each of which interprets Bj581 a little differently.

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