The Dark Queens Brunhild and Fredegund

The legend of Brynhild, the warrior woman who was betrayed by the man she loved, was one of the most popular stories in the Viking North. As I note in my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, it was told and retold for hundreds of years. Episodes were woven into tapestries. They were carved on memorial stones and doorposts and cast as metal amulets. They were alluded to in poetry and prose and worked into myths and genealogies.

But the later the version, the more romantic it becomes.

"I am a shield-maid," Brynhild cries in an early account. "I wear a helmet among the warrior-kings, and I wish to remain in their warband. I was in battle with the King of Gardariki and our weapons were red with blood. This is what I desire. I want to fight."

But she is forced to marry.

She swears to marry only a man who knew no fear. But she is tricked.

Later storytellers focus not on her ambition or the sanctity of her oath, but on passion; her crisis of honor becomes a case of jealousy. At the same time, the hero who betrayed her becomes fused with the famous Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer.

This is the version most familiar to modern audiences, thanks mostly to Richard Wagner’s reworking of the tale in his opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelungs. Wagner’s Brünnhilde "quickly became opera’s most recognizable figure: a busty woman in braids and a horned helmet, hefting a shield and spear," notes Shelley Puhak in her wonderful history of sixth-century Europe, The Dark Queens.

Brünnhilde's final aria, Puhak points out, gave rise to the expression "It ain't over til the fat lady sings." Her character "has become yet another way to casually ridicule women’s bodies, and their stories."

But the real Queen Brunhild and her nemesis, Queen Fredegund, the two Dark Age queens of Puhak's book, were much more powerful. Together, they reshaped Europe.

Brunhild was celebrated as a princess and an efficient bureaucrat; Fredegund was despised as slave-born and feared as an assassin. Both were ruthless politicians in courts teeming with secrets, spies, and hidden lusts, alongside high culture and progressive lawmaking.

Both queens devised war strategies and even led their troops in battle. Poised and powerful, these two real valkyries played a “game of thrones” even richer than legend would remember.

That we don't all know about them, Puhak writes, is no accident. The historians of Charlemagne's time organized a smear campaign. The Carolingians "systematically rewrote history" to make it seem that "giving women power would lead only to chaos, war, and death."

But some sources remain: Accounts by the "naive and credulous" Bishop Gregory of Tours, who knew both women. Some of the queens' own letters. Enough written information to let Puhak break down the doors of history to reveal a Dark Ages we’ve been told to forget: when queens ruled Europe, with wisdom, piety—and poisoned daggers.

"I don’t know what it would have meant for me, and for other little girls," Puhak concludes in an epilogue, "to have found Queen Fredegund’s and Queen Brunhild’s stories collected in the books I read. To discover that even in the darkest and most tumultuous of times, women can, and did, lead."

She continues, "The misogynistic logic of patriarchy is curiously circular: women cannot govern because they never have. But this big lie rests upon a bed of induced historical amnesia, the work of numberless erasures and omissions, collectively sending the message that the women who have ruled haven’t earned the right to be remembered."

Read The Dark Queens and regain your history.

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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.