Poet-Maidens and Shield-Maidens

Songs of the Vikings--Viking poetry--has been the topic of this blog a number of times. Poetry was the gift of Odin, according to the 13th-century Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson (you can read that story from an earlier blog post here), and Vikings loved their poems as much as they loved drinking mead.

Poets, or skalds, as I've written in my book Song of the Vikings (just out in paperback!), were a fixture at the Norwegian court for over 400 years. They were swordsmen, occasionally. But more often they were a king’s ambassadors, counselors, and keepers of history. They were time-binders, weaving the past into the present.

In a world without written record—as the Viking world was—memorable verse made a man immortal. Or a woman.

I recently discovered a book by Sandra Ballif Straubhaar called Old Norse Women's Poetry: The Voices of Female Skalds, published by D.S. Brewer in 2011. It contains nearly 50 poems, some long, some short, by women, real or imagined, from Viking Age Norway through the time of Snorri Sturluson's Iceland (and a little beyond). In Straubhaar's translations, these medieval women are valkyries of verse, with tongues as sharp as swords.

One of them was a king's skald--and possibly a shield-maiden. Jorunn skáldmær ("Poet-maiden") composed a poem congratulating her fellow king's skald for negotiating peace between two princes, both sons of Harald Fairhair, the ninth-century king who unified Norway. Snorri quotes her poem in his Saga of King Olaf the Saint. Notes Straubhaar: "The Flateyjarbok manuscript of Olafs saga helga uniquely calls Jorunn not skáldmær ('poet-maiden') but skjáldmær (‘shield-maiden’). Given that Olafr … was known to station his male warrior-poets around him in the shield-wall for the better subsequent recording of great battle-deeds, it is tempting to think of Jorunn playing such a role for Haraldr."

Another women poet Straubhaar introduces us to was well able to handle a sword. When the 10th-century Icelander Breeches-Aud is divorced by her husband--ostensibly because she dresses like a man, in breeches--she not only spits out a poem, she gets on her horse (yes, wearing breeches) and rides off to avenge herself. Finding her husband asleep, Straubhaar writes, Aud "draws her sword on him, striking not to kill, but only to cripple. She gashes him across the nipples, successfully puts his sword-arm out of commission, and leaves him pinned in the bed with the blade. Then she rides away, presumably feeling the score to be now even."

In two of my favorite poems in Straubhaar's collection, the woman poet has a tongue every bit as sharp and precise as Aud's sword.

In Iceland in 999 a woman named Steinunn makes fun of a Christian missionary in a poem that is "metrically near-flawless," Straubhaar says. "It has a fine, aggressive rhythm, echoing its sea-going topic, and lively kennings."

I explained the complexity of skaldic verse in an earlier post on the mechanics of Viking poetry (read it here). Straubhaar handles that complexity by translating each poem twice: once in verse (to capture the form) and once in prose (to give the literal meaning). "In the poetry translations," she explains, "I have tried to maintain at least some of the following features of the originals, in this order of precedence:
--Meaning
--Tone (e.g., heroic, comic, serious, frightening)
--Alliteration (at least sets of two, ideally sets of three…)
--Syllable count (six per line, in dróttkvætt) and/or stress count
--Internal rhyme (perfect and slant); also occasional end-rhyme
--Circumlocutions for nouns, both complex and simple: kenningar (e.g., ‘goddess of gold’ for ‘woman’) and heiti (e.g., ‘ski’ for ‘ship’).

The mocking tone, especially, of Steinunn's poem comes through brilliantly:

Thorr snatched Thangbrandr’s longboat,
thwacked it, smashed it, wrecked it,
shook the prow-steed, plowed it 
precisely, nicely under.
So sad! No more sliding
of ski upon the sea-foam:
god-gales grabbed the sail-horse,
god-winds chewed its splinters.

The tone, again, is perfect in Straubhaar's translation of another mocking poem. Here, the daughter of Earl Arnfinn, somewhere in 10th-century Denmark, rebuffs the advances of an untried warrior:
Who said this seat was yours, boy?
Seldom have you drawn sword.
From you the wolf gets no flesh.
My flesh likes sitting solo.
You’ve never seen the crow caw
on corpses slain at harvest;
when shell-sharp swords came slashing
you shied away, and stayed home.

Many of the verses Straubhaar translates are said, in the sagas that contain them, to be spoken by witches, trolls, wise-women, and valkyries. Who would not shiver at this witch's curse?
May wights wander free, 
and wonders be seen;
may cliffs crash, 
and plains quake;
may the weather worsen…

I curse your ears 
so they cannot hear.
I curse your eyes 
to turn inside out…

When you set sail, 
the riggings will slit,
the rudder will rip 
free from its frame,
the sails will rot 
and fall free from the mast,
the sheets will split 
and fly free in the wind…

In your bed, 
burning straw;
in your privy 
queasy unease;
and after that 
worse things…

And then there is the poignant set of verses by a 16-year-old in the south of Iceland in 1255, eight stanzas that constitute "the largest body of poetry by a single historically attestable woman that survives in Old Norse literature," Straubhaar says. Knowing her kinsmen are caught up in a great battle in the north, Jorunn speaks a poem she heard in a dream:
By his house-door he bides,
byrnied for battle.
Fiends wait with fire,
false dogs that they are.
False dogs that they are!
...
The snare is snapped;
fate has them trapped.
These men I would tell
to go straight to Hel,
to go straight to Hel.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world. And if you would like to go to Iceland with me next summer, check out the tours at America2Iceland.com.

Valkyrie or Shield-Maiden?

Last December, a man named Morten Skovsby found a small face peering up at him from a lump of frozen dirt. He'd been working with a group of amateur archaeologists using a metal detector near the village of Hårby in Denmark. His find, cleaned up, was an intricately detailed amulet made of gilded silver, about an inch tall, in the shape of a beautiful woman with long hair twisted into a ponytail. She carried a sword and shield.

She was immediately dubbed a "valkyrie." Why?

Because Snorri Sturluson, writing between 1220 and 1241, described valkyries as semi-goddesses with shield and sword (or spear) who accompanied dead heroes to Odin's feast-hall,Valhalla, and there served them mead.

In Heimskringla, Snorri quoted a poem by Eyvind Skald-spoiler (his nickname might mean "plagiarist") about the death of King Hakon the Good in 960. Although Hakon was a Christian king, the poet pictures him, not meeting St Peter at the Pearly Gates, but being carried off by valkyries to Valhalla. In Erling Monsen's translation, it reads:

Gauta-Tyr sent the Valkyries / Gondul and Skogul / To choose amonst the kings / Which of Yngvi’s race / Should go to Odin / And be in Valhalla …

Gondul said / As she took a spear shaft, / “The Aesir’s following grows, / When Hakon the High / Goes with so great an army / To the burg of the gods.”

The king heard / What the battlemaids said, / Those quick horsewomen, / They were ready to strike, / As they sat helmeted, / With shields by their side….

Said the rich Skogul, / “Gondul and I shall ride / To the gods’ green home / To tell Odin / That quickly the prince / Comes himself to see him.”

“Hermod and Bragi,” / Said the war father Odin, / “Go forth to meet Hakon, / For that warrior king / Is called hither to the hall.”…

Note that Eyvind doesn't call these battlemaids beautiful. Snorri doesn't either, in so many words. But by making being served mead by a valkyrie one of the perks of dying in battle, as Snorri does when describing Valhalla in his Edda, he makes it pretty easy for later readers to make that assumption. 

It's not the only possibility. Eyvind, in fact, is in the minority when he makes the valkyries dignified horsewomen.

Poems and sagas written before--and after--Snorri's time describe the valkyries as monsters. They are troll women of gigantic size who ride wolves and pour troughs of blood over a battlefield. They row a boat through the sky, trailing a rain of blood. They are known by their “evil smell.” 

In the part of Sturlunga Saga written by Snorri's nephew Saga-Sturla in the 1270s, and in which Snorri plays a major role, we learn of the dream of a man named Haflidi Hoskuldsson. According to Julia McGrew's translation: 

"In the winter after Christmas he dreamed … he was in Fagraskogar and seemed to be looking up along Hitardal, where he saw a group of men riding down from inland. A woman rode at the head of their company, large and evil-looking, in her hand a cloth which hung down in tatters and dripped blood. Another group was coming against them from Svarfhol; they met one another west of Hraun, and fought. The woman then brandished the cloth over each man’s head, and when the ragged ends touched a man’s neck she jerked off his head. She said:

I move with bloody cloth, 

I strike men into fire, 

I laugh when I see them go 

To that loathly place I know."

Snorri didn’t care for that kind of monstrous valkyrie. I think it's a reflection of the popularity of his works--over those of his nephew, among others--that the image of the valkyrie we hold in our heads today so closely matches that of the little gilded silver amulet  Morten Skovsky found in Hårby last December.

But there's another assumption we make when calling this amulet a valkyrie. Valkyries, all the poets and saga-writers agree, are not human. They are semi-goddesses--or trolls--but not real women. Why could this little amulet not depict a real woman? A true shield-maiden? 

There are examples of women warriors in the sagas, too. The most famous is Hervor who, in an extremely spooky poem known as "The Waking of Angantyr," travels to the isle of Samsey to conjure her dead father up from his grave and get his sword, Tyrfing, which was made by the dwarfs. In Patricia Terry's translation, it says:

Now she saw the fire from the grave mounds and the living dead standing outside. She went toward then and was not frightened, passing through the fire as if it were smoke until she came to the berserks' graves. Then she said: … "May you writhe within your ribs, your barrow an anthill where you rot, unless you let me wield Dvalin's weapon--why should dead hands hold that sword?"

Replies her father,

"You are not at all like other people if you go to grave-mounds at night, helmed, in ring-mail, spear in hand, to stand here, warlike, and wake us in our halls."

Says Hervor, 

"Men always thought me human enough before I set out to seek you here."

Before this amulet was found at Hårby, as Christopher Abram points out in his 2011 book, Myths of the Pagan North, other images have been labeled "valkyries." Writes Abram, "there has been a tendency to identify any female figure on an artefact found in a grave as a valkyrie: it is supposed that these objects were supposed to symbolize the dead person’s passage to Valhalla, or helped ensure it. Yet these so-called valkyries are most often found in women’s graves—the graves of people who would not go to Valhalla, which was reserved for the bravest and mightiest of (male) fighters. These female figures are sometimes depicted holding a cup. From the myths we know that one of the roles played by the valkyries was to serve mead or beer in Valhalla; but high-status women were also expected to honor their guests with drink here on earth. This depiction could, in other words, relate to a perfectly ordinary aspect of a woman’s life, rather than to the hyper-masculine cult of Odin."

Could it not also be true that carrying a sword and shield was "a perfectly ordinary aspect of a woman's life" in the Viking Age, and we've just been too biased against the idea of real women warriors to accept it? 

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.