1. The valkyrjur have captured modern
imagination like few other figures from
Nordic myth, inspiring art in every
conceivable media, from operas to paintings
(like the one by Arthur Rackham
[“Brünnhilde”, 1910], right) and comic
books to computer games, but present-day
valkyries are quite distinct from their Iron-
Age ancestresses. What could be termed
‘valkyric’ characteristics – such as beauty,
flight, links with Óðinn and/or Valhöll, and
an interest in the fates of warriors on or off
the battlefield – are rarely found in
combination in Iron-Age valkyrjur, and are
also exhibited by beings described as dísir
or not labelled as belonging to any specific
mythological ‘race’ at all.
As such, this thesis not only examines
evidence for the Iron-Age warrior elite’s beliefs regarding the valkyrjur, but also
related spirits including the dísir. It proposes a new understanding of dísir-beliefs –
rejecting the previous scholarly consensus that the dísir were merely fertility spirits
whose cult took different forms in eastern and western Scandinavia – by arguing that
while some dísir were worshipped as embodiments of fertility, in many instances the
term ‘dís’ appears to have been deployed as a general signifier for supernatural females
of different types, frequently in battlefield or protective contexts, and may be been
employed to designate spirits such as valkyrjur, spádísir and fylgjur.
Beliefs regarding these ‘valkyric’ spirits seem to have been highly varied: in
some texts the valkyrjur mere manifestations of the will of Óðinn, but in others they
are fully independent actors; in some contexts they are portrayed as beautiful, erotic
beings, elsewhere they are little more than asexual battle demons. Yet the crux of these
figures – what scholars have termed their ‘semantic centre’ – appears to have remained
constant. The valkyrjur served as psychopompoi to the warrior-elite, spirits responsible
for bringing recently-deceased warriors to Valhöll. In doing so, they propagated and
sustained the social structures of the male-dominated, hall-based culture that created
them throughout the late Iron Age, not only within that culture, but also into the very
afterlife itself.
Overview: This thesis is a study of the valkyrjur
(‘valkyries’) and other similar female spirits in the Old
Nordic Cultural Area – roughly modern Iceland,
Scandinavia, and parts of the British Isles and northern
Continental Europe – during the late Iron Age;
specifically of the different uses to which the myths of
these beings were put by the hall-based warrior elite of
the society which created and propagated these
religious phenomena.
Sources: Supernatural females of widely-varied types
appear in textual sources as diverse as tenth-century
skaldic verse, the thirteenth-century prose work
Snorra Edda, and fourteenth-century fornaldarsögur
(‘legendary sagas’). In addition, iconographical
representations of female figures – cast in silver (see
below), carved in stone, and woven into tapestries –
have been identified as “valkyries” for decades, often
without coherent reasoning or significant debate.
Methodology: Given the fragmentary nature of the
source data available, this thesis makes no claims to
have reconstructed the actual historical reality of pre-
Christian beliefs regarding the valkyrjur and their ilk.
Instead, it proposes a series of models, probable
scenarios based on the reading of all of these sources
in combination, that seem most likely to reflect Iron-
Age conceptions of female warrior-spirits and
psychopomps.
‘Herjans dísir’
Valkyrjur, Supernatural Feminities, and Elite Warrior Culture in the
Late Pre-Christian Iron Age
Luke John Murphy
MA Thesis in Old Nordic Religions
Submitted under the aegis of Prof. Terry Gunnell,
Department of Folkloristics, June 2013
The Hårby “Valkyrie”: This silver figurine of a woman armed with
a sword and shield was found, without context, near Hårby in
Denmark, in late 2012. Despite a host of other possible interpretations
– from a protective dís to a legendary or historical human woman –
the figure has been referred to only as a “valkyrie” in both popular
media and academic circles.