Valkyries (Valkyrjur)

hi I'm Old Norse specialist dr. Jackson Crawford the lust of men for women has long motivated men to take crazy and even irresponsible actions but this lust has been at least comprehensible to society and in some ways useful to it in a way that another lost that men sometimes feel sometimes is not and that is the often unaccountable lust for battle I believe that the figure of the Volk area the battle determining woman in Norse mythology is in some ways an origin a a physical ization of that lust for battle which sometimes can seem as overpowering and maddening has a lust for a woman many Old Norse poems and sagas concern Valkyries and Old Norse vaalu kiria meaning dead body on a battlefield vol chooser kiria plural vol qu order but one of the earliest that gives us a description of a Valkyrie and that also has I think encapsulated within its first four stanzas a really crisp concise look at her major characteristics as she emerges in the poems and sagas his Robbins mole composed circa 900 by the Norwegian poet thorbjørn hoard and cloven for Harald fairhair this poem praises Harald fairhair and his prowess as a warrior and war king by having a Valkyrie and a raven discuss his recent battles here are those first four stanzas in my unpublished English translation of this poem listen ring rich nobleman while I tell of the feats of Spears of wealthy Harald I will speak of the words that I heard a blond bright haired girl speak when she talked to a raven that valkyrie seemed wise men cosmos stir in the heart of the snake eyed woman who knew birds language the blonde lashed pale throated girl greeted that eyeball plucking Raven where he set on a mountain crag how are you Raven where have you come from with bloody beak on the dawn of this day flesh dangles from your claws your breath stinks of corpses I think you spent last night where you know some dead men lie the gray feathered bird the Eagles own blood brother stirred himself and wiped his beak at his feet I followed har old he said old Don's son the young England ever since I left the egg so here we have two figures who Norse poetry often associates with battle and its aftermath the Raven because of course Ravens Eagles wolves and other such scavenging animals of prey will prey upon the bodies upon a battlefield and the Bell curry because she is the chooser of the slain for Othon here we see she is depicted as I quote blonde and bright haired girl this associates her with the upper class we noticed that Valkyries are very frequently very explicitly described as being upper-class women these are not women of low or common social orders but seem to be drawn exclusively from the nobility we see in many other north sources a strong codification of social class by hair color the best example of this is of course in the poem Greeks tula and the poetic Edda where we see blonde hair associated more with this upper class as it is casually and formally alike and many other sources she has called a quote snake eyed woman who knows Birds language this also increases her association with the upper class and specifically with the family of the bull sings who often are said to have eyes with take light characteristics in fact cigarette or d'marco snake and I is a descendant of the bull sings through Ragnar lothbrok and sicker there himself the Great Dragon Slayer as well as his daughter Swan Hildur are said to have such fierce eyes that their enemies have difficulty facing them men cosmos stir in her heart well we also see that the Valkyries are not depicted as women who are particularly interested in men in general sometimes in one of these narratives the Valkyrie will become very interested in a particular war leader for instance in the helgi poems we see that but with the very famous example of the Valkyrie Brunhilde or singer to Eva and the volsangs material she's actually punished by being made to marry and even though she does have a certain envious love for siga there it was not exactly that she loved this man that set her off upon the path that she was on but rather her own independent war loving streak so these are never damsels exactly and they are certainly not simply sex objects as I think sometimes our cultural atmosphere has has made them again we see her as blond lashed and pale throated these are more associations with the upper-class women who don't have to work outside being a nobler better family extraction wealthier family extraction huckle one to be paler because they had not sunburned and of course the very fact that she is talking with a raven at all that she is showing this curiosity about where he's been that he's found dead bodies that he's satisfied it seems like it seems like she's perhaps on a on a hunt for some lawyer or for some war leader who may provide her also with the bodies of the Fallen not for eating but rather for bringing to othon in all whole the place often known today in English as Valhalla now the concept of the Valkyrie is actually probably older than the concept of Valhalla the word Valkyrie is found in an exactly cognate form in the closer related language Old English this cognate word while Syria is formed exactly the same way from exactly the same Germanic elements and means chooser of the slain the dead body on the battlefield unfortunately in the Old English context in which this is preserved it is just an old English gloss on a Latin text that's being translated it simply glosses a word for which or some other female vexatious character so it doesn't really tell us what the Old English concept of a Valkyrie might have been but it does suggest that the concept is bold enough that it actually proceeds when old a mission old nor cease to be one speech community which one might play some of three hundreds ad or so by contrast the term vol whole as I'm going to discuss in my series of videos about the afterlife when I do the second installment about that which is exclusively about ball whole this is probably a fairly late concept in the Norse mythological cosmos as attested by the fact that in the earliest poem that mentions it at makeva the word vol whole simply means a human Lord's Hall and it seems like in our very earliest sources that all the dead go to hell so the Volk area may well actually be an earlier concept than the place where she brings the dead bodies in which case it's a little bit difficult to understand what exactly her role was before she was incorporated into the othon Valhalla mythos but we do see a pretty consistent picture of women of noble extraction who are apparently human that you're not seen to be a different species rather they seem to take upon some kind of of mantle of almost employment certainly an hour late sources explicitly for othon which makes them the creature that is more than human which is the Valkyrie now what is the chicken of what is the egg is this a woman who is simply fated to be a Valkyrie forever we don't exactly know as we're never explicitly told how woman becomes a Belle curry but we have some hints about that now this is as good a place as any to pause and reflect on the fact that our sources of Norse myth are often conflicting and often very partial and to senses of the word partial for one thing when these were myths current in the belief of living generations there were different there were no reasons to write them down how the the runes were rarely used to write narratives when they were they were typically burial occasions and you never find anything very long written down in runes and the culture as a whole during the Viking Age seems to have been quite content with keeping its literature oral so by the time any of this is written down it's being written down by Christians who already inherit a very partially preserved tradition but then you get another kind of partiality I am NOT one of the people who thinks that the quote/unquote Christian influence on our surviving Norse myths is too strong for us to to take the Eddas as evidence but we have to remember that in their choices of what to preserve they might have been influenced maybe not so much by Christianity as simply by what stories were most appealing to them and we can see that the volsung narratives were extremely appealing we have all kinds of versions of those stories and the Valkyries in the volsung narrative which are some of the most famous Valkyries in all of north literature especially brynhildr are also somewhat influenced by the chivalric romance literature of knights and ladies that was coming in to iceland from the continent so we don't have a very quote/unquote pure look at the Valkyries we certainly don't have a systematic look at them that says this is how you become a Valkyrie this is what a Valkyrie does this is a Valkyrie the lifespan or anything like that so we really have two hints in the poetic Edda I think about something that might suggest a little bit of how women become a Valkyrie in the poem Hillary brynhilda from the aforementioned volsung material the Valkyrie Brunhilde has died and she has ridden to hell in a wagon that she was cremated upon notice again as I mentioned in my first afterlife video about Hell and general concepts that the afterlife is very physical and people take physically with them what they were burned or buried with it stands a seven she tells about how she became a Valkyrie or it seems like that's what she's telling about but it's very difficult to understand because this is just a sort of an elusive brush over of what must have been a richer story if this story was told more richly in detail some point here is that Stan's I'll give it to you in Old Norse and in my English translation that's Han Evora who'd fool or Conan Gore or toss astre oon deck boards Farrukh Petra told everything literally steer Eric Engel Graham Ava sell dock a bold King let our skins our eight sisters so of us eight sisters be born under an oak so a king had eight sisters skins whatever exactly this is to be interpreted as be carried under an oak tree I was 10 winters old if you want to know when I gave Earth's to a young prince this seems to have something to do with her origin as a Valkyrie because we read about the Valkyries having a hammer or skin of feathers or or otherwise swan-like appearance in another poem Vohland dark freedom or actually in the prose material that precedes the poem Bolin decree them but notice how elusive this is and how difficult that is understand what's happening who is the king who had these these skins born under an oak what exactly is the ritual or ceremony that's being conducted here is the king who is having these skins born under the oak tree the same as the young prince that she gave the oaths to what exactly are the oaths that she gave and what is the relationship of this young / Institute Othon who seems to be the master of the Valkyries and most of the explicit material about them very difficult to conclude anything based on those but I'll read you also the prose material from the first part of fallen dark freedom so vulnerable that is a very old poem about the hero volun daughter a Smith who was said to be an elf and he and his brothers Mary are really abduct Valkyries at the beginning of their story that particular part of the story is not told in this very old poem this poem may well be from the 800 this probably not quite as old as I look to be that hum this mole but it's quite old unfortunately this part of the story is not told in that poem it's told in the prose introduction that is written for the poem in the Codex Regius at the porchetta so who knows exactly how old it is with prose you always have to be more worried about that than with poetry but here's the relevant part from that prose introduction Namah of Morgan funda fair or VAT stron do Connor the Ox Poona lean Tarboro your fame after honey earth era thought for a Vulcan so early in the morning they found on the lake side three women and they were spinning linen next to them were there Swan skins Othar honey these were Valkyries now the men are going to take these Swan skins and force the women to marry them and then after seven years of this the women are going to take their skins back and go back to being Valkyries they're going to go back to to judging fates baroque Turia says stands at one of the poem itself of Boleyn dr. Elam so it is possible perhaps that the Valkyries power as a Valkyrie per se has something to do with this this garment which may be a spawn skin this may perhaps be her means of flying since Valkyries do clearly fly over battlefields and fly when they take men to ball hole it may also impart on her some other abilities but it can be stolen from her as well and this seems to remove her powers as a Valkyrie at least if we are reading a little bit between the lines of the story and Voland dark villain and the associated prose I think that's pretty interesting and it reminds us that the Valkyrie is not a separate species but rather an empowered human being or empowered yatin by the way in the saga of the volsangs itself the mother of bolson gutter who is then himself the grandfather of the great heroes to go to there she is a Valkyrie she's called an OC boy wish girl which is a common name for Valkyries especially in their relationship to Odin and she is also said to be the daughter of a you'll turn so it's not just human women who can take on this mantle but also apparently yolt nod or or guilt and women rather and of course I should also point out in that same breath that there's no record of a male Valkyrie the word is grammatically feminine you could hypothetically conceive of a masculine equivalent of bulk area which would be something like a ball cutie but that is never attested there's no hence whatsoever that men can fulfill this position it is somehow exclusively the domain of women now next what I want to look at are the preserve names of Valkyries both in the lists of Valkyrie names in the Porta Quetta and in some of the most famous narratives about them because I think that these may shed some light on on early conceptions of their roles and as well on what it looks to me like a strong connection of the Valkyrie with the goddess Freyja two poems and the poetic Edda purport to contain the names of Valkyries in green this mall stands at 36 it is Odin himself who named some of them raced oak missed Villa got mayor horn Barry scheduled Oaks coho Hildur walk through the look or care feauture goal oak garelu run greed oak Roth greed regen leave their para in her room all the names we see here are Crist shake missed missed scheduled acts aged incidentally also the name of one of the terrible ages that is coming for us on earth during fimble Vetter the terrible winter before Ragnarok Scoble perhaps something like projector Hildur the very common woman's name or element and women's women's names meaning battle through their strength especially with the sense of supernatural strength look which is the cry of an eagle head or field or which you could read as war fetter or chain as well as war wife I think the latter is a little more likely their goal noise and then Garrow rule is probably a copiers error for Guerra skull which is a name for Valkyrie in fullest ball garelu is difficult to make any sense out of but Garros kögel would be something like a spear projector then we have round greeter that would be shield eager world could either advise eager Regan laid divine survivor remnant so altogether here we have I wish that Chris and mist bring me my horn scheduled and Scoville Hildur and through their walk and hair filter goal and garelu Ron breather and Rose breather and Regan lave they bring the aim had a out L fear ain't hair they are being the dead men who inhabit follow hole with Odin then in another poem in the poetic Edda in the famous volus ball the vulva who is narrating the beginning and end of the world and stands a 30 according to the Codex Regius recension of fullest ball she gives us some names of Valkyries as well so hone Valkyrie or eat uncommon our core var at Vida till called the old are schooled health skill D and score who all or keuner Hildur gondol or care skull new arrow told our in honor Harriet's corporately the crude Valkyrie or so names we see here are schooled which would be cognate with the English word should applying debt or necessity this is also the name of a Norn we have the three nornes three goddesses that and fate order that are better than the its schooled Snorri and his prose edda interprets assist meaning that one of the norms in fact rides with the Valkyries sometimes that is a possible interpretation the course of Al Curry and an Oran might have the same name - or it's quite possible that there was in fact no systematic difference between these groups of divine or semi-divine female beings it's just hard to say based on the hints that we have here and another is Gogol that would be something like projector good nutter battle Hilde better battle both of these very common and women's names golden duel is an interesting word has a couple different ways you could go with this one is to relate it to a word for magical staves gone better which you do see for instance in the name gondol butter gandalf something like magic staff elf actually not an uncommon name in the Old Norse world also Gonder can be a wolf in or monster in a in a mythic context so for instance we see that one of the names of the serpent that encircles the earth is your moon gone better great monster so what exactly is meant here it could it could have a sense of and rule you can just take as a feminizing suffix to be simple about it it so is she's sort of the monstrous one as she's sort of the magical one is she associated with the wand or the spear perhaps this is an interesting name and it comes up once again here in just a moment and then Garris kögel which I mentioned was probably also originally intended to be in Grima small - that's a spear projector or something like that so this stanza says she saw Valkyries come from widely around ready to ride to the god nation schooled held a shield and Scoville was another one gunner Hildur gondol and Karis golden now the of of hadrian of Othon are counted ready to ride the earth the Valkyries but these two lists in green the small and bolus paw don't encompass all valkyrie names and in fact the most famous Valkyries are the Valkyries of the volsung material first of the helgi poems where we meet Slava meaning something like put to sleep er that may seem weak but in fact Old Norse poetical language often sort of grimly jokingly refers to death as sleep we also see in the OL saga there's a sword named fuel or suave near life sleep maker put the sleeper so life ender oh she is then well in the inn that's in the how quickly the hoard of our soul in our poem then in the Hellcat could be the hooting spawn of poems 1 & 2 the Valkyrie is named sick rune so that is victory rune or victory mystery and in the saga of the bull sings itself we meet put in healed armor armor wore armor warrior something to that effect that's actually not uncommon woman's name but in some of the early poems specifically in sick of three evil mole in the poetic Edda about the Folsom's material the Valkyrie who has her lines is called Sigrid Eva the victory driver ie the one who drives victory perhaps chooses victory or makes victory happen it's unclear or they're sick of the Riva and putting the ill deter or understood to be different Valkyries in some traditions or not but I want to draw your attention particularly to the name gondol which I said is a little bit mysterious and it's origin and also comes up as a name of the goddess Freyja and a strange source story called sorta thought but written down circa 1390 and the manuscript called flat a at bulk now this beautiful manuscript is quite late and it contains a much expanded version of the saga of all of our trig for us one the first missionary king of Norway who also converted Iceland and was later revered in his memory was revered in Iceland for being the one who had accomplished the conversion of the country and in this expanded version of his story there are many that tear so literally threads but short stories that are added in some of which have interesting mythological information that seems quite old and sorely thought that are is one of those in this story which I've alluded to elsewhere Freya the well-known Vanier goddess is oath ins concubine and she in a story that's a little bit secondary to talking about Valkyries gets a necklace from some dwarves by sleeping with him as the price Odin is upset about this and has Loki steal it from her and when she goes to get it back from Odin subsequently I'll just read you my translation of this this story mine published translation of this part she asked him to give it back to her Odin said she would never get it back because of how she'd acquired it unless you can accomplish this make two kings each one of them served by another twenty Kings become enemies and cursed them so that they will always stand up again and fight after they fall unless a Christian man is so brave and followed by so much luck from his King all right blah blah blah this is the part where it connects to electrics and because it's one of his Christian men who comes and breaks up this never-ending battle well who is going to never-ending lis battle but a certain King heaven and who should then appear to him on the road but a tall beautiful woman calling herself gondol now she seems quite invested in getting him to to go battle against his enemy hogni she tries to convince him that hold me is claiming to be a greater Kingdom he but he just peacefully goes to hook me and and resolves that with him then she gives him a horn full of a drink that makes him forget this and then she says hey hogni has a better wife than you and heaven says well then I will ask for his daughter's hand in marriage he says no that would make you less than him finally she convinces him to go and fight okay in the battle lasts forever just as Odin stipulated that container to kill each other and be reborn it's sort of like a ball hole on earth a little bit more fearsome than a heaven on earth huh but this gondol must be Freya and so I have wondered is Freya actually a Valkyrie perhaps the the head of Valkyrie in some ways I do think that Freya has probably absorbed a lot of other female figures over time I mean you see this in a lot of religions a lot of mythological systems where some particularly prominent goddess basically absorbs all the other goddesses over time I mean this happens with Isis in Egypt absorbing the functions of circuit for example but it seems like perhaps there is a chief Valkyrie gondol whose role Freya has absorbed by a certain point in the Norse mythological tradition another thing that connects for it to the Valkyries is the statement in the poem dream this small when Odin is describing the different halls of the different gods and goddesses and stanza 14 he mentions Freya and here's what he says they're full van Gogh Aaron even be and thyroid either sets a custom esal all von ball horn coos weary undock and hold on Odin or let me translate this completely exactly literally for you folk bunger army plane is the ninth Hall and there Roya she rules the choice of seats in the hall ie she arranges who sits where she chooses each day half the dead in battle hold on Vall and Othon owns is she in fact then again chief Valkyrie choosing half and is folk longer just fall hole after all if Freya and Frigg have merged or were once merged or whatever the case is Freya may well be Rosen's wife I don't believe for a second that Oh Thor is a different person than Posen who was always taking different names but that's kind of a subjective under the video so she would arrange the seats in Odin's Hall and all that we see here isn't any suggestion Snorri makes us into a whole separate afterlife when he's talking about the afterlife in the prose oh all we see here is there's a place called Vulcan longer which might be vowel hole or might be like a secondary ball hole but it doesn't seem all that separate from ball hole and we see that Freya chooses half the dead who fall in battle that doesn't necessarily mean she's taking them somewhere other than ball hole or that she's serving a function other than that of a Valkyrie of whom she may in fact be the chief now why am I so compelled to make this case for Freya and her deep connection with the Valkyries well I think that it subverts some of our expectations about froy him because we so often want to put these labels of of roles on the god so we want to say Freya well she's the goddess of love oh then well he's the god of poetry Thor well he's the god of storms or something like this but these titles these roles are useless and really discussing the primary sources of Norse myth and froy yes could just Leiby described as a goddess of love if if you have to give her a title like that but I think that part of what's happening here is that the Valkyrie figure is in a sense a love figure herself she's also sexualized like Freud is Freya is an object of sexual affection for all of the gods all humans all elves according to locusts and all the Illinois and their lust for her often drives them to do crazy things like the Builder who wants froa at the beginning of time and and is is induced to build the wall around all scar there I guess his own interest as a Yeltsin believing that he'll receive her as his prize or the Oulton through Morehu inference capito steals Thor's hammer because he thinks that he can he can get the gods to bring freya to him as his bride to return Mjolnir and similarly that lust for Freya is kind of reflected in the way that men go off to battle that the women in their lives may not wish for them to now sometimes in the sagas that the women are actually the ones who try to get him into fight so particularly in the sagas of ice endures women are often the ones who are inciting men to remember their family connections that that should compel them to take blood vengeance or something like that but mostly women are sort of presented as being in this opposite sphere this opposite world from men so for instance in the poem crow Kamal attributed to Ragnar lothbrok several times he compares fighting to to being the opposite of hanging out with with attractive women it's like this battle was not at all like kissing a pretty young widow on your lap that sort of thing so women are often sort of put it put aside their but the but the compulsion to possess a woman has some similarities sometimes at the compulsion men feel to engage in battle and I think that's sort of what the Valkyrie images notice that she is often what the hero is fighting for at least in the material about the bolson hero's helgi in every one of the three versions of his story fights another man who his Valkyrie lovers husband had promised her to and she's the one who incites him to do it we also see Gundel who is probably Freya in Sarla filter as I mentioned her her astonishing beauty that's reported as part of what convinces heaven to to do what she says and we see that in the the rich material about the bull zooms that these Valkyries may be looked at as rivals by other women in the heroes live so for instance in GU thern RK the one in stands at 24 I'm just gonna do the rest of these in my published English translation I'm already testing you could folks patience enough with the length of this video then Ghul rone daughter of spokes she's speaking to brynhilda this is after the death of singer there the man that burned Hildur and guzar and both loved and it is brent hilter's jealousy ultimately that that has killed cigarette silence you curse on this people no more of these words you have always caused misery for our noble family everyone wishes you a bad end you have been the sorrow of seven kings and the betrayer of all women well we don't know who all of these seven kings are but things like this are said about brynhildr elsewhere that she has caused the death not just of sigurdur but of other men perhaps in her role as a Valkyrie perhaps like was sick of her in her role as a as we even call that something like jilted lover but this this sense a guru and whose guru and sister the why the the wife of sigurdur is accusing brynhildr of being this sort of lure toward out actually out of the realm of women but what is strong enough to lure men out of the realm of women what's strong enough to lure man out of the out of the embrace of a beautiful woman well maybe these battles that keep luring men away are sort of being visualized as being a sort of rival but supernatural women is ultimately what I'm saying we also see some some discussion of Valkyries as being these sort of femme fatale figures elsewhere in the poem great this ball when sick other is laughing is his future foretold to him by his uncle creepier creepier mentions brynhildr and he says this in stanza 29 that beautiful woman who was growing up at hey Mears will deprive you of all of your happiness she will make you sleepless she will make you senseless you'll pay attention to nothing unless you're with that girl so emphasizing her desirability which is something that of course can make men crazy just as the lust for battle perhaps can and whenever our heroes encounter Valkyries for the first time that is almost always just what is instantly on their mind they want the woman when sigur their first meets sick at 3:00 or put in Hildur depending on which tradition of this you're following in her burning Ring of Fire he wants advice from her and he wants her when helgi first meets his valkyrie lover for instance in how quickly the chorus owner stands a seven he or she has given him a name he has not been named yet by his parents and he says you named me helgi what gift will you give to accompany my name giving you lovely woman I think you know what everyone's names are but I will not accept my name unless I get you as a gift along with it right he's instantly turning this into working her right he wants her bad and it seems like our heroes who want to fight more than anything who want to go to vol whole which is a place actually truly far removed from the world of the pleasures of women may have been conceived of as being driven by a lust that was just as powerful as the lust for women and how can that be imaged but in the image of a beautiful woman well I hope this has given you kind of a different spin on on the notion of a Valkyrie as I think my ideas about this I've evolved quite a bit over the years as I've read more and read more deeply especially in some of the heroic sagas and poems my videos which are the product of what is it now 12 years of teaching Norse mythology at various universities in the United States are made for free and beautiful places in my Rocky Mountain homeland of Colorado and Wyoming but my videos are supported by generous donations from my community of patreon supporters and I encourage you to join them if you'd like to help me keep making these series now that I've switched to a once a week update of Old Norse material on Wednesday what other day could I choose for that I think that there's going to be more these deep dive real meat and potatoes videos like this so if you enjoyed this I think you're I think you're going to get more of more of the same sort of thing as 2019 unfolds for now from beautiful Colorado I'm wishing you all the best [Music]

Channel: Jackson Crawford

Views: 97,871

Keywords: valkyrie, valkyries, valkyrja, valkyrjas, valkyrjur, walküre, die, valhalla, valhöll, odin, odinn, óðinn, othin, othinn, ooinn, oòinn, norse, education, myth, old, myths, mythology, hrafnsmal, hrafnsmál, afterlife, origin, meaning, symbolism, viking, vikings, edda, poetic, prose, how, become, woman, women, shieldmaiden, nordic, shieldmaidens, symbolize, symbolise, gondul, göndul, name, names, chooser, choosers, slain

Id: VMrYEq_jNVs

Length: 41min 12sec (2472 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019