Valkyries

Valkyries, Old Norse valkyrjur, "choosers of the slain", are female battlefield spirits attested across Eddic and skaldic poetry and later prose sources who select which warriors die in battle and which of the dead are worthy to be brought to Odin's hall, Valhalla, to prepare for the final battle of Ragnarok. The Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda describe them riding armoured over battlefields and across the sky, sometimes associated with the aurora borealis in later folk interpretation, and serving the einherjar, the chosen dead, mead in Valhalla between bouts of ritual combat undertaken to keep them ready for the final battle.

Some named valkyries in the sources, including Brynhildr in the Volsunga cycle, take on fuller individual roles as tragic heroines bound by conflicting oaths and loves rather than remaining anonymous battlefield functionaries, showing that the category ranged in the sources from faceless collective spirits to fully developed characters with their own sagas. Norse scholarship situates the valkyrjur within a broader Germanic and circumpolar set of beliefs about spirits who determine the fate of warriors, closely related to but distinct from the norns, who determine fate more generally for all people rather than specifically on the battlefield.

The valkyries only make full sense placed within the wider Norse afterlife scheme they serve: Old Norse cosmology offered several possible destinations for the dead, not one universal afterlife, and Valhalla, reserved specifically for a portion of warriors who died gloriously in battle, sat alongside Freyja's hall Folkvangr, which by Snorri's account received the other half of such warriors, and the more general realm of Hel, which received most people who died of illness or age rather than in combat. The valkyries' selecting function therefore is not a judgment of moral worth in the way a Christian or Egyptian afterlife weighs a soul, but a battlefield sorting mechanism feeding directly into Odin's ongoing military preparation for Ragnarok, reflecting how thoroughly Norse religious imagination treated the afterlife of the elite warrior class as continuous with, rather than separate from, life's central preoccupation with combat and reputation.

Rudolf Simek's dictionary of Northern mythology notes that valkyrie iconography, armed women on horseback bearing cups or drinking horns, appears on Viking Age picture stones and jewellery well before the Eddic poems were written down, indicating the belief was current in actual Viking Age visual culture rather than a purely literary later invention.