Mayra Ameth (2:15)

People.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (2:21)

Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and welcome to Gone Medieval From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the Normans, from Kings to Popes to the Crusades, we delve into the rebellions, plots and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

King Gylfie (Narrator) (3:13)

At the dying of the day when Clash of arms is done. The sky itself splits open. A light shines from above, a blinding radiance. And from the clouds come Valkyries, A host of women dressed in armor, caked in blood. Their helmets rattle in the wind. Their spears shine like distant beacons. Their wings hammer like drums of war. And as they descend, heralded by bolts of lightning, they pluck the valiant from their deathly stupor to guide their souls to Odin's Hall. Valhalla.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (4:02)

Welcome back to gone medieval. I'm Dr. Eleanor Jenega. This month on the podcast, we've been taking a deep dive into Norse mythology, bringing the tales of gods, giants and the nine realms roaring back to life. Along the way, King Gylfie, a character from the medieval Icelandic sagas, has been our guide, helping us to retell these stories of cosmic creation and mythic mayhem. While Matt and I have been joined by world class experts to help us untick the history behind these epic legends. So far, we've witnessed how the nine realms came to be journeyed to Asgard to meet the all father Odin and encountered the gods of Marvel fame, Giant Slaying Thor and Loki the Trickster. Later this week, Matt will bring it all to an end. I mean literally, with the story of Ragnarok, Apocalypse and the death of the gods. But today, like all brave Vikings, we're ascending to the hall of Valhalla. Soon I'll be joined by Professor Caroline Larrington, expert in old Norse literature, to explore the dramatic impact Norse myths had on the lives of mere mortals. But first, here's King Gylfie to tell you more about Valhalla.

King Gylfie (Narrator) (5:30)

I, King Gylfie, have wandered far and questioned much of the gods in Asgard. I learned of fabled Valhalla, the hall of the slain, and heard stories of the fallen heroes who guzzle and gorge inside its mead stained walls. How to reach its hearts before the world's end, I will now share, if you have ears to hear. As you may already know, I am more than just a mighty king. I am a wanderer, a seeker of hidden truths. And on one large arduous odyssey, as cosmic dust clung to my weary cloak, I came across the realm of the gods. And in their shining city of Asgard, I met three kings sat on high upon thrones encased in shimmering gold. Their majesty was without question. And as I bowed to them, they spoke to me of the secrets of the gods and the stories of this world. From the birth pangs of creation to the end of all things, countless questions I asked of these Three kings seeking wisdom from the wellspring of celestial memory. But for my mortal subjects, a single haunting question eclipsed all others. Where do we go when we die? This is what they told me. The place of joy and gold. Right there stands Valhalla, stretching wide. And there does Odin. Each day they choose the men who have fallen in fight. Its rafters are spears with shields. It is roofed. On its benches are breastplates strewn. There hangs a wolf by the western door, and over it an eagle flies. Odin is All Father, for he is the greatest of all gods. But he is also the Val father, keeper of the slain. Those who fall in battle become his chosen sons. Thus it is Odin, and Odin alone who governs, who is worthy of Valhalla's embrace. Yet Valhalla is not the only hall of the dead, for the goddess Freya too claims her share of the slain. In her hall of Sessrumnir, she gathers the brave to her side, a reminder that even among gods, glory is divided. Half of Oedon, half to Freya. Such is the fate of warriors. Not all are so chosen. Those who fall without honor, or who meet death not by steel, but by sickness or shame. Their lot is harsher still. They go to Hell, the cold, mistbound realm beneath roots of the world. There they wander in shadow, without feast or song, until the end of days. I asked what became of the noble warriors chosen to grace Odin's heavenly heart. What did they drink and what did they eat? How did they spend the rest of their days? The kings replied that they await the wolf, Odin's bane, whose coming is foretold. At the end of time, the wolf shall rise and Odin is doomed to die. But until that doom, they fight and feast forever on the fruits All Father provides. At dawn each day, Odin's champions take up their arms and gorge their themselves on battle. They fight, they fall, they rise again, training for that fated day when 40 score and 40 more will stride from Valhalla's gates to face the wolf in fight. And when light dims, their wounds are healed and peace breaks out among them. They file into halls with great hearts alight and sit to eat and revel in their glory. Their meat comes from a wondrous boar, slain, cooked and carved each day. Yet with the coming of dawn, it stands whole again, ready to feed Odin's warriors once more. Never shall the company in Valhalla be so great that its meat will not suffice. Mead too, was had by Valhalla's kings and earls to quench their eternal thirst for after the death, wounds and agony suffered below, their hunger was vast, their thirst greater still. This mead flows not from cask nor cellar, but from the others, of a goat who grazes upon the leaves of an ever living tree. From her milk is filled a vat so vast that all of Oedon's champions may drink their fill. Such is the hall of Oedon, a house battle, a fortress of feasting, A place where death is is but the doorway to endless war and endless glory. More I could tell you of my time in the presence of these three kings, but much have you already heard of the fate of heroes. Even I, King Gylfi, found my mind filled with as many questions as answers. For what? Is Valhalla truly a hall of the gods blazing in the heavens? Or a story told among men to stir courage and steel their heart? Is it a promise of life beyond debt? Or a mirror of all that warriors most desired? These things I pondered. And so I sought out the counsel of a wise one to help me better understand what I had seen and what it meant for mortal men and women.

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Foreign.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (11:59)

Welcome to Gone Medieval.

Professor Caroline Larrington (12:01)

It's a great pleasure to be here.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (12:03)

I'm very excited to speak to you today because I think a lot of the time when we speak about Norse mythology, we think about it almost as a form of literature or something that is just kind of happening over in a corner. But this was a living, breathing belief system that a lot of people had. So I guess, to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about how belief in the Norse gods played out in the lives of people who believed in them?

Professor Caroline Larrington (12:32)

That's a more complicated question than you might think, in a sense, because where with, you know, biblical myth or with Greek myth, we got a lot of records of what people did, what their rituals were, what their behaviors were, and how they related to the stories that they told themselves about the gods. We really don't have enough in Old Norse to give us a clear picture of what people were doing and how it related to the gods in any one time. And, of course, our sources, such as they are, are all written down by Christians, by and large. And so what we get, for example, in the Icelandic sagas, which are all written in the 13th century, is a kind of set of historical novels which give a picture of what people in the 13th century thought their ancestors 250 years before were doing at the same time as they wanted to kind of tone down anything that was too shocking because they didn't want their ancestors to be cannibals. Or human sacrifices or anything like that. Not that we think that their Norse ancestors were cannibals, but in some sagas, we do have some of the historical saga set in Scandinavia rather than in Iceland. We have stories about human sacrifice. So the picture that we have of belief is very much filtered through this kind of Christian lens. But what we can probably say with all those caveats around how historical the sagas really are, is that in Iceland at least, most people were worshipping the God Thor. He was the most dominant God, it seems, in western Norway, where most of the Icelandic settlers came from. And so what you do when you arrive in Iceland and you settle your farm, you consecrate it by taking fire around the boundaries to mark out your particular possessions. Then you build a temple or a kind of cult building in which you perform some kind of sacrifice. Usually it looks as if you would sacrifice an animal from time to time, and you would get people to swear on the ring if they were swearing an oath within that temple sometimes. But for the rest of the time, we don't really have very much more information about what people were doing. A couple of the settlers seemed to have worshipped the God Fre, Freyr rather than Thor. And they have slightly different habits, it seems. They build temples. But in one saga, for example, a man decides to give half of his goods to Freyr. Not in a very practical way. He just says, I have a favorite horse and half of it belongs to Freyr, and therefore nobody else must ride it except for me. And that has repercussions. And then the poets were often adherents of the God Odin, who was the God of poetry and the originator of poetry. So that's what we have in Iceland. But the picture that we have from the rest of Scandinavia is again, quite different, because we don't have early written sources. We don't really know what people were doing in Sweden, for example. But it does look as if the gods, Freyr and his sister Freyja, were more important in Sweden than elsewhere. Going on the evidence that you can derive from place names, and it looks as if Odin was quite important in Denmark, but what people actually did is really not all that clear. We're told that at the great feast in Uppsala in Sweden, which happened every nine years, there was a lot of sacrifice, sacrifice of horses, dogs and humans, and they were hanged on trees or thrown down a sacred well. But how that related to any stories that have survived isn't at all clear. So there's a quite a bit of a sort of mismatch between what we can assume must have been going on because most people have got some kind of ritual and what their descendants kind of invented for them.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (17:08)

It's so tricky, isn't it, because we're specifically hearing from people who have a vested interest in making their ancestors look good, and also a sort of vested horror in the practices of anyone who is behaving in an unchristian manner. Which makes sense. It makes perfect sense, I suppose. Do we have any archaeological evidence for things like this? You know, I generally tend to find that it gets a little bit tricky A lot of the time when we're talking about the pre Christian days, we're building exclusively in wood. Do we have objects that persist at all? Or any idea of what temples looked like?

Professor Caroline Larrington (17:46)

We can find post holes for some really big halls. So they were. Yes, they were built of wood and so they didn't survive. And of course, the fate of most wooden buildings is to get burnt down sooner or later. But were they halls or were they cult buildings? Who can say? Some of the archaeological work done in Sweden has uncovered kind of very early Viking age or pre Viking age cultic sites. And there you got pottery deposits, you got quite a lot of animal remains in a way that suggests it's not just where a household chucked the remnants of their dinners, but something that's a bit more cultic than that. Sort of carefully arrange layers of different kinds of bones. And we have picture stones, particularly in Sweden and in the island of Gotland between Sweden, Sweden and Finland. And they quite often seem to show us pictures of divine beings. But what you always need in that case is the kind of fingerprint that says, this must be this story. And of course, the runestone or the picture stone carvers didn't helpfully label the picture stones. And so one example I always use is that there's a figure on one stone of a man with some serpents in a pit. And we might very well think, ah, that's the God Loki, when he was bound with a serpent dripping into his face before Ragnarok. But it could equally be the hero Gunnar in the snake pit, or it could be Ragnar Lothbrok, who famously perished in the snake pit. So absent a kind of little note by the carver saying, by the way, this is Ragnarok, this makes it, these images, quite difficult to decode. And with archaeology, I think there's always a kind of slightly, not exactly a vicious circle, but a difficult circle between written texts and archaeology that archaeologists are prone to saying the written texts talk about this kind of Item. Here's the thing. That thing is probably this kind of item. And then the literary scholars go, oh, yeah, this is what that item must have looked like, because the archaeologists have found one over here. So there is quite a lot of archaeology which points to blood sacrifice, sacrifice of animals and humans in Sweden in particular. How much further west that went is something that it's quite difficult to figure out. But one of the key things that I think has really emerged from Scandinavian archaeology of this era and the last 10 years or so is really, we. We probably have to talk about different belief systems for each part of Scandinavia. And so the idea that a Viking who came from Iceland, when he bumped us into a Swede somewhere when he's harrying down the Volga river or something like that, can swap notes on their favorite myths and say, oh, yeah, I see you worship Freyr as well. That they'll have all that much in common is probably. It would be difficult to prove, at least.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (21:06)

But that's such a really interesting point because I think we have a tendency to think about religion as organized, as having a universal mythos that everyone would understand. But that's really a product of very much medieval work, you know.

Professor Caroline Larrington (21:22)

Yeah, it's the religion of the book, isn't it, that when you have a canonical set of scriptures, as we have with Christianity, with Judaism or with Islamic, then you know what you're meant to believe and you've got a priest who will teach it to you. But that doesn't seem to have been the system at all in Scandinavia.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (21:40)

So we've talked a little bit about varying deities that people might have understood in the Norse world. What about belief in other beings? Because, for example, when I was a child, I was really enamored with all the troll stories that one would get, or, you know, the giant stories or the elves. Is this something that we see play out in people's everyday lives? Are you going to be, I don't know, thinking about trolls when you're making decisions or figuring out how you're going to work in your environment?

Professor Caroline Larrington (22:11)

Trolls are certainly a figure quite largely in the text that we have. And they're the kind of creature which lives out in the wilderness, which is probably quite big, not very clever, very much like the kind of folkloric trolls that we. We know now in modern culture, mostly from collected Norwegian Swedish stories in the 19th century. So they're kind of lumbering around out there, and you can. You can see how they kind of operate. As a man goes up in the mountains, he doesn't Come back. What happened to him? Well, he probably fell into a glacier or he fell down a ravine. But yeah, just maybe the trolls took him. And so they. They have quite a strong explanatory function. But we also have a kind of broader idea of trolls in the medieval texts, at least not all trolls are really hideously ugly. Troll women can be a little bit more attractive than you might expect. And there's some. A couple of sagas which talked about sort of doomed love affairs between humans and troll women. And the troll woman might be somebody who the human hero is really, really keen on, but the family are never going to accept her. And in one case, she turns up bringing the son that the hero left behind. And the hero's father says, well, you're not marrying that troll. So off she goes again, very sadly, back to Norway. So we have trolls, we have elves a little bit. There's one big feast that seems to occur in the winter months called Arvablot, which is when you sacrifice to the elves. But what the elves were is pretty mysterious. They're mentioned in the mythology, but as a kind of given. So we know what elves are, but we don't actually. They're not probably very much like our modern perception of fairies or the kind of elves that we've got from 19th century German stories like those collected by the Brothers Grimm. And we also have, in the mythology, we have these figures called Jotnar, singular is Jurten, and that's normally translated as giants. But increasingly, scholars have decided just to leave the term untranslated, because sometimes these figures are big, but they're not huge necessarily. Not as huge as the kind of giants you have in. In European folklore, again, the women can be quite attractive. Some of them even marry into the divine pantheon. And so though you do get some with three heads, or in one exceptional case, one with 900 heads, which is, you know, obviously way too many heads. But you also have some who are quite sort of socially presentable. And so in a way, the giants represent a kind of other with a capital O, but with a society that's quite similar to human society, quite similar to the gods society in a way, but just always on the lookout for what they can get from the gods. And the gods are on the lookout for what kind of treasures the Jotnar might have, which they might want to take as well. I love that.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (25:42)

I love these third spaces or third groups of people, like we see, for example, in the other world in Irish belief, you know, when you have the fairies, whatever you want to call them the others that show up. It's always nice when you have these ambiguous groups of people, because I think it really challenges our assumptions about these kind of neat binaries.

Professor Caroline Larrington (26:01)

Yeah, these. These kind of minor figures who are not deities. Because what we don't have very much of in Old Norse is unlike what you would find in Greek myth, for example, you don't have a kind of apotheosis. There are very few stories where Thor, for example, wanders into a human home and starts telling people they're not behaving themselves. Odin does it a bit more because he's interested in reinforcing ideals about kingship. That's one of his big projects, is to make sure that rulers are ruling properly. But these other creatures, like the elves, like the dsir, who are a kind of female equivalent of elves and who seem to be almost death spirits, they're quite often involved in unexplained and peculiar deaths. A little bit like the Irish idea of being taken by the fairies when something happens, when somebody dies in a manner that's not really expected. And the d. Sir of perhaps female ancestors, they're always kind of on the lookout for somebody whose time has come and it's time for them to bring them into the next world.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (27:12)

I think that this is a really important point as well, because I think that there are these easy assumptions that we make, again, as a result of the way we think about religion and the fact that we tend to think that there is one way of looking at things and that there's a neat binary. I think when we oftentimes look at Norse mythology, a big thing that we tend to do is say, oh, here's the equivalent. You know, Odin is the equivalent of the good guys.

Professor Caroline Larrington (27:40)

Here are the bad guys. Yeah.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (27:42)

Yes. And, like. So, for example, one part of this is this idea that Valhalla is heaven.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (27:49)

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Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (27:50)

And I've dragged you on today to ask you rather a lot about Valhalla in particular. And I think that a good place to start is to ask exactly what that is. How would you define Valhalla?

Professor Caroline Larrington (28:03)

Well, Valhalla, if it is a kind of heaven, it's a very exclusive version of heaven. It's a hall that's attributed to Odin. And in a sense, it's important to know that in Norse myth, each of the gods, and some of the goddesses as well, seem to have a territory that they rule over. And in the middle of the territory, just as a human magnate would have, you have a nice big hall where you sit and you Feast and you entertain your followers and so on. And Odin's main hall is Valhall, in Old Norse Valhalla. It's enormous armies of men can march in and out of its doors. It's a place where heroes go on death. And gathered there, they're waiting for Ragnarok for the end, the final battle. And so every day they're practicing fighting and they seem to be able to kill each other with impunity. But the end of the day, because you're already dead, everybody gets up and is undead again, ready to fight the next day. And we're told that they drink mead, that it has benches, that you have rushes on the floor very much like a human hall. And every day they get to eat wild boar stew, more or less, because there's a self replicating boar that is cooked every day and it comes back every evening. Anoden sits there at the high table with his two wolves, Gehry and Freki, and apparently drinks wine mostly, which would be quite an exotic, expensive southern drink, where everybody else is drinking mead or beer. And also in Valhalla are the Valkyries. But we're probably going to come onto them in a moment. I guess you're not wrong.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (30:05)

You mentioned already that it's heroes who live in Valhalla. And I think this is a really important point because you sort of have to qualify to live there, right? It's not just, oh, well, you were a nice guy, so you can come live in Valhalla now, right?

Professor Caroline Larrington (30:20)

No, definitely not. I mean, if you think of the God Baldr, for example, who is the best, the brightest, the most handsome, the most beloved of the gods, but he doesn't die in battle. And so his fate when he's killed, and the question of how it is a God can die is another matter altogether. But when he's killed through the machinations of Loki, he didn't die in battle. So he's not qualified to go to Valhalla, which his grieving father, Odin obviously wouldn't mind so much, I guess if he was in the hall of the heroes and he could see him every day. But no, he has to go down to the world of the dead, to a place called Nippleheim, the World of Mists, to a hall which is kind of like other halls, but full of those who died of sickness, women, those who didn't die a heroic death. And they're all kind of milling around, they're drinking mead or beer, they're sitting around feasting, but it's not the same as it is clearly, in Valhalla, this.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (31:28)

Is a really interesting point because this suggests that we have a real bifurcated way of looking at society. So you are just simply seen as a more courageous or worthy person if you're dying in battle, which isn't to say you're bad. It's not that you go to the land of the mists because you were a bad person, it's just that you weren't a courageous person. So. Yeah, and that.

Professor Caroline Larrington (31:58)

Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (31:59)

It kind of tells us rather a lot about society, I would argue.

Professor Caroline Larrington (32:03)

Yes. And it tells you probably about Viking society at a particular point, because the latest thinking seems to be that although Odin was quite an old God, it seems the whole of this sort of apparatus of Valhalla, of dying in battle, of this being really valorized in culture, goes along with the rise of Viking raiding, that this is a kind of ideology that you need to inspire people. And it's one thing to say to the lads on your farm in Norway, hey, kids, I've got a boat. Let's go and raid England. And if we live, we'll come back with lots of treasure and you can buy small cows for your mum's farm and everything will be fine. And if you don't live, Ah, well, you know, what's the payback there? Well, if you die fighting against the English or the Russians or who else, then you'll be with Odin. So. And you'll be enjoying this wonderful ideal martial life in heaven. If all you like doing is fighting, then you can do it for all eternity. And you can see how that, that works as a kind of ideological encouragement and particularly, again, this is where the Valkyries come in. You've got beautiful women in the hall bringing you horns of mead and presumably making the place look decorative. But the other side of these women is that they're also the ones who go to fetch you from the battlefield. And so there's both a terrifying aspect, a death related aspect to them, as well as this kind of sexually inviting aspect. You know how everything's a subscription now. Music, movies, even socks.

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Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (36:05)

So can we talk a little bit about the Valkyries then? Because I think this is one of these household words that we get from Norse mythology. Now everyone kind of understands the word Valkyrie, then they can probably hum the flight of the Valkyries, right? So how, how does one become a Valkyrie?

Professor Caroline Larrington (36:25)

Well, the, the thing about Valkyries is I think that there are basically two different conceptions that have, in some of the poetry and certainly in some of the sagas, have kind of melded into one. But originally I think we want to see the Valkyries as kind of minor death goddesses. There are lots and lots of them and they have different names which mean something like battle or violence or something like that. They are called Odin's Wish Girls. Their job is to fulfill Odin's wishes and they go out to the battlefield riding on horses. They don't have wings, which is something that you sometimes see in modern depictions of Valkyries. But they have these horses, they ride through the sky, they're fully armed, they've got helmets, spears and so on. And then they appear to the hero and say, okay, sonny, your time's up, in effect, and lead him back to Valhalla. And we do Have a couple of very good poems in which the hero enters Valhalla and the heroes are running around the place. The ones who are there, they're making sure the beer's ready, they're clearing the benches, this great hero is coming. And the great hero himself is incredibly annoyed about the fact this is where he's ended up. Because it's great to be in Valhalla, but it's even better being alive. And even if you say to your hero, as happens in one of the poems, well, your side kind of won, but sorry, you're dead, and hey, hey, come and meet these other heroes. And this Haakon in this particular King of Norway is, well, I'm not really thrilled about this. And no, I'm not going to put my weapons to one side because I just don't trust anyone around here. And all the kind of jollity of being in Valhalla takes a while to kind of kick in, I think. So you have the Valkyries who have a kind of desire for the heroes, but it's a desire to bring them to the hall. And so having a kind of feminine presence, particularly because Hel, the goddess of death who rules over that hall of mist where the other dead go, is one half a beautiful woman, one half of her is a corpse. And she really embodies the kind of eroticized idea of death as something that will take you into her embrace and you won't feel any pain or fear anymore. You'll be with her, but at the same time, you're still dead. And you've got this corpse reminding you of the reality of death and decay. So that seems to have been the original conception of these divine war goddesses, if you like. But what we also have is the idea of the shield maiden warriors who are female, who ride through the air on horses, like the more divine kind of Valkyries who go and choose heroes and say, right, you will have luck in this battle. Your luck's running out in this one. But they're also still enmeshed in the kind of human patriarchal system. So we have some poems where the Valkyrie appears to a hero and says, you fought really well. And I was very pleased to see that. And in fact, I made some of your foes kind of melt out of the way. And I love you. And now I have a problem because my father wants me to marry this guy and I don't want to marry him, so I need you to go and attack him and kill him, preferably. And the hero says, well, yeah, sure. And off he goes and attacks the other guy and kills him. And. But in a couple of these poems, because the other guy, the kind of unwanted fiance, is very much the person that the Valkyrie's father wants her to align with. The Valkyrie's father and her brothers are all fighting on the side of the hero. And it's kind of like a big wipeout that Helgi, the hero, takes out all of his opponents and then afterwards is kind of saying, sorry, also, your dad is dead too, and most of your brothers, but hey, we can still get married. And so at that point, the Valkyrie kind of. Or this shield maiden Valkyrie figure retires from battle and settles down to get married. But it's always the case that the hero's not going to live for very long, that having got embroiled in this feud with some group of people, vengeance is always on the way. And so you have a surviving brother, for example, turning up and saying, yeah, Odin persuaded me to kill your husband. And so I did. I'm sorry about the oaths that I swore. I didn't really mean them. And then when he finds his sister's really upset about this, he's kind of, oh, what are you crazy? Why are you cursing me? He killed our father, remember? And then she dies of grief quite often. So it's a very different kind of pattern. But you get them run together in some of the poetry and in particular in the figure of Brunhilde, who we see in the saga of the full songs and in some of the heroic poetry.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (41:53)

Well, you know, it's. What a way to look at problems with the in laws. What can I say? Can you tell us a little bit about Brunhilde?

Professor Caroline Larrington (42:00)

Yeah. Brunhilde is one of these shield maidens who has a human father and a brother and has clearly had a kind of fighting career as well. But at the same time, she falls out with Odin, whose order she was following by going to a battle. And she's been told very precisely she needs to bring the young hero back to Valhalla, because that's the one that Odin has his eye on. But she looks at him and then she looks at the older king that he's fighting with and goes, nah, I'll take the old guy. And that's the kernel of her disobedience, that she makes her own choice here. She doesn't marry the younger hero, but she disobeys Odin. Odin is very cross. He puts her to sleep on the top of a mountain and says she must sleep there until a hero comes to awaken her. And then she's probably going to have to marry him, and that means no more being a Valkyrie. And so she's sleeping there, and eventually the hero Sigurd finds her. He's got a magic sword, he's very brave, and he cuts open her corselet. He wakes her up, and in the poetry they exchange wisdom. And then in effect, he says, I think you're wonderful. If I marry anybody, it's going to be you, but I need to go off and do some more heroic stuff first. And as he goes off to do more heroic stuff, he kind of moves out of this heroic mythological world into a world of courtly romance and ends up being served a magical drink of forgetting marrying somebody else. Meanwhile, his bride's brother has heard about Brynhilde, who is by now sitting. She's kind of revived, so she's not asleep, but she's sitting in her own independent hall, surrounded by flames. Story gets very complicated, but one way or another, Sigurd aids his brother to win the Valkyrie who still loves him by changing appearances. And when Brynhilde thinks something very strange has happened, but she promised to marry whoever could cross the flame wall and come into her hall. And then, in the great argument with her sister in law, the sister in law reveals the trut. And after that, Brynhilde has got it in for everybody around her. Sigurda is going to have to die because he deceived her. Her husband is going to have to die because he deceived her and various other people in the neighborhood. Kind of collateral damage.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (44:51)

I was going to say good for her until the bit about the collateral damage.

Professor Caroline Larrington (44:54)

She commits suicide after that, and suicide is pretty rare in Old Norse literature, particularly from women. But she commits suicide so that she and Sigurda can be together in the afterlife. And she's pretty confident that now they're going to be together for all time, which is going to be awkward when Sugardha's actual wife finally many, many years later, also turns up in the afterlife. But the sources don't go into that.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (45:29)

Can these stories about Valkyries and shield maidens really tell us anything about the position of women in the Viking world? Do stories like these make it more desirable or acceptable for women to be involved in martial life? Or can we really extrapolate from this that perhaps women are fighters until they get married? Or is that just a way of desiring to see warrior women where they may not have existed?

Professor Caroline Larrington (45:59)

We really don't know, but it seems vanishingly unlikely. There were kind of cadres of fighting women, because they would have been mentioned, I think in historical sources. But we have quite a lot of texts that talk about fighting women. But at the same time we have, you know, the Amazons in Greek myth. Do we really think that a lot of fighting women turned up on the plains of Troy? I think this is a way of imagining a kind of group of fighters who are totally unlike the ones that you're used to. But at the same time, we do find some evidence. And the most famous case is a grave labeled as BJ581, a grave that was where the gender of the occupant was re examined back in 2017 and found to be female. Even though this person was buried with swords, spears, a gaming board, two horses, a dog, I think as well, all the kind of accoutrements that have made the archaeologists who originally excavated the grave say, oh, high ranking warrior here and now the bones are female. Is this person now not a high ranking warrior anymore? Or what were they? Were they a fighter? There wasn't enough skeletal trauma to suggest that they had wounds from fighting that had been healed. But were they strategists, were they a kind of armchair general who decided how you might set about organizing a raiding party or a campaign without actually going into battle? And of course, we always have to remember that the dead don't bury themselves. It's the living who bury the dead and decide what kinds of ceremonial and what kinds of objects they're going to go with. So there was a kind of flurry of excitement around this five or six years ago. But I think it's not possible to say there are a lot of fighting women. But what we do have to remember is that what we imagine when, or what you see in the movies, a bunch of Vikings appear on the the coast. By the time you've got these huge armies like the great Viking, the great heathen army of the mid 9th century in England, they've got vast numbers of women with them and they're doing the cooking, they're doing the laundry, they're sexual partners, obviously, they're doing provisions, they're sourcing provisions. In the winter encampments, they're probably the ones making cheese and selling it to the natives. So an army needs its women. If it's going on a long campaign, if it's a quick summer raid, you can whiz around, raid some monasteries, burn down a few villages and go home at the end of the season, then you can probably manage with just men. But if you're coming on A big campaign like that, you need women. And places like the great cemetery at Repsom, for example. Ago. A lot of female bones in there too.

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Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (50:38)

I guess this brings me on to my next set of questions, which is how do we know about these varying beliefs? You've talked a little bit about sagas, you know, the story of Brunhilde, you know, we're looking at graves, we're seeing what sorts of things people are buried with. Where does our understanding of Valhalla come from? I guess. What are our sources here?

Professor Caroline Larrington (51:03)

Well, our sources are a couple of texts. We have a description in an eddic poem, and by the term eddic, I mean the kind of poem that's usually mythological or heroical. And it's composed in a quite simple alliterative metre, like the meter of Old English or Old High German. So it's anonymous, it's oral, it's handed down over generations. It's written down in around 1270. So again, we've got the problem of Christians wrote this down. Did they change it? Did they? Probably not. But did they leave huge amounts out because they didn't like it? Very likely. And eddic poetry is opposed to skaldic poetry, which is a very intricate, difficult poetic form, one which again is passed down orally till it's committed to writing, but one which is very difficult to tamper with, in a sense, because if you change one word, you're going to ruin the meter or the alliteration won't work, or the rhymes won't work and so on. But skaldic poetry is usually praise poetry or lament. It has mythological illusions, but it doesn't really tell sustained stories about the gods. And so we have a poem called Grimnessmaur, in which the God Odin has come to human hall because he's been told that the king has been stingy with guests. And the king seizes him and tortures him because he's come as a kind of wandering old man in disguise. And he begins to recite a monologue in which he gives a lot of information about the gods, including the names of the gods, their halls, their territories and so on. And this is where we learn the detail about Valhalla, that it's Odin's hall, that it's got gates that are so big, 540 men can march through side by side. And we have mentions of it in passing in some other poems. And then in the Prose Edda, which is a mythological treatise written probably by the Icelandic scholar, politician poet Snorri Sturglisson, it's sometimes called the Snorre Edda as well as the Prose Edda. Snorri writes an explanatory treatise about beliefs in the gods in order to tell aspiring poets what the mythological allusions are in the poems. That a part of the kind of canon that they have to study, if you like. And so Snorri's very clear that the gods are not real, that they're refugees from Troy. It's a kind of euhemerist belief in which they've managed to. Clever humans have managed to persuade a lot of less clever humans to worship them. But he tells us quite a lot about Valhalla in that, mostly drawn from the eddic poems, and explains about the Valkyries bringing the dead there and eating habits there and so on. He doesn't invent anything in particular about Valhalla. Everything that he has he's sourced from Eddic poetry in some way. But what he does do later on in the Edda is to talk about some of the other halls that are mentioned in Old Norse poetry and kind of map them onto a Christian idea of heaven and hell. So after Ragnarok, when gods and humans come back, there's a very nice hall that's thatched with gold, very pleasant. And that's where the surviving gods sit around and talk about events of the past. And then there's a horrible place in an area called Nastrund Corpse Strand. And the roof of that is made of serpents, kind of woven together, and the poison from the serpents drips inside. And Snorri says that's where the bad people go. But that looks very much like Snorri imposing Christian ideas of punishment and hell onto a mythology that doesn't really have them.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (55:19)

Can you tell us a little bit more about the role of Valhalla and Ragnarok? You've mentioned already that you know what you're doing there. Theoretically, it's not just a heaven. You're not just hanging out, drinking meat and having a nice time. You're also hacking your friends to bits and getting your military skills ready for Ragnarok. I always remember this because I had a really delightful illustrated Norse myths book as a child, and the bits with the Vikings hacking each other up and then getting up and patting each other on their back tickled me to no end. But is this something that also we would expect to see the Valkyries engaging in, or the warriors on their own going to be at Ragnarok? Or what are we thinking of in terms of this army on Odin's side?

Professor Caroline Larrington (56:07)

Well, it's all a kind of massive disappointment in a way, because there they are. They've been training for, you know, eons for this great battle. And in one poem we're told that as they're marching out to the great battlefield, and we know the name of the battlefield, it's called Oskopnir, which means unmade. And so it sounds like a kind of chaotic space where this confrontation between the Einherja, as they're called, the fighters from Valhoek, and presumably the giants, presumably the dead, are going to come back on the great ship as well. Maybe they're fighting the other dead, as it were, the ones from Nippelheim, from Hel's kingdom. But in one text, we're told that as they're riding across the rainbow bridge to get to this battlefield, the bridge breaks and they all fall in the river and the battle doesn't happen. And that's incredibly disappointing in all kinds of ways. And we only have very limited descriptions of Ragnarok, really, in one poem, which is the source for it. And then various writers take bits out of that and retell it in slightly more detail. It's possible that they were riding back from the field, having had a very successful, successful campaign of fighting. And then the bridge breaks and they all drown. But whatever happens, they're destined to be on the losing side, because there's no place for them after Ragnarok, when the world comes back again, the old order is swept away, and there's no more Valhalla, there's no more Odin, and there's no more need to keep preparing for Ragnarok when Ragnarok has already happened. And we're starting up again.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (57:58)

I think that's so interesting because you get this real ambiguity when you have a look at Norse mythology, which we're simply not used to. I think in the 21st century, we like these unambiguous good guys, bad guys, heroic stories, happy endings sort of a thing. I suppose my question is, why do you suppose it is that we are still interested in Norse myths when they are so different to what that we're used to? I mean, why on earth did I, as a child, have a book of Norse mythology? You know, other than the fact that my parents raised me right? You know, what is it about this that means that we still really want them to inhabit our imagination?

Professor Caroline Larrington (58:40)

There's a question I'm asked all the time, and you can see it's an interest which has kind of come and gone. So just after the Second World War, we weren't talking about this kind of thing at all because of the association with Nazism. But by as early as 1960, you were getting children's retellings again. And that's what I read when I was 7 and what made me start to be interested in all of this. And I think there's a number of reasons for why we're interested in Norse mythology. I think partly it's because it seems accessible. There's not too much of it, and it's not a province of the elite. If you want to know a lot about Greek and Roman mythology, then in the 19th century, the early 20th century at least, you would have to learn Latin. You'd have to learn Greek if you thought you were going to understand it properly. And you would have to take in a lot of quite complicated stories. You have to remember all of the people in Nead and the Odyssey and so on. What you have in Norse is a group of gods who. They're not so many of them. They have fairly simple stories. Gods go and raid the giants, or the giants come and raid the gods. You have an arc from kind of creation to Ragnarok. You have stories about individual gods doing things. But you can also. And I think this is why the myth has been popular in northern Europe and in North America, for the same kinds of reasons that these are gods who kind of live in the same places that we live. They live where there are forests and mountains and the sea. They're not where the weather is bad. They're not living in a kind of perpetual Mediterranean sunlight. They're wandering around through the olive groves in togas and sandals. They're wearing furs and they've got to try and figure out how to keep warm. So I think it's partly that. I think you've got some very interesting relationships. You've got rivalries, you've got a kind of fifth columnist among the gods themselves in the form of Loki. You've got monsters like Loki's children. You have beautiful women with their own particular roles, and you have a kind of family of gods, but they're not a family who are always fighting with each other quite like the Greek gods. So I think it's partly we can imagine them living lives a bit like those of what we imagine our ancestors to have been like. And that, of course, lays open the myths to being the myths of white Anglo Saxon Protestants, because WASPs are the kind of heirs of that kind of European stratum that emigrated to America. But I think if you look very closely at the Norse myths, in fact, not even that closely, you can see quite easily that what people with a kind of alt right interpretation of the myths think were the good old days when men were brave and heroic, women were beautiful and knew their place, and everybody was very straightforward, and there were good guys and there were bad guys, just doesn't stand up. When you look at the cross dressing, when you look at the kind of strange sexual practices, when you look at the things that drive the gods, which is very often either we really don't want to have to face Ragnarok, can we find a way out of this? Or the giants have got something we want, how can we get our hands on it? Or how can we stop them getting their hands on our stuff? This very kind of reciprocal arrangement that's always being renegotiated all the time. I think those are things that people recognize in contemporary society. So it's not just down to, oh, wow, Thor's really cool. Cause he's got a big hammer and he can fly around with it and whack people with it. There's more going on in that kind of story world for people now, I think, than the world of the Greek gods in some ways.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (62:53)

Can we talk a little bit about the misappropriation of Norse mythology, especially in the fascist movements of the 20th century. But. But, you know, it is one of those things, as you say, it's so funny to imagine, you know, here's a world where there's a story where Odin's horse is his son that he fathered with Loki when Loki turned himself into a sexy mare. And we're supposed to see this as some kind of story that heralds you know, a wonderful heterosexual white past. You know, it just, it seems at odds if you actually look at it for even five seconds. And yet, you know, Heinrich Himmler existed, right?

Professor Caroline Larrington (63:33)

Yeah. Though I mean, to be fair, if we have to be fair to the Nazis, it was Himmler who was really, really crazy about this stuff. And Hitler liked it because he liked Wagner. So he liked the Ring, of course, and would drag all the party faithful off to Bayreuth to watch endless Wagner productions. And you did have some pretty crazy beliefs being encouraged by Himmler, but you also had beliefs that the Aryans were an original white, blonde, beautiful, Superman ubermensch kind of society. And their homeland, they must still be around somewhere in a kind of pure untainted form in Iceland or in Tibet of all places, or in various parts of South America. And could they be discovered if, if you sent expeditions to find them? So there was something about that belief, the kind of Blutunt Boden belief, the belief of blood and soil, that there are particular stories about particular sets of gods that speak to you because they're the stories of your people and your people in a particular place. And I think there's something in that, in that we find it more relatable as people living in the northern part of the world to say these myths are myths that we can take for our own because they're set in a world which is like that of what we understand our own early history to be like. But at the same time, the idea of blood is always very disturbing here. Who can be part of this? Is it something that's genetically transmitted? Of course it's not. It's something that's open to being understood by anybody from any part of the world and to be understood and thought about and enjoyed and to be reshaped in different ways. So I think the misappropriation is very much the alt right projecting onto Norse myth a belief that there was a time when everybody was white. And part of it has got to do with that kind of excitement that came about in the early sixties in North America when the Ingstads found Lansey Meadows, the Norse settlement in Newfoundland, that showed that the Vinland sagas, while not being true in the historical sense that the Scandinavians really did come to North America before Columbus, and then suddenly the original settlers were blond, blue eyed Scandinavians and not a bunch of Italians led by Columbus. And so the north, the white, the Anglo Saxon Protestants, could claim America back from the Mediterranean Catholic immigrant groups of later on. And so this is always enmeshed in the kinds of stories people want to tell themselves. And I think it's the same here in Britain that the idea that you have Viking ancestry gets everybody really excited and they send off a DNA test to prove that they're 23% Viking. And what does that actually show if you're a normal person living a normal life now? I think that kind of yearning to discover your past and claim it for your own, as far as the kind of personal myth making that individualism in today's culture really encourages, I think this.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (67:29)

Also is quite an interesting point because we see Norse mythology as still being a big part of our popular culture now. So, you know, I'm thinking the Marvel movies or how similar looking beliefs will sort of crop up in pantheons in imaginary places, like, for example, Game of Thrones or, you know, even in Tolkien's earlier, you know, works, if you, if you actually sit down and read the Silmarillion like me, because you're really cool, you know, you see these kind of echoes there. And I mean, do you think that this is a desire when people say, oh, I'm 23% Viking, they just kind of want to think that they're some kind of a hero or something like that.

Professor Caroline Larrington (68:08)

We can probably trace all of this back to the 18th century and the rise of romanticism. And with that romanticism and interest in primitive peoples who were but primitive peoples who are ancestors. And in the British Isles, you began to get a kind of the hardy Anglo Saxon versus the Normans who came over here with their fancy French ways and messed around with our language and so on. And part of that then fed into a rediscovery of Old English and then followed by translation, the availability of translations of old Norse sagas and myths. And all of a sudden Iceland was a cool place and people like William Morris were going to visit it. But there was also a way of, of defining the English in particular as a race who'd always loved freedom, who had and, you know, like the Vikings traveled the world and made settlements in Greenland, in the British Isles and in Normandy, and sailed down the Volga and through the Mediterranean and went to Byzantium and so on. So the British Empire was the legacy of the descendants of the Vikings. So it's tied into, I think, a very particular sort of British cultural that it's that Viking spirit that in part was an important factor in the self image of the British Empire when it was at its height in the 19th century.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (69:41)

Caroline, I could probably talk to you about this for another five hours, but I'm afraid we've come to the end of our time, so I'll just have to thank you one more time. This has been an absolute delight.

Professor Caroline Larrington (69:53)

Well, it's been great fun to talk talk to you. Really interesting.

Dr. Eleanor Jaenega (69:56)

Thanks once again to Carolyn for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History hit. If you haven't already heard our previous Norse Myths episodes on the creation of the world, Odin and Thor and Loki do go back and have a listen to those three as well. You won't want to miss them. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film the Medieval Apocalypse, released weekly and ad free podcasts by signing up@historyhit.com subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

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