This article argues that the medieval Scandinavian valkyrie and shield-maiden, overlapping categories of warrior, are best understood as a third gender, a hybrid of masculine and feminine attributes. Found in a variety of texts, myths, and legends of heroes, for example, these figures are clad in masculine attire, armor, and weapons, and exercise masculine power as they fight and choose who will die in battle. At the same time, linguistic markers, literary devices, and other of their activities mark them as feminine. The article further argues that the shield-maiden who chooses a male spouse subsequently transitions from the third gender to the feminine gender. As a consequence, she loses many of the powerful abilities of a warrior woman, along with her armor and weapons. Furthermore, her subjectivity is altered so that it is founded and dependent on that of her husband. When he dies, she is left with a diminished social network that, given the construction of subjectivity in this medieval context, leaves her personhood diminished as well.

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Drawing on Bruce Lincoln’s argument that Snorri Sturluson’s Edda provides an explicit, indigenous pantheon, this chapter examines the place of gender in a part of the Edda, Gylfaginning. This text divides the Old Norse deities in a relatively rigid binary of male and female, a binary that provides one of structures that organizes Snorri’s explicit pantheon. This gender binary further intersects with other binaries such as those of light and dark, and of god and giant. Snorri’s systemization of gender certainly has an impact on modern scholars and neopagan, but not as much as Lincoln’s argument would predict. Instead, intermediaries such as Jacob Grimm elaborate on Snorri’s text to a significant extent. Frigg, the case study for this chapter, becomes a goddess of weaving, family, and domesticity in Grimm’s reworking. This image of Frigg is widespread among contemporary neopagans, especially the more conservative subset of neopagans. The result is that the complex and sometimes non-heteronormative Old Norse myths are re-read and redeployed to support the more “traditional” gender binary of male and female roles championed by contemporary, conservative neopagan communities.