The Valkyrie’s Gender: Old Norse Shield-Maidens and Valkyries as a Third Gender

Abstract

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.

One of the blokes: Brewsters, branding and gender (in)visibility in New Zealand’s craft beer industry

“…‘Freyja’ and ‘Gudrun’ invite sado-machochist connotations as each maiden-warrior sits spread-legged in black leather lingerie. These choices are significant given the Valkyrie of Old Norse literature arguably occupied a ‘third gender’ (Self, 2014): a masculine/feminine hybrid of ‘blood-spattered byrnies’ who donned masculine armour, weapons and battlefield prowess, while also performing domestic roles. Valkyrie’s interpretation, however, maps onto modern sexually postured interpretations of these mythological warriors as ‘a feminine form waiting for a man to claim it’ (Self, 2014: 167).…”

“…These choices are significant given the Valkyrie of Old Norse literature arguably occupied a ‘third gender’ (Self, 2014): a masculine/feminine hybrid of ‘blood-spattered byrnies’ who donned masculine armour, weapons and battlefield prowess, while also performing domestic roles. Valkyrie’s interpretation, however, maps onto modern sexually postured interpretations of these mythological warriors as ‘a feminine form waiting for a man to claim it’ (Self, 2014: 167). The overt sexualisation of the Valkyrie invites a negotiated (if not post-feminist) reading of unmasked, confident femininity as an integral component of the beer’s brand identity but – given the legacy of sexism in beer – is likely to be read as another instantiation of beer culture’s ongoing misogyny.…”

Revisiting the ‘Valkyries’: Armed Females in Viking Age Figurative Metalwork

“…In trying to explain their meanings, Petersen situated them in the context of Old Norse textual descriptions of the valkyrjur (valkyries), supernatural female beings who collected the dead from the battlefield and served alcohol to the warriors gathered in Óðinn's hall. The textual valkyrjur have seen a multitude of readings over the decades, and now appear as a nexus of gendered violence in scholarly perceptions of the Viking mind and its problematic intersections with medieval Old Norse literature; for a selective array of interpretations from the past two decades, see Praestgaard Andersen 2002 ;Quinn 2007;Egeler 2011;Murphy 2013;Boyer 2014;Self 2014;Näsström 2016;Price 2019;Friðriksdóttir 2020. As we have seen, by the 1990s the idea that all kinds of non-ferrous miniature 'female' figures discovered in Denmark and Sweden (typically long haired, clad in trailing garments and carrying horns) depicted valkyries had already been firmly established in academia and this assertion paved the way to interpret their completely new and armed variants in a similar vein (Petersen 1992b:41).…”

Women, War and Words: a Verbal Archaeology of Shield-maidens

“…As already noted, shield-maidens are quite a different category of beings from valkyries, though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably by modern scholars, or indiscriminately when the texts being discussed do not use the ON equivalents (e.g. Finch 1965: 93-4;Jochens 1996: 90;Self 2014). Valkyries have been more intensively studied in their own right than shield-maidens, though they would still benefit from the kind of detailed study of text and vocabulary, tracking down all the instances, as done here for the shield-maidens.…”