A To Z Blogging Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - V Is For Valkyries!

 So, let’s talk about some more Norse(V is for Viking?) stuff. Well, also German, same stories, right? 

Valkyries are the “choosers of the Slain”, who pick up slain warriors who have died bravely from the battlefields and carry them off to Valhalla, the “Hall of the Slain” where they double as waitresses to serve the permanently partying warriors their food and booze. They are found in a fair bit of fiction.

They appear in a couple of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. The first is Soul Music, in which Death’s granddaughter Susan Sto Helit has to take over the round while Death is off somewhere grieving about the deaths of her parents, Mort and Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell. One of Susan’s spots is a battlefield where she sees a loud bunch of Valkyries arrive singing “Hoyotoho!” The head Valkyrie offers her a job, as they are short on sopranos.

The next Is Interesting Times, in which wizard Rincewind meets the “Silver Horde”, a group of elderly heroes, led by Cohen the Barbarian, who have plans to conquer a country that’s the Discworld equivalent of China. They have brought with them a school teacher to help them learn manners and etiquette. He is really with them because of his romantic ideas about being a barbarian. He has hopes that if he gets killed he will go to Valhalla. He does. The Valkyries come to carry him off. Death in the Discworld can be whatever you believe - in another novel, Maskerade, a murder victim who has been working with the chorus at the Ankh-Morpork Opera House asks if there will be choirs in the after life. “Do you want one?” Death asks.

In Magnus Chase And The Sword Of Summer, (see the S post), there is a part-time Valkyrie, Samirah, a daughter of Loki by an Iranian Muslim woman, a doctor who treated him in Emergency. 

Samirah was offered the job by Odin when she bravely saved her schoolmates. She still goes to school and does homework in between missions.

A retelling of German poem The Niebelungenlied  is The Wolf And The Raven by Diana L. Paxson.  It’s the first of a trilogy, Wotan’s Children, set in Germany. The heroine is Brunahild, related to Attila the Hun. She is not a fantastical “Chooser of the Slain.” The Valkyries in this novel are perfectly human priestesses whose job is to point their spears at those chosen to be killed in the battle. And they are under orders, as it’s a political thing. Brunahild gets into trouble when she refuses to go along with it.

You may recognise this as the story of Wagner’s opera The Valkyrie, of course, as that’s where Wagner got his storyline. The story is also in Old Norse as part of the Volsunga Saga. I have a (translated) copy somewhere which I got at a school fete in my teens. Goodness, those characters are vicious! 

The Diana L. Paxson book is available on Amazon in print and Kindle. I see she has also written some non fiction about Odin and runes, which tempt me greatly!

Aussie author Keith Taylor wrote a series of fantasy novels about the adventures of an Irish bard - the series was called … Bard. In one of the novels he has a scene in which he shows a very different version of Valkyries to what we imagine. Far from being beautiful maidens, they are scary creatures worthy of horror fiction. The author reminds us that Odin was a god of the gallows(sacrifices to him were hanged) and that the eight legs of the horse Sleipnir were meant to symbolise the legs of four men who carried a dead person, on a bier or in a coffin. Not much like the dignified version of the Allfather presented in comics and films!

The series was first published in the 1980s, so you would think it would be well and truly out of print, but it seems to be back up and running, so you can get these books in ebook - both Kindle and Apple Books - and print.

Animated feature Thor: Tales Of Asgard is a Marvel story with Valkyries in it. In it, the teenaged Thor is a spoilt prince who is indulged, even by his brother Loki. They go off with the Warriors Three to Jotunheim on a quest for a sword. Sif doesn’t go because, fed up with Thor’s behaviour, she has gone off to join the Valkyries, in the Marvel universe an elite female army. They have their own training place where men are not welcome, but Thor and his friends desperately need to borrow their winged horses. In this story, Sif is the romantic interest(and so she should be! She was his wife in the myths), The role is played by Tara Strong, a well known voice actress whom you may have heard as the voice of Miss Minutes in Season 1 of Loki. She doesn’t have a Southern accent, by the way.

I bought my copy on Apple TV.

Finally, I highly recommend comedian Anna Russell’s twenty minute Ring Cycle, for which she was famous. She actually manages to tell the story of the entire Ring cycle in just over twenty minutes!  You can watch it free on YouTube. It’s very funny, and she has done several other operas.