Forget the shining armor of Marvel or the winged helmets of Wagner. To a Norse pagan a thousand years ago, a Valkyrie was a blood-drenched woman in a dark hut weaving on a loom weighted with severed heads and strung with human intestines. This deep dive traces the word valkyrja, chooser of the slain, back to its grim origins as demons of the dead associated with the wolves and ravens that scavenged battlefields, and to a possible human source in the massive priestess Ibn Fadlan called the angel of death during a 10th-century Rus ship burial on the Volga.

The episode follows their evolution into weavers of fate in the Darradarljod scene before the 1014 Battle of Clontarf, a 1324 Bergen witchcraft trial invoking the Valkyrie Gondul, and Anglo-Saxon charms blaming sudden pain on mighty women hurling invisible spears. It then explains how the g ...