Choosers of the Slain

Valkyries, Old Norse valkyrjur, "choosers of the slain", are female battlefield spirits attested across Eddic and skaldic poetry and later prose sources who select which warriors die in battle and which of the dead are worthy to be brought to Odin's hall, Valhalla, to prepare for the final battle of Ragnarok. The Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda describe them riding armoured over battlefields and across the sky, sometimes associated with the aurora borealis in later folk interpretation, and serving the einherjar, the chosen dead, mead in Valhalla between bouts of ritual combat undertaken to keep them ready for the final battle.

Some named valkyries in the sources, including Brynhildr in the Volsunga cycle, take on fuller individual roles as tragic heroines bound by conflicting oaths and loves rather than remaining anonymous battlefield functionaries, showing that the category ranged in the sources from faceless collective spirits to fully developed characters with their own sagas. Norse scholarship situates the valkyrjur within a broader Germanic and circumpolar set of beliefs about spirits who determine the fate of warriors, closely related to but distinct from the norns, who determine fate more generally for all people rather than specifically on the battlefield.