A Raven from the Ballads, Not the Eddas

The valravn is a creature of Danish balladry rather than of Norse mythology, and the distinction matters: it does not appear in the Eddas and belongs to folk song collected in the modern period, chiefly the great nineteenth-century collections of Danish medieval ballads. In these songs the valravn ("raven of the slain") is a raven that has fed on the bodies of the dead on the battlefield, or a fallen king who has become such a bird, bound to a dark condition from which release comes only through a monstrous act, in one ballad through consuming the blood or heart of a child, after which it may regain human or knightly form.

The figure draws on the older and genuinely ancient association of ravens with the battlefield dead and with Odin, whose ravens Huginn and Muninn belong to a different, mythological register; but the valravn itself is a late folkloric being and should not be read back into the pre-Christian material. It has enjoyed a considerable second life in modern Scandinavian and heavy-metal imagery.