The Amazons

Author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash compare and contrast two of the most well-known sisterhoods of heavily-armed mythological warrior women -- the Amazons of ancient Greece, and the Valkyries of Viking legend. In addition to recounting the myths, epic legends, and heroic battles that have enthralled audiences for centuries, they also look into the possible historicity of their stories, and what these badass women represent on a more significant cultural level.

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Episode Transcript:

The warrior prepares for battle. On goes the gleaming breastplate made of gold. Next, a sturdy belt with a scabbard resplendent with ivory and silver, holding a mighty sword that will fell many foes. With a firm left-hand grip, the warrior grabs not only a sturdy shield shaped like a half-moon but also two long spears, and with the right hand a battle axe--of the their own invention. Adjusting the straps on a crested helmet, the warrior grabs bow and arrows and jumps astride a horse that was a gift from none other than the wife of the North Wind. This warrior’s father is Ares, the God of War, and her name is Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons. And she’s here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and bubble gum hasn’t been invented yet.

Ben [00:01:11] Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson and I am here, as always with my co-host, Dr. Pat LaRoche and Pat. The bubble gum hasn't been invented yet, as I like it. Well, that was fun.

Pat [00:01:25] Glad you liked it. I had to specify bubble gum because in, like, we're talking about ancient Greece and they had chewing gum. It was the reason of a tree called the Mastic tree, but it wasn't bubble gum. So I needed to specify that to make sure the joke worked with footnotes.

Ben [00:01:41] Well, I'm glad you didn't include all of that in the cold open. It would have lost a little bit of momentum.

Pat [00:01:47] Yeah, we would have. We would have.

Ben [00:01:49] Well, we are talking today about I mean, as we could tell from that from that intro, we are talking about warrior women. And I mean, I feel like warrior women are having a bit of a resurgence. And in pop culture recently, we're seeing a lot more like female action heroes and female led movies and things along that nature. And I think that's great. And I think that it's not necessarily even that new Warrior Women is a story that has kind of fascinated humans forever.

Pat [00:02:19] Yeah, totally. The stories that people tell, like some of them are closer to historical reality and some of them get a little more legendary in the telling. Some of the fictionalized have got all sorts of pop culture things like Marvel movies. We've got The Lord of Rings, Rings of Power with Galadriel that's come out recently.

Ben [00:02:38] Yeah. And like it, people have their opinions about it and whatever. But like, this is the kind of this is a story that is and has always kind of enthralled people. And yeah, like you said, some of them are grounded in reality. Like a lot of our myths are right, Like Gladiator has a sword in the rings of power and people are mad about.

Pat [00:02:54] It, right? Because girls can't hold swords, right?

Ben [00:02:57] Because yeah, girls don't fight.

Pat [00:02:59] I mean, there might be other reasons to criticize rings of power, you know? I mean, it's people.

Ben [00:03:03] Just are professionally mad on the Internet. People just professionally have a problem with everything. Yeah, but, you know, also this is bullshit because there are women warriors in history that we can prove. Yes. Existed.

Pat [00:03:15] Yes and yes.

Ben [00:03:16] And there are badass women action heroes.

Pat [00:03:18] Yes.

Ben [00:03:19] All the time. Myths.

Pat [00:03:21] Yeah. Either it's fiction and hey, it's a made up world, so, you know, whatever. But also it actually is plausible that women used weapons and might have been good at it.

Ben [00:03:35] Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm totally with you. I'm going to be talking about the Valkyries later, and we're going to get into some of that today. You're going to be talking about the Amazons pad and and we have like archeological evidence. We don't have like a lot of, like, written stuff, but there is some archeological evidence that points to this maybe going the way of the Troy thing where we all thought it was a myth. And it turns out actually, we found the city, you know.

Pat [00:03:57] Yeah, there's there's actually a lot of archeological evidence and you, Ben or you are beloved listeners are interested in the Amazons. A lot of what I'm going to say is derived from Adrian Mayer's book on the Amazons, which came out a few years ago. And she puts together a lot of the archeological evidence and then also a lot of the the stories that were told that were passed down and a lot of the stuff that we see in art, like on vast paintings. So the Amazons weren't just an idea or maybe the idea of the Amazons was inspired by actual women of nomadic cultures that lived in the steps of Eurasia in the Black Sea region. And the name Amazon maybe didn't apply to a specific historical group. We're talking about cultures that were like called the Oceans or the Scythians and some other cultures in that general area. And over the decades, archeologists have found tombs of people they have identified as male warriors because they were buried with weapons. But in recent years, DNA testing has shown that a significant fraction of these remains were chromosome only women, according to the DNA. And also a lot of these skeletons show evidence of injuries that are typical of injuries you would sustain in combat. So, I mean, okay, yeah, this is circumstantial, but if it walks like a duck and it talks like, okay, we've got women out here fighting.

Ben [00:05:25] Yeah, Yeah. And we run into that in some of these Viking cultures as well, right? The Vikings, it's very difficult to separate their mythology from their history because they incorporate them into each other and it gets a little bit messy. But there are stories of shield maidens, right? Which that's a they were women that fought with the fought alongside the men and King Harald war tooth We're going to get into some really fun Viking names later but King Harald war tooth went into the battle of Bravo with three shield maidens apparently, and we have found Viking burials of women with weapons. And it's kind of what you said as well. Like at first they were like, This must have been the wife of somebody who was a warrior because girls don't fight. But maybe they did. And maybe there is something to the stories of these of these Vikings. And these Amazons, my wife is six feet tall, and I watched her beat up a dude once. It was pretty fun, you know? Hey, great story here.

Pat [00:06:18] I don't want to.

Ben [00:06:19] I know it's possible. I've seen it done. There is a lot of historical evidence for a lot of these things. The information that we have that is the most prolific are the myths. And they can tell us about the role of women in these different societies and civilizations. We're going to talk about Valkyries. We're going to talk about the Amazons. And while a lot of this is going to be kind of rooted in mythology, a lot of the history of this stuff was was lost to history. And while the archeological evidence is still developing, we can look at these myths not only as being awesome stories and being, you know, the ancient Greeks versions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but also as an interesting insight into women's roles in these different societies and also maybe look into what could have happened in real life. And so, yeah, we might not know the real stories, but the myths will give us a hint. We're going to talk about a few of them, and we're going to start with the silly and the Amazons right after this.

Pat [00:07:23] So. Hey, welcome back. So when people these days hear the word Amazon, they either think of a certain online retail conglomerate or they might think of Wonder Woman. And the thing is, the Amazons or the cultures that gave rise to the legends of the Amazons were actually ordinary people leading ordinary lives. But in a culture and in a context and with reasons that were very different from those of the ancient Greeks who wrote about them. I also want to make clear I'm starting from the point of view of the ancient Greek sources. There are other historical accounts and epics and sagas from the Caucasus Mountains. There are even accounts from as far away as China. And we even hear of Amazon like women in sources from Egypt and other places in North Africa. But the most influential sources for the, I don't know, stereotype or the myth of the Amazons as I think its made its way into pop culture today is definitely the Greek sources. What we know not only from cultures who've written down and passed down oral traditions throughout the generations, but also from what we know of how nomadic societies work. You do a lot of hunting, gathering and foraging, and basically everyone has to contribute. I mean, obviously everyone's invested in the survival of the community. And what this means is that people of any gender are going to be out there on horseback. People of any gender are going to be learning how to hunt. People of any gender are going to be learning how to use weapons. And that attitudes around like marriage and family and child rearing might be different from a very sedentary society. So like an ancient Greece, especially in classical Athens, if you were a woman, you expected to, you know, get married, have kids, stay in the household, stay out of the public eye, kind of do domestic things in a domestic sphere. And these nomadic cultures whom Greek sources heard about. You have women who are riding horseback, who are shooting bows and arrows, who are getting tattoos.

Ben [00:09:41] I mean, that makes it this makes a lot of sense, though, because, I mean, if the tribe is on horseback and they're moving, right, they're bringing the women and children with them and with the warriors and they are not settling in any location, there is no home for you to go home to. There is no house for you to stay inside. You're not going to ride horseback with the rest of the tribe in some big frilly dress or toga or whatever. And I could imagine that being, like, very jarring for the city state people, the more quote unquote, civilized people who have this kind of much more urban lifestyle set up. Right. Even people on a farm in rural Greece wouldn't understand the lifestyle of a mongolian horde, right?

Pat [00:10:29] Yeah. And these horseback nomadic cultures would look at, you know, a culture that builds lots of houses and structures their life around houses as weird, also.

Ben [00:10:42] Weird and soft right there. You don't have to know how to hunt. Like, how do you live? You just buy food at the store. What's that?

Pat [00:10:50] Oh, yeah. I mean, ironic that Amazon becomes the name for.

Ben [00:10:54] People being lazy in their house. Yeah.

Pat [00:10:56] Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm trying to be non-judgmental here. So I think an anecdote that illustrates some of these things is a story that we get from Herodotus. You know, the Greek historian who tells us about this interesting moment where some nomadic women whom he refers to as Amazons, I'm just going to roll with that were captured by some Greeks and they were taken captive and put on ships. They managed to overcome their captors. One thing led to another, and they end up in the Sea of Azov, which is the territory of the Royal Scythians. And the story goes, the Scythian men were like, Whoa, who are these women? It occurred to more than one of them. Oh, we would like these women to bear our children. Our son was all become strong warriors.

Ben [00:11:48] I guess I can see it. All right.

Pat [00:11:51] Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So what they decide to do is let's move a little closer to the Amazons camp. Let's see what they do. If they attack us, we'll retreat. If they don't attack, maybe we'll move a little bit closer.

Ben [00:12:05] Can we establish quickly where city is? Because I always picture it as like it's north of Greece.

Pat [00:12:11] So quite that far.

Ben [00:12:12] I always kind of picture it as Ukraine, honestly.

Pat [00:12:15] You know, that's that's not wrong.

Ben [00:12:16] Like the steppe area is north of. Yeah. Kind of. Right? Yeah. What's the origin of the. Word Amazon.

Pat [00:12:23] The way the Greeks explained it, the word Amazon means without a breast. Right.

Ben [00:12:27] There's that story about the Amazons were great archers, but the only way that they could be great archers was if they cut one of their breasts off, which.

Pat [00:12:35] Doesn't actually make sense.

Ben [00:12:37] Lots of women shoot bow and arrows today without having to do that.

Pat [00:12:41] Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, the word Amazon might not even be Greek in origin. It might be a Greek like reinterpretation of a Caucasian word. And Caucasian is a language spoken in the Caucasus region. It's related to like, say, the Georgian language. I mean, Georgia, Tbilisi, Georgia, not like Atlanta, Georgia. And that word, the word that the Greek sources might be misinterpreting is maybe forest or moon mother or something like that. But it sounds just enough like the Greek words for no breast.

Ben [00:13:16] The origin of that myth to begin with, huh? Yeah.

Pat [00:13:18] Yeah. You know, like you hear something and you make up something about it. And so another theory is that, you know, if a woman gave birth to a kid, she wouldn't nurse the child herself. She would milk her horse and give the kid mare's milk like instead of baby formula. Right. Okay, so maybe it means not breastfeeding. My favorite theory is that it actually comes from that Circassian word, meaning forest or moon mother. And it just got interpreted to fit whatever preconception which.

Ben [00:13:49] Happens all the time when you're looking at especially like Egyptian stuff that the Greeks were talking about. They kind of bastardized a lot of those words and it's fine.

Pat [00:13:56] Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:13:57] Okay, so let's get back to these Scythian dude. Scythian dudes. Yeah, I always thought that Scythian but Scythian dudes who have no game and are trying very, very hard to get these very nice, very deadly Amazonian women to to talk to them.

Pat [00:14:12] Okay. So they're not getting a no signal. So individual dudes start approaching individual Amazonian women, and I'm just going to like, make up a an Amazon woman. Let's call her Melanie Bay. You know, maybe she has a friend, which we named the friend told her. Okay, so Melanie, Opie and Tota, they're going out there, like doing their Amazon thing. Maybe there's a Skip Indian. I don't have a name for him. Sorry, but they don't speak the same language anyway.

Ben [00:14:35] Vladimir.

Pat [00:14:36] Vladimir Okay. So. Vladimir And reality, they catch each other's eyes. And Melanie B says to her friend Toto, Oh, I'll be in that thicket of trees over there.

Ben [00:14:49] So suck on the doorknob kind of thing.

Pat [00:14:51] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And the next day, this dude, he brings a friend. So, like, a double date, You know, stuff happens, You know, one thing leads to another, And after a certain point, you know, the Amazons are like, some of the Amazons are with child. So the men say, Hey, we would like to marry you. We have families, we have homes, We have like a whole established society. Please come join us. And what the Amazons say and return is No, thank you. No, like it's been great. It's been totally great.

Ben [00:15:26] Not me. It's not you. It's me.

Pat [00:15:29] Well, yes. You want to put us in these houses? You want to, like, ties down to these, like, family structures that are not our vibe. We want to be able to roam free. We want to be able to ride horses. We want to be able to, you know, raise our daughters in the same with the same skills as we raise our sons with. And so that I could even go away. And this is supposedly, I guess, how the Amazons kind of sort of merged with the Scythians, kind of through this, you know, baby having thing.

Ben [00:16:00] Yeah. In the the continuity of this story, it is a group of like bad ass warrior riding women on horseback from unknown origin who at some point through some nefarious means find themselves captives of the Greeks on a boat. They overthrow the Greeks, kill them all, presumably steer the boat to the closest place they think they can find, then hook up with a group of like, warrior dudes and then bale kind of bad ass. That was pretty awesome, actually.

Pat [00:16:37] Yeah.

Ben [00:16:38] Yeah, I love it. I mean, that's an awesome story. I'd never heard that one before, but that's. That's fantastic. I love it.

Pat [00:16:43] Yeah. So that's maybe a way of thinking about the Amazons is like a culture. And then, at least at the mythical level, one of the most famous Amazons is Panther Slayer, who's an Amazon queen who murdered someone and had to atone for the murder. And the way she wanted to atone for the murder was to go and defend Troy against the Greeks in the Trojan War.

Ben [00:17:07] So it's kind of Herculean, honestly, doesn't it?

Pat [00:17:10] So, Panther Slayer, she and about a dozen of her fellow Amazon Warrior women went out to Troy because King Priam of Troy needed help against those pesky Greeks. And they. Thought incredibly valiantly and destroyers in the thick of battle. And eventually she meets up with Achilles, who's the best of legions, you know, the top Greek fighter. And so they're facing each other in a of slayers, in full armor. She's got her helmet on. And Achilles delivers the fatal blow as she's there dying. She removes her helmet and his long flowing tresses spill out from the helmet.

Ben [00:17:53] He didn't know he was fighting a woman.

Pat [00:17:55] Achilles, who's Greek, actually appeals to or makes a petition to King Priam, the king of the Trojans, to make sure that Panther slayer gets full warrior burial. Full Warrior honors because he has so much respect for her as a warrior on the other side.

Ben [00:18:14] That's saying something because he's like famously a dick to everybody.

Pat [00:18:17] And like in the Middle Ages, like there's some stuff in the 15th century where people basically write fanfiction. Some of it's Achilles and Panther Slayer. So anyway, so that's yeah, those are the Amazons.

Ben [00:18:27] One thing that I think of when you when you talk about this is I think of Atalanta.

Pat [00:18:31] Oh, yes.

Ben [00:18:32] So she has a lot of similarities with some of this stuff. So you get the story of Atalanta and and Diana, like, you know, women in the forest with a bow and arrow and they're, you know, you can't marry them unless you beat them in a race. And if you lose, you die.

Pat [00:18:48] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:18:48] This kind of thing. So I imagine it's probably related in some way.

Pat [00:18:53] Yeah, definitely.

Ben [00:18:54] One other thing I've seen with the Amazons, I mean, previously is the big one. And we get the good description of her in the Iliad. And I had never heard the Herodotus when you went through. That was really fun. When I've definitely walked through in the British Museum, they have a bunch of different friezes, I guess, that they stole from the Greeks. And one of them is this huge frieze of Amazons fighting. Fighting Spartans. Looks like Spartan Warriors from the movie 300, and it looks like Centers and Amazons are fighting it, but it's just fan fiction. Like you said. It's just there's this cool looking centaurs fighting Amazons. Isn't that awesome, right? It's. It's a comic book, right? It's what we're still doing today. And this is a cool story and a cool idea and cool imagery. And. And I like looking at it.

Pat [00:19:36] Yeah. So those are the Amazons. Like, there's, you know, a more historical way of thinking about Amazons. And then there's the more mythical, often imagination driven, shall we say, version of them.

Ben [00:19:47] I like that. And then the truth is probably somewhere in between. It's just a matter of how far each direction, you know. Yeah, that's kind of what we've been talking about is, you know, mythological warrior women that we have some archeological evidence to suggest that this may have been or may have at least been some truth to these stories. But beyond that, we don't know much. You were talking about the the Amazons, and then I'm going to transition from the DC to the Marvel Universe. Now we're going to go from Wonder Woman over to the new Thor movie where we have a Valkyrie who's played by Tessa Thompson. No relation, and we're going to talk about the Valkyrie, so we're going to get into that right when we get back. Okay. Welcome back. We are talking about mythological warrior women from history. And we're going to talk now about the Valkyries. The Valkyries are very Viking. I'm going to start with a story from one of the great Viking myths. There's a guy named Helgi Hunting's Bane. He's called Hunting's Bane because he is the bane of a guy named Hunting who has a life blood feud with. And they've had this huge battle. Dead Vikings everywhere. And everybody's getting their arms and legs cut off. Hunting is killed, then hunting's kids are killed. And Helgi is the last man standing is wounded and bleeding. But he's slain all of his enemies and is the last man sitting on a rock. The crows are their carrion eating creatures, or they're vultures and crows and things. According to the story, as he's sitting there, the sky gets dark and he can kind of hear the thunder and the lightning and the flashes. And then he hears the sounds of horses riding in armor clattering, and he thinks, Oh, maybe it's another army coming. Maybe I'm going to have to fight them all by myself. But then over the rise over the mountain, you can see this host of like, Warrior Women on Flying Horses. They're dressed in armor that's covered in blood, and they're shooting lightning out of their spears and they're carrying swords and they've got long golden hair coming out of their helmets. And they fly over and they're the Valkyries of the angels of Death. And they're going to take him to Valhalla. And this is the imagery that we all love to see, like airbrushed on the side of a van. And this is what we're going to be talking about is the Valkyries. They are very, very awesome. Yeah. So the Valkyries are kind of a quintessentially Viking myth on the surface. The Myth of the Valkyries is very, you know, these warrior women that ride on to the field of battle after the battle is over and they choose half of the slain and they bring the great heroes of the battle up to Valhalla, where they will dine with Odin in the afterlife. Viking afterlife is is kind of awesome. Viking Afterlife is definitely like the most badass of the mythological afterlife that I can think of. So if you die gloriously in battle, the Valkyrie comes and you ride with her to Valhalla, which is this giant golden palace up in the clouds where Odin is there in his hall, he has all the great warriors of all the great Viking warriors who have died in battle. And they drink mead and they eat boar meat, and then they train by doing battle. Every day they go out into the field outside Valhalla and outside the castle, and they they fight into the death. And then at the end of the day, they all resurrect back and they eat this awesome meal and they get drunk and then they go to sleep. And then the next day they come back out and fight again. It's all very Viking. It's all very badass. It's all very, you know, Hair Metal and the Valkyries are kind of a central role in that because they would take the dead from the battlefield and bring them to Valhalla for this afterlife. They're very like. I mean, the myth is awesome and I love it. But they are also like kind of quintessentially Viking constructions, right? This entire idea of, of, of fighting until death and then going to Valhalla and fighting forever. It's kind of, you know, the people of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland in the eight hundreds was a hard life. It was a hard place to be. And these guys were were just brutal and fatalistic and bloody. And, you know, there was a lot of great culture of these areas as well. But like what they wanted to be known for at the time was, you know, striking terror into the hearts of the French and the British and the Irish and all of the people They were sending Viking raids after. And over the course of about 300 years, the Vikings they raided everywhere, including like the Middle East. There were some Vikings that attacked Constantinople once. There were some Vikings in North Africa. They were in Spain. They came over to to to the New World in Newfoundland and Canada. And they all had kind of had these beliefs in these Valkyries.

Pat [00:24:39] Yeah.

Ben [00:24:40] So one of the difficult things when you're talking about Vikings is that there's not a ton like a lot of what we know about them was written down after their time. They carved stuff under Rune Stones. They used a lot of what was known as Canning, which is the kind of thing where they would say The steed of the sea, and that means a boat. But there were some that were so complicated that we don't even know what the heck they were talking about still. Imagine a person like talking in like pop culture references and like, you know, emojis and stuff like.

Pat [00:25:09] Yeah, it.

Ben [00:25:10] Might have made sense at the time, but there's some stuff that it's like, if you don't know who this guy is or what he's talking about, like you might not understand what the heck is happening here. Anyway, the most complete version we have was written down after the end of the Viking age. There was a guy named Snorri Stirlitz and who wrote down a bunch of the Viking myths as he knew them. And it's kind of interesting because I believe that the Valkyries changed a lot over the course of Viking mythology, but when you read the myths of them, you read them all at the same time as they were all written at the same time at the beginning. They are kind of death goddesses. They are they are dark and scary and witchy and creepy. And if you see one, it's bad news, right? There's a there's a scene where some Vikings are about to go into battle in in Ireland. And these Vikings, this guy named brigadier of man is marching towards the battlefield and he sees this house on the side of the road. And there's these these three women there. And they're they've got this loom and the loom is made out of like dried intestines. And it's got fingers and skulls and blood. And they're.

Pat [00:26:18] Yeah.

Ben [00:26:19] They're blooming. They're like weaving fate. And they're singing this creepy song about how, like, everybody's going to die.

Pat [00:26:25] Oh, that's.

Ben [00:26:26] Nasty. You know, they say that to look at them was to stare into a flame.

Pat [00:26:29] And that's intense.

Ben [00:26:31] It's intense. Yeah, they're intense. They say that they. They create the din of battle. They spill the gore and they bring rain and storms to battle. There was a Viking, you know, group of women known as the Nortons who kind of weave fate. They're kind of tied in with them. They're tied in with like slaughter and death. They present more as like the furies, the Greek furies or the banshees or the witches in Macbeth. Dark, creepy, weird, scary monster. Yeah. Don't want anything to do with it.

Pat [00:27:01] And also had an association with fate.

Ben [00:27:03] Yeah, they kind of combine all of this stuff, and when we kind of go a little further along with them, like, they are tied pretty closely to. To Freya, who was as a Viking goddess. And she's kind of a complicated character. And I like Freya because I feel like she and the Valkyries kind of represent a lot of Viking women in general. Viking women had a lot more autonomy and power than women in other places around medieval Europe at this time, Right? It's a time when when women's rights aren't, like, universally accepted, but they are holding council positions. They work, which they're not allowed to do in other places in Europe at this time. They're building bridges, they're planning cities. They are running everything in town because a lot of the men will go off on these Viking raids during the summer and they leave the women and the women run shit while these guys are gone, right? They kind of are the are the bridge between the Athenian women and the and the Amazonian women, if we're going to call back to that. Yeah. Tons of rune stones across Sweden and Norway that are like a testing to the great works of women architects and writers and builders. We have some reports of these shield maidens, these women who went to war. There's a great story of a woman named Belinda who? Viking. Came to raid her town while all of her Vikings were gone. And so she organized. They were like a little worried because all these Vikings are coming to town and they're going to raid this poor Swedish village. So Linda organizes all of the women at the town. They meet these Vikings outside the city with beer and food, and they give them beer and food. And these guys eat all the food and drink all the beer. They had this huge party. And then when those guys pass out drunk, the women kill them with shovels.

Pat [00:28:49] Whoo hoo hoo!

Ben [00:28:54] Yeah. And she is a great hero of her people for doing this.

Pat [00:28:57] Yeah.

Ben [00:28:58] Yeah. This is Viking culture.

Pat [00:28:59] And Freyr, the goddess that you mentioned with. What's her deal? What is she all about?

Ben [00:29:03] Free is interesting because the wife of Odin is Frigg. Her name is Frigg. But there's some some speculation that this might be some kind of game of telephone thing. They might have been the same goddess, but they're separated at some point in the history, and now they're considered two different things. So Frigg is is basically she's Viking Aphrodite. She's the love sex fertility goddess, but she's also the Leader of the Valkyries. She's also the patron goddess of dark rituals and war. She's like the patron goddess of Lake Viking, which is of the norms of fate. So she has this kind of there were witches that would travel around Norway. They called themselves the vulva, and they wore blue cloaks and they dressed in falcon feathers or wore cat fur to, like, honor. Freya Freya could turn into a falcon, and she had a chariot that was pulled by cats, which is fun.

Pat [00:29:59] Part of me wants to know, how do you get the cats to coordinate enough to pull Chariot or whatever?

Ben [00:30:04] Maybe that's what made her so badass, is that she knew she could literally herd cats.

Pat [00:30:08] Yeah. Maybe she had one of those fishing pole toys with, like, a toy dangling off the engine. But anyway.

Ben [00:30:16] There's a great story about in Iceland. When Iceland the meeting at which Iceland decided to accept Christianity over Viking paganism. They had this big ol thing, which was where all the leaders of Iceland would meet and like have this democratic vote on things. This guy got up and he was going to talk about they wanted to. This is way later. This is way after the Viking age. We're talking like 1300 A.D. or whatever. And as Guy gets up and gives this speech about why we should adopt Christianity. And during the course of the speech, he calls Freya a bitch. Ooh.

Pat [00:30:52] How does that go?

Ben [00:30:53] The whole thing gets together, and they meet about this and they vote. This guy's right. We should adopt Christianity and get rid of the old pagan ways. But also this guy called Freya a bitch. So he's an outlaw now, which means, like, you have 24 hours, and then it's legal for anybody in Iceland to kill you.

Pat [00:31:10] Okay.

Ben [00:31:12] To avenge friends. Honor against you.

Pat [00:31:16] Do not insult Freya. Even if, as a collective body, you have voted to not believe in her as a goddess anymore. You shall not insult her, Honor.

Ben [00:31:26] You're not wrong. You're just an asshole.

Pat [00:31:28] Yep.

Ben [00:31:30] So we start with these Valkyries being war goddesses right there. They're. They're doused in blood. They're carrying spears. And if you see them, you die. And then, as tends to happen with mythology and and and warrior women in mythology, occasionally, like later on, you get the Scythian guys who are like, Maybe if I sit over here, she'll talk to me. And the Narrative for the Valkyries kind of changes a bit. So you start to get these stories of the Valkyries being attainable by great warriors as a romantic interest, whereas before you were scared when you saw them later stories. It's like, Yeah, but what if this what if she was pretty? What if she talked to me? So you start to get some of these stories later on where I mean, the most famous of which is is Bruna. Hilda from the story of the Ring.

Pat [00:32:21] The Ring. Wagner's cycle of opera is not the ring. J.R.R. Tolkien's thing.

Ben [00:32:26] Yeah, and not the ring. The Japanese one with the girl that comes to the TV and kills you. Yes. Although I do want to. I do want to say one thing before we leave the realm of scary, which is there's a theory that in the original version of Beowulf, Grendel's mother is not a monster, but she is just one of these witches. She's a she's an evil spell caster. They never describe Grendel's mother as a as a monster. You assume it because Grendel is a monster. But there is some thought. And when you kind of look at the way that Valkyries are portrayed in more of like a and Freya are portrayed and the more like sinister magical way that like it could have been a woman, a witch that created a monster. And you know it's probably a little bit of out there of a theory. But I do want to mention it because I think it's cool. Yeah. And Grendel's mom might have been a Valkyrie.

Pat [00:33:15] I'll have to rethink Beowulf now.

Ben [00:33:17] Yeah. Yeah. So Sabrina Hild is the daughter of. LAMB. She was a Valkyrie.

Pat [00:33:21] When you say flame, is that a name or is it like.

Ben [00:33:23] Of just a fire?

Pat [00:33:24] Fire. Okay. Yeah. You can't.

Ben [00:33:26] Burner. She's invulnerable to fire. And so she went against Odin because she fell in love with the Viking. Some brave warrior Viking won her over and she fell in love with him. And Odin exiled her and and banished her, imprisoned her in a mountain where she would sleep until a great hero came to rescue her. And, you know, we're starting to see some Disney, some Disney connections here that didn't exist, where.

Pat [00:33:48] She's surrounded by a ring of fire.

Ben [00:33:50] She is surrounded by a ring of fire at the top of a mountain and depends on whether you're looking at the Icelandic like the Icelandic version of the story or the German version of the story. They're a little bit different. Yeah, but this is the story of Sigurd or Siegfried. Sigurd is a great warrior who had to slay a dragon named Fofana with a magical sword, which he does. And as he's on his way back after having, like, avenged his father and the slain this dragon, he finds this mountain and he walks through the flame and he sees Burn Hilde. And he falls in love with her. And she's brought back from status and is going to become his wife. She teaches them runes. She uses a magic like Freya is very associated with magic and so are the Valkyries. Freya has her own hall, which is called Sesame Air, which we know nothing about, other than that she has a hall called Sesame. So it's possible. And like she takes some of the dead there and we don't know why or what the qualifications are. All we have is one line about sesame or that phrase, a hall named Sesame near. It's a little smaller than Valhalla, but like she takes some of the dead also.

Pat [00:34:51] That's fascinating.

Ben [00:34:52] That's it. That's all we know about this. And it's possible that it's a mini Valhalla. It's possible The Valkyries live there. It's a lot of things are possible. And a lot of things are open to speculation. Anyway, with Sigurd, Sigurd gets Springfield to fall in love with him. She teaches them runes, She teaches a magic. And then he, of course, does the Jason and the Argonauts thing and goes off and marry somebody else because she's a princess and he wants to be rich.

Pat [00:35:15] Dick moves weird. Dick move.

Ben [00:35:17] Dick, move. It does not work out well for him either.

Pat [00:35:20] Now in Jason and the Argonauts, I mean, spoiler alert, Medea, the jilted girlfriend, actually winds up getting her revenge by killing the children that she has with Jason, which does not make sense to me. But it made sense to her.

Ben [00:35:33] Like a piece of the cargo falls on Jason and kills him, which I love. Yeah, he said that his kids died and then, like, a piece of his boat falls off and squishes him. And that's how he goes.

Pat [00:35:41] Yeah, but Sigurd, what does she do to him?

Ben [00:35:44] Oh, she glances him through the back and he dies.

Pat [00:35:47] There you go. That seems a little more, I don't know, neater somehow than killing your own children.

Ben [00:35:51] Yeah, it's still cleaner, But then she throws herself into a fire, and it does burn her and she dies. There's a similar story of a group of a guy named Sigrid and a Valkyrie named Helgi. She is engaged to a guy whose name is spelled h0t bod, which I only read as hot bod.

Pat [00:36:09] Hot bod, which.

Ben [00:36:10] But she doesn't like him. No matter how hot his body is. She doesn't like so cigaret and is engaged to this guy, a hot bod, but she doesn't like him. And so Helgi says, Oh, I'll defend you and he goes to war.

Pat [00:36:23] Helgi is is Helgi another Valkyrie or is Helgi a dude?

Ben [00:36:26] Helgi is a dude that likes her and he's like, Well, maybe if I kill your husband, you're your fiancee who you hate. You'll marry me instead. So he does. So she's there in the battle. She. She turns into a falcon at one point. She has a bunch of wolves come and bite people like she's in the middle of all of the fighting. And they they defeat hot bod and then they get married and they're happy together. But then later on, hot, bad sign comes back and kills Helgi and Sigrid and, like, curses him with Valkyrie magic so that no ship he rides on will ever have the wind in its sails. No horse will ever carry him when he is being chased. No shield. He wheels will stand up against an enemy sword, stroke and no sword he wields will injure anyone but himself. Well, then she banishes him to some forest and tells him he can only carry and to survive.

Pat [00:37:13] Okay, that's pretty tough. Pretty punishing. They're pretty.

Ben [00:37:16] Punishing. Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of interesting because with a lot of these stories, women that these guys are very interested in and they they want to marry them. And sometimes they do. And these Valkyries do get married to these men at various points during these stories. But every one of these stories ends in death and destruction and horror and gruesomeness and people being banished and exiled and throwing themselves into fires. And I like to think that that's kind of because that is the Valkyrie nature, right? The Valkyries are death goddesses and war goddesses. And you can't break that no matter how much you try. That's pretty cool.

Pat [00:37:50] Yeah. In a, you know, bleak kind of way, you know, kind of horrific kind of way. Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:37:55] But to tie it together, like I do kind of think that there is historical evidence we have seen for. For Viking warrior women. Yeah. Viking women buried with weapons and gear and stuff and. Yep. And symbols to Freya and symbols to the Valkyries. And we do kind of see like, a lot with the Amazons as well. And, and honestly, like, if we're talking relative location to Athens, the Vikings are also warrior women from the north. Of Greece. Yeah. With the right color hair and the right attitude. So it's just interesting to kind of see the comparisons between the different civilizations. Yeah, they teach us about. Yeah. The groups of people that wrote these myths down. Yeah. In conclusion, Galadriel can use a sword if she wants.

Pat [00:38:35] She can tell you to sort of share.

Ben [00:38:39] That's all we got for you guys today. Thanks so much, as always, for listening. We'll see you on the next one.

Pat: Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.