Excerpt of The Real Valkyrie by Nancy Marie Brown

Before books, there were stories. In them was distilled the knowledge each generation wished to pass on to the next. Storytelling was (and is) a form of power. It was time-binding: It linked then to now. Told eloquently, at the right time to the right listeners, a story shaped the future. Told often enough, in as many ways as possible, a story became indelible. Such a story is the one told of Eirik Bloodaxe’s great-grandmother, Queen Asa. 

            The story was still being told when Snorri Sturluson visited Vestfold nearly three hundred years later. As he relays it in Heimskringla, Asa was the only daughter of King Harald Redbeard, who ruled Agdir, Norway’s southernmost kingdom. Gudrod, king of Vestfold and two other kingdoms at the head of Viken, sent messengers to Agdir asking for Asa’s hand. Asa might have preferred to marry Gudrod’s grown son, who was exceedingly handsome and tall, for the Hunting King had already seen one wife to the grave. Or Asa may have been a shield-maid who wished not to marry at all. Whatever the reason, her father refused Gudrod’s suit.

The Hunting King swept down from the north with many ships. He took Agdir by surprise, surrounded the king’s estate, fired the thatched roofs, and turned his Vikings loose to plunder. Fighting against heavy odds, Asa’s father and brother were killed. Asa herself was captured and raped by her father’s murderer. She kept her dignity and contained her rage. When she became pregnant, he made her his queen. When their son, Halfdan the Black, was a year old, she took her revenge.

The Hunting King and his queen were on their autumn progress, sailing from one chieftain’s estate to another, enjoying a harvest feast at each one, dispensing justice, attending rituals, witnessing oaths and boasts, and generally reminding their subjects who was in charge. At Stiflu Sound (a place still unidentified by modern historians), Queen Asa saw her chance. At the end of the quay where they’d moored the royal ship she’d noticed a thicket of trees. That night there’d be no moon.

            She posted her errand runner in the thicket. She ran her thumb up the edge of the spear she’d given him and was pleased to see beads of blood well up. He’d whetted it as sharp as her need for vengeance.

            If he survived she’d make him rich. He wouldn’t survive. She couldn’t help that. The king’s bodyguard were berserks—his best fighters. She refilled the king’s mead cup and re-entered the tent on the ship, where he slept.

            Late at night the king went on land, looking for a woman, as she knew he would. He was very drunk—she’d seen to that. It was very dark. When he reached the thicket, the boy leaped out and ran him through. The Hunting King fell into the water, dead.

            So far, the story of Queen Asa is what you’d expect of a Viking queen. She is tough, decisive, unbowed—but still helpless. She has, as sociologists say, no agency. She can plot revenge, but not execute it. She can provide the spear, but not make the thrust. She is reduced to getting her way through “deep-wrought wiles,” in the words of the ninth-century Norwegian poet Thjodolf of Hvin, who preserved Asa’s story for posterity. He called her wicked and the murder foul-play.

            Snorri Sturluson didn’t say much more, when he expanded on Thjodolf’s poem in Heimskringla. Yet, for me, the few lines he added change everything.

            The next morning the king’s killer, hacked down at the quayside, was seen to be the queen’s errand runner. King Gudrod’s warriors confronted her. Queen Asa, said Snorri, “did not deny it was her plan.” You’d expect her to be executed; instead, Snorri wrote, Asa “at once” took her infant son Halfdan and went south to Agdir. There, she “reigned over the kingdom that her father, Harald Redbeard, had ruled” until Halfdan the Black grew up. “He was eighteen years old when he took over the kingdom.”

               Given the length of Snorri’s book, it’s easy to overlook what Queen Asa’s revenge reports about women and power in the Viking Age. At once she proceeded south. She established herself in Agdir as the ruling queen. What does that say about her agency, her ability to act independently?

            It says she needed no help from any man. Her father and brother and most of their warriors were dead—or still south in Agdir if they had escaped the Hunting King’s attack. She alone had been captured and kept captive, though queen in name. Her son was an infant. Alone she faced down her dead husband’s warband. Alone she faced down her son’s tall, handsome half-brother. She faced down the chieftain at whose quay they were moored. She not only escaped punishment, she left at once. Regally. Like a warrior queen no one dared cross. She must have taken the royal ship. She must have taken all the ship contained, including its crew, whose sworn oaths she exacted. She returned to the kingdom of her birth and established herself there, ruling Agdir for seventeen years.