The love life of the dead: Norse Valkyries from an Indo-European perspective

Old Norse Val-kyrja is a reflex of Proto-Germanic *wala-kuzjōn­, which is easily interpreted as ‘slain-chooser, she who chooses the slain’. In view of the likely origin of Valkyries as female death-demons and in view of the compound’s great antiquity, however, it is also possible that *wala-kuzjōn- originally meant ‘slain-taster’, displaying the older semantics (still attested in Gothic and Old English) of the Proto-Indo-European root *ǵeu̯s- ‘taste’ that underlies Proto-Germanic *keus­. The development from corpse-tasting she-demons to splendid warrior-women who love mortal heroes may be linked to the technical formula of “own-choice” marriages in Germanic (‘to choose a man as husband’, as attested in Old Norse and Old English). The Valkyries and their “chosen” Einherjar may thus be Norse counterparts to several Indo-European “Heavenly Maidens” who are said to “choose as husbands for themselves” characters who were originally not gods and were only accepted among them later (e.g. Sūryā in the Indic tradition and Helen in the Greek one).