The word valkyrie entered English in 1768 as a scholarly borrowing from Old Norse valkyrja, a compound of valr meaning the slain or those fallen in battle and kyrja from kjosa meaning to choose. The literal meaning is chooser of the slain. The Old Norse compound traces to Proto-Germanic *walakuzjo, formed from *walaz meaning the slain and *keusana meaning to choose. Both elements have deep Indo-European roots: *walaz connects to PIE *welh- meaning to strike or wound, while *keusana connects to PIE *geus- meaning to taste or to choose.
The concept of the valkyrie is attested throughout the Old Norse literary corpus, composed and written down primarily in Iceland between the 10th and 13th centuries CE. The Poetic Edda, a collection of mythological and heroic poems preserved in the Codex Regius manuscript (c. 1270), contains several poems featuring valkyries, including Voluspa and Grimnismal, which list their names. The Prose Edda, composed by Snorri Sturluson around 1220, describes valkyries as maidens sent by Odin to the battlefield to choose which warriors would
The Old English cognate waelcyrge reveals that the concept was known to the Anglo-Saxons as well. Old English texts use waelcyrge to gloss Latin words for the Furies and for sorceresses, suggesting that the Anglo-Saxons associated the valkyrie figure with supernatural female beings of a more ominous character than the noble maidens of later Norse literature. The compound has the same structure: wael (slaughter, the slain) plus cyrge (chooser), both cognate with the Old Norse elements. The element valr/wael also appears in Valhalla (Old Norse
The English word choose is itself a cognate of the second element of valkyrie. Old English ceosan descends from Proto-Germanic *keusana, the same root that produced Old Norse kjosa. Latin gustare (to taste), from PIE *geus-, is a more distant relative, preserving the root's original meaning of tasting or sampling, from which the sense of choosing developed.
The valkyrie figure underwent significant transformation in its reception outside Scandinavia. The 19th-century Romantic movement embraced Norse mythology as a source of national identity, particularly in Germany and Britain. Richard Wagner's opera Die Walkure (1870), the second work in his Ring cycle, features valkyries prominently, and his Ride of the Valkyries became one of the most recognizable pieces of orchestral music in the Western repertoire. Wagner's valkyries are armored horsewomen, a characterization that has dominated
In modern English, valkyrie is used primarily in mythological, literary, and cultural contexts. It refers to the supernatural figures of Norse mythology and, by extension, to any fierce or powerful woman, though this figurative use is less common than the mythological one. The word appears frequently in fantasy literature, video games, and popular culture. The name was given to a NASA Mars lander