June 20, 2023 • 39 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
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
(00:30):
the right hand, a battle axe of 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 Ari's, the god of war,
and her name is Penthesalia, the Queen of the Amazon,
(00:53):
and she's here to kick ass and shoe bubblegum and
bubblegum hasn't been invented yet.
Speaker 1 (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, doctor Pat Larish and Pat the
bubblegum hasn't been invented yet.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
As I like it. That was fun.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Glad you liked it. I had to specify bubblegum because
in like, we're talking about ancient Greece and they had
chewing gum. It was the resin of a tree called
the mastic tree, but it wasn't bubblegum, So I needed
to specify that to make sure the joke worked with footnotes.
Speaker 1 (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 momento.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, we would have. We would have.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
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 recent urgents, and
in pop culture recently we're seeing a lot more like
female action heroes and female led.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Movies and things along that nature.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
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 We've 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.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, like people have their opinions about it and whatever,
but like this is the kind of this is a
story that 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 glad
Reel has a sword in the Rings of Power and
people are mad.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
About it, right because girls can't hold.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Swords, right, because yeah, girls don't fight.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I mean, Okay, there might be other reasons to criticize
Rings of Power, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
I mean it's people just are professionally mad.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
On the Internet, people will just professionally have a problem
with everything. But you know, also, this is bullshit because
there are women warriores in history that we can prove.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yes existed, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And there are badass women action heroes yes all the time.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm totally with you.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
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 Amazon's pad. And we
have like archaeological evidence. We don't have like a lot
of like written stuff, but there is some archaeological evidence
that points to this maybe going the way of the
Troy thing where you all thought it was a myth
and it turns out actually we found the city.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, there's actually a lot of archaeological eviden and you
ben or are beloved listeners are interested in the Amazons.
A lot of what I'm going to say is derived
from Adrian Meyer's book on the Amazons, which came out
a few years ago, and she puts together a lot
of the archaeological evidence and then also a lot of
the stories that were told that were passed down, and
(04:20):
a lot of the stuff that we see in art,
like on vase 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
(04:40):
Amazon maybe didn't apply to a specific historical group we're
talking about cultures that were called the Thracians or the
Scythians and some other cultures in that general area. And
over the decades, archaeologists 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
(05:05):
significant fraction of these remains were chromosomally 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, if it talks
like a duck, okay, we've got women out here fighting.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
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 in together and it gets a little bit messy.
But there's stories of shield maidens, right, which that's they
were women that fought with fought alongside the men.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
And King Harold.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
War Tooth We're going to get into some really fun
Viking names later, but King Harold war Tooth went into
the Battle of Bravol with three hundred 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 the girls
don't fight. But maybe they did, and maybe there's something
(06:08):
too of these 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, story here, I don't want to 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
(06:31):
of women in these different societies and civilizations. We're going
to talk about valkyries, and 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 lost to history, and
while the archaeological evidence is still developing, we can look
at these myths not only as being awesome stories and
(06:52):
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 missile
give us a hint. We're going to talk about a
few of them, and we're going to start with Penthesiley
(07:13):
and the Amazons right after this.
Speaker 2 (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
(07:44):
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.
(08:08):
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 it's made
its way into pop culture today is definitely the Greek sources.
(08:31):
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 and gathering and foraging, and
basically everyone has to contribute. I mean, obviously everyone's invested
in survival of the community. And what this means is
(08:53):
that people of any gender are going to be out
there on horseback, people of any gender are going to
be learned 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
(09:14):
be different from a very sedentary society. So like an
ancient Greece, especially in like classical Athens, if you were
a woman, you expected to 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
(09:36):
who are riding horseback, who are shooting bows and arrows,
who are getting tattoos.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I mean that makes it.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
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 too.
There is no house for you to stay inside. You're
not going to ride horseback with the rest of the
(10:02):
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
(10:26):
the lifestyle of a Mongolian horde, right.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, weird and soft right there? You know, you don't
have you don't know how to hunt, like, how do
you live? You just buy food at the store.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
What's that?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, ironic that Amazon becomes the name for.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
People being lazy in their house.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah, okay, yeah, okay. I'm trying to be nonjudgmental 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 he tells us about this interesting
moment where some nomadic women whom he refers to with
(11:20):
amazons and 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 Scithians,
and the story goes the Skiffian men were like, who
who are these women? It occurred to more than one
(11:42):
of them, Oh, we would like these women to bear
our children. Our sons become strong.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Warriors, I can see.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
So what they decide to do is, let's move a
little closer to the Amazon's 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.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Can we establish quickly where Scithia is because I always
picture it as like it's north of Greece, it's that
quite that far. I always kind of pictured it as Ukraine, honestly,
you know that's that's not wrong, Like the step.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Area is north of Yeah, this kind of right.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
What's the origin of the word amazon?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The way the Greeks explain it, The word amazon means
without a breast.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Right, there's that story about the Amazon's where great archers.
But the only way that they could be great archers
was if they cut one of their breasts.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Off, which doesn't actually make sense.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Lots of women shoot bow and arrows today without having
to do that.
Speaker 2 (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 Krekassian word, and Carkassian is
a language spoken in the Caucasus region. It's related to like, say,
the Georgian language. I mean Georgia to see Georgia, not
like Atlanta Georgia, and that word. The word that the
(13:04):
Greek sources might be like misinterpreting is maybe forest or
moon mother or something like that. But it sounds just enough,
like the Greek words for no breast.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The origin of that myth to begin with huh yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
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 mayre's milk like instead of baby formula.
Are right, Okay, so maybe it means not breastfeeding. My
(13:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Which happens all the time when you're looking at it,
especially like Egyptian stuff that the Greeks were talking about.
They've kind of bastardized a lot of those words and
it's fine, oh yeah, yeah, okay, So let's get back
to these Cythyan dude skithy and dudes I always thought scythian,
but Skithian dudes who have no game and are trying
very very hard to get these very nice, very deadly
Amazonian women to talk to them.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Okay, so they're not getting a nose signal. So individual
dudes start approaching individual Amazonian women, and I'm just going
to like make up an Amazon woman. Let's call her Melanippe.
You know, maybe she has a friend, which we name
the friend Tota. Okay, So Melanippe and Tota they're going out.
They're like doing their Amazon thing. Maybe there's a Skithian dude,
and I don't have a name for him, sorry, but
(14:33):
they don't speak the same language anyway. Vladimir Vladimir. Okay,
so Vladimir and Melanippe they catch each other's eye, and
Melanipe says to her friend Tota, I'll be in that
thicket of trees over there.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
It's a sock on the door knob kind of thing, exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
And the next day the Skithian dude he brings a
friend set of 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 at least some
of the Amazons are with child. So the Scithian men say, hey,
we would like to marry you. We have families, we
(15:14):
have homes, we have like a whole established society. Please
come join us. And what the Amazons say in return
is no, thank you no, like, it's been great. It's
been totally great.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
It's me 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.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
We want to be able to roam free. We want
to be able to ride our 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 the I guess the scithy men go away,
and uh, this is supposedly I guess how the Amazon's
kind of sort of merged with the Skiffions kind of
(15:58):
through this you know baby hea thing.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, in the continuity of this story, it is a
group of like badass warrior riding women on horseback from
unknown origin who, through some nefarious means, find themselves captives
of the Greeks on a boat. They overthrow the Greeks,
(16:24):
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 bail kind
of bad as That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Actually, yeah, yeah, I love it.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
That's an awesome story. I'd never heard that one before.
But that's fantastic. I love it.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, So that's maybe a way of thinking about the
Amazon's as like a culture. And then at least at
the mythical level. One of the most famous Amazons is Penthaslea,
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
(17:05):
against the Greeks in the Trojan War.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Sounds kind of herculean, honestly.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Doesn't it. So Penthesilea, she and about a dozen of
her fellow Amazon warrior women went out to Troy because
King Prime of Troy needed help against those pesty Greeks,
and they thought incredibly valiantly. Penthesilea is in the thick
of battle, and eventually she meets up with Achilles, who's
(17:33):
the best of me kims, you know, the top Greek fighter,
and so they're facing each other. You know, Penthesilea is
in full armor, she's got her helmet on, and Achilles
delivers the fatal blow. As she's there dying, he removes
her helmet and these long flowing tresses spill out from
the helmet.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
He didn't know he was fighting a woman.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Achilles, whose Greek actually appeals to or makes a petition
to King Prime I am the King of the Trojans,
to make sure that Penthesilea gets full warrior burial, full
warrior honors, because he has so much respect for her
as a warrior.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
On the other side, that's saying something because he's like
famously addict to everybody.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
And like in the Middle Ages, like there's some stuff
from the fifteenth century where people basically write fan fiction.
Some of its Achilles and Penthesala. So anyways, so that's yeah,
those are the Amazons.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
One thing that I think of when you when you
talk about this is I think of Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Oh, yes, so she.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Has a lot of similarities with some of this stuff.
So you get the story of Atlanta 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.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
If you lose, you die. Yeah, this kind.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Of thing, So I imagine it's probably related in some way.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
One other thing I've seen with the Amazons, I mean,
Petesley is the big one and we get the good
description of her and the Iliad, and I had never
heard the Herodotus when you went through.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
That was a really fun one. I've definitely walked through.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
In the British Museum, they have a bunch of different
friezes I guess that they've stole from the Greeks, and
one of them is this huge frieze of amazons fighting
fighting Spartans.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
It looks like Spartan.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Warriors from the movie three hundred, and it looks like
centaurs and amazons are fighting it. But it's just fan fiction,
Like you said, it's just this is cool looking centaurs
fighting amazons.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Isn't that awesome? Right?
Speaker 1 (19:28):
It's a comic book, right, It's what we're still doing today. Like,
this is a cool story and a cool idea and
cool imagery and I like looking at it.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (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. That's kind of what we've been talking about.
Is you know, mythological warrior women that we have some
archaeol logical 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
(20:09):
about the Amazons, and 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,
(20:35):
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 a Hunting's bane
because he is the bane of a guy named Hunting
who they have a life blood feud with.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
And they've had this huge.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Battle, dead Vikings everywhere, and everybody's getting their arms and
legs cut off. You know, Hunting is killed, and Hunting's
kids are killed, and Helgi is the last man standing.
He's wounded and bleeding, but he's slain all of his enemies,
and he's the last man sitting on a rock. The
crows are there, and the carrying eating greets are there,
vultures and crows and things, according to the story. As
(21:22):
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 and
armor clattering, and he thinks, oh, maybe it's another army coming.
Maybe I'm gonna have to fight them all by myself.
But then over the rise over the mountain, he can
see this host of like.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Warrior women on flying horses.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
And they fly over and they're the Valkyries. They're the
angels of death, and they're going to take him to Valhalla.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
And this is the imagery that we all love to see,
like airbrushed on the side of a band and this
is what we're going to be talking about is the Valkyries.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
They are very, very awesome.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Yes, 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 onto the field
of battle after the battle's 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
(22:33):
Odin in the afterlife. Viking after life is kind of awesome.
Viking after life is definitely like the most badass of
the mythological afterlifes.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
That I can think of.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
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 this 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 bore meat, and
(23:03):
then they train by doing battle.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Every day they go out into the field.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Outside Valhalla and outside the castle and they fight to
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
(23:27):
are kind of a central role in that because they
would take the dead from the battlefield and.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
Bring them to Valhalla for this afterlife.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
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 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
(23:57):
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
(24:19):
raids after and over the course of about three hundred years,
the Vikings they raided everywhere, including like the Middle East.
There were some vikings that attack constant to noble ones.
There were some Vikings in North Africa, they were in Spain,
they came over to the New World in Newfoundland and Canada,
and they all kind of had these beliefs in these valkyries.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (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 onto runestones. They used a
lot of what was known as kenning, 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 what
the heck they were talking about. Still, imagine a person
(25:03):
like talking in like pop culture references and like you know,
emojis and stuff like. Yeah, it 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 Stirlisson who wrote down
(25:25):
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 mists of them, you read
them all at the same time, because they were all
written at the same time. At the beginning, they are
kind of death goddesses. They are dark and scary and
(25:49):
witchy and creepy, and.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
If you see one, it's bad news. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
There's a scene where some Vikings are about to go
into battle in Ireland, and these Vikings, this guy named
Brodier 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 there they've got
this loom, and the loom is made out of like
dried intestines, and it's got fingers and skulls and blood,
(26:18):
and they're they're looming. They're like weaving fate, and they're
singing this creepy song about how like everybody's gonna die.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
You know. They say that to look at them was
to stare into a flame, and that's intense.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
It's intense. Yeah, they're intense. They say that 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 Norns 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
(26:53):
Banshees or the witches in Macbeth, dark, creepy, weird, scary, monstery,
don't want anything to do.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
With it, and also had an association with fate.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yeah, they kind of combine all of this stuff and
when we're going to go a little further along with them,
like they are tied pretty closely to Freya, who was
a Viking goddess and she's kind of a complicated character.
And I like Freya because I feel like she and
the Valkyrie is kind of represent a lot of Viking
(27:26):
women in general. Viking women had a lot more autonomy
and power than women in other places around medieval Europe.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
At this time, right, it's a time when women's rights.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Aren't like universally accepted, but they are holding council positions,
they work, which they're not allowed to do in other.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Places in Europe. At this time.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
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 are the
bridge between the Athenian women and the Amazonian women. If
we're gonna call back to that. Yeah, tons of runestones
(28:05):
across Sweden and Norway that are like testing to the
great works of women architects and writers and builders. We
have some reports of these shield maidens, these women who.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Went to war. There's a great story of a woman
named Blenda who Vikings 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.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Vikings are coming to town and they're going to raid
this poor Swedish village. So Blenda 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 have this huge party, and
then when those guys pass out drunk, the women kill
(28:47):
them with shovels. Yeah, and she's a great hero of
her people for doing this. Yes, is Viking culture.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
And Freya, the goddess that you mentioned, what's her deal?
What is she all about?
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Freya is interesting because the wife of Odin is frig
Her name is frig But there's some speculation that 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 frig Is is basically she's Viking aphrodite. She's the love, sex,
(29:26):
fertility goddess. But she's also the leader of the Valkyries.
She's also the patron goddess of like dark rituals and war.
She's like the patron goddess of like Viking witches, of
the norns of fate. So she has this kind of
There were witches that would travel around Norway. They call
themselves the Volva, and they wore blue cloaks and they
(29:48):
dressed in falcon feathers or wore cat for to like
honor Freya. Freya could turn into a falcon, and she
had a chariot that was pulled by cats, which is fun.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
I part of me wants to, you know, how do
you get the cats to coordinate enough to poe chariot whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Maybe that's what made her so bad ass is that
she she could literally heard cats.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah. Maybe she had one of those fishing pole toys
with like, oh yes, toy dangling off the end.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Anyway, 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 all Thing which was
where all the leaders of Iceland would meet and like
have this democratic vote on things.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
This guy got up and he was going to talk.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
About they wanted to This is way later, this is
way after the Viking age. We're talking like thirteen hundred
AD or whatever ce and this 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.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Ooh how does that go?
Speaker 1 (30:53):
The All 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 bitch, so he's an outlaw now,
which means, like, you have twenty four hours and then
it's legal for anybody in Iceland to kill you.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Okay, to avenge Fran's honor against you.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
You're not wrong, You're just an asshole.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
So we start with these valkyries being war goddesses, right,
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 warrior women in mythology, occasionally, like later on,
you get the Scithian guys who are like, maybe if
I sit over here, she'll talk to me. And the
(31:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
What if she was pretty? What if she talked to me?
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So you start to get some of these stories later on,
where I mean, the most famous of which is Brunhilda
from the story of The Ring, the.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Ring Wagner's cycle of operas, not The Ring j R.
Tolkien's thing.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Yeah, and not the Ring, the Japanese one with the
girl that comes through the TV and kills you. Yes,
although I want to I do want to say one
thing before we leave the realm of scary witches. 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 an evil spellcaster. They never describe
(32:48):
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 and Freya portrayed
in the more like sinister magical way, that like it
could have been a woman, a witch that created a monster.
(33:09):
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, Grendel's mom might
have been a valkyrie.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
I have to rethink Beowulf now.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, so Brunehild is the daughter of Flame. She was
a valkyrie.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
When you say flame, is that a name or is
it like just a fire? Fire? Okay, yeah, you can't
burn her.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
She's in vulnerable to fire.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
And so she went against Odin because she fell in
love with the Viking.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
Some brave warrior.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Viking won her over and she fell in love with him,
and Odin exiled her and banished her, imprisoned her in
a mountain where she would sleep until a great hero
came to rescue her. You know, we're starting to see
some Disney, some Disney connections here that didn't exist.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
With Is she surrounded by a ring of fire?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
She is surrounded by a ring of fire at the
top of a mountain. It depends on whether you're looking
at the Icelandic like the Icelandic version of the story
or the German version of the story. Is there a
little bit different, But this is the story of Sigurd
or Siegfried. Sigurd is a great warrior who had to
slay a dragon named Faffnir with a magical sword, which
he does. And as he's on his way back after
(34:13):
having like avenged his father and to slay in this dragon,
he finds this mountain and he walks through the flame
and he sees Brunehild and he falls in love with her,
and she's brought back from stasis and is going to
become his wife.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
She teaches him rooms. She's as a.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Magic like Freya is very associated with magic, and so
are the Valkyries. Freya has her own hall which is
called Cesromir, which we know nothing about other than that
she has a hall called cestrom Heir, so there'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 cestrom Heir, that freyas
a hall named sestrom Heir. It's a little smaller than Valhalla,
(34:50):
but like she takes some of the dead.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Also, that's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
That's all we know about this. And it's possible that
it's a mini Valhalla. It's possible the valkyris live there.
A lot of things are possible, a lot of things
are open to speculation anyway. With Sigurd, Sigurd gets sprun
Hill to fall in love with him, she teaches him ruins,
she teaches him 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.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
To be rich.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Dick move, Sigurd, Dick move.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Dick move. It does not work out well for him either.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Like a piece of the argo falls on Jason and
kills him, which I love. Yeah, he's sad that his
kids died, and then like a piece of his boat
falls off and squishes him, and that's how he goes.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Yeah, but Sigurd, what does she do to him?
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Oh, she lances him through the back and he died.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Okay, there you go. That seems a little more i
don't know, neater somehow than killing your own children.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, it's a little 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 sig and a valkyrie named Helgi. She's engaged to
a guy whose name is spelled hot bo d D
which I only read.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Is hot Bod hot Bod, which but she doesn't like him.
No matter how hot his bod is, she doesn't like him.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
So Cigarette is engaged to this guy hot Bod, but
she doesn't like him, and so Helgi says, oh, I'll
defend you, and he goes to war.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Helgi is is Helgi. Another valkyri or is Helgia dude.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Helgi is a dude that likes her, and he's like, well,
maybe if I kill your husband or your fiance who
you hate, you'll marry me instead, So he does.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
So she's there in the battle. She she turns into
a falcon.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
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 defeat hot Bod and then
they get married and they're happy together. But then later
on hot Bod's son comes back and kills Helgi and
Sigurine like curses him with valkyrie magic so that no
ship he rides on will ever have the wind and
(36:58):
it sails. No horse will ever carry him when he
is being chased. No shield he wields will stand up
against an enemy sword stroke, and no sword he wields
will injure anyone but himself.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
Wow. Then she banishes him to some forest and tells
him he can only carry into survive.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Okay, that's pretty pretty punishing there.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Pretty punishing.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
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
everyone 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
(37:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I think that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, in in a bleak kind of way, kind of
horrific kind of way. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, But to tie it together like I do kind
of think that there is historical evidence we have seen
for for Viking warrior women, Viking women buried with weapons
and gear and stuff, and symbols to Freya and symbols
to the Valkyries, and we do kind of see a
lot with the Amazons as well, And honestly, like if
we're talking relative location to Athens, the Vikings are also
(38:18):
warrior women from the north of Greece with the right
color hair and the right attitude. So it's just interesting
to kind of see the comparisons between the different civilizations,
and they teach us about.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
The groups of people that wrote these myths down.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
In conclusion, Galadriel can use a sort if she wants.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
You can totally use.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
That's all I got for you guys today. Thanks so
much as always for listening. We'll see on the next one.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by Me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
(39:09):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(39:29):
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.
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
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
(00:30):
the right hand, a battle axe of 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 Ari's, the god of war,
and her name is Penthesalia, the Queen of the Amazon,
(00:53):
and she's here to kick ass and shoe bubblegum and
bubblegum hasn't been invented yet.
Speaker 1 (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, doctor Pat Larish and Pat the
bubblegum hasn't been invented yet.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
As I like it. That was fun.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Glad you liked it. I had to specify bubblegum because
in like, we're talking about ancient Greece and they had
chewing gum. It was the resin of a tree called
the mastic tree, but it wasn't bubblegum, So I needed
to specify that to make sure the joke worked with footnotes.
Speaker 1 (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 momento.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, we would have. We would have.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
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 recent urgents, and
in pop culture recently we're seeing a lot more like
female action heroes and female led.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Movies and things along that nature.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
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 We've 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.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, like people have their opinions about it and whatever,
but like this is the kind of this is a
story that 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 glad
Reel has a sword in the Rings of Power and
people are mad.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
About it, right because girls can't hold.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Swords, right, because yeah, girls don't fight.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I mean, Okay, there might be other reasons to criticize
Rings of Power, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
I mean it's people just are professionally mad.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
On the Internet, people will just professionally have a problem
with everything. But you know, also, this is bullshit because
there are women warriores in history that we can prove.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yes existed, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And there are badass women action heroes yes all the time.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm totally with you.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
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 Amazon's pad. And we
have like archaeological evidence. We don't have like a lot
of like written stuff, but there is some archaeological evidence
that points to this maybe going the way of the
Troy thing where you all thought it was a myth
and it turns out actually we found the city.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, there's actually a lot of archaeological eviden and you
ben or are beloved listeners are interested in the Amazons.
A lot of what I'm going to say is derived
from Adrian Meyer's book on the Amazons, which came out
a few years ago, and she puts together a lot
of the archaeological evidence and then also a lot of
the stories that were told that were passed down, and
(04:20):
a lot of the stuff that we see in art,
like on vase 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
(04:40):
Amazon maybe didn't apply to a specific historical group we're
talking about cultures that were called the Thracians or the
Scythians and some other cultures in that general area. And
over the decades, archaeologists 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
(05:05):
significant fraction of these remains were chromosomally 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, if it talks
like a duck, okay, we've got women out here fighting.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
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 in together and it gets a little bit messy.
But there's stories of shield maidens, right, which that's they
were women that fought with fought alongside the men.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
And King Harold.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
War Tooth We're going to get into some really fun
Viking names later, but King Harold war Tooth went into
the Battle of Bravol with three hundred 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 the girls
don't fight. But maybe they did, and maybe there's something
(06:08):
too of these 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, story here, I don't want to 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
(06:31):
of women in these different societies and civilizations. We're going
to talk about valkyries, and 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 lost to history, and
while the archaeological evidence is still developing, we can look
at these myths not only as being awesome stories and
(06:52):
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 missile
give us a hint. We're going to talk about a
few of them, and we're going to start with Penthesiley
(07:13):
and the Amazons right after this.
Speaker 2 (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
(07:44):
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.
(08:08):
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 it's made
its way into pop culture today is definitely the Greek sources.
(08:31):
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 and gathering and foraging, and
basically everyone has to contribute. I mean, obviously everyone's invested
in survival of the community. And what this means is
(08:53):
that people of any gender are going to be out
there on horseback, people of any gender are going to
be learned 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
(09:14):
be different from a very sedentary society. So like an
ancient Greece, especially in like classical Athens, if you were
a woman, you expected to 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
(09:36):
who are riding horseback, who are shooting bows and arrows,
who are getting tattoos.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I mean that makes it.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
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 too.
There is no house for you to stay inside. You're
not going to ride horseback with the rest of the
(10:02):
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
(10:26):
the lifestyle of a Mongolian horde, right.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, weird and soft right there? You know, you don't
have you don't know how to hunt, like, how do
you live? You just buy food at the store.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
What's that?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, ironic that Amazon becomes the name for.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
People being lazy in their house.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah, okay, yeah, okay. I'm trying to be nonjudgmental 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 he tells us about this interesting
moment where some nomadic women whom he refers to with
(11:20):
amazons and 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 Scithians,
and the story goes the Skiffian men were like, who
who are these women? It occurred to more than one
(11:42):
of them, Oh, we would like these women to bear
our children. Our sons become strong.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Warriors, I can see.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
So what they decide to do is, let's move a
little closer to the Amazon's 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.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Can we establish quickly where Scithia is because I always
picture it as like it's north of Greece, it's that
quite that far. I always kind of pictured it as Ukraine, honestly,
you know that's that's not wrong, Like the step.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Area is north of Yeah, this kind of right.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
What's the origin of the word amazon?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The way the Greeks explain it, The word amazon means
without a breast.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Right, there's that story about the Amazon's where great archers.
But the only way that they could be great archers
was if they cut one of their breasts.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Off, which doesn't actually make sense.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Lots of women shoot bow and arrows today without having
to do that.
Speaker 2 (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 Krekassian word, and Carkassian is
a language spoken in the Caucasus region. It's related to like, say,
the Georgian language. I mean Georgia to see Georgia, not
like Atlanta Georgia, and that word. The word that the
(13:04):
Greek sources might be like misinterpreting is maybe forest or
moon mother or something like that. But it sounds just enough,
like the Greek words for no breast.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The origin of that myth to begin with huh yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
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 mayre's milk like instead of baby formula.
Are right, Okay, so maybe it means not breastfeeding. My
(13:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Which happens all the time when you're looking at it,
especially like Egyptian stuff that the Greeks were talking about.
They've kind of bastardized a lot of those words and
it's fine, oh yeah, yeah, okay, So let's get back
to these Cythyan dude skithy and dudes I always thought scythian,
but Skithian dudes who have no game and are trying
very very hard to get these very nice, very deadly
Amazonian women to talk to them.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Okay, so they're not getting a nose signal. So individual
dudes start approaching individual Amazonian women, and I'm just going
to like make up an Amazon woman. Let's call her Melanippe.
You know, maybe she has a friend, which we name
the friend Tota. Okay, So Melanippe and Tota they're going out.
They're like doing their Amazon thing. Maybe there's a Skithian dude,
and I don't have a name for him, sorry, but
(14:33):
they don't speak the same language anyway. Vladimir Vladimir. Okay,
so Vladimir and Melanippe they catch each other's eye, and
Melanipe says to her friend Tota, I'll be in that
thicket of trees over there.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
It's a sock on the door knob kind of thing, exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
And the next day the Skithian dude he brings a
friend set of 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 at least some
of the Amazons are with child. So the Scithian men say, hey,
we would like to marry you. We have families, we
(15:14):
have homes, we have like a whole established society. Please
come join us. And what the Amazons say in return
is no, thank you no, like, it's been great. It's
been totally great.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
It's me 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.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
We want to be able to roam free. We want
to be able to ride our 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 the I guess the scithy men go away,
and uh, this is supposedly I guess how the Amazon's
kind of sort of merged with the Skiffions kind of
(15:58):
through this you know baby hea thing.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, in the continuity of this story, it is a
group of like badass warrior riding women on horseback from
unknown origin who, through some nefarious means, find themselves captives
of the Greeks on a boat. They overthrow the Greeks,
(16:24):
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 bail kind
of bad as That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Actually, yeah, yeah, I love it.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
That's an awesome story. I'd never heard that one before.
But that's fantastic. I love it.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, So that's maybe a way of thinking about the
Amazon's as like a culture. And then at least at
the mythical level. One of the most famous Amazons is Penthaslea,
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
(17:05):
against the Greeks in the Trojan War.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Sounds kind of herculean, honestly.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Doesn't it. So Penthesilea, she and about a dozen of
her fellow Amazon warrior women went out to Troy because
King Prime of Troy needed help against those pesty Greeks,
and they thought incredibly valiantly. Penthesilea is in the thick
of battle, and eventually she meets up with Achilles, who's
(17:33):
the best of me kims, you know, the top Greek fighter,
and so they're facing each other. You know, Penthesilea is
in full armor, she's got her helmet on, and Achilles
delivers the fatal blow. As she's there dying, he removes
her helmet and these long flowing tresses spill out from
the helmet.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
He didn't know he was fighting a woman.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Achilles, whose Greek actually appeals to or makes a petition
to King Prime I am the King of the Trojans,
to make sure that Penthesilea gets full warrior burial, full
warrior honors, because he has so much respect for her
as a warrior.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
On the other side, that's saying something because he's like
famously addict to everybody.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
And like in the Middle Ages, like there's some stuff
from the fifteenth century where people basically write fan fiction.
Some of its Achilles and Penthesala. So anyways, so that's yeah,
those are the Amazons.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
One thing that I think of when you when you
talk about this is I think of Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Oh, yes, so she.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Has a lot of similarities with some of this stuff.
So you get the story of Atlanta 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.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
If you lose, you die. Yeah, this kind.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Of thing, So I imagine it's probably related in some way.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
One other thing I've seen with the Amazons, I mean,
Petesley is the big one and we get the good
description of her and the Iliad, and I had never
heard the Herodotus when you went through.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
That was a really fun one. I've definitely walked through.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
In the British Museum, they have a bunch of different
friezes I guess that they've stole from the Greeks, and
one of them is this huge frieze of amazons fighting
fighting Spartans.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
It looks like Spartan.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Warriors from the movie three hundred, and it looks like
centaurs and amazons are fighting it. But it's just fan fiction,
Like you said, it's just this is cool looking centaurs
fighting amazons.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Isn't that awesome? Right?
Speaker 1 (19:28):
It's a comic book, right, It's what we're still doing today. Like,
this is a cool story and a cool idea and
cool imagery and I like looking at it.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (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. That's kind of what we've been talking about.
Is you know, mythological warrior women that we have some
archaeol logical 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
(20:09):
about the Amazons, and 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,
(20:35):
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 a Hunting's bane
because he is the bane of a guy named Hunting
who they have a life blood feud with.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
And they've had this huge.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Battle, dead Vikings everywhere, and everybody's getting their arms and
legs cut off. You know, Hunting is killed, and Hunting's
kids are killed, and Helgi is the last man standing.
He's wounded and bleeding, but he's slain all of his enemies,
and he's the last man sitting on a rock. The
crows are there, and the carrying eating greets are there,
vultures and crows and things, according to the story. As
(21:22):
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 and
armor clattering, and he thinks, oh, maybe it's another army coming.
Maybe I'm gonna have to fight them all by myself.
But then over the rise over the mountain, he can
see this host of like.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Warrior women on flying horses.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
And they fly over and they're the Valkyries. They're the
angels of death, and they're going to take him to Valhalla.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
And this is the imagery that we all love to see,
like airbrushed on the side of a band and this
is what we're going to be talking about is the Valkyries.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
They are very, very awesome.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Yes, 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 onto the field
of battle after the battle's 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
(22:33):
Odin in the afterlife. Viking after life is kind of awesome.
Viking after life is definitely like the most badass of
the mythological afterlifes.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
That I can think of.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
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 this 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 bore meat, and
(23:03):
then they train by doing battle.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Every day they go out into the field.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Outside Valhalla and outside the castle and they fight to
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
(23:27):
are kind of a central role in that because they
would take the dead from the battlefield and.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
Bring them to Valhalla for this afterlife.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
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 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
(23:57):
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
(24:19):
raids after and over the course of about three hundred years,
the Vikings they raided everywhere, including like the Middle East.
There were some vikings that attack constant to noble ones.
There were some Vikings in North Africa, they were in Spain,
they came over to the New World in Newfoundland and Canada,
and they all kind of had these beliefs in these valkyries.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (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 onto runestones. They used a
lot of what was known as kenning, 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 what
the heck they were talking about. Still, imagine a person
(25:03):
like talking in like pop culture references and like you know,
emojis and stuff like. Yeah, it 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 Stirlisson who wrote down
(25:25):
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 mists of them, you read
them all at the same time, because they were all
written at the same time. At the beginning, they are
kind of death goddesses. They are dark and scary and
(25:49):
witchy and creepy, and.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
If you see one, it's bad news. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
There's a scene where some Vikings are about to go
into battle in Ireland, and these Vikings, this guy named
Brodier 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 there they've got
this loom, and the loom is made out of like
dried intestines, and it's got fingers and skulls and blood,
(26:18):
and they're they're looming. They're like weaving fate, and they're
singing this creepy song about how like everybody's gonna die.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
You know. They say that to look at them was
to stare into a flame, and that's intense.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
It's intense. Yeah, they're intense. They say that 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 Norns 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
(26:53):
Banshees or the witches in Macbeth, dark, creepy, weird, scary, monstery,
don't want anything to do.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
With it, and also had an association with fate.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yeah, they kind of combine all of this stuff and
when we're going to go a little further along with them,
like they are tied pretty closely to Freya, who was
a Viking goddess and she's kind of a complicated character.
And I like Freya because I feel like she and
the Valkyrie is kind of represent a lot of Viking
(27:26):
women in general. Viking women had a lot more autonomy
and power than women in other places around medieval Europe.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
At this time, right, it's a time when women's rights.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Aren't like universally accepted, but they are holding council positions,
they work, which they're not allowed to do in other.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Places in Europe. At this time.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
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 are the
bridge between the Athenian women and the Amazonian women. If
we're gonna call back to that. Yeah, tons of runestones
(28:05):
across Sweden and Norway that are like testing to the
great works of women architects and writers and builders. We
have some reports of these shield maidens, these women who.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Went to war. There's a great story of a woman
named Blenda who Vikings 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.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Vikings are coming to town and they're going to raid
this poor Swedish village. So Blenda 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 have this huge party, and
then when those guys pass out drunk, the women kill
(28:47):
them with shovels. Yeah, and she's a great hero of
her people for doing this. Yes, is Viking culture.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
And Freya, the goddess that you mentioned, what's her deal?
What is she all about?
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Freya is interesting because the wife of Odin is frig
Her name is frig But there's some speculation that 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 frig Is is basically she's Viking aphrodite. She's the love, sex,
(29:26):
fertility goddess. But she's also the leader of the Valkyries.
She's also the patron goddess of like dark rituals and war.
She's like the patron goddess of like Viking witches, of
the norns of fate. So she has this kind of
There were witches that would travel around Norway. They call
themselves the Volva, and they wore blue cloaks and they
(29:48):
dressed in falcon feathers or wore cat for to like
honor Freya. Freya could turn into a falcon, and she
had a chariot that was pulled by cats, which is fun.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
I part of me wants to, you know, how do
you get the cats to coordinate enough to poe chariot whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Maybe that's what made her so bad ass is that
she she could literally heard cats.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah. Maybe she had one of those fishing pole toys
with like, oh yes, toy dangling off the end.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Anyway, 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 all Thing which was
where all the leaders of Iceland would meet and like
have this democratic vote on things.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
This guy got up and he was going to talk.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
About they wanted to This is way later, this is
way after the Viking age. We're talking like thirteen hundred
AD or whatever ce and this 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.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Ooh how does that go?
Speaker 1 (30:53):
The All 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 bitch, so he's an outlaw now,
which means, like, you have twenty four hours and then
it's legal for anybody in Iceland to kill you.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Okay, to avenge Fran's honor against you.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
You're not wrong, You're just an asshole.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
So we start with these valkyries being war goddesses, right,
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 warrior women in mythology, occasionally, like later on,
you get the Scithian guys who are like, maybe if
I sit over here, she'll talk to me. And the
(31:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
What if she was pretty? What if she talked to me?
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So you start to get some of these stories later on,
where I mean, the most famous of which is Brunhilda
from the story of The Ring, the.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Ring Wagner's cycle of operas, not The Ring j R.
Tolkien's thing.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Yeah, and not the Ring, the Japanese one with the
girl that comes through the TV and kills you. Yes,
although I want to I do want to say one
thing before we leave the realm of scary witches. 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 an evil spellcaster. They never describe
(32:48):
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 and Freya portrayed
in the more like sinister magical way, that like it
could have been a woman, a witch that created a monster.
(33:09):
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, Grendel's mom might
have been a valkyrie.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
I have to rethink Beowulf now.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, so Brunehild is the daughter of Flame. She was
a valkyrie.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
When you say flame, is that a name or is
it like just a fire? Fire? Okay, yeah, you can't
burn her.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
She's in vulnerable to fire.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
And so she went against Odin because she fell in
love with the Viking.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
Some brave warrior.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Viking won her over and she fell in love with him,
and Odin exiled her and banished her, imprisoned her in
a mountain where she would sleep until a great hero
came to rescue her. You know, we're starting to see
some Disney, some Disney connections here that didn't exist.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
With Is she surrounded by a ring of fire?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
She is surrounded by a ring of fire at the
top of a mountain. It depends on whether you're looking
at the Icelandic like the Icelandic version of the story
or the German version of the story. Is there a
little bit different, But this is the story of Sigurd
or Siegfried. Sigurd is a great warrior who had to
slay a dragon named Faffnir with a magical sword, which
he does. And as he's on his way back after
(34:13):
having like avenged his father and to slay in this dragon,
he finds this mountain and he walks through the flame
and he sees Brunehild and he falls in love with her,
and she's brought back from stasis and is going to
become his wife.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
She teaches him rooms. She's as a.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Magic like Freya is very associated with magic, and so
are the Valkyries. Freya has her own hall which is
called Cesromir, which we know nothing about other than that
she has a hall called cestrom Heir, so there'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 cestrom Heir, that freyas
a hall named sestrom Heir. It's a little smaller than Valhalla,
(34:50):
but like she takes some of the dead.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Also, that's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
That's all we know about this. And it's possible that
it's a mini Valhalla. It's possible the valkyris live there.
A lot of things are possible, a lot of things
are open to speculation anyway. With Sigurd, Sigurd gets sprun
Hill to fall in love with him, she teaches him ruins,
she teaches him 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.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
To be rich.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Dick move, Sigurd, Dick move.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Dick move. It does not work out well for him either.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Like a piece of the argo falls on Jason and
kills him, which I love. Yeah, he's sad that his
kids died, and then like a piece of his boat
falls off and squishes him, and that's how he goes.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Yeah, but Sigurd, what does she do to him?
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Oh, she lances him through the back and he died.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Okay, there you go. That seems a little more i
don't know, neater somehow than killing your own children.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, it's a little 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 sig and a valkyrie named Helgi. She's engaged to
a guy whose name is spelled hot bo d D
which I only read.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Is hot Bod hot Bod, which but she doesn't like him.
No matter how hot his bod is, she doesn't like him.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
So Cigarette is engaged to this guy hot Bod, but
she doesn't like him, and so Helgi says, oh, I'll
defend you, and he goes to war.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Helgi is is Helgi. Another valkyri or is Helgia dude.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Helgi is a dude that likes her, and he's like, well,
maybe if I kill your husband or your fiance who
you hate, you'll marry me instead, So he does.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
So she's there in the battle. She she turns into
a falcon.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
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 defeat hot Bod and then
they get married and they're happy together. But then later
on hot Bod's son comes back and kills Helgi and
Sigurine like curses him with valkyrie magic so that no
ship he rides on will ever have the wind and
(36:58):
it sails. No horse will ever carry him when he
is being chased. No shield he wields will stand up
against an enemy sword stroke, and no sword he wields
will injure anyone but himself.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
Wow. Then she banishes him to some forest and tells
him he can only carry into survive.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Okay, that's pretty pretty punishing there.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Pretty punishing.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
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
everyone 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
(37:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I think that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, in in a bleak kind of way, kind of
horrific kind of way. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, But to tie it together like I do kind
of think that there is historical evidence we have seen
for for Viking warrior women, Viking women buried with weapons
and gear and stuff, and symbols to Freya and symbols
to the Valkyries, and we do kind of see a
lot with the Amazons as well, And honestly, like if
we're talking relative location to Athens, the Vikings are also
(38:18):
warrior women from the north of Greece with the right
color hair and the right attitude. So it's just interesting
to kind of see the comparisons between the different civilizations,
and they teach us about.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
The groups of people that wrote these myths down.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
In conclusion, Galadriel can use a sort if she wants.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
You can totally use.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
That's all I got for you guys today. Thanks so
much as always for listening. We'll see on the next one.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by Me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
(39:09):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(39:29):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as. We'll
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