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Gold rings stack up her raised arm, and mail covers her to the throat. The spear is lifted. Her face carries no anger, because picking the dead out of a battle is the job and not a grudge.

She is working. The spear is up and the black horse has its footing on the storm. Somewhere below her men are fighting. She decides which of them will not be going home. Valkyrja is a job description. It means the one who chooses the killed. Odin's women ride over the fighting and pick the ones worth keeping out of the dying. Their names are the work: Hildr and Gunnr and Skögul, which mean Battle and War and Shaker. Some lists run to 30 names, enough for shifts. The chosen wake in Valhalla, the hall roofed with shields, and find out what they were chosen for. They were chosen for more war. Every morning the einherjar, the army of the honored dead, arm themselves and fight in the meadow. Every evening the killed stand up whole and walk back to the hall. Dinner is a boar that grows back overnight, with mead that runs from a goat on the roof. It is training, with catering. Odin is stockpiling the best dead of every generation against Ragnarök, the last battle. The faith is honest about how that ends: the gods will lose. The seeress who lays out the end of the world in the oldest poems does not soften it. A wolf swallows Odin and the sky burns. The recruiting pitch of the religion of the north was a war already lost, fought anyway, in the best company available. The poems are exact about the destination, in the way of soldiers' daydreams. Valhalla has 540 doors, and 800 warriors will come out of each one when the last morning arrives. The rafters are spear shafts and the roof is shields. And Odin does not even get first pick. The oldest verses say Freyja takes half the killed for her own hall before Odin's share is counted. Later ages found that awkward and mostly forgot it: the war god standing second in line behind a goddess. The dead who went to neither hall went down to Hel's grey country, dry and unremarkable, which was the real threat. Not fire, just irrelevance. The faith did not promise rest. It promised selection. Believing that explains a great deal about men who took open boats across winter seas. Death in bed led nowhere worth going; death with a blade in hand was a promotion. In the sagas the valkyries sometimes come very close to the ground. Before the battle of Clontarf in 1014, an Icelandic saga has 12 of them at a loom, weaving the coming slaughter. The loom is weighted with men's heads and strung with their guts, and the women sing while they work. The poem does not present this as a nightmare. It presents it as production. Peter Nicolai Arbo painted Valkyrien in 1869, in a Norway busy rediscovering itself as the heir of all this. He got the belief into the picture: gold rings, mail, and a face with no cruelty and no pity in it. This was his second run at the subject. An earlier Valkyrie of 1864 hangs in Stockholm, and this one hangs in the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo. Munich heard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries the year after Arbo finished it. The decade was crowded with these women, and Arbo's does not sing. A second rider fades into the cloud behind her. They seldom rode alone. Below the horse's hooves, a river catches the last light of an ordinary human evening. The ravens hold formation around her, the way gulls follow a fishing boat, and for the same reason.