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Updated: May 3, 2025
To choose the heroes, and to give victory to those whom he willed to have victory, Odin had battle-maidens that went to the fields of war. Beautiful were those battle-maidens and fearless; wise were they also, for to them Odin showed the Runes of Wisdom. Valkyries, Choosers of the Slain, they were named. Those who were chosen on the fields of the slain were called in Asgard the Einherjar.
He appears, indignant at Brünnhilde's disobedience, dismisses the other Valkyries, and tells Brünnhilde what her punishment is to be. She is to be banished from the sisterhood of Valkyries, and Valhalla is to know her no more. Thrown into a deep sleep, she shall lie upon the mountain-top, to be the bride of the first man who finds and wakens her.
It was he who had struggled with her, taking the ring off her hand and claiming her for a bride, not for himself but for another, and out of disdain. Falsely had she been won. And she, one of Odin's Valkyries, had been wed to one who was not the bravest hero in the world, and she to whom untruth might not come had been deceived.
In Wagner's operas there is plenty of descriptive or pictorial music, but no program music, properly speaking; for even in such things as the Ride of the Valkyries, or the Magic Fire Scene, the music does not depend on a programme, but is explained by the scenery.
I am afraid I was a little flat myself during the "Valkyries' Ride." My steak was rather underdone, and I could not work it quickly enough. After getting outside hard beefsteak to Wagner, putting away potato salad to the garden music out of Faust was comparatively simple.
It is largely made up of what in the guide-books used to be called the "Flight motive" as though a serious composer would or could invent a motive of Running away! and as the opening bar may be taken as a variation of the Sword theme, and the thing ends with what we learn to be a tune associated with the Valkyries, a really fertile and picturesque mind may see in it a musical account of Siegmund flying with the Sword and pursued, for good or evil, by the Valkyrie.
Hardly had he done this deed of blood when a dense black cloud arose and a violent hail-storm broke over the ships, the hail-stones weighing each two ounces and beating so fiercely in the faces of the Jomsvikings as nearly to blind them. Some say that the Valkyries, the daughters of Odin, were seen in the prow of the earl's ship, filling the air with their death-dealing arrows.
The funeral pyre of Baldr is described by Ulf Uggason: he is burnt on his ship, which is launched by a giantess, in the presence of Frey, Heimdal, Odin and the Valkyries. Though heathen writers outside of Scandinavia are lacking, references to Germanic heathendom fortunately survive in several Continental Christian historians of earlier date than any of our Scandinavian sources.
Here and there a few shrubs grew, in place of the flourishing firs of the Norwegian mountains, and the surface of a spongy soil which sinks and rises under the foot is carpeted with mosses, fungi, and lichens. No! this was not the enticing country where the echoes of the sagas resound, this was not the poetic realm of Wodin and the Valkyries.
The clear, pure style of Gluck and Mozart which, like that of Goethe, seems to be bathed in the light of Italy the style which begins to change and to become vibrant and dazzling with Weber the style ridiculed by the ponderous caricatures of the author of Crociato had been killed by the triumph of Wagner. The wild flight of the Valkyries with their strident cries had passed over the Grecian sky.
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