Loving the article! Thank you! Have you read the story of Adela in Codex Oera Linda? Here is an excerpt of the story of this seven foot tall Frisian woman:
> The gang would quickly have taken them, but Adela came.
> At the burg, she had learned to handle all weapons. Seven feet tall she was, and her staff was equally long.
> Three times she swung it over her head and, each time it came down, another attacker bit into the grass.
> Helpers came rounding the corner of the lane, and the raiders were slain or captured.
> But too late. An arrow had hit her in the chest.
> Treacherous magus! It’s head had been dipped in poison, and this is what killed her.
> 13d. Ode to Adela
> Ode to the burgmaid
> Yes, comrade from afar. Thousands have come and yet more are on their way. Why? They come to honor Adela’s wisdom.
> Assuredly, she is the chief among us, for she was always foremost. O wall — what could they
contribute?
> Her shirt is of linen, her tunic of wool, which she spun and wove herself.
> What could they add [096] to highten her beauty? Not pearls, for her teeth were whiter. Not gold, for her hair shone brighter.
> Not jewels, for though her eyes were soft as a lamb’s, they were so brilliant that one scarcely dared hold their gaze.
> But what do I prattle about beauty? Frya herself could not have been more lovely.
> Yes, comrade. Frya, who had seven gifts of beauty, of which her daughters received but one each, or at most three. But, even were she hideous, Adela would have been dear to us all the same
> Was she heroic? Hark, comrade. Adela was our reeve’s only child, seven feet tall she was.
> Even greater than her stature was her wisdom, and her courage was like both combined.
> See! There once was a peat fire, and three children had climbed onto a gravestone to escape it. A fell wind blew. They screamed and their mothers were desperate.
> Then came Adela, calling out: “Why do you stand and wince? Try to help them and Wralda shall give you strength!”
> She hurried to the thicket, grabbed some alder trunks [097] to build a bridge. Then the others came to help and the children were saved.
> The children return here every year with flowers.
> Once, three Phoenician sailors were about and tried to harass them. But Adela heard their crying
and came.
> She knocked the molesters unconscious and, to force them to admit how unworthy they were, she
tied them to a distaff.
> Their foreign masters came to look for them and became furious when they saw how they had been humiliated.
> But we told them what had happened. And what did they do then? They bowed before Adela and
kissed the fringe of her tunic.
> But come, distant comrade! The forest birds flee from the many visitors. Come so you may learn of
her wisdom!
> Nearby the gravestone mentioned in the ode, my mother’s remains were buried. And on her
Remember boys next time you are dying on the battlefield make sure your dead enemies are stacked before and you still grasp your spear and shield and that tall hot blond of your dreams might come along, nurse you back to health and bare you a host of mighty sons. Woe to you hath you cast down your spear!
Fascinating post! I've come across the speculation that Valkyries were not only a mythological/spiritual being, but also a role held by flesh-and-blood human women before, I think first in *Gods and Worshippers: In the Viking and Germanic World* by Thor Ewing (that book makes comparisons to one well-known group of male devotees of Odin, the berserks). Another book that seems adjacent that you might find interesting if you haven't read it is *Lady with a Mead Cup* by Michael Enright. While not speaking of "valkyries" per se, Enright traces the role of the seeress/priestess attached to Celtic and Germanic warbands through to her becoming usually the consort of the warband leader, and later her jobs becoming part of the duties of a lord's wife, seen as late as Wealtheow in *Beowulf,* where Hrothgar's queen establishes the honor given to guests by the order in which she serves them mead.
Anyhow, thought-provoking stuff, thanks for posting!
I immediately thought of the correlation with modern day cheerleaders performing ritual chants on the sidelines of football games, trying to demoralize the enemy team, exhorting their team to win and shaming them for losing. Very Indo-European. Nothing new under the Sun.
I enjoyed that immensely, particularly the meanderings. But, my favorite is the way you capture the sexual frisson and existential needs of those,until this article, mysterious strong women. Your matter of fact, of-course-this-is-how-the-world-worked(s) is so refreshing.
Universal tales you tell. Thank you for doing the work.
The Spartans, uniquely among the classical Greeks, did not just encourage their maidens to exercise but required it. Because warriors come from the loins of strong women. I also remember reading of a Scythian tribe that required its young men to kill or capture a man of an enemy tribe before they could marry, but also required their young women to kill or capture a woman of an enemy tribe before they could marry.
Okinawa during WWII is another vivid example of women killing their children and themselves when they hurled themselves over a cliff to avoid shameful captivity, which they were convinced awaited them from the approaching Americans.
As for Napolean's retreat from the 1812 Moscow campaign, "Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier", written by a German conscript pressed into the Grand Armee, is a grim classic and still in print.
This reads like an overcomplication of something simple, which is disappointing; I would quite like to be a bioweapon. It would even have explanatory power; it would explain why I get stopped and interrogated at borders and security checkpoints more than most people, due to being a violation of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, there's a lot here I respectfully think is inaccurate.
Large, centralised states with monopolies on violence select against aggressiveness and violence in both men and women, since at least the Roman Empire where the latronum were outlawed and populations pacified. That the Roman Empire didn't conquer everywhere doesn't change much, since gene-culture co-evolution occurs rapidly and the selection has been against these traits for centuries in most places and certainly in urban areas, where it has been for a long time.
Contrarily in less urban, barbarous societies with weak and decentralised states, it's important to be able to use violence effectively. This is simple and obvious. Anything about women being weaker ignores the reality that rule of law represents small blips of time in history and it doesn't matter if you are weaker than a man if you might be the only one able at times to defend yourself, or your children or property. People mythologise what they don't understand, and invent fictions that suit a desirable narrative based on small pieces of evidence.
Much of it seems to be fetishistic of violence to me, and based on glorification of it from people who don't understand it as a tool and have been exposed to too much 20th and 21st century fiction, like Hollywood movies. Further, like most historical myths—be it either of generally fictional castes of warrior-women, or the equally ridiculous recoiling and denial of female warriors altogether—most belief originates in second hand and more distant sources, hearsay, and speculation, rather than what we know for sure. Few people read first hand sources. E.g., Eiríks saga rauð has a female warrior, because she has to defend herself from skrælingarnir.
Further, prosperity and lack of stress intensifies the selection against violence; even state violence such as the death penalty. Some of the statements in this article are also contradicted by the reality that sexual selection in Eurasia west of the Hajnal line including northern Europe was controlled by women and not men. Anthropologist Peter Frost and historian Jim Penman are a couple sources I can recommend that have written extensively on matters such as these, i.e on sexual selection and its effects through time on behaviour and personality, if one is interested in further reading in pursuit of the truth – something difficult when it comes to matters where fact and evidence is more commonly than not interpreted in a way that best suits ideology.
Something you miss in trying to understand female masochism and sexual submission is that the extremity of this is recent, and therefore phenotype, not genotype. You completely miss that much of this is actually driven by the influence over several decades of porn, since corporations now have more influence over people's children than do their parents, and shape men's sexualities before they are even old enough to understand what is happening. Women are also affected this way now that a majority of young women watch porn too. People are exposed to extreme, sadomasochistic, formerly deviant sexuality often before they even hit puberty, at least if they have Internet connections. Women, regardless of our own preferences, are also expected to adapt if we want sexual attention and not to be seen as boring by men. All this is artificial and recent, driven by porn.
I don't think you understand female sexuality very well, in general, as e.g in your interpretation of orgasm in rape you miss that female arousal isn't the same as men's to begin with and physical responses don't necessarily represent mental ones. What rape actually had an impact on behaviour and genetics occurred far earlier, by the way, far before your timeline, with the hybridisation of Neanderthal (https://www.nature.com/articles/453562a).
I find it sad you exaggerate Roman and Celtic victories and martial prowess against Romans when most were not as lucky as at Teutoberg, and you ignore that Romans were well known to exaggerate the strength of their enemies to bring more glory to themselves as victors, as Tacitus pretty much admits to doing himself and being the common practice of the time. Germanic and Celtic histories are histories of defeat and loss, and the culture can never recover or move forward without understanding where it's come from. Most battles were lost.
The Romans had no honour and would use the customs of e.g Gauls against them, such as when challenged by duel of commanders to avoid battle, they would honour it only when victorious, but not when they lost. They slaughtered and enslaved entire populations. Even subjugated populations like Gallia Togata were slaves like most Romans themselves, confusing luxury and vice for "civilisation" when it was, like Tacitus wrote, part of their slavery. Julius genocided Gaul for gold simply because he was in debt, mainly to Crassus. He would tail Gallic armies going out of his way to kill women, the elderly, and the weak at the rear march of the tribe, and lay sieges reducing the population to cannibalism until they surrendered, then killing everyone who wouldn't have value as a slave. If gold was the motivator for Gaul, for Germania it was lumber; Romans devastated their own lands and needed it for their underground fireplaces the slaves tended for "central heating" and the baths.
Teutoberg itself was a Pyrrhic victory for northern European culture anyway, so why exaggerate the victories? Centuries later, Karl the Slaughterer [Charles "le Magne"] would cut down the Irminsul and, having destroyed the sacred grove symbolic of the world tree, end decades of Saxon rebellion he had failed to put down by breaking the strong kinship ties they had all shared. Saxons were forcibly separated from their own families and each other, placed in different distant places where they'd never see kin or kith again, like what would once be better known for having been done to Native Americans, many of whom were very similar to pagan Europeans (in fact, their belief systems even have distant ancestry to European religions through the common origin in the Neanderthal religion).
Widukind went to Denmark to warn his brother-in-law the Konungr Sigfred of what happened. Then after his son would go on to build the Danevirke, and the Viking Age would begin in holy war; regardless, Europe would all come to be under the submission of a foreign religion with much of the culture being destroyed. If this had not happened, we would not have such misunderstanding and conjecture around valkyrjurnar today, and no one would think I am a bioweapon.
There is more I could respond to, but I'm not sure anyone reads long comments like this anyway, and it's already long; just saw this as trending under Explore and felt strongly enough on some of this to want to give input, maybe someone will appreciate it or maybe not.
Massively brilliant article. A whole lot of stuff I did not know. I read parts of it out loud to my roommate who is by the way, A Boudica fan. Basically digesting the info at the moment. I found you on Freecanada and I'll give you a follow.
Really interesting, throughout history, individuals, populations, and "types" jockeying for presumed advantage. Girard's fingerprint once again.
And the not-conscious-enough successor religions splitting off from instinct, yet only driving it to the pre-conscious underground abattoir. I/we, who would never dig this out, say Thank you. Wow. At least we can start facing these things.
Loving the article! Thank you! Have you read the story of Adela in Codex Oera Linda? Here is an excerpt of the story of this seven foot tall Frisian woman:
> The gang would quickly have taken them, but Adela came.
> At the burg, she had learned to handle all weapons. Seven feet tall she was, and her staff was equally long.
> Three times she swung it over her head and, each time it came down, another attacker bit into the grass.
> Helpers came rounding the corner of the lane, and the raiders were slain or captured.
> But too late. An arrow had hit her in the chest.
> Treacherous magus! It’s head had been dipped in poison, and this is what killed her.
> 13d. Ode to Adela
> Ode to the burgmaid
> Yes, comrade from afar. Thousands have come and yet more are on their way. Why? They come to honor Adela’s wisdom.
> Assuredly, she is the chief among us, for she was always foremost. O wall — what could they
contribute?
> Her shirt is of linen, her tunic of wool, which she spun and wove herself.
> What could they add [096] to highten her beauty? Not pearls, for her teeth were whiter. Not gold, for her hair shone brighter.
> Not jewels, for though her eyes were soft as a lamb’s, they were so brilliant that one scarcely dared hold their gaze.
> But what do I prattle about beauty? Frya herself could not have been more lovely.
> Yes, comrade. Frya, who had seven gifts of beauty, of which her daughters received but one each, or at most three. But, even were she hideous, Adela would have been dear to us all the same
> Was she heroic? Hark, comrade. Adela was our reeve’s only child, seven feet tall she was.
> Even greater than her stature was her wisdom, and her courage was like both combined.
> See! There once was a peat fire, and three children had climbed onto a gravestone to escape it. A fell wind blew. They screamed and their mothers were desperate.
> Then came Adela, calling out: “Why do you stand and wince? Try to help them and Wralda shall give you strength!”
> She hurried to the thicket, grabbed some alder trunks [097] to build a bridge. Then the others came to help and the children were saved.
> The children return here every year with flowers.
> Once, three Phoenician sailors were about and tried to harass them. But Adela heard their crying
and came.
> She knocked the molesters unconscious and, to force them to admit how unworthy they were, she
tied them to a distaff.
> Their foreign masters came to look for them and became furious when they saw how they had been humiliated.
> But we told them what had happened. And what did they do then? They bowed before Adela and
kissed the fringe of her tunic.
> But come, distant comrade! The forest birds flee from the many visitors. Come so you may learn of
her wisdom!
> Nearby the gravestone mentioned in the ode, my mother’s remains were buried. And on her
gravestone, these words were written:
> “Pass by not too hastily, for here lies Adela.”
Remember boys next time you are dying on the battlefield make sure your dead enemies are stacked before and you still grasp your spear and shield and that tall hot blond of your dreams might come along, nurse you back to health and bare you a host of mighty sons. Woe to you hath you cast down your spear!
Fascinating post! I've come across the speculation that Valkyries were not only a mythological/spiritual being, but also a role held by flesh-and-blood human women before, I think first in *Gods and Worshippers: In the Viking and Germanic World* by Thor Ewing (that book makes comparisons to one well-known group of male devotees of Odin, the berserks). Another book that seems adjacent that you might find interesting if you haven't read it is *Lady with a Mead Cup* by Michael Enright. While not speaking of "valkyries" per se, Enright traces the role of the seeress/priestess attached to Celtic and Germanic warbands through to her becoming usually the consort of the warband leader, and later her jobs becoming part of the duties of a lord's wife, seen as late as Wealtheow in *Beowulf,* where Hrothgar's queen establishes the honor given to guests by the order in which she serves them mead.
Anyhow, thought-provoking stuff, thanks for posting!
I immediately thought of the correlation with modern day cheerleaders performing ritual chants on the sidelines of football games, trying to demoralize the enemy team, exhorting their team to win and shaming them for losing. Very Indo-European. Nothing new under the Sun.
I enjoyed that immensely, particularly the meanderings. But, my favorite is the way you capture the sexual frisson and existential needs of those,until this article, mysterious strong women. Your matter of fact, of-course-this-is-how-the-world-worked(s) is so refreshing.
Universal tales you tell. Thank you for doing the work.
"Denmark plans to conscript women for military service for first time
Prime minister says government wants ‘full equality between sexes’ as it plans to call up 5,000 conscripts a year from 2026"
14 Mar 2024
The Spartans, uniquely among the classical Greeks, did not just encourage their maidens to exercise but required it. Because warriors come from the loins of strong women. I also remember reading of a Scythian tribe that required its young men to kill or capture a man of an enemy tribe before they could marry, but also required their young women to kill or capture a woman of an enemy tribe before they could marry.
Okinawa during WWII is another vivid example of women killing their children and themselves when they hurled themselves over a cliff to avoid shameful captivity, which they were convinced awaited them from the approaching Americans.
As for Napolean's retreat from the 1812 Moscow campaign, "Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier", written by a German conscript pressed into the Grand Armee, is a grim classic and still in print.
Nice work.
This reads like an overcomplication of something simple, which is disappointing; I would quite like to be a bioweapon. It would even have explanatory power; it would explain why I get stopped and interrogated at borders and security checkpoints more than most people, due to being a violation of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, there's a lot here I respectfully think is inaccurate.
Large, centralised states with monopolies on violence select against aggressiveness and violence in both men and women, since at least the Roman Empire where the latronum were outlawed and populations pacified. That the Roman Empire didn't conquer everywhere doesn't change much, since gene-culture co-evolution occurs rapidly and the selection has been against these traits for centuries in most places and certainly in urban areas, where it has been for a long time.
Contrarily in less urban, barbarous societies with weak and decentralised states, it's important to be able to use violence effectively. This is simple and obvious. Anything about women being weaker ignores the reality that rule of law represents small blips of time in history and it doesn't matter if you are weaker than a man if you might be the only one able at times to defend yourself, or your children or property. People mythologise what they don't understand, and invent fictions that suit a desirable narrative based on small pieces of evidence.
Much of it seems to be fetishistic of violence to me, and based on glorification of it from people who don't understand it as a tool and have been exposed to too much 20th and 21st century fiction, like Hollywood movies. Further, like most historical myths—be it either of generally fictional castes of warrior-women, or the equally ridiculous recoiling and denial of female warriors altogether—most belief originates in second hand and more distant sources, hearsay, and speculation, rather than what we know for sure. Few people read first hand sources. E.g., Eiríks saga rauð has a female warrior, because she has to defend herself from skrælingarnir.
Further, prosperity and lack of stress intensifies the selection against violence; even state violence such as the death penalty. Some of the statements in this article are also contradicted by the reality that sexual selection in Eurasia west of the Hajnal line including northern Europe was controlled by women and not men. Anthropologist Peter Frost and historian Jim Penman are a couple sources I can recommend that have written extensively on matters such as these, i.e on sexual selection and its effects through time on behaviour and personality, if one is interested in further reading in pursuit of the truth – something difficult when it comes to matters where fact and evidence is more commonly than not interpreted in a way that best suits ideology.
Something you miss in trying to understand female masochism and sexual submission is that the extremity of this is recent, and therefore phenotype, not genotype. You completely miss that much of this is actually driven by the influence over several decades of porn, since corporations now have more influence over people's children than do their parents, and shape men's sexualities before they are even old enough to understand what is happening. Women are also affected this way now that a majority of young women watch porn too. People are exposed to extreme, sadomasochistic, formerly deviant sexuality often before they even hit puberty, at least if they have Internet connections. Women, regardless of our own preferences, are also expected to adapt if we want sexual attention and not to be seen as boring by men. All this is artificial and recent, driven by porn.
I don't think you understand female sexuality very well, in general, as e.g in your interpretation of orgasm in rape you miss that female arousal isn't the same as men's to begin with and physical responses don't necessarily represent mental ones. What rape actually had an impact on behaviour and genetics occurred far earlier, by the way, far before your timeline, with the hybridisation of Neanderthal (https://www.nature.com/articles/453562a).
I find it sad you exaggerate Roman and Celtic victories and martial prowess against Romans when most were not as lucky as at Teutoberg, and you ignore that Romans were well known to exaggerate the strength of their enemies to bring more glory to themselves as victors, as Tacitus pretty much admits to doing himself and being the common practice of the time. Germanic and Celtic histories are histories of defeat and loss, and the culture can never recover or move forward without understanding where it's come from. Most battles were lost.
The Romans had no honour and would use the customs of e.g Gauls against them, such as when challenged by duel of commanders to avoid battle, they would honour it only when victorious, but not when they lost. They slaughtered and enslaved entire populations. Even subjugated populations like Gallia Togata were slaves like most Romans themselves, confusing luxury and vice for "civilisation" when it was, like Tacitus wrote, part of their slavery. Julius genocided Gaul for gold simply because he was in debt, mainly to Crassus. He would tail Gallic armies going out of his way to kill women, the elderly, and the weak at the rear march of the tribe, and lay sieges reducing the population to cannibalism until they surrendered, then killing everyone who wouldn't have value as a slave. If gold was the motivator for Gaul, for Germania it was lumber; Romans devastated their own lands and needed it for their underground fireplaces the slaves tended for "central heating" and the baths.
Teutoberg itself was a Pyrrhic victory for northern European culture anyway, so why exaggerate the victories? Centuries later, Karl the Slaughterer [Charles "le Magne"] would cut down the Irminsul and, having destroyed the sacred grove symbolic of the world tree, end decades of Saxon rebellion he had failed to put down by breaking the strong kinship ties they had all shared. Saxons were forcibly separated from their own families and each other, placed in different distant places where they'd never see kin or kith again, like what would once be better known for having been done to Native Americans, many of whom were very similar to pagan Europeans (in fact, their belief systems even have distant ancestry to European religions through the common origin in the Neanderthal religion).
Widukind went to Denmark to warn his brother-in-law the Konungr Sigfred of what happened. Then after his son would go on to build the Danevirke, and the Viking Age would begin in holy war; regardless, Europe would all come to be under the submission of a foreign religion with much of the culture being destroyed. If this had not happened, we would not have such misunderstanding and conjecture around valkyrjurnar today, and no one would think I am a bioweapon.
There is more I could respond to, but I'm not sure anyone reads long comments like this anyway, and it's already long; just saw this as trending under Explore and felt strongly enough on some of this to want to give input, maybe someone will appreciate it or maybe not.
Massively brilliant article. A whole lot of stuff I did not know. I read parts of it out loud to my roommate who is by the way, A Boudica fan. Basically digesting the info at the moment. I found you on Freecanada and I'll give you a follow.
Really interesting, throughout history, individuals, populations, and "types" jockeying for presumed advantage. Girard's fingerprint once again.
And the not-conscious-enough successor religions splitting off from instinct, yet only driving it to the pre-conscious underground abattoir. I/we, who would never dig this out, say Thank you. Wow. At least we can start facing these things.
Embrace the shit tests, lads!
Fascinating article. Thanks!
Great essay. You might find this interesting https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/02/joan-of-arc-gender-theorist
If Aryan blonds are Valkyrie, what are red heads? Red heads are Valkyrie amped up to 10!
Probably your best article yet. This one is going in the archives!