The Saga of Vanadís, Völva and Valkyrja

Bird Goddess
Symbols are a means of conveying ideas, which are inexpressible in any other form.
Dorothy Cameron, 1981, p. 9
A living symbol from my diary – a memory from a not so distant winter 109
The ravens have settled on the rocks in my backyard. Sometimes there are just the two,
who seem to have made themselves at home there, sometimes a flock of 13, when I have just fed
them with the leftovers from my kitchen. Their huge beautiful shining black bodies make perfect
contrast with the white snowy earth. They fly and dance and converse and inspire me in my
writing, as I sit in my office facing east and the rock.
Yesterday they seemed excited about something, their dancing was a staccato movement
and as their number increased on and around the rock their attention was all elsewhere. Suddenly
they all took flight. I walked into the kitchen, and looking out the window, there to the north I saw
the sky filled with ravens, all the ravens of the area it seemed. Amongst the black flock there was
an even bigger more powerful bird, a silvery gyrfalcon.
A falcon does not visit this town every day. This was one of the moments when thinking
makes way for experience, intuition, a noetic feeling that has nothing to do with ideas, nothing
with belief, all with experiencing and remembering.
I saw her, I saw the Goddess, Freyja and her companions, the valkyrjur. Had I never
heard of Freyja’s falcon cloak and the raven shape of the valkyrjur, I know that the experience
would have been there, although different. The linking of knowledge, of names, the linking of
myth with experience is important, it gives form and more importantly it gives connection to the
experience of others in other times and places. It makes me realize that this is something my
ancestors have felt before me, something which people all over the world experience in similar
ways.
In Jungian terms the birds would have been coined as symbols, probably
122