The Saga of Vanadís, Völva and Valkyrja

mentions could be Óðinn himself, who took her and her sisters into his service. He could
also have been her father, and he could have given them the bird forms under the tree,
instead of taking them away. This could refer to an initiation ceremony, where the
king/father gives his daughters to Óðinn or the Goddess, symbolized by the oak.
Could the king have been Sigurður, and then she would have been only 12 years
old when she made her pledge to him, or was the pledge for the young prince Agnarr,
whom she protected in the fateful battle? Is she saying that she was only 12 years old at
the time when Óðinn put her to sleep in the ring of fire? And when he took away her bird
form.
Around the world of today, girls are given in marriage at the age of 12 or 13. The
UN ambassador, Waris Dirie, in her book Desert Flower (1998), recounts when her
father planned to give her away at that age. Brynhildur may well have been 12 years old,
when she was initiated as a valkyrja, or as a woman. To be able to fully understand the
context we need to know more, and we don’t, but from this one stanza we can assume
that Brynhildur, as well as Hervör and Freyja, had her bird-cloak and that it had
significance in some kind of rites of passage.
Her name, Brynhildur, seems at first glance to be very war related. Bryn- comes
from brynja, meaning ‘armor’, and -hildur is ‘battle’, but this is an Æsir interpretation. If
we look behind that, brynja is actually derived from Old Irish bruinne, from *brusnios,
meaning ‘breast’. So brynja means ‘breast-plate’ (Ásgeir B. Magnússon, 1989) and could
originally have simply been a word for breast. The -hildur part of the name is related to
Hel, Holla and Hulda and hollow, hill and hall (see above). Here we have, once again, an
incorporation of an Old European phenomenon, the Great Goddess of death and rebirth,
173