The Women on the Picture Stones

Archaeology supplies images this tradition never captioned. Gotland picture stones from the eighth century onward show a rider met by a standing woman holding out a drinking horn, and small silver and bronze figures of armed or horn-bearing women have been found across the Norse world, including one from Harby in Denmark in 2012 carrying a sword and shield. Museums label them valkyries. The stones and the figures carry no names and no text, so the label is a modern reading of an image — a plausible reading rather than a demonstrated one, and worth knowing as a reading.