Odin's Household and the Norse Afterlife of Warriors

The valkyries only make full sense placed within the wider Norse afterlife scheme they serve: Old Norse cosmology offered several possible destinations for the dead, not one universal afterlife, and Valhalla, reserved specifically for a portion of warriors who died gloriously in battle, sat alongside Freyja's hall Folkvangr, which by Snorri's account received the other half of such warriors, and the more general realm of Hel, which received most people who died of illness or age rather than in combat. The valkyries' selecting function therefore is not a judgment of moral worth in the way a Christian or Egyptian afterlife weighs a soul, but a battlefield sorting mechanism feeding directly into Odin's ongoing military preparation for Ragnarok, reflecting how thoroughly Norse religious imagination treated the afterlife of the elite warrior class as continuous with, rather than separate from, life's central preoccupation with combat and reputation.

Rudolf Simek's dictionary of Northern mythology notes that valkyrie iconography, armed women on horseback bearing cups or drinking horns, appears on Viking Age picture stones and jewellery well before the Eddic poems were written down, indicating the belief was current in actual Viking Age visual culture rather than a purely literary later invention.