They decide who falls and who comes to Valhalla: the valkyries are far more than the winged beauties of later images.
Their name says what they do: valkyrie (Old Norse valkyrja) means ‘chooser of the slain’. On Odin’s behalf they decide on the battlefield who falls – and who is worthy to come to Valhalla.
The valkyries escort the fallen heroes, the einherjar, into Odin’s hall and there hand them the mead. So they connect the world of battle with the world of the hall – death and honour in a single figure.
The older sources do not depict them as lovely women but as grave, sometimes terrifying powers of fate, closely related to the Norns. A darker poem, the Darraðarljóð, shows valkyries weaving the fate of a battle on a gruesome loom.
In the heroic sagas, valkyries merge with human heroines – such as Brynhild from the Sigurd saga, a valkyrie whom Odin puts to sleep behind flames as punishment. The romantic image of the winged warrior arose only later, above all in the 19th century.
Read more about Odin’s hall, to which they bring the fallen, in our post on Valhalla.