The Weaver and the Witch Queen

by Genevieve Gornichec

I wonder what it’s like, Gunnhild thought, not to have a mother or a husband telling you what to do all the time. I wonder what it’s like to be a woman respected on her own, for her own skills, and not who she’s related to.

There’s nothing that will cause you greater grief than trying to fulfill or avoid a prophecy.”

“People say things they don’t mean when they’re hurt and wish to make others hurt with them,” her mother had said once when Oddny was younger and had come crying to her after an argument with Signy. “You’re sisters. When two people know each other as well as you girls do, you know the exact things to say that will cause each other the most pain.”

“You’ll get used to being afraid. If you don’t feel fear, why would you need to be brave?”

When your patron calls you, they’ll judge your strengths and weaknesses against yourself, not against others.”

It was clear to Gunnhild now that no good would come of this conversation; it was time to end it before she lost her composure. She could relay each memory to her mother one by one in extensive detail, and the woman would tell her she was wrong—that she was only a child; she was misremembering.

But to me, you’ve been someone all along. You never had anything to prove.

And he said, “When I was born, my father gave me a daughter’s name. And when he died, I took my own.”

“How will you ever master your fear if you won’t admit to feeling it in the first place? Embrace it. Wield it. Things are only going to get more difficult from here. But in the end, it shall be worth it.”

There’s more to being a man than doing the things men are supposed to do. I think that’s what Gudrod was trying to tell me. I was his brother because I said I was, and that was enough for him. And I think our father would’ve felt the same way.”

I don’t think the dead want us to die for them. I think a better way to honor them is to live.”

“That a woman need not be defined by her men. That she can stand for herself and make her own way.”

Finally, although separate gender roles are likely to have existed in the Viking Age, this isn’t to say that people never crossed or blurred the boundaries between these spheres. Queerness is not a new phenomenon, and Halldor’s experience as depicted in this novel is just one way that someone we would interpret as transgender could have lived. We’ll never know how many people we’d recognize today as LGBTQIA+ have been omitted from history, but we have always been here, and we always will be.