Badass Of The Week - Hervor

"My your ribs writhe with worms, may your barrow be an anthill where you rot, unless you speak with me, sons of Arngrim, all girt with battle-gear, keen blades at your sides and bright spears stained with blood.  Death has made you cowards, but I have kin-right here. I come for the sword made by Dvalin. Why should dead hands hold the blade?"

Hervor was a powerful, fearless Viking warrior woman who didn't take crap from anyone – living or dead – avenged her father's death with a magical sword, led Norse raiding parties in the pillage and plunder of unsuspecting civilizations, and proved to everyone under her command that she had bigger, brassier balls than any other Viking warrior in Norway.

Hervor's father was a great Viking warrior, and her mother's father was a head-splitting insane-o-bot berserker, so she didn't really have a chance to become anything other than a completely over-the-top assbeater.  She was born not long after her father was gloriously slain in a Valhalla-approved bloody mess, dying with another warrior's sword lodged in his abdomen.  Everyone who knew Hervor's dad knew that the guy was kind of a bloodthirsty murder-machine, so when the young girl was born her frightened neighbors all suggested that the best course of action might well have been to just take the baby out into the woods and leave it to be eaten by wild dogs.  This didn't happen, and Hervor grew up pretty much exactly the way everyone was worried she might.  She was tall, strong, and tough as hell, with reddish-gold hair and a sword arm that wouldn't quit.  At a time when other girls in her village were learning how to knit and weave and paint pots and do other boring nonsense, Hervor was practicing horsemanship, archery, and swordfighting, routinely beating the neighbor boys into crumpled heaps or sending them running home to their mommies with black eyes and broken bones.

Hervor decided she didn't really want to settle down and be a bored housewife when she was obviously so adept at rendering grown-ass men unconscious with a few well-placed sword blows to the throat, so she decided to forgo the homemaker profession for a while and become a badass shieldmaiden instead.  Now, I talk about the shieldmaidens briefly in my book (insert imperceptibly-subtle-yet-shameless self-promotion here), but the short version is that they were hardcore warrior-women who strapped on the chainmail, grabbed a spear, and spent the warm summer months sailing around on Drakkar longships getting their rape, plunder, and pillage on...
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