Ride of the Valkyries

The funeral service for Sheri, my son-in-law's mother, is today. We will gather to thank our Lord for her life and to bid her farewell, as we commit her soul into the hands of our loving Lord. We rejoice that she and we will meet again on the Last Day when our Lord will raise up our bodies and grant us the gift of life in a renewed universe.

Not everyone in every place has such faith. As I wrote the third novel, having to do with the Nazis' belief that it was their destiny to restore the worship of the ancient Nordic gods, I had to do some research to discover how the Norsemen would say farewell to their departed warriors. I already knew the basics, because I've seen some movies of Vikings, like Kirk Douglas way back in 1958 in The Vikings. So I knew that they had some kind of ceremony about burning their dead warriors on a funeral pyre or, in the case of chieftains, putting them on their flaming ship and sending them out into the ocean heading into the west.

My problem was that my dead Nazi was in Minnesota, a long way from the ocean or even from Lake Superior. So I couldn't send him out on his ship. He didn't even have a ship. So I had to imagine a great funeral pyre and the ceremony that went with it.

Then there was this thing about the Valkyries. No, I'm not talking about the 2008 Tom Cruise movie. I'm speaking about those mythical creatures that came to carry the soul of the departed Viking to Valhalla where he would join his drinking buddies in glorious and eternal bliss in the great hall. How would one portray that belief?

Answer: Richard Wagner to the rescue. Hitler was a great Wagner fan and Wagner has a great opera by that title, the second of the four that comprise the Ring of the Nibelung. It is the source of the famous piece that opens the third act, the Ride of the Valkyries.

So I had the pieces I needed. Simply add Silver Shirt paramilitary soldiers marching and a strangely garbed Wiccan Priestess to the spectacle and you have a Viking funeral fit for any Nazi. Of course, you'll have to wait for the publication of the novel to read what happened. And you may have to wait a bit longer for the movie!