Valkyries
Norse female warriors who rode above the battlefield, choosing who would die and who would survive. The Valkyries transported the honored dead to Valhalla — the Hall of the Slain — in Asgard. They are choosers of the fallen, aerial escorts between the living world and the next.
The Valkyrie is one of aviation’s most persistent iconographic presences: she appears on WWI nose art, German military insignia, the covers of pulp aviation magazines. Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” became the defining sound of aerial military power, most famously appropriated in Apocalypse Now’s helicopter attack sequence — the myth and the machine fused explicitly.
Aeromythic Role
The Valkyrie occupies a specific slot in the aeromythic taxonomy: she is a Watcher who is also an Ascender — not ascending for herself but escorting others upward. She holds the vertical axis of the battlefield, moving between the earthly plane and the divine one, making the final determination of who gets to rise.