Shield-maiden and female fantasy as well as emblematic of the danger of abandoning gender roles. Brynhildr of the "Vǫlsunga saga", along with her rival in love, Guðrún Gjúkadóttir, provides an example of how a shield-maiden compares to more conventional aristocratic womanhood in the sagas. Brynhildr is chiefly concerned with honor, much like a male warrior. When she ends up married to Gudrun's brother Gunnarr instead of Sigurðr, the man she intended to marry, Brynhildr speaks a verse comparing the courage of the two men: Brynhildr is married to Gunnarr and not Sigurðr because of deceit and trickery, including a potion of
Norse mythology of euhemerization, a process in which deities and supernatural beings are presented as having been either actual, magic-wielding human beings who have been deified in time or beings demonized by way of Christian mythology. Texts such as "Heimskringla", composed in the 13th century by Snorri and "Gesta Danorum", composed in Latin by Saxo Grammaticus in Denmark in the 12th century, are the results of heavy amounts of euhemerization. Numerous further texts, such as the sagas, provide further information. The saga corpus consists of thousands of tales recorded in Old Norse ranging from Icelandic family histories (Sagas of Icelanders) to Migration