Valkyrie and knotted into a ponytail, sometimes bearing drinking horns, have been discovered throughout Scandinavia. These figures are commonly considered to represent valkyries or dísir. According to Mindy MacLeod and Bernard Mees, the amulets appear in Viking Age graves, and were presumably placed there because "they were thought to have protective powers". The Tjängvide image stone from the Baltic island of Gotland, Sweden features a rider on an eight-legged horse, which may be Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir, being greeted by a female, which may be a valkyrie at Valhalla. The 11th century runestone U 1163 features a carving of a female
Divine twins Divine twins The divine twins are a mytheme of Proto-Indo-European religion. The Yoruba orishas Ibeji, the Maya Hero Twins, and the Haitian vodoun Marassa Jumeaux are similar examples outside the Indo-European realm. O'Brien (1982) reconstructs a horse goddess with twin offspring, pointing to Gaulish Epona, Irish Macha (the twins reflected in Macha's pair, Liath Macha and Dub Sainglend), Welsh Rhiannon, and Eddaic Freyja in the tale of the construction of the walls of Asgard, seeing a vestige of the birth of hippomorphic twins in Loki in the form of a mare (in place of Freyja) giving birth to eight-legged Sleipnir.