What is a Valkyrie? Bay Area WNBA team’s new name sparks Google search spike

Where does the new name of Bay Area's WNBA expansion franchise come from?

When the Bay Area’s new WNBA team revealed its name, logo and black and purple color scheme on Tuesday morning, more than a few people had one question:

What is a Valkyrie?

The San Francisco team, which will start play in 2025, dipped into Norse mythology to pick a name that had the search frequency for the word jump by 100% on Google’s search engine shortly after the announcement.

The angelic figures who guide slain heroes to the afterlife in Valhalla – paradise in Norse legends – were first written about in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda manuscripts in the Middle Ages. 

In those myths, valkyries work as a collective for the one-eyed god Odin, and are ready to fight as warriors in the apocalypse known as Ragnarok. 

“It’s a beautiful nod to the Golden State Warriors, but also is uniquely our own,” team president Jess Smith said in a news release. “What’s so incredibly powerful about it is first and foremost is what a valkyrie is. A valkyrie doesn’t act alone, it’s a group moving things forward. As we think through what we’re building here at Golden State, it’s on the court and off the court. To make the impossible, possible like the Bay Area does.”

Richard Wagner’s musical work “Der Ring des Nibelungen” from 1845 included a song called “Ride of the Valkyries,” which helped shape modern interpretations of valkyries.

Since then, they’ve graced countless books, movies and other forms of media but, clearly by the spike in Google searches on Tuesday, remain largely unknown to the general public.

They’ve been heroes in anime, foes in the critically-acclaimed God of War video game series and characters in Marvel comics.

And starting next year, valkyries will make their pro basketball debut in the Bay Area.

We view this as an incredible time for the WNBA and something we’ll all reflect back on as the 13th team came into the league and what that looked like at that moment in time,” Smith said.