Baldr

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In the catalog of the gods that Snorri Sturluson set down in Iceland around the year 1220, one entry reads almost like a confession of love. The second son of Odin, he writes, is Baldr, and of him there is only good to be said: he is the fairest of all and the most praised, so beautiful in form and feature that a light shines from him, and there is a flower so white that it is likened to Baldr’s brow — the whitest of all flowers, and by that the beauty of his hair and his body may be judged. He is the wisest of the gods, the sweetest-spoken and the most merciful; but it is a property of his nature that no judgment he pronounces will stand. The praise runs on, warm and unguarded, and then it turns. For this is the one god whose story the Norse told to the end, and the end is a death that nothing can undo.

Baldr (Old Norse Baldr, often anglicized Balder or Baldur) is the bright god of the Æsir, the second son of Odin and his wife Frigg. His name is most often connected with words for “lord” or “prince,” though some have linked it to a root meaning “bold” or even “white, shining”; the etymology is unsettled, and the texts themselves seem less interested in what the name means than in what the god embodies — radiance, gentleness, and the unbearable fact of its loss. Around his death the northern imagination built its most complete and most sorrowful narrative, and into that narrative it folded its deepest intuition: that brightness is mortal, that the gods themselves stand under sentence, and that the worst harm comes not from the giants outside the wall but from one of their own.

Son of Odin, lord of Breidablik

Baldr belongs to the inner family of the Æsir, the ruling gods of Norse religion who dwell in Asgard. He is a son of Odin, the one-eyed sovereign of war and wisdom, and of Frigg, the foremost of the goddesses, who alone may sit on Odin’s high seat and see across all the worlds. Among his brothers the sources count Thor, the thunder-god; the blind god Hodr; and Váli, who will be born for a single, terrible purpose. Baldr’s wife is the goddess Nanna, and their son is Forseti, the god of justice and reconciliation whose hall is named Glitnir — a small dynasty of fairness and light set within the larger, harsher house of Odin.

His own hall is Breidablik, “the broad-gleaming,” and the texts dwell on it with the same care they spend on the god. The Grímnismál, one of the older poems of the Poetic Edda, places it among the great dwellings of heaven and says that there Baldr has built himself a home in the land where, the poet insists, the fewest evil runes are found. Snorri sharpens the line in his prose: Breidablik is the fairest place in heaven, and into it nothing unclean can come. The image is precise. The brightest of the gods lives in the one place from which harm has been excluded by definition — a sanctuary against fate. That the story of Baldr is the story of how harm reached him anyway is the whole of its weight.

Here a caution belongs that governs everything written below. Almost the entire coherent narrative of Baldr survives from two compilations made in Christian Iceland: the Poetic Edda, a gathering of older anonymous verse preserved chiefly in a single manuscript of about 1270, and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, a chieftain and historian who composed it as a handbook for poets roughly two centuries after Iceland’s formal conversion, conventionally dated to the year 1000. Snorri was a Christian working within a learned Latin culture; he opens his Edda by deriving the gods from refugees of Troy, a plainly medieval gloss. The myth therefore reaches the modern reader already at one remove, filtered through writers who no longer worshipped its gods. What is reconstructed as pre-Christian belief and what was shaped by the scribes who recorded it cannot always be cleanly told apart — a problem that, as will be seen, bears with particular force on Baldr.

The dreams, the oath, and the one thing overlooked

The tragedy begins, in Snorri’s telling, not with an attack but with sleep. Baldr is troubled by heavy dreams that warn his life is in danger. He tells the gods, and they take counsel. There is a separate, stranger witness to this: Baldrs draumar, “Baldr’s Dreams,” a short poem of the Poetic Edda in which Odin himself rides down to the world of the dead and raises a long-buried seeress to read the omen. She tells him the mead stands brewed for Baldr in Hel’s hall, that the bright god is expected below, and — when Odin presses her — that it is the blind Hodr who will send the high one down. The doom is spoken before it is done. It is a recurring shape in this mythology: the gods know their fates, the Norns having already cut them, and act them out all the same.

Frigg will not accept it. A mother against prophecy, she travels through the whole of the world and exacts an oath from every thing in it not to harm her son — from fire and water, iron and every metal, stones, earth, trees, sicknesses, beasts, birds, poisons, and serpents. All of them swear. But one small plant she passes over. West of Valhalla there grows a slender shoot called mistletoe, and Frigg judges it too young to swear — too slight, too newly sprung to bind by oath (a modern reading by the scholar Merrill Kaplan notes that in Norse law the young could not be held to an oath at all, which would make the omission not careless but legally exact). She thinks it harmless. That single exception is the hinge of the entire story.

What follows is the most quietly terrible image in the myth: a game made of the god’s invulnerability. Because nothing will now wound Baldr, the Æsir take it for sport at their assembly to set him in their midst and strike at him — some hurling spears, some stones, some hewing with swords — and watch every weapon turn aside or fall short. It does him no hurt, and all of them count it a great honor to him. The gods have made a festival of their love and their certainty. Into that festival walks Loki.

“Each arrow overshot his head,” Elmer Boyd Smith, from In the Days of Giants (1902). Public domain (US). Via Wikimedia Commons.

The mistletoe dart and the hand of the blind brother

Loki, the ambiguous figure who lives among the gods but is bound to them by no loyalty, is displeased that nothing can harm Baldr. He takes the shape of a woman and goes to Frigg, who, suspecting nothing, falls into conversation and lets slip the one thing she withheld: that a plant called mistletoe, growing west of Valhalla, seemed to her too young to ask the oath of. Loki has what he came for. He pulls up the mistletoe and carries it to the assembly, where the gods are still at their game.

Off to the side stands Hodr, blind and taking no part. Loki asks why he does not honor Baldr with the others, and Hodr answers that he cannot see where his brother stands and has nothing to throw. Then “take this,” says Loki, “and shoot where I direct you”; and he sets the mistletoe in Hodr’s hand and guides the aim. Hodr lets fly. The dart drives clean through Baldr, and the bright god falls dead to the ground. Snorri calls it the greatest ill-deed ever done among gods and men. For a long moment the Æsir cannot speak, and when they find their voices it is only to weep; and worst of all is Odin’s grief, for he alone fully knows what his son’s death portends — that the wall has been breached from within, and that the long fall toward Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, has begun. No one may take vengeance at once, for the killing has happened in the sanctuary of the assembly, where blood may not be shed.

“Baldr’s Death,” Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, 1817. Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The vengeance, when it comes, is uncanny. Odin fathers a son for the single purpose of avenging Baldr — Váli, who in the space of one day grows to manhood, neither washing his hands nor combing his hair until he has brought Hodr’s slayer to the pyre and killed him. Hodr’s own guilt is a knot the tradition never quite unties: he is the brother who threw the dart, yet he was blind, unarmed, and used as a tool. The myth seems to hold him guilty and innocent at once, and to reserve its true verdict for the one who guided his hand.

The ship-funeral and the ride to Hel

The gods give Baldr a funeral on the grandest scale the myth describes. His own great ship, Hringhorni, is to serve as the pyre, and they mean to launch it burning out to sea. But the ship will not move; it sits too heavy on the rollers. So they send to the land of the giants for one Hyrrokkin, who comes riding a wolf with vipers for reins, and at her first shove the ship runs forward so hard that fire bursts from the rollers and all the worlds tremble. Thor, enraged, raises his hammer and would have killed her, but the other gods beg for mercy on her.

Baldr’s body is borne onto the ship. When Nanna his wife sees it, her heart breaks with grief and she dies, and she is laid on the pyre beside him — a small detail, but one the tradition does not soften. Odin steps to the bier and lays on it his own arm-ring, Draupnir, the ring that drips eight rings of like weight every ninth night. Thor hallows the pyre with his hammer Mjǫllnir; and as he does, a dwarf named Litr runs before his feet, and Thor kicks him into the fire, where he burns with the rest. A great host attends — Odin and his ravens and valkyries, Frigg, the Vanir gods Freyr and Njǫrðr, the frost-giants and the cliff-giants, all gathered at the burning of the bright god. It is the funeral of the world’s best-beloved, and the myth lets it be enormous.

Then Frigg asks who among the Æsir will ride the long road down to Hel and offer the goddess of the dead a ransom for her son. Hermod the Bold, another son of Odin, volunteers. He mounts Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir and rides nine nights through valleys so deep and dark that he can see nothing, until he comes to the river Gjǫll and its golden bridge. The maiden who guards the bridge, Móðguðr, tells him that five companies of dead men crossed it the day before, yet it thundered no less under him alone — and that his living color is on him; he is not dead; why does he ride the road to Hel? To seek Baldr, he answers, and rides on to the barred gate of the dead, where he sets spurs to Sleipnir and the horse leaps clean over it. Within, in the seat of honor, he finds his brother.

“Hermod before Hela,” John Charles Dollman, 1909. Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Hermod stays the night and in the morning makes his plea to Hel, the half-living, half-corpse goddess who keeps the dead. He tells her of the great weeping among the gods. Hel answers with a test rather than a refusal: it shall be proved, she says, whether Baldr is so beloved as is told — if all things in the world, living and dead, will weep for him, then he shall go back to the Æsir; but if any one thing speaks against him or will not weep, he stays with her. Baldr rises and walks Hermod to the door, and sends back to Odin the ring Draupnir as a keepsake; Nanna sends Frigg a robe of linen and other gifts, and to the goddess Fulla a gold ring. Hermod rides home with the terms, and the gods send messengers across the whole world with one command: weep Baldr out of Hel.

The giantess who would not weep

And everything weeps. Men and beasts, the earth and the stones, the trees and every metal weep for Baldr — as, Snorri adds in an aside that turns a myth into an observation of the world, one will have seen these things weep when they come out of frost into warmth. The ransom is all but paid. The messengers are going home, the world wet with grief, when they come upon a giantess sitting in a cave. She gives her name as Thǫkk. They ask her to weep Baldr from Hel. She will not. In the verse Snorri gives her — here in Brodeur’s 1916 rendering — she answers:

Thökk will weep waterless tears for Baldr’s bale-fare; living or dead, I loved not the churl’s son; let Hel hold to that she hath.

That one dry refusal undoes everything. By Hel’s terms, a single withheld tear keeps Baldr below, and so he stays. Men believe, Snorri writes, that the one who sat there was Loki, who had wrought the most ill among the Æsir — the same hand that fashioned the dart now closing the door it opened. With this the gods turn at last to vengeance, and Loki flees and is run down and bound beneath the earth with venom dripping on his face, there to writhe until the end. Baldr’s death, in the architecture of the myth, is the act from which there is no recovery — the moment the slow machinery of Ragnarök is set turning, and the gods, for all their power, can only watch it run.

A dying god? The long argument over Baldr

No Norse story has drawn more comparative speculation than this one, and the debate over what Baldr “is” must be kept distinct from the myth itself. From the later nineteenth century, scholars set Baldr beside the dying-and-rising gods of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean — Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, Attis — divine youths who perish and are mourned and, in some readings, return with the turning year. Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough (1890), made Baldr a centerpiece of exactly this pattern, reading his death and the great burning as a seasonal fertility rite mythologized, the killing of the spirit of vegetation. For a long stretch of the twentieth century the identification was repeated as near-fact.

It no longer stands unchallenged; the contrary case is now at least as strong. The historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith argued that the whole category of the “dying-and-rising god” is largely a scholarly construction built on late, ambiguous, or Christian-colored evidence, and that gods who truly died tended not to return while those who returned had not truly died. Applied to Baldr, the objection is pointed and simple: in Snorri’s account Baldr precisely does not rise. He dies, he goes to Hel, the ransom fails, and he remains among the dead. He returns only after Ragnarök, when the entire world is reborn — and he does not bring that renewal about or stand above the other survivors of it. He is restored because everything is restored. Whether the older tale held a genuine resurrection that the Christian Snorri suppressed, or whether the dying-rising frame was never the right one, is a question that turns precisely on the source-distance noted above, and it remains a matter on which serious scholars take opposite sides.

The Christian question shadows the comparative one. A beautiful, blameless, beloved son, betrayed and killed, descending to the realm of the dead and destined to return to rule a renewed world — the resonance with the Gospel story was felt early, and some have read the whole Baldr narrative, or at least its shaping, as the work of Icelanders steeped for two centuries in Christianity. Against this stands the weight of the detail: the mistletoe, the blind brother, the giantess in the cave, the failed ransom — these are not Christian motifs, and much of the verse underlying Snorri’s prose is demonstrably older than his telling. The cautious position, and the prevailing one, is that genuinely archaic Germanic material and a Christian literary sensibility are layered in the text and cannot be cleanly separated. The Norwegian-American scholar Anatoly Liberman, surveying the controversies, treats even basic questions — what Baldr’s name means, what kind of god he was, why the mistletoe — as unresolved.

There is, finally, a wholly different Baldr to set against the Icelandic one. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing his Latin Gesta Danorum around 1200, gives a euhemerized version in which Balderus and Høtherus are not brothers but rivals — two heroes, one a demigod and one a mortal prince, contending for the hand of the same woman, Nanna. Saxo’s Høtherus is no blind innocent guided by a trickster but a capable warrior who wins a magic sword and deals Balderus the wound that kills him, three days in the dying. The two accounts share names and little else, and their divergence is itself instructive: it shows the myth already pulling in different directions in the hands of medieval Christian writers, the one rationalizing the gods into kings, the other preserving the sorrowful cosmic shape that has come down as the story of Baldr.

The return after the doom

The myth does not end in the cave with Thǫkk. In the prophecy of the Völuspá, the seeress who has foretold Ragnarök looks past the fire and the drowning of the world to a green earth rising a second time from the sea, where the surviving gods gather on the field of Iðavǫllr and find in the grass the golden game-pieces they had owned in the beginning. There, the poem says, Baldr will come again, and Hodr with him — the slain brother and the brother who slew him, dwelling together in the reconciled hall of the new world. It is a quiet astonishment of the northern imagination: the betrayed god and his unwitting killer restored side by side, the wound that broke the old world healed in the making of the next.

This is what gives Baldr his strange place in the tradition. He is not a god of acts but of meaning. He does almost nothing in the myths; he is loved, he is mourned, he is lost. His death is the pivot on which the whole Norse story turns from its long bright middle toward its end, the first irreversible loss in a mythology that knows its gods are mortal and tells their doom without flinching. And his return is the single image the tradition offers of mercy on the far side of that doom — not the avoidance of the end, which no one in this religion is spared, but something on its other shore. The light that went out of the worlds when the mistletoe found its mark is the same light the seeress promises will shine on the reborn earth, when the gods who could not weep him back from Hel will have him among them again, where nothing unclean can come.

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