Baldr

The story

Baldr was so radiant that, people said, light seemed to come from him.

He was the most beautiful of the gods, and the gentlest. He never said a harsh word. He spoke well, he judged fairly, and whoever listened to him felt better. He lived in a hall called Breiðablik, where nothing impure could enter. He had a wife, Nanna, and the whitest flower in the meadows was named after him.

One night Baldr began to have bad dreams. He would wake with the feeling that he had lost something important, and lie there watching Nanna sleep, without the courage to wake her. He did not tell everyone about them. He told his mother, who stroked his hair and could find nothing to say.

So the gods gathered, and Odin mounted his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, and rode down, down, all the way to the realm of Hel. A bloodstained dog barked at him from the shadows. He kept going, until he reached a grave, and with a chant he woke a seeress who had been dead for a very long time.

“Who are you?” she said, as dusty as old snow. “Who disturbs me?”

“My name is Vegtam,” Odin replied. “For whom are these benches made ready, with rings scattered over them? For whom are the seats covered in gold?”

“For Baldr,” the seeress answered. “Here the mead stands ready, with a shield over the cup. The gods have no hope left.”

Odin climbed back up without a word.

That was when Frigg set out to ask every single thing in the world for an oath: fire, water, iron, stones, trees, beasts and poisons, that none of them would harm her son. And everything swore. So, out on the plain of the assembly, the gods invented a game. Baldr would stand in the middle with his arms spread wide, and the others would throw whatever came to hand at him: arrows, stones, axes. Everything bounced off, stopped, fell to the ground. Baldr laughed loudest of all, and that was part of the game too: there was nobody in the world who didn't want to throw something at him.

Except one.

Loki watched them from a distance, and his face was twisted. He went to Fensalir disguised as an old woman, and soon came back with a secret. There was a plant, west of Valhalla, that Frigg had not asked for an oath because it had seemed too young to her. A shoot of mistletoe.

Loki pulled it up. He took it to the assembly, keeping it hidden in his hand. At the edge of the circle, alone, stood Höðr, the blind god, who was not joining in the game because he could not see where Baldr was.

“Why aren't you throwing too?” said Loki.

“I can't see where he is,” Höðr answered. “And I have no weapon.”

“Then I'll help you. Hold this twig. I'll show you where he's standing, and you can honour him like the others.”

Höðr felt the twig between his fingers, as light as a feather. He felt Loki's hand guiding him, to the right, a little higher. He threw.

Baldr did not see the twig. He saw only Höðr, standing at the edge with his arm still outstretched, and he had just enough time to smile at him, the way he smiled at everyone.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the voices stopped one by one, and silence rose up from the grass.

Baldr was lying on the ground.

The gods could not speak. They could not even move. They wanted to make Loki pay there and then, but the assembly was a sacred place and no blood could be spilled there. Nobody knows how long they stood frozen like that. Then someone at the back burst into tears, and the others followed.

The funeral was the greatest ever seen. They carried the body to the shore, where Hringhorni lay, the largest of all ships. Odin came with his ravens, and Frigg, and the Valkyries, Freyr in a chariot pulled by the boar Gullinbursti, Heimdall on his golden-maned horse, Freyja with her cats. Even the giants came, the frost giants and the mountain giants, and they too were silent.

The ship was so heavy that nobody could move it. They sent for a giantess, Hyrrokkin, who arrived riding a wolf, with snakes for reins. She put her hands against the prow, gave one single push, and the ship slid into the sea with such a roar that sparks flew from the rollers and every land trembled.

Nanna, Baldr's wife, was gazing at the water. At a certain moment her heart broke with grief, and she fell without a word. They laid her beside him on the ship.

Before stepping down, Odin leaned towards his son's ear and whispered something. Nobody has ever known what. Then he placed a gold ring on the pyre, Draupnir, from which eight rings just like it were born every nine nights. Thor blessed the fire with his hammer. As the ship moved away in the last of the light, the sea looked like silver, and for a long time nobody on the shore could bring themselves to turn back.

Then came the attempt. Hermóðr rode for nine nights through the dark to the realm of Hel, and Hel told him that Baldr would return if every single thing in the world wept for him. And everything wept. People, beasts, the earth, the stones, the trees and the metals. All except a giantess in a cave, named Þökk, who said: “With dry tears I will weep for Baldr's pyre. Let Hel keep what she has.” Some said she was Loki.

Baldr stayed where he was.

But the ancients sang that this was not the end. They said that one day the world would burn and sink, in Ragnarök, and that afterwards it would rise again from the sea, green and new. Fields that no one had sown would bear fruit. Every wrong would be healed. And Baldr would come back, together with Höðr, to live in the halls of the gods.

It may not be much, for someone who is waiting. But it is all they left us.