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The Death of Baldr · Norse Mythology Sleep Story · 3 Hours · The Sleeping Almanac: Sleep Stories for Adults from Myth and Fairy Tale

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  Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight we follow a story about a death. About the most beautiful of the gods, and the dream he kept having that no one in Asgard could ease. About a mother who walked all of the worlds asking the trees, the stones, the waters, the iron, the metals, the sicknesses, the beasts, the birds, the serpents, the poisons — asking each of them in turn to swear an oath that they would not harm her son. About a small parasitic plant growing on an oak west of Valhǫll that no one thought to ask, because it was too young to take an oath. About a blind brother who could not see, and a small dart placed in his hand. And about a long ride down into Hel, on the eight-legged horse, through valleys so dark and so deep that the rider could not see his own hand for nine nights. This is the story of Baldr. Of his death. And of how, after his death, the world of the gods was no longer the world it had been before. It is the story of Frigg, who took the oaths. Of Loki, who found the one thing she did not. Of Hǫðr, who threw the dart and did not know what he was throwing. Of Hermóðr the bold, who rode the eight-legged horse to the underworld and stood before the goddess Hel herself, and asked for his brother back. Of Hringhorni, the greatest of all ships, which the giantess Hyrrokkin pushed into the sea with such force that the rollers caught fire. Of Nanna, who died of grief on the shore and was placed beside her husband on the pyre. Of Þǫkk — a name we will speak softly tonight — the giantess in the cave who would not weep. It is the story we have been moving toward, slowly, since the season began. Across the evenings that have come before tonight, we have walked through the cosmos and the wisdom and the binding and the apples. We have heard, in earlier episodes, the prophecies of the seeresses — small distant warnings, given in quiet voices, that the gods would not, in the end, hold all the worlds forever. We have not, until tonight, watched any of those prophecies come to pass. Tonight we will. Tonight is the night the first prophecy lands in the great hall of Asgard, and the gods understand, for the first time, that the appointed twilight is no longer a thing that lives somewhere far ahead of them. It is a thing that has started moving in their direction. This is the turning point of the entire Norse mythology, and the surviving sources know it. Snorri Sturluson, in his Prose Edda, gives this story more space than he gives any other. The Poetic Edda preserves a separate poem just about Baldr's dreams — Baldrs draumar — that tells us what the gods knew in the very first hours of the trouble. A skaldic poet named Úlfr Uggason, writing in the tenth century, more than two hundred years before Snorri, set the scenes of Baldr's funeral into a long descriptive poem called Húsdrápa, which we still have in fragments. Three sources, written across three centuries, all reaching back to one story. We are going to tell it carefully tonight. We will follow Snorri's account where Snorri is clearest. We will follow Baldrs draumar where the poem adds what Snorri did not. We will name Húsdrápa when we describe the funeral, because that is the oldest surviving account of it. And where the sources are silent, we will, in the small careful way of this Almanac, say that we are reaching past them — and we will reach gently. Episode 6 of a complete twelve-part season. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday at 8pm ET. If you fall asleep before the end — leave a 💤 in the comments. I read every one in the morning. Settle in. Lower the lights. Let your shoulders drop. We begin in the high hall of Asgard, where a god has not been sleeping well.
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  Chapter One. The Dream That Baldr Had. There is a kind of dream that is not quite a dream. It is not made of the ordinary stuff a sleeping mind produces — the rooms you have lived in, the voices you have heard, the small unfinished business of the day. It is made of something stranger. It feels true while it is happening. It leaves the dreamer, on waking, with a heaviness that does not lift through the day, or through the next day, or through any day that follows. It is not a nightmare. A nightmare is a thing the mind makes to frighten itself. This is a thing that comes from somewhere else. Baldr began to have such dreams. Baldr — and we should pause on his name a moment before we go on — Baldr was the most beautiful of all the gods. Snorri Sturluson, who is our chief source for the story we are about to tell, describes him in Gylfaginning, chapter twenty-two, this way. He is the son of Óðinn and of Frigg. He is so fair of face and so bright that light shines from him. There is a plant so white that it is called Baldrsbrá — Baldr's brow — because it is the whitest thing in the world, and even it is not so white as the brow of the god whose name it bears. He lives, Snorri tells us, in a hall called Breiðablik — broad-shining — and Snorri says of that hall that no unclean thing may be in it. He is the wisest of the Æsir. He is the most pleasant-spoken. He is the most gracious. The judgements he gives are the most beautiful, although — and Snorri puts this strangely — Baldr's judgements are so finely-spoken that none of his rulings, in fact, ever come to pass. The other gods love him. There is no god in Asgard the other gods love more. This is the god who began to dream his own death. The dreams, Snorri tells us, came to Baldr at night. He did not at first speak of them. He went about his days in Asgard as he had always gone about them. He sat in his hall. He took counsel with his brothers. He walked the streets of the city and greeted those who greeted him, and his face was as bright as it had always been. But there was something behind the brightness now that there had not been before. A small fixed look around the eyes. A way of pausing, sometimes, mid-sentence, as if he had just remembered something he could not bring himself to say. The first dream came on an evening that had been, by every other measure, an ordinary evening. Baldr had eaten with his wife. He had walked, before sleeping, on the small enclosed terrace of his hall — the terrace that looked out over the western quarter of Asgard. He had watched the light go down over the rooftops. He had thought of nothing in particular. He had gone in, when the cold began to come, and he had drawn the covers of his bed up to his chest, and he had slept. The dream came to him in the deep part of the night. Snorri does not describe the content of the dreams in detail. He says only that they were heavy, and that they were dreams of things to come, and that they were not the kind of dreams a god in his hall should have. We will not press further than Snorri presses. We will say only that Baldr woke from that first dream sometime before dawn, and lay in the dark for a long time afterward without moving, and that when the sun finally came up through the eastern windows, he rose with the small fixed look around his eyes that the other gods would, in the days that followed, come to recognize. His wife noticed. His wife was Nanna, daughter of Nepr — and we will say a little about her in a moment, because she belongs to this story too. She noticed the change in him before anyone else did. She would wake in the deep part of the night and find Baldr awake beside her, lying on his back, his eyes open, looking up at the wooden beams of their hall, his lips slightly parted as if he were waiting to speak but the words had not come. She would ask him what was wrong. He would close his eyes again and say only that he had had a small bad dream. Go back to sleep, he would say. It is nothing. She would sleep. In the morning he would not speak of it. But the dreams did not stop. They continued for many nights. And after a time, Baldr could no longer hold them inside himself. He went to the high seat where Óðinn his father sat. He went in the morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the eastern windows of the great hall of Glaðsheimr. He stood before his father and he told him. Snorri does not give us the exact words Baldr used. We will not invent them either. We can say only that the dreams were dreams of his own death. They were vivid. They came back, with small variations, night after night. In one form of the dream — and here we are reaching past what the surviving sources directly say, but the long tradition of the story implies it — in one form Baldr saw the gates of a country he did not know. In another, he saw a feast laid out in a hall he had never visited, the benches strewn with gold, the mead-cup raised, and the seat at the head of the long table empty, waiting for him. In another, a long road, a cold road, going down between high black walls of rock into a darkness that was not the darkness of any night he had lived through. Whatever the dreams were, Baldr understood them. He knew what they were telling him. They were telling him that he was going to die. The Æsir, when Baldr told them, did not know what to do. It is the strange thing about gods. The gods of Asgard knew that they would die, in the end — they knew it from the prophecies of the vǫlur, the seeresses, who had said over the centuries that all things end at a twilight whose name we do not need to speak yet. But they had not expected the dying to begin in their own time. They had not expected it to begin with Baldr — Baldr, who was the most beloved, the brightest, the one no one in Asgard could imagine being without. They called a council. They sat in the great hall and they spoke long. They asked each other what to do. They asked what the dreams meant. They asked who might be able to interpret them, and what could be done if the interpretation was the worst one. And in the end, Óðinn rose from the high seat and said: I will go and find out. I will ride down and ask one who knows. He went out from the council. He took down his cloak from the peg by the door. He went to the stables. He saddled his horse, Sleipnir — the great eight-legged horse, who could run on any road, who could cross any water, who could pass through any country no other horse could pass. He swung up into the saddle. He turned the horse east, toward the road that goes down. He rode out of Asgard alone.
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  Chapter Two. The Long Ride to Hel. There is a poem in the Poetic Edda called Baldrs draumar — Baldr's dreams. It is short. It is only a few stanzas long. It is told in a kind of stripped-down, dark Eddic verse, the way you might tell a story to a child in the small hours when you want the child to listen but you do not want to frighten them too much. The poem begins with the gathering of the gods over Baldr's dreams. It ends with Óðinn riding to the underworld to ask a dead seeress what those dreams mean. What we are about to tell is what that poem tells, combined with what Snorri later wrote in his fuller telling. Where the two diverge, we will say so. Where they agree, we will speak as one. Óðinn rode east. He rode through Niflheim — the country of mist, the country between the worlds, the country whose name means "house of mist." He rode through valleys whose floors were the color of old iron and whose walls were the color of slate. He rode under a sky that was not quite a sky — a sky that was lower than the sky of Miðgarðr, lower than the sky of Asgard, a sky that seemed to press down on the rider as if it could feel his weight and was minding it. He rode for nine nights. That is what Snorri tells us, when he describes a similar journey later. Nine nights of riding through deep dark valleys, with the rider unable to see anything around him — not the road, not the sides of the valley, not the head of his own horse. Only the deep cold dark, and the soft regular sound of the eight hooves on the unseen path beneath, and the cold breath of the horse on the rider's hands. Sleipnir did not stop. Sleipnir did not need to stop. The eight-legged horse, born of the strange mare-shape Loki took once long ago — a story for another evening — Sleipnir could run forever if Óðinn asked him to. Down through the country of mist, down past the lower rivers, down to the gates of the underworld itself. The gates were closed. Snorri does not describe these gates in his account of Hermóðr's later journey, but Baldrs draumar tells us this: Óðinn came to a high hall in the east, and the hall was the hall of Hel, and there was death-dew on it, and at the doors a dog was barking. The dog had blood on his breast. He had been gnawing some unseen carcass. He saw Óðinn coming. He came snarling toward him. Óðinn rode past him. The Allfather did not stop at the front gates of Hel. He rode around. He rode to the eastern side of the hall — and here we are following the poem's strange detail — to the eastern side of the hall, where in old times a vǫlva, a seeress, had been buried. A great seeress. A woman who had known the futures of the gods. A woman who had, in her own time, walked the world and spoken her prophecies, and whose name had been forgotten by the living. She had been buried long ago in a mound east of Hel's hall. Her bones lay in the mound. Her bones were the bones of one who could see. Óðinn dismounted. He stood beside the mound. He began to speak.
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  Chapter Three. The Seeress Who Did Not Want To Speak. The words Óðinn spoke at the mound, in the poem Baldrs draumar, are called valgaldr — speech-of-the-slain, or more literally, charm-of-the-slain. They are the kind of words by which a god could call up the dead, if the god was old enough and strong enough to know how. Óðinn knew how. He had learned, in the story we told some episodes ago, how to wake the dead. He had paid for the knowledge. He had hung on the tree for nine nights. He had given his eye. He had taken the runes. He used the runes now. He stood beside the mound, in the deep cold of the country east of Hel, and he spoke the charm. The earth above the mound moved. The seeress, in the old, slow way of the dead waking, rose from her bones. The poem does not describe her face. We will not describe it either. We will say only that she was, by the time Óðinn finished his speaking, sitting up in her mound, her ancient form half-visible in the cold thin air, her voice — when it came — coming from a long way off, the way the voice of the dead always comes from a long way off when the dead are called back to speak. She said: Who is this that has called me up. I have lain long in the dark. Snow fell on me. Rain beat on me. Dew settled on me. I have been a long time dead. Who is this that has come. She did not know who Óðinn was. He did not, at first, tell her. He gave a false name. In the poem he calls himself Vegtamr — wanderer, or way-tame — and he says he is the son of Valtamr. Battle-tame, son of war-tame. He gives the names a vǫlva of old would have respected without question — the names of men born to the lineage of warriors. He asks her his question. He asks: For whom are the benches in Hel decked. For whom is the gold strewn. For whom is the mead brewed. Who is the great one being awaited. The seeress answered. She said: Here stands the mead, brewed for Baldr. The cup is covered. There is grief in Asgard. I have spoken under duress. Now I am silent. The phrase "I have spoken under duress" is the formula the dead, in the old Norse tradition, use when they have been called up against their will. They give their answer. They give it true. And then they ask, by speaking the formula, to be allowed to return to the silence of their mound. The convention is that the asker, having heard the answer, lets the seeress sleep. Óðinn did not let her sleep. Óðinn pressed her. He asked: Who shall be Baldr's killer. She answered: Hǫðr will throw the death-bough. Hǫðr will become Baldr's killer. I have spoken under duress. Now I am silent. He pressed again. He asked who would avenge Baldr. And here the seeress, from her cold mound east of Hel, told Óðinn the strangest small piece of the story we are telling tonight. She said: In the western halls, Rindr bears Váli. He shall fight at one night old. He shall not wash his hands. He shall not comb his hair. He shall not rest until he has brought Hǫðr to the pyre. I have spoken under duress. Now I am silent. The not-washing and the not-combing are, in the old Norse imagination, ritual signs. A man on a vengeance-errand did not, by the old custom, wash or comb until his errand was complete. The signs marked him out. They told the people who saw him that he was a man on a mission, that he was not in his ordinary days, that he was to be left alone until what he had to do was done. Váli, the seeress was saying, would be one of these men. He would be born for the errand. He would do the errand the day he was born. He would not, in his single-day-of-vengeance, be a god to approach. Óðinn took the prophecy in. Rindr. Váli. Rindr is a giantess. The sources tell us little of her. She lives, the poem implies, in the western halls — that is, in the country beyond the worlds, in some far place. Snorri tells us elsewhere that Óðinn would, in the time after this story, beget a son on her named Váli. Váli would be born for a single purpose: to avenge Baldr. He would grow with the swiftness of a god born for a single act. At one night old, before he had washed his hands or combed his hair — that is, before he had even done the small things a person does on their first day — he would find Hǫðr and slay him. This is what the seeress told Óðinn. She did not know who she was speaking to. She thought she was speaking to a wanderer. She told him the truth because the dead, called up by valgaldr, must tell the truth. But then Óðinn asked her one more question. He asked her something so strange — and the poem, in its sparse Eddic way, does not gloss it for us — he asked her: Who are these maidens who weep, and throw the throat-cloths to the sky. It is not clear what this question means. Scholars have argued over it for centuries. We will not solve it tonight. We will say only that it is the kind of question a god might ask a dead seeress to test whether she really is who he thinks she is. It is a question whose answer the wanderer Vegtamr would not need to know. It is a question whose answer only Óðinn would care about. And the seeress, when she heard the question, paused. She paused, in the cold thin air east of Hel. She said, slowly: You are no wanderer, as I thought. You are Óðinn, the oldest of the gods. Óðinn did not deny it. She said: Go home, Óðinn. Go home, and have your triumph. No one will call me up again, nor wake me with the wand of speech, until — and here the poem stops mid-line, in a way that is mysterious — until Loki bursts his bonds and the wreckers come to the twilight. Then she was silent. The mound settled. The bones, the poem tells us, were bones again. Óðinn turned. He mounted Sleipnir. He rode back through the country of mist, back up through Niflheim, back up the cold road to Asgard. He rode through nine nights. He rode into the gates of his own city as the sun was rising on the tenth morning. He brought the news to the gods. Their son, their bright son, the most beloved of the Æsir, was going to die. His brother, the blind one — Hǫðr — was going to kill him.
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  Chapter Four. Frigg's Long Walking. Frigg, the mother, did not accept it. Frigg is one of the great goddesses of Asgard, and the surviving sources tell us less about her than they tell us about Freyja or about Iðunn or about Sif, but what they do tell us is consistent. She is Óðinn's wife. She is the keeper of the household, but the household she keeps is not a household of small things — it is the household of all the Æsir. She is the keeper of the threshold, the lintels, the keys. She is, in Snorri's account, the only god other than Óðinn permitted to sit on the high seat Hliðskjálf and look out over all the worlds. She has, in some traditions, the gift of seeing the future — though in others it is said she sees but does not speak of what she sees. She is the mother of Baldr. And she would not have her son die. Snorri tells us what she did. The chapter in Gylfaginning is fifty. The Æsir, Snorri says, took counsel, and the resolution that came of the counsel was this: Frigg, the goddess, took oaths from all things that they would not harm Baldr. Read that slowly. She took oaths from all things. We need to understand what that means. She did not write a letter. She did not call a meeting. She did not send messengers. She went, herself, in person, to every thing in the worlds that had the power to harm her son. She went to fire first. Fire is the oldest harm. Fire was there at the beginning, in the country called Múspell, in the south, where the giant Surtr keeps his flaming sword and waits for the appointed twilight. Fire is what cooks the food and warms the hall and lights the dark — but fire is also what burns the houses and the forests and the bodies of the dead, and Frigg knew that fire, of all the things in the world, was the one most likely, in some carelessness, to take her son. She went to fire first. She went, the surviving sources do not say where — but we will imagine it. We will imagine her going to the great hearths of Asgard, kneeling beside them as if to warm her hands, and speaking under her breath to the small steady flames. We will imagine her walking south, to the borders of Múspell, where the air grows hot and the rocks themselves seem to shimmer, and speaking to the great flames there — the flames so old they have no memory of having been small. We will imagine her speaking to the small flames of mortal hearths in Miðgarðr, in the dim huts of farmers at night, in the kitchens of kings, in the camp-fires of travelers under the stars. She spoke to every fire she could find. She bound them all. Fire swore. She went to water. Water is the second great harm. Water in its cold form, water in its deep form, the salt sea and the freshwater rivers and the lakes that hide the sleeping serpents and the rains that fall on the long roads. Water is what slakes the thirst and bears the boats and grows the grain — but water is also what drowns the swimmer, takes the ship, swallows the traveler at the river crossing. Frigg went to the seas first. She walked along the shores of Miðgarðr and spoke to the waves as they came in. She knelt at the water's edge with her cloak gathered up around her ankles, and she spoke into the water as one speaks into an ear. The waves listened. The waves answered, in the slow rolling way that waves answer. She bound the sea by oath. She went to the rivers and bound them — going from river to river, from the great rivers that cross continents to the smallest brooks that run only after the spring rain. She spoke to each one. Each one swore. She went to the lakes and bound them. She went, last, to the rain that falls from the sky, and made the rain swear too. There were rains in many countries that year, the sources do not say, but we will imagine that the rain that fell on the cold fields of Frigg's walking was a rain that had taken its oath, and fell knowing it would not harm what it touched. All of water swore that it would not harm her son. She went to iron. Iron, of all the metals, is the great killer. The swords of men are iron. The axes are iron. The spears, the knives, the small thin needles that pierce. Frigg went to iron and bound it. Iron swore. She went to all other metals — gold, silver, bronze, copper, lead, tin, the metals dug out of the earth by the dwarves of Svartalfheim. She bound each in turn. They each swore. She went to stones. Every kind of stone — the round stones of riverbeds, the sharp flint that cuts, the great heavy stones that crush, the small pebbles that turn an ankle. She bound them all. They swore. She went to the trees. Each kind of tree, in turn. The oak. The ash. The pine. The birch. The willow. The thorn. The yew. The hazel. The elm. The fir. The rowan with its red berries. The juniper with its blue ones. The alder. The maple. The beech. She walked the forests of Miðgarðr and Asgard for many days, going from tree-kind to tree-kind, taking the oath of each. She stood under their canopies. She put her hand on their bark. She spoke the oath in a quiet voice — for the trees, she had learned in her long walking, listened to a quiet voice better than to a loud one — and she let her hand rest a long moment on the bark of each kind before moving on. The trees, in turn, gave their word. The oak's word was deep and slow. The pine's word came down through the needles in a hush. The willow's word was given with a small sweep of its long branches. The hazel's word was given quickly, in the bright nervous way of the hazel. The trees gave their word. She went to the sicknesses. This is the strange one, in Snorri's account. She went to fevers, and bound them. She went to coughs, and bound them. She went to the small wasting illnesses that take a person slowly over months, and bound them. She went to the sudden sicknesses that take a person in a day. All swore. She went to the beasts. Every kind of four-footed thing. The wolves. The bears. The wild cattle. The deer. The boars. The lynxes. The hares. The mice. Every animal in turn. She bound them all. She went to the birds. Every kind of winged thing. She went to the serpents and the lizards and the cold-blooded things that move along the ground. She went, finally, to the poisons — the venoms of the serpents, the dark drops in certain berries, the toxic things that grow in the wet places of the world. She bound all the poisons. How long this took, Snorri does not say. We will allow ourselves a small interpretation here. We will imagine that it took many months. Perhaps a year. Perhaps longer. We will imagine Frigg walking the world in a long gray cloak, with the dust of many roads on the hem, going from country to country, taking each oath in turn. Stopping in the evenings at the edges of forests, in the small huts of mortal women, in the open fields under the stars. Eating little. Speaking little. The mission steady and slow and patient. The grief of her son's dreams sitting always at the back of her shoulders. The knowledge that if she failed in even one oath, her son would die. We will imagine the small details of the walking. The way her feet, in their soft leather shoes, came to know the surfaces of many countries — the soft moss of forest floors, the sharp gravel of mountain passes, the cool wet sand of sea-shores. The way her hands, by the end, were marked by the texture of so many things she had touched in the binding — the rough bark of trees, the cold scales of serpents, the dry skin of stones in the sun, the wet hide of beasts she had reached out to. The way her cloak, in the late part of the journey, was a cloak that had been many places — a cloak that smelled, at the same time, of pine and of sea and of smoke from many small fires, of the strange thin air of high places and the heavier air of valleys. We will imagine her sleeping, in those many months, in many beds. The bed of a king who recognized her and gave her his own chamber. The bed of a farmer's wife who did not recognize her but offered the warm corner by the hearth. The open ground of a forest clearing, with her cloak rolled up beneath her head, and the stars wheeling slowly above her through the gaps in the canopy. The flat ledge of a high pass, where the cold was such that she did not sleep at all, but sat upright through the night, her cloak gathered around her, waiting for the dawn so that she could go on with the next set of oaths. We will imagine that she did not, in those months, speak of her son. She would have known better than to speak of him to those she met. She would have known that to speak of him aloud would have been to draw attention to the very thing she was trying to protect. So she walked silent, and she bound silent, and she went on. We do not know how long it took. We know only that, in the end, she returned to Asgard. She returned and she stood before the Æsir and she said: It is done. Every thing in the worlds has sworn. Nothing will harm my son. There was, in Snorri's account, one small exception. But she did not mention it. She did not, in fact, even remember it. It seemed too small to remember.
• 35:35
  Chapter Five. The Sport of the Gods. The Æsir, when they heard that Baldr was now safe from all harm, were filled with joy. Joy is a thing the gods of the Norse stories do not feel often. The Norse gods are not, mostly, a joyful pantheon. They are wary. They are watchful. They are aware of the prophecies and of the slow turning of fate. But on this day, when Frigg returned from her long walking and said: it is done — on this day, the Æsir felt something close to joy. Their bright son, the beloved one, the one whose dreams had been so bad — he was safe. They began to play. This is the part of the story that is, in some way, the strangest. Snorri tells it without comment. He simply says it happened. The Æsir, knowing that nothing could harm Baldr, made it into a sport. They would gather in the courtyard of Asgard. They would stand Baldr in the center of the gathering. And they would throw things at him. They threw stones first. The stones bounced off and fell harmlessly to the ground beside him. The Æsir stood in a loose circle around him and they threw — Þórr threw the heaviest stones, the great round river-stones that took two of his hands to lift, and the stones, in their flight, would slow as they came near Baldr, and they would fall at his feet without striking him. Týr threw the throwing-stones of the warriors, smaller and sharper, the stones a man threw in a contest. They fell harmless too. Bragi, who was not a warrior but a skald, threw a small smooth stone he picked up from the courtyard at his feet, and the stone went up in a high arc and came down soft as a leaf on Baldr's shoulder, where it rested for a moment and then rolled down his cloak and onto the cobbles. They threw spears. The spears, in mid-flight, would lose their edge as they came near Baldr — they would soften, they would turn aside, they would fall at his feet. Óðinn himself, the Allfather, threw a great spear once — Gungnir, the spear that always strikes its target — and Gungnir, the spear that always strikes its target, did not strike Baldr. The spear arced over the courtyard, came down toward Baldr's chest, and at the very last moment — perhaps an inch from his cloak — turned, in mid-air, away. It fell, light, on the cobbles beside him. Óðinn looked at it for a long moment. Then he laughed too. They threw axes. The axes did the same. They drew their swords and they swung at him, and the swords passed through where Baldr was as if Baldr were not there, and Baldr stood smiling, and no harm came to him. This became, Snorri says, an honor. A game of honor. It became the way the Æsir greeted Baldr in the mornings. Walking into the courtyard, a god would pick up a stone or draw his sword, and he would throw, and the thing thrown would harmlessly turn aside, and Baldr would laugh, and the god would laugh, and the morning would begin. We need to pause and think about this for a moment. In one reading of the Eddas — and this reading is contested by scholars, who have argued about it for many years — the sport of throwing things at Baldr is a kind of ritual. It is not, in this reading, cruelty. It is the gods affirming, every morning, the great oath their mother and queen had taken. It is them saying: here is our brother. Here is our most beloved. Here is the proof that he cannot be harmed. Watch the spear turn aside. Watch the stone fall. In another reading, it is darker. In another reading, the gods of Asgard, having been told that their son is invulnerable, want — at some level beneath the level they would admit to — they want to test it. They want to see what would happen if it failed. They want to push against the oath. Snorri does not tell us which reading is right. He simply describes the sport. We will, for the rest of tonight, take the gentler reading. We will assume the gods were affirming the oath, not pushing it. We will assume the throwing was joyful. But we will also note that, somewhere in Asgard, one god was watching the sport. One god was watching, and his face — when no one was looking — his face was not joyful. Loki was watching. Loki, foster-brother of Óðinn. Loki, whom you have heard much about in the episodes that have come before this one. Loki, who had brought the gods their greatest treasures and also their greatest troubles. Loki, who walked the streets of Asgard a free god still, although the gods watched him more carefully every season that passed. Loki was watching the sport. He did not like it. Snorri does not give us his reasons. The sources are silent. We will allow ourselves to wonder, here, what Loki saw. Perhaps he saw the joy of the other gods and was, in his strange dark heart, jealous. Perhaps he saw the affirmation of Baldr's invulnerability and was, in his other strange capacity, curious. Perhaps he wondered, the way a child wonders at a strong wall: where, somewhere, is the small crack? He thought he would go and find out.
• 40:53
  Chapter Six. The Old Woman at Frigg's Door. There is, in the story we are telling, a great deal of shape-shifting. Loki, in the Norse stories, is famous for his shapes. He has been a falcon, when he borrowed Freyja's cloak — you may remember this from a recent evening. He has been a horse. He has been a salmon. He has been a fly. He has been, on at least one occasion, an old woman. Snorri tells us, in Gylfaginning fifty, that Loki on this day took the form of an old woman. Why an old woman, Snorri does not say. We will allow ourselves a small inference: an old woman is, in the world the story imagines, an unremarkable figure. An old woman walking the streets of Asgard would not draw attention. The watchman would not stop her. The gods who passed her would not look twice. She would be one of the small slow figures that came and went at the edges of the city, and she could go where she wished, and she could speak to whom she wished, and she would be answered with the small absent courtesy that the great show to those they do not need to take seriously. Loki in the form of the old woman went to the hall of Frigg. We will allow ourselves a small picture of the old woman, since the sources do not give us one. We will imagine her short and bent. We will imagine her hair white under her dark wool wrap, her eyes pale and watery, her hands knotted with the small joint-troubles of age. We will imagine her cloak gray and well-worn, with the small mendings of many years visible along its seams. We will imagine her stick — for she would have a stick, leaning on it as she walked — to be a piece of old hazel, smoothed in the middle where her hand had held it for many seasons. She was the kind of woman the guards at any gate would have looked at and looked past. She was the kind of woman who could go anywhere in Asgard without anyone wondering what she was doing. He knocked. The servants of Frigg opened the door. They let the old woman in. Frigg, who was sitting in her chamber, looked up. She saw the old woman come in. She greeted her kindly. Frigg was kind, in the surviving sources, to those who came to her door — and especially kind, we may infer, to those who came to her in the small unremarkable shapes that the proud do not bother with. An old woman in a worn cloak was the kind of figure Frigg would have received with the small courtesies of a lady receiving an aging neighbor. She would not have looked closely at the face under the wrap. The old woman bowed. The old woman said: My lady, what a fine sight that is, the gods throwing weapons at your son and no harm coming to him. Is it true, then, my lady, that all the things in the world have sworn to leave him alone? Frigg, looking at the old woman with affection — for she liked it, in Snorri's account, when those outside her household showed an interest in the great work she had done — Frigg said: Yes. It is true. All things have sworn. The old woman said: All things, my lady. All. Even the smallest things. Frigg said: All. I have gone to each kind. They have each sworn. The old woman said: My lady, that is a great wonder. There is nothing, then, in all the world, that could harm your son. Frigg paused. She paused. In the way that a person pauses when she remembers something she had not thought of in a long time. In the way that a person pauses when she realizes there is one small thing. She said, slowly: Well — there is. There is one thing. But it is too small to matter. There is a small plant that grows on the western side of Valhǫll. A small parasitic plant on an oak, with white berries. Mistilteinn it is called. It was too young when I made my rounds. I thought it not worth taking the oath of. It is not big enough to harm anyone. The old woman bowed. The old woman said: My lady, you are wise to have thought as much. Your son is safe. The old woman left the chamber. She left the hall. She walked, with her old slow steps, out the front door of Frigg's house, down the street of the city, around the corner, into a small alley. In the alley, in the deep shadow against a wall, the old woman shed her shape. Loki stood up, in his own form, in the alley. He brushed off his cloak. He looked at his hands. He smiled. He turned and walked, quickly now, toward the western edge of Asgard, toward the great hall called Valhǫll, where the slain warriors feasted nightly, and where on the western side of the hall — the cold side, the side away from the rising sun — a small ancient oak grew. He was going to look for the plant.
• 45:57
  Chapter Seven. The Plant West of Valhǫll. Mistilteinn — mistletoe — is a strange thing. Snorri, writing in Iceland in the early thirteenth century, knew of it the way a scholar knows of a thing he has read about and not necessarily handled himself. Mistletoe is not common in Iceland. It is a continental plant, found in the oak forests of the European mainland. Snorri would have known of it from his reading of Latin sources, from the descriptions of older Norse poets, perhaps from travelers who had been to the south. He describes it accurately enough. It is a small parasitic plant that grows on the branches of other trees — most commonly the oak. It has small white berries. It is — and this is the point of the story — small. Slender. Slight. A thing easily overlooked. Why mistletoe, in Snorri's story, is the one thing Frigg did not bind by oath is not explained. Snorri's reason — that the plant was too young — is the surface reason. Some scholars have suggested deeper reasons that have to do with the strangeness of mistletoe as a plant. It grows not from the ground but from another plant. It is, in the medieval botanical understanding, not quite a true plant — it does not have roots in the earth. It is parasitic. It is liminal. It is a thing that exists between categories. And the things that exist between categories — the things that are neither one thing nor another — are, in the old folk wisdom of many peoples, the things that have power. We will not press this point. We will say only that Frigg, when she went out to bind all things by oath, did not bind the mistletoe — and that this small not-binding became, in the long shadow of the story, the great catastrophe of Asgard. Loki found the oak. It stood on the western side of Valhǫll, in a small grove of older trees, in a part of Asgard that the warriors who feasted nightly inside Valhǫll did not often walk. The grove was, in fact, a part of Asgard most of the gods did not walk in either — not because anything was wrong with it, but because the great hall of Valhǫll cast its shadow over the grove most of the day, and the grove was therefore cool, and a little damp, and not the kind of place a god would choose for a morning's stroll. The grass between the trees was a little long. The light that reached the ground was the green-filtered light of a place under a high canopy. There was a small stillness about the grove, as if the noise of the rest of the city did not quite reach there. The oak was old. Its bark was deeply furrowed. Its branches were heavy with the leaves of summer. It was, perhaps, three times the height of a tall man. Its trunk was broad enough that two gods, standing on either side and reaching, would have just barely been able to clasp hands around it. High on one branch, perhaps fifteen feet above the ground, there grew the small parasitic clump of green leaves and white berries — the mistletoe. Loki stood at the foot of the oak and looked up at the mistletoe for a long moment. He did not, in the surviving sources, hesitate. He did not, in the surviving sources, change his mind. He had decided, at the moment Frigg told him in her chamber that the one thing she had not bound was the mistletoe west of Valhǫll, what he was going to do. He had not changed his mind on the walk across the city. He did not change it now, standing beneath the oak in the cool green light, looking up at the small clump of leaves and berries that was, on this morning, the only thing in all of the worlds that had not sworn to leave Baldr alone. Loki climbed. He was not, in his ordinary shape, a heavy god. He was lean. He could climb a tree quickly, when he wished to. He went up the trunk of the oak with the practiced movement of someone who had climbed many trees in many forms. He came to the branch on which the mistletoe grew. He cut it loose. He cut it with a small knife he had brought with him for the purpose. He cut it carefully, taking the longest single stem — the strongest one, the straightest — and leaving the rest of the clump on the branch. He came back down. He stood at the foot of the oak with the stem of mistletoe in his hand. He turned it slowly in the light. It was perhaps the length of an arrow. It was light. It was green. The small white berries clung to it at the ends. A dart, he thought. It is the length of a dart. It is the weight of a dart. It is the shape, almost, of a dart. With a little trimming, with a small sharpening of the cut end, it could be a dart. He took out his knife again. He worked on the stem. He sharpened the cut end. He smoothed the wood. By the time he was done, he was holding a slender wooden dart with white berries at its base — a dart, but a dart that did not look like a dart. A dart that looked, to anyone who had not been told what it was, like a small green branch a man might carry as a walking-stick. He put the dart inside his cloak. He walked back toward the center of Asgard, toward the courtyard where the gods were even now, in the morning light, beginning their game.
• 51:33
  Chapter Eight. The Brother Who Could Not See. The game was in full swing when Loki returned. The Æsir were gathered in the great courtyard of Asgard. Baldr stood, smiling, in the center. The gods stood in a loose circle around him. They were taking turns throwing. Þórr had just thrown a great stone, which had passed through where Baldr was standing as if Baldr were a column of light, and fallen with a heavy thud on the cobbles beyond. Týr had just struck at him with a sword, which had failed to find anything to cut. Freyja had thrown a slim spear, which had turned aside in mid-flight and fallen on the stones at Baldr's feet, where it lay still ringing on the cobbles. Baldr was laughing. The gods were laughing. One god, however, was not in the circle. He stood at the edge of the courtyard, just inside the great archway that led in from the street. He stood with his hands clasped politely in front of him. He was not throwing. He was not laughing. He was listening. This was Hǫðr. Hǫðr was Baldr's brother. He was a god of Asgard, a son of Óðinn — although the genealogy of Hǫðr is one of the parts of the Norse mythology that is, in places, contradictory across sources. Snorri tells us that Hǫðr was the brother of Baldr, and was blind. Blind from birth, Snorri implies. He had never seen anything. He had never seen his brother. He had never seen the face that was so bright that light came from it. He knew his brother only by voice, by touch, by the way the air seemed to warm when Baldr came near. He knew his brother loved him. He knew he loved his brother. But he had never thrown a stone, in the game in the courtyard, because he could not see where to throw. He stood at the edge of the courtyard, listening. Loki came up beside him. Loki said, very quietly: Hǫðr. Brother. Why do you not honor your brother as the others do? Hǫðr turned his head toward Loki's voice. He smiled — a small, sad smile. He said: I have no weapon. And I cannot see where to throw if I had one. Loki said: It is right that you should honor Baldr as the others honor him. Here. I have a dart. Use mine. I will guide your arm. Hǫðr hesitated. He hesitated, in the way a person hesitates when they have been offered something they had not expected to be offered. He had assumed, his whole life, that he could not take part in the things the seeing gods did. He had made his peace with this, in the slow way the blind make their peace with the world that does not see them. Now Loki was offering him a way in. He said: Brother — if you will guide me — yes. I will honor him. Loki put the dart into Hǫðr's right hand. He closed Hǫðr's fingers around it. He turned Hǫðr — gently, the way one turns a child — so that Hǫðr was facing the courtyard. He stood behind Hǫðr. He took Hǫðr's right arm. He guided it. He aimed. He whispered: There. Throw. Hǫðr threw. The dart flew across the courtyard. It flew straight. It flew the way an arrow flies when the archer is good. The other gods — turning, the way one turns toward an unexpected motion — saw the green slender thing flying through the air. They had time, perhaps, to think: another spear. Another sport. Another stone. The dart will turn aside. The dart will not harm him. The dart did not turn aside. There is a quality, the surviving sources do not directly say but the long shape of the story implies, to the flight of that small green dart through the air of the courtyard. It flew, perhaps, in the slow strange way that things fly when fate has chosen them. It flew in a small clear arc. The morning light caught the white berries at its base. The other gods watched it. They watched it the way one watches something one is sure will not happen — the moment between when the cup is knocked over and when the wine is on the table, the moment between when the foot catches on the threshold and when the body strikes the ground. The watching feels like a long moment, although it is only a moment. The dart struck Baldr. It struck him in the chest. It went in clean. It went in deep. It struck him at the heart. Baldr stopped smiling. He looked down at the dart in his chest. He looked at it for a long moment, the way one looks at a thing one cannot quite understand. He put one hand to the dart. He touched the green wood. He touched the small white berries at the base. He swayed. He fell. He fell forward, slowly, to his knees. He sat for a moment on his knees on the cobbles of the courtyard, the dart still in his chest, his hand still on it. Then he fell sideways. He fell onto the cobbles. He did not move again. He was dead.
• 56:37
  Chapter Nine. The Throw. The gods of Asgard stood, for a long moment, where they stood. They did not move. They did not speak. They did not, at first, even fully understand what they had seen. Snorri tells us this directly: that there was, after Baldr fell, a great silence. It was, he says, the worst stroke of fate that had ever struck the gods and men, and at first they could not give it voice. Hǫðr, in the doorway, did not know what had happened. He could not see. He had thrown the dart. He had heard a small soft sound — the sound of a body falling, but he did not know it was a body. He stood with the empty hand still held out, the dart no longer in it, waiting for the laughter that always came at the end of a throw in this game. The laughter did not come. He turned his head, listening for someone. He said: What was that? Did I miss? No one answered him. He said: Brother? Brother, did I throw well? No one answered. The silence went on. It is a strange thing, the silence of a courtyard full of gods who have just seen something they cannot believe. It is not the silence of a held breath. It is the silence of a held believing — a moment in which the gods, all of them at once, are refusing to admit that what they have just seen has actually happened. They stand. They look at the body of Baldr on the cobbles. They look at the small green dart in his chest. They look at the white berries at its base. And they refuse, for several moments, to believe. Then the belief comes. It comes to each of them at different speeds. Þórr — Þórr who is, for all his strength, the most quickly-emotional of the Æsir — Þórr believed first. His face changed. His great hand went to his beard. He made a small sound deep in his chest. The others, who had been watching the body, turned at the small sound, and they saw Þórr's face, and they understood too. Loki was no longer behind him. Loki, when the dart had landed and Baldr had fallen, had quietly stepped backward — into the archway, out of the courtyard, and was gone. The other gods, for several long moments, did not even notice that Loki had been there. Then Frigg saw. Frigg had been at the edge of the courtyard, watching the game. She had seen the dart fly. She had seen — but had not been able, in the moment, to understand — what had happened next. She walked, in a long slow walk, from where she had been standing to where her son lay. She knelt beside him. She put her hand on his face. She put her hand on the small green dart in his chest. She touched the white berries. She knew, then, what the dart was. She made a sound. The sound, Snorri does not describe. Some sounds in the surviving sources are not described, because to describe them would be to make small a thing that was not small. Frigg made the sound a mother makes when she understands that the small thing she did not bother to bind by oath is the thing that has killed her son. She made the sound only once. After it she was silent. She rose. She walked back from the body of her son. She stood with the other gods in the wide courtyard. She did not speak. It was Óðinn who broke the silence. Óðinn the Allfather, the one who had ridden to Hel and back to learn this was coming, the one who had known, since the seeress had spoken to him in her mound, that this was how the story would end — Óðinn stood at the edge of the courtyard. He stood looking at his son's body. He stood for a long time. Then he spoke, in a voice that was, Snorri implies, quite quiet. He said: It is done. He said: It is the worst thing that has ever come to the Æsir. He said: We must take him to his ship. The gods moved. They moved in the slow heavy way of people who have just been struck. They moved without speaking. They lifted Baldr's body — carefully, with the dart still in his chest, because no one had the strength yet to draw it out. They carried him from the courtyard. They carried him through the streets of Asgard, past the watching figures of the warriors and the watching faces of the slain in the windows of Valhǫll, past Heimdallr the watchman who had come down from his post on the walls when he heard the silence, past the figure of Bragi the skald who came running with his hands held to his mouth, past every god and every servant of every god, all the way to the shore. Baldr's ship lay on the shore. Its name was Hringhorni — ring-prow. Snorri tells us it was the greatest of all ships. It was a longship of great length, with a high carved prow that curled inward like the horns of a ram, with shields hung along its sides, with a mast bare of sail. It had been Baldr's ship in his life, but Baldr in his life had not used it for war or for trade. He had used it only sometimes for travel, in calm weather, on calm seas. It was a ship of peace. It would now be a ship for him to lie in.
• 1:02:03
  Chapter Ten. The Greatest Ship in the World. What happened next is told in two places. The first is in Snorri's Gylfaginning fifty, which is our main source for this episode tonight, and which we have been following throughout. The second is in a skaldic poem called Húsdrápa — house-drape, or hall-tapestry — composed in the tenth century by a poet named Úlfr Uggason. The poem is named for the hall in which it was first recited. It was, in its own time, a description of the painted scenes carved on the panels of a hall in western Iceland. The painted scenes included, among others, the scene of Baldr's funeral. Úlfr's poem is the earliest surviving account in any source of what we are about to describe. Snorri, writing two and a half centuries later, is drawing on Úlfr — and on older sources we no longer have. So what we describe here is told in the oldest layer of the Norse tradition that survives. The gods carried Baldr to the shore. They lifted him onto the deck of Hringhorni. They laid him out on the long planks. They straightened his cloak around him. They turned his head so that he looked toward the sea — toward the west, toward the country of mist into which his ship would carry him. Then they tried to launch the ship. The ship would not move. This is the strange detail. Snorri tells us — and Húsdrápa, in its fragmentary surviving lines, confirms it — that the gods could not, with their combined strength, push Hringhorni into the sea. The ship was too great. The wood was too heavy. The keel was set too deep in the sand of the shore. They pushed. They pulled. They put their shoulders to the sides of the hull. The ship did not move. The Æsir, after a time, stopped trying. Þórr — Þórr the strongest, Þórr who held up the cosmic weight when it had to be held — even Þórr had not been able to move the ship. He stood beside it, breathing hard. Someone — the sources do not say who — said: We must send for Hyrrokkin. Hyrrokkin. The name means, in Old Norse, fire-shriveled. She was a giantess. She lived, the sources imply, in a country far to the east of Asgard — a country of high mountains and cold winds where the giantesses of the older races still kept their halls. A messenger was sent. The messenger rode east, fast. Some time later — Snorri does not say how long — Hyrrokkin came. She came in a way that no other being in the surviving sources comes. She came riding a wolf. A great wolf. Wolves are, in the Norse cosmos, often the mounts of giantesses, or the companions of giant-witches. There is something in the imagination of the old Norse storytellers that pairs the wolf with the giantess — perhaps because both, in the old picture of the world, belonged to the country outside the country, to the cold places past the edge of the settled. The wolf was not, in the Norse imagination, the dog of any house. The wolf was the thing the dog had not been domesticated from. The wolf was the older, wilder thing. Snorri does not give the wolf a name. He says only that the wolf was great, and that Hyrrokkin rode it sitting astride, the way a man rides a horse. We may imagine the wolf as tall at the shoulder as a horse — tall enough that Hyrrokkin's feet, hanging down on either side, did not touch the ground. Its fur was the color of old iron. Its eyes — yellow, the way a wolf's eyes are yellow — caught the morning light as it moved. It did not pant. It did not lower its head to sniff the road. It walked, in the long steady stride of a wolf accustomed to traveling, carrying its rider toward Asgard with the patience of something that knew where it was going and was not in a hurry to arrive. She did not have ordinary reins. For reins, Snorri tells us, she had vipers. Two great vipers, twisted together. She held them by their tails. They writhed, in her hands, as she rode. They hissed. They did not bite her. They did her bidding because she was Hyrrokkin and they were vipers and that was the relationship between them. She rode up to the shore of Asgard. The gods saw her coming. They saw the wolf. They saw the vipers. They saw the giantess in her dark heavy cloak, her hair iron-gray, her face stern. They were afraid. They were not afraid of her — they had asked her to come, and she had come. They were afraid of the wolf. A wolf the size of Hyrrokkin's mount, walking freely among the gods, was a thing the gods could not allow. Snorri tells us what they did. They went out, all the strongest of them, and they tried to hold the wolf. Four berserks — strong men of the warrior bands — went out to hold the wolf while Hyrrokkin worked. The wolf did not let itself be held. It threw the four berserks off. They went, the sources say, and got more rope and bound the wolf to the ground, and finally the wolf, bound, lay still. Hyrrokkin dismounted. She walked, with her long slow stride, to the bow of Hringhorni. She put her hands against the prow. She pushed. She pushed with the strength of a great old giantess, and Hringhorni — which the gods could not move — Hringhorni moved. It moved with such force that, Snorri tells us, the rollers under the keel — the round logs the gods had placed there to help the ship slide — caught fire from the friction. Sparks flew. The whole shore around the prow was, for a moment, lit with the bright orange of catching wood. The earth shook beneath the ship. The wood of the rollers blazed. Hringhorni slid forward, slid forward, slid into the water with a great hiss — the great hiss of a heavy hot keel striking cold sea — and was launched. The whole shore, for a moment after the launching, was loud. The sound of the rollers burning. The sound of the seawater meeting the hot hull. The sound of the Æsir, a long collective in-breath from those standing on the shore. The smell of burning oak and pine. The smell of seawater. Above the shore, the gulls — which had been wheeling silently overhead through the morning — now cried out, all at once, as if the launch had broken some long-held silence in them too. Hringhorni floated on the water, low and heavy, the great prow still curling forward over the calm gray waves. It bobbed once. It steadied. It sat, waiting, on the water for what would come next. Þórr was angry. Why Þórr was angry, Snorri does not fully explain. The simplest reading is that Þórr was angry because he, the strongest of the Æsir, had not been able to launch the ship, and a giantess had. The deeper reading is that Þórr, in his grief, needed to be angry at something — and Hyrrokkin, having succeeded where he had failed, was at hand. Þórr raised Mjǫllnir. He was going, in his anger, to bring it down on her head. He was going to kill her there on the shore. The other gods stopped him. They held him. They reasoned with him. They reminded him that Hyrrokkin had done what they had asked her to do. She had launched the ship. She was not their enemy. She was their helper. Þórr lowered the hammer. He turned and walked away from the shore. He did not look at Hyrrokkin again. Hyrrokkin, in the surviving sources, does not appear after this moment. She went, we may assume, back to her wolf and her vipers and her country in the east, and was not seen by the gods again. Then came the burning. The gods began to prepare the pyre on the ship's deck. They piled wood around Baldr's body. They placed his ship's gear at his feet. They placed his weapons beside him — the spear, the shield, the sword he had carried in his life but never used in battle. They placed gold around him. They placed silver. They placed the small things he had loved in life. His wife came forward. Nanna, daughter of Nepr, the goddess who had been Baldr's wife. The surviving sources tell us little about her. We know that she was Baldr's wife. We know that she had a son with him named Forseti, who would, in the time after this story, become the god of justice in Asgard. We know that she was, in the small fragments that survive, gentle. She came to the side of the ship. She looked at her husband lying on the pyre. She did not weep. Snorri says only that she died — that her heart broke from sorrow, and she died on the shore. The gods, when they saw it, lifted her body also, and they placed her on the pyre beside Baldr. Two now, lying together. The husband and the wife. Óðinn came forward then. He took, from his arm, the great gold ring Draupnir. Draupnir is one of the strangest objects in the Norse mythology. It is a gold ring made by the dwarves. It has the property that every ninth night, eight more rings of equal weight drip from it. It is a self-replicating ring of gold. It is one of Óðinn's greatest treasures. He took it from his arm. He placed it on the pyre. He placed it beside Baldr's hand. Why he did this, Snorri does not say. We will let our small interpretation stand: he was giving his son, who had ridden no road into death and would now ride a fire-road, a gift for the country beyond. Baldr's horse was led forward. The horse, in its trappings of gold and bronze, walked up the gangway. It walked, in the slow way of horses on a strange surface, onto the deck of the ship. It stood beside Baldr. It did not, in the surviving sources, struggle. It seemed to know it had been asked to come. The fire was set. A dwarf — and this is the small strange moment in Snorri's account — a dwarf named Litr ran in front of Þórr at the moment Þórr was raising Mjǫllnir to bless the pyre. Why he ran in front of him, Snorri does not say. Perhaps he was clumsy. Perhaps he was running for some other purpose and crossed the wrong path. Þórr, who was already on edge, kicked the dwarf. He kicked him with such force that Litr was thrown into the flames of the pyre. Litr burned with Baldr and with Nanna and with the horse and with Draupnir and with all the small things of Baldr's life. Thus, Snorri says, was Baldr burned. The ship, on fire, drifted out from the shore. The flames rose. The smoke went up into the gray sky. The gods stood on the shore and watched. They watched the ship go out, burning, into the western sea. They watched it become a small bright shape on the water. They watched it become a smaller shape. They watched it become a point of light. They watched until they could not see it anymore. Then they turned and walked, in silence, back into the city of Asgard.
• 1:13:13
  Chapter Eleven. Hermóðr's Nine Nights. The gods did not, all of them, accept Baldr's death. Some of them — Snorri implies — settled into it the way one settles into a great grief. They did the work of the city. They tended the orchards. They sat the council. They went on, in the slow heavy way of those who have lost something irreplaceable, with the business of being gods. But Frigg — Frigg the mother — did not settle. She stood, in the days after the funeral, in the great hall of the Æsir. She looked around at the assembled gods. She said: Who among you would ride down to Hel for me, and offer Hel ransom for my son? Who would do this thing? Snorri's chapter 49 tells us who answered her. Hermóðr the bold. Hermóðr was another son of Óðinn — and we should pause briefly on him too. Hermóðr is, in the surviving Norse sources, a minor figure. He appears mostly in this story. The lateness of his appearance in the texts has led some scholars to wonder whether he is an old figure or a relatively new one. We will not settle that tonight. We will say only that Hermóðr was Baldr's brother. He was a god of Asgard. He was, the sources imply, swift on his feet and brave of heart. He was not, perhaps, the obvious one to send. He was not the strongest god in the hall — Þórr was. He was not the wisest — Óðinn was. He was not the most clever — well, Loki was, and Loki was at this moment not in the hall, and the gods did not yet quite know why. Hermóðr was none of these things. He was, perhaps, the bravest in the simplest meaning of the word. He was willing to go because Baldr was his brother, and because no one else had stepped forward yet, and because someone had to. He stepped forward. He said: I will go. Óðinn took the bridle of Sleipnir — his own eight-legged horse, the only horse strong enough to ride the road down — and put it in Hermóðr's hand. Hermóðr swung up onto the saddle. The other gods watched. He turned the horse east, toward the road that goes down. He kicked Sleipnir into a run. He rode for nine nights. This is the great detail of Hermóðr's journey, and it is given to us in Snorri's chapter 49 almost word for word. He rode through valleys so deep and so dark that he could see nothing — not the road, not the sides of the valley, not the head of his own horse. Only the deep cold dark of the country below the country, and the soft regular sound of the eight hooves on the unseen ground beneath, and the cold breath of the horse on his hands. Think about what nine nights of riding in the dark would be. Nine nights, with no sleep. Nine nights, with no companion. Nine nights, with no fire — for there was nothing in the country below the country with which to make a fire, and even if there had been, Hermóðr would not have stopped. Nine nights, with no food — for he could not see to eat what he carried, and he was not, by then, in the part of himself that thought about eating. Nine nights, in which the only sound was the soft eight-fold drumming of Sleipnir's hooves, and the only thing he could feel was the cold air moving past his face, and the warm reassuring bulk of the horse beneath him. He rode through the country of mist. He rode through the country below the country of mist. He rode through countries the names of which the surviving sources do not record. We will not invent names for them. We will say only that they were countries of cold, and countries of dark, and countries through which no living thing had ever ridden before — except, perhaps, his father Óðinn on his earlier ride, and even Óðinn had not ridden them in the way Hermóðr was riding them now. Óðinn had ridden them as the wisest of the gods, who knew where he was going. Hermóðr was riding them as a brother who was riding in grief, who did not know where he was going, who knew only that he had to keep going. On the ninth night, he came to a river. The river was called Gjǫll. The name means, in Old Norse, "loud-noise." It was a river of crashing water and grinding ice. Across the river was the country of Hel proper — the country of the unhonored dead, the country where those who had not died in battle went to live their second long quiet existence. The river was spanned by a bridge. The bridge was called Gjallarbrú — Gjǫll's bridge. It was a bridge of gold. It had been built long ago by the gods, although in the surviving sources who built it is not clear. The planks of the bridge were gold. The rails were gold. The whole bridge gleamed dimly even in the deep dark of the country east of the road. Hermóðr rode onto the bridge. The bridge resounded under the hooves of Sleipnir. A maiden stood at the far end of the bridge. Her name was Móðguðr. The name means, in Old Norse, "battle-weary" — or possibly "spirit-battle." She was the guardian of the bridge. She watched who came across, and asked of each their name and their lineage, and what their business was on the road to Hel. She saw Hermóðr coming. She said: What is your name? What is your lineage? Yesterday five hosts of the dead passed across this bridge, and it did not resound as loudly under their feet as it resounds now under yours alone. You have not the color of the dead about you. You are not pale. You are not bloodless. Why have you come to ride to Hel before you are dead? Hermóðr drew up Sleipnir at the far end of the bridge. He said: I am Hermóðr the bold, son of Óðinn. I have come to look for my brother Baldr. Has he passed this way? Móðguðr said: Yes. Baldr has crossed Gjallarbrú. He passed yesterday. The road to Hel lies down and to the north from here. Ride down. Ride down and to the north. You will find the gates. Hermóðr rode on. He rode down and to the north. He rode through countries colder than the countries he had passed before. He rode until the road brought him at last to the great gates of Hel. The gates were closed. They were great iron gates. They were the gates Snorri described to us already — the gates of Hel, the gates beyond which Óðinn had not gone, on his earlier ride to wake the seeress. They were closed against the living. Hermóðr did not stop. He could not stop. He gathered Sleipnir under him. He leaned forward. He kicked the eight-legged horse into the hardest run it had run on the whole nine-night journey. Sleipnir leapt. He cleared the gates. He cleared them with the ground a great distance below his hooves. He landed on the other side, his eight hooves striking the cold stone of the courtyard within. He did not stumble. He came smoothly to a walking pace. Hermóðr rode through the courtyard. He rode up to the door of Hel's great hall. He dismounted. He went inside. In the hall of Hel, the benches were strewn with gold, as the seeress at the mound had said. The mead was brewed and set out. The hall was deep and long. Its walls were of dark stone. Its ceiling, where it could be seen, was hung with the smoke of small old fires that never quite went out and never quite blazed. The hall was full of figures — many figures — sitting at the long benches, eating and drinking in a slow quiet way, the way the dead eat and drink. They did not look up when Hermóðr came in. They did not seem to notice him. At the head of the high table, in the great high seat of honor, sat Baldr — pale now, with the pallor of the dead, but otherwise as he had been in life. His hair was the same. His face was the same. The small new pallor around his eyes was the only sign of what had happened to him. He saw Hermóðr come in. He stood up. He came around the head of the table. They embraced. Snorri does not give us this moment in any detail. He says only that the brothers were together, and that they spoke. We will not invent the speech they spoke. We will say only that, in the long shape of the story, this was the last time the two brothers would be together — or, in the prophecy we will tell on the last evening of our season, the last time before the new world. They sat together at the high table. They drank from the cups in front of them. They did not eat — or if they ate, the surviving sources do not say so. They spoke. Whatever they spoke of, it was not, in the part of it we are told, an unhappy speaking. They were brothers. They had loved each other. They had time, in the long pale evening of Hel's hall, to be brothers for a while longer. His brother Hermóðr saw him there. He sat with him a long time. They spoke, although what they spoke of Snorri does not record. They spoke through the night. In the morning, Hermóðr went to the goddess Hel. Hel was the daughter of Loki. She was the queen of the country named for her. She is described, in Snorri's account elsewhere, as half-fair and half-livid — that is, half her body alive and the other half the color of death. She was strange to look at, but she was not cruel. She kept her country with the cold patience of one who knew she would have all the dead, eventually. Hermóðr stood before her. He said: Lady. I have come to ride down for my brother. The Æsir have sent me. They mourn him so deeply that the worlds are heavy with the weight of their mourning. Let him return. Hel looked at Hermóðr for a long moment. She was not, the implied tone of her words suggests, easily persuaded. But she said: I will test what you say. If Baldr is truly so beloved that every thing in the world will weep for him, I will let him go back. If even one thing refuses to weep, he will stay with me. She said this and she sat in her seat and she waited. We may pause, here, and notice the cruelty of the condition. It is not, in any ordinary sense, a kind condition. It is a condition that has been set knowing that there are, in the great wide worlds, many things that do not weep. Stones do not weep. Iron does not weep. The cold black places between the stars do not weep. To require that every thing in the world weep for one mortal — even a mortal as beloved as Baldr — is to set a condition that is, in its very form, almost impossible to fulfill. But Hel is not, in the surviving sources, exactly cruel. She is the keeper of a country, and the keeper of a country has rules. The rules are not personal. The rules are how the country runs. Hel did not require that every thing in the world weep because she wanted Baldr to stay. She required it because Baldr, having died, belonged to her country now — and the only way the rules of her country could be set aside was by a demonstration that the rest of the worlds wanted him back more than her country had the right to keep him. If the demonstration succeeded, she would let him go. If even one thing in the worlds did not weep, the demonstration would fail, and she would keep him by the same logic by which any keeper of any country keeps what is theirs. Hermóðr understood the terms. He understood them in the part of his mind that had ridden nine nights in the dark to get there. He understood them in the part of his heart that had loved his brother. He understood them, also, in the part of him that knew his foster-brother Loki, and knew that there was, very likely, somewhere in the worlds, something Loki could find that would refuse to weep. But he did not let himself think of that. Not yet. He rose. He bowed. He left her hall. He walked back to the courtyard. He mounted Sleipnir. He rode out through the gates — which opened for him this time, on his way out — and he rode back up the long road, through the country below the country of mist, through the country of mist, through nine more nights of cold dark. He returned to Asgard on the eighteenth night since he had left. He told the Æsir what Hel had said. The Æsir sent out messengers in every direction. They sent messengers to all the kingdoms of Miðgarðr. They sent messengers to the high places and the low places. They sent messengers to the kings of men, the queens of women, the chiefs of the dwarves, the elves of the bright country, the elves of the dark country. We may imagine, here, the kind of messengers the Æsir sent. They were not, the surviving sources do not tell us, ordinary messengers. They were swift. They were carried by horses that could cover in a day what a mortal messenger would cover in a week. They went by every road. They went by paths the gods had used in older times and had since forgotten. They went to places no living mortal had gone in a thousand years. They carried the same message everywhere: weep. Weep for Baldr, son of Óðinn, son of Frigg, brother of Hermóðr, husband of Nanna, father of Forseti, the most beloved of the Æsir, who lies in Hel and waits to come home. The message was simple. The message was direct. The message was hard to deny. And the answer, in every place, was the same. Men wept. Women wept. Children wept. The dwarves wept in their forges under the mountains, and their tears hissed on the hot iron of the anvils, and they did not stop their work because of the weeping — they wept and worked at the same time, because that is how the dwarves grieve. The elves wept in their gardens, the bright elves of Álfheimr and the dark elves of Svartalfheim, both kinds together, who did not in the ordinary course of their long lives weep, but on these mornings wept. The kings wept on their thrones, before their courts, without shame. The queens wept in their chambers. The cattle in the fields wept. The horses in the stables wept. The dogs at the doors wept. The cats on the hearths wept. The small mice in the walls wept. The fires in the hearths gave up small bright tears that hissed on the hearthstones. The very stones at the edges of the roads — and here Snorri's account is at its most lyrical — the very stones wept. There was, in that season, a phenomenon that mortals afterward remembered: when the cold mornings came, the stones along the roadsides would be covered in a kind of dew that was not exactly dew, that came from the stones themselves rather than from the air. The mortals did not understand what they were seeing. They thought it was a strange new weather. The Æsir understood. The stones were weeping for Baldr. Iron wept. The blades of weapons in their scabbards, the heads of axes hanging on the walls of halls, the small thin needles in the sewing boxes of women, the great iron rings of gates and the small iron nails of doors — all of them, in the cold mornings of that season, were beaded with a strange wet that was not condensation, because it formed on the iron when the air was dry. The iron was weeping. The metals wept. Gold wept its slow soft tears. Silver wept its bright fast tears. Copper wept tears the color of its own surface. Lead wept the heaviest tears, which fell straight down and did not splash. Tin wept tears that, in some traditions of the story, made small ringing sounds as they hit the floor. The trees wept. There was, in the worlds, in that season, a strange phenomenon that mortals afterward remembered: in the cold mornings, the trees would weep small clear drops from their bark. Snorri describes it directly. He says — and we will give it close to his own words — that the trees in those mornings were seen by men to have wept, and that this is the same thing that happens when trees come out of frost, where they shed drops as the sun rises. He is telling us, in his careful scholar's way, that the natural phenomenon mortals had observed in their lives — sap and frost-melt running down the bark of trees in the early mornings of late winter — was, according to the old story, the trees weeping for Baldr. The story explains the natural fact. The natural fact remembers the story. The sicknesses wept. This is the strange one. Snorri tells us that the sicknesses, which had taken the oath not to harm Baldr, also wept for him. We may imagine, for a moment, what that means. A fever, hot in a man's chest, weeping. A cough, in the throat of a small child, weeping. A wasting sickness, slow at its work in some old woman in some far country, pausing in its work to weep. The poisons wept — the venom in the fangs of serpents, the dark drops in certain berries, all of them wept. The serpents wept, opening their cold dry mouths, and small bright drops fell from them onto the rocks where they coiled. Everything that lived, everything that did not live but had once been thought to live, everything that the gods had thought to ask — everything wept. Almost. There was one thing that did not weep. In a cave, far from any road, in a country east of the road to Hel — in a cave whose mouth was set into the side of a low gray hill, whose floor was packed dry earth, whose ceiling was hung with the smoke of an old small fire — there sat a giantess. Her name was given, in Snorri's account, as Þǫkk. The name means, in Old Norse, "thanks." Whose thanks she was given, or for what, is not explained. She was old. She was alone. She sat by her small fire in her cave and she did her own small business and she did not speak with anyone. A messenger of the Æsir came to her cave. The messenger stood at the mouth of the cave. The messenger bowed. The messenger said: Mother. Lady. Will you weep for Baldr the son of Óðinn, that he may come back from Hel? Þǫkk did not rise. She did not turn her head. She did not even look at the messenger. She spoke from her place by the fire. She spoke in verse — the surviving sources preserve her words as a small couplet, which we will speak in English tonight: Þǫkk will weep dry tears for Baldr's funeral journey. The son of the Allfather is none of mine, in life nor in death. Let Hel hold what she has. The messenger heard the words. The messenger turned. The messenger walked back out of the cave, back along the road, back through the long countries, back at last to Asgard. The Æsir heard the report. They sat for a long time in silence, as they had sat in silence on the day of Baldr's death. They knew, then, that Baldr would not be coming back. They knew that Hel would keep him. They knew that the small old giantess in the cave had refused, alone of all the worlds, to weep. And they knew — although Snorri does not state it outright in this chapter — they knew, or strongly suspected, who Þǫkk really was. It is the long tradition, in the surviving sources and in the centuries of scholarship that have followed them, that Þǫkk was Loki. Loki in another shape. Loki taking the form of a giantess in a cave, to ensure that his work was complete. Loki refusing to weep for the god he had killed. Snorri leaves this implicit. He does not say so directly. He says only that "men believed" that this was Loki. We will let men believe it tonight.
• 1:32:38
  Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Wolf at the Edge of Time. Baldr did not come back. He stayed in Hel. He sat, the surviving sources tell us, in the high seat in Hel's hall, with the gold strewn on the benches and the covered mead-cup at his hand. He waited. What he was waiting for is told in one short passage of Vǫluspá, the great prophetic poem of the Poetic Edda. The poem describes the coming of the appointed twilight — the day when the gods will face their final fates. The poem describes the wolf in the east, the great wolf bound on the island Lyngvi by the cord called Gleipnir, the wolf who is called Fenrir — and you may remember his binding from an earlier evening's story. The poem describes the serpent that lies in the sea. The poem describes the ship of the dead that will come from the east. The poem describes the burning of the world. And then, at the end of the burning, the poem describes the new world that will rise from the sea. A green earth. A small clear place. The sons of the dead gods, walking out into the morning, finding each other, finding a place to sit and play with old game pieces in the grass. In that new world, Vǫluspá tells us, Baldr will return. He will come back from Hel. He will come back into the green earth after the burning. He will sit with the surviving gods in the new place. He will speak with his brother Hǫðr, who will also be there — for the new world, in the poem's vision, is the world after the old quarrels have been forgotten, and Hǫðr will be there beside him. This is the long shape of it. But that is for another evening — for the eleventh and the twelfth episodes of our season, when we will tell the appointed twilight and what comes after. For tonight, the story closes on the silence in Asgard after the messenger returned. The gods stood in the great hall. They knew now that Baldr would not be coming back to them. They knew the worlds had wept — all but one. They knew Loki had killed their son with the small dart of mistletoe and had then, in the form of a giantess in a cave, refused the weeping that would have brought him home. What the gods did to Loki, in time, is also a story for another evening. We will tell it on our next night. There is a cave, in the story to come. There is a serpent. There is the long pain. We will not begin it tonight. For tonight, we close on the shore of Asgard. The pyre-fire of Hringhorni has long gone down. The smoke has drifted east on the wind. The shore is cold. The sea is dark. The waves come in, the way waves come in, against the cold sand. The sound of the waves is the only sound on the shore. The footprints of the gods who carried Baldr's body to the ship — the prints of bare feet and of sandaled feet and of the heavier feet of Þórr — are still in the sand, just above the line where the tide will reach. By the morning the tide will have washed them away. By the morning there will be no sign on the shore that the ship was launched there. Only the small charred remains of the rollers, half-buried in the sand, will remain to tell, for a few days more, what happened. The gods know now what their bright son's dreams meant. They know now that even Baldr the most beautiful — Baldr who shone with his own light, Baldr whose hall was so clean nothing unclean could enter it, Baldr whose mother walked all the worlds and took every oath she could think to take — even Baldr could die. They know, now, that one small parasitic plant on an oak west of Valhǫll was enough. They know that the small things are the dangerous things. They sit, in the great hall of Asgard, in the evening of the day Hermóðr returned. They do not speak much. The mead is on the table. The bread is laid out. They eat little. They drink little. They look at one another's faces, and on each face the small new lines of grief are visible. In the long shadow of this evening — and this is something the sources do not say outright, but is implied by everything that comes after — in the long shadow of this evening, the worlds have changed. Before Baldr died, the gods were the gods. They knew, in some far-off way, that they would die in the end. They knew the appointed twilight was coming. But it was far away. It was something a seeress might speak of in a deep mound. It was not real. After Baldr died, it was real. The first death had come. The first irreplaceable thing had been taken. The shape of what was coming was no longer hidden. The wolf at the edge of time — the wolf bound on the island Lyngvi — the wolf whose binding we told you of three evenings ago — that wolf was now no longer a thing that the gods could pretend to ignore. That wolf was waiting. And the wolf knew, somehow, what had happened in Asgard. The wolf knew the gods had taken their first wound. The wolf knew that the long pull on the cord Gleipnir was, very slowly, beginning to loosen. You may have felt something like this in your own life. A first death. A first irreplaceable thing taken. The way the world, after such a thing, no longer looks the way it used to look. The way the small remaining people in the room — the people who are still there, the people you still have — become more precious, but also somehow more fragile. The way a person who has known a great loss walks through their days differently afterward. Slower. More careful. More aware that everything around them could, at any moment, be the next thing taken. The gods of Asgard knew this, on the night Hermóðr returned with the news of Þǫkk in the cave. They did not speak of it. They sat in their hall. The mead was on the table. The fire was low. Frigg, who had walked all the worlds to bind every thing she could think to bind, sat at her place at the long table. She had not, since the news returned from the cave, cried again. Her grief had moved into a different shape. It had become the shape of stone — a heavy unchanging weight she would, for the rest of her long life, carry with her wherever she went. She would carry it, in time, into the day of the appointed twilight. She would carry it across the burning of the world. She would, in the new world that came after, still carry it. The stone of a mother who knew that her son, who had been bound by every promise the world could give, had been killed by the one small plant she had not asked. Óðinn sat at the head of the table. He did not speak. He had, in his long life, learned many things. He had given his eye for one of them. He had hung on the tree for nine nights for others. But of all the things he had learned, what he had learned tonight — that even the most-loved of the gods could die, and that the one who had killed him was a god of Óðinn's own household, his own foster-brother — what he had learned tonight was, perhaps, the heaviest thing. Þórr sat midway down the table. The hammer Mjǫllnir was on the bench beside him. He had used it, that day, to bless the pyre. He had used it, in his anger, to threaten Hyrrokkin on the shore. He had, in his sudden flash of grief and rage, kicked the dwarf Litr into the fire. He sat now and looked at the hammer beside him, and his great hand rested on the handle, and his face was, for once, not the face of the storm-god. It was the face of a brother. Bragi sat with his harp at the far end of the table. He had not, since the news came, played anything. The harp lay on the bench beside him, untouched. We will say only that, in the long traditions of the story, no song was ever composed in Asgard for Baldr — no song that could match what was being mourned, no song that could carry the weight. Bragi sat with his harp untouched, and he did not, on this night, try. Hermóðr, the brother who had ridden down for him, sat near Óðinn. He had not eaten since he had come back. He had drunk a little water. He would sleep, eventually, that night, for he was very tired — nine nights of riding down and nine nights of riding back, and the day of the messengers between, and the long evening of waiting for them to return. But he had not slept yet. He sat with his hands flat on the table, and his eyes were open, and he was looking — not at anything in particular — at the wood of the table itself. And the wolf in the east — and the wolf at the edge of time — did not move. But the wolf knew. That is the story for tonight. Tomorrow, in another evening — we will tell of what came after. We will tell of Loki, who fled from Asgard after this, and who in the form of a salmon hid in a river under a waterfall, and who was caught in a net the gods themselves had taught the salmon, and who was carried back to a cave under the earth and there bound — bound the way Fenrir had been bound, but with crueler bonds, and for a longer time. We will tell, on a coming night, of his children, who had been taken from him long before this, and what the gods did to each of them. We will tell of the slow waiting for the appointed twilight that begins on the night this story closes. We will tell, in time, of the new world. We will tell, in the very last of these evenings, of what Vǫluspá tells us: that after the appointed twilight has come, after the wolf has swallowed the sun and the great burning has happened and the gods have fallen and the world has sunk back into the sea — after all of that, the sources say, the sea will rise again. Green earth will come up out of the water. A small clear morning will come. The gods who survive — and there are, in the prophecy, a few — will walk out into the new grass. They will find the small game pieces of the old gods, the small carved wooden tokens the old gods used to play with on the long evenings, half-buried in the new earth where the old halls had been. They will pick them up. They will sit on the new grass in the new morning, and they will look at the game pieces in their hands, and they will, in the slow way of survivors, begin to remember. And Baldr will be there. He will come back from Hel. The prophecy tells us so. He will come back in the new world, in the new green. He will sit with his brother Hǫðr, who in that new world will not be blind, and who will not need to be forgiven for what he did in the old world, because in the new world it will be understood that the old quarrels are not the new quarrels. They will sit on the grass. They will play with the game pieces. They will speak, perhaps, of small things. They will be, again, the brothers they had been before the dart. This is the end of the story. It is in the very far distance. But it is there. It is, the prophecy implies, the only kindness the old gods got — the knowledge, on the night Hermóðr returned with the news of Þǫkk in the cave, that somewhere in the long unfolding of time, after the burning, there would be a morning. And in that morning, Baldr the most beloved, the brightest, the one whose dreams had been so heavy — Baldr would walk out into the new grass, and he would not, in the new world, dream those dreams again. But that is for another evening. For tonight, we close here. If you have stayed with me this far — and few do — then you have been very patient. If you have drifted off, somewhere in the long ride of Sleipnir, or in the sport of the gods, or on the cold shore where Hringhorni burned, or in the cave where Þǫkk refused to weep — then you are exactly where you should be. The Almanac will return. Goodnight, dear listener. Goodnight.