Heimdall is the ever-watchful guardian of the gods, who dwells where the rainbow bridge Bifrost meets the sky and keeps the road to Asgard. His senses are supernaturally acute: he needs less sleep than a bird, can see for a hundred leagues by day or night, and can hear the wool growing on a sheep and the grass growing in the earth. His great possession is the horn Gjallarhorn, whose blast will summon the gods to the final battle when the enemies of Asgard advance across Bifrost at the world's end. A curious detail of his origin is that he was born of nine mothers, usually understood as nine sisters, possibly the waves of the sea, and he is called the white god, the shining one.
Heimdall's obscure self-description, that he is the child of nine mothers, comes down to us only as a fragment: Snorri Sturluson quotes a single line, said to be from a now otherwise lost poem called Heimdalargaldr, Heimdall's Chant, in which the god states this directly, and no fuller version of the poem has survived, leaving the nine-mothers tradition a tantalising remnant of a text scholars can no longer read in full. A separate saga tradition, the late Sorla thattr, tells how Heimdall and Loki once fought each other in the shape of seals off a skerry to determine who would win back Freyja's stolen necklace Brisingamen, a myth outside the main Eddic corpus that nonetheless casts Heimdall in his familiar role as guardian and recoverer of what belongs to the gods.