Baldr

Baldr is the shining god of the Aesir, radiant, gracious and so beloved that Snorri says nothing but good can be told of him, the son of Odin and Frigg. When Baldr began to be troubled by dreams foretelling his death, his mother Frigg travelled the world and took an oath from every thing, fire and water, iron and stone, beasts, birds and sickness, that none would harm him. Only the mistletoe, a young plant she thought too small to matter, was passed over. Delighted that nothing could hurt him, the gods made a game of hurling weapons at Baldr and watching them fall harmless. Loki, discovering the one exception, fashioned a dart of mistletoe and guided the hand of Baldr's blind brother Hodr, who threw it and killed him. The death of the best of the gods is the turning point of Norse myth, the first of the calamities that lead toward Ragnarok.

Baldr's death is not told the same way in every medieval source. Saxo Grammaticus, writing his Latin Gesta Danorum around 1200, gives a historicised version in which Baldr and Hodr are rival human warriors, a demigod and a mortal prince, fighting for the hand of a woman named Nanna, with no mention of the mistletoe, the oath-taking or Loki's scheming found in Snorri's later Icelandic account; Hodr kills Baldr in this version with a magic sword rather than a dart. Modern scholars generally treat the two versions as independent branches of a shared older tradition, evidence that the myth of Baldr's death circulated in more than one form even before the Eddas were written down.

After Baldr's death the god Hermod rode nine nights down the dark road to the realm of Hel to beg for his return. Hel answered that she would release him only if every thing in the world, living and dead, would weep for him. Messengers went out, and all things wept, all but one giantess, Thokk, who refused, saying Baldr was no use to her and Hel could keep what she had; and she is generally understood to have been Loki in disguise. So Baldr remained among the dead. His funeral, on the great ship Hringhorni, is one of the grandest scenes in the mythology. Yet his story does not end in loss: the prophecies say that after Ragnarok, when the old world has burned and a new earth rises green from the sea, Baldr will return from the dead to live in the renewed world, a note of rebirth that later readers, rightly or wrongly, have often compared with other returning gods.

The eighth-century Ardre VIII picture stone from Gotland, Sweden, carved with a dense sequence of mythological scenes, is widely interpreted by scholars as including an image of a great ship being launched, generally read as Baldr's funeral vessel Hringhorni, whose launching Snorri says required the strength of the giantess Hyrrokkin because none of the gods could move it alone; if the identification is correct, the stone would be among the very few pieces of Viking Age art depicting this specific episode of the myth, predating by centuries the written Icelandic sources that otherwise preserve it.