Vali

Vali is the god of vengeance, a son of Odin by the giantess Rind, and he exists in the mythology for a single purpose: to avenge the death of Baldr. The prophetic poem Voluspa and Snorri's account tell that Vali was conceived and born expressly to punish the killing, and that he grew to full manhood in a single day, neither washing his hands nor combing his hair, the sources say, until he had brought the slayer to the funeral pyre.

The one he kills is Hodr, the blind brother whose hand Loki had guided to throw the fatal mistletoe. Vali is thus a personification of the duty of blood-vengeance that lay at the heart of the old Norse moral world, in which a death within the family demanded requital and a designated avenger. He is one of the gods named among the survivors of Ragnarok: when the old world has burned and a new earth arises, Vali is said to be among those who live on to inhabit it, so that the god born of a single act of vengeance outlasts the destruction of the very order he avenged.

Norse mythology contains a second figure named Vali entirely distinct from Odin's avenging son, and the coincidence is stranger than it first appears because both bear directly on the same central tragedy, the death of Baldr. In Snorri's account of Loki's punishment, after the gods have caught Loki and dragged him to a cave to bind him for his role in engineering Baldr's death, one of Loki's own sons, also named Vali, is transformed into a wolf and tears apart his brother Narfi, and it is Narfi's entrails, turned to iron by the gods, that are then used to bind Loki fast to the rocks.

Whether this second Vali's name is a genuine coincidence, a scribal or oral confusion between two similarly named figures over generations of retelling, or a deliberate thematic echo linking the punishment of Loki to the same act of vengeance that Odin's son Vali exists to carry out, is not settled among scholars of the Eddas, and the sources themselves make no comment on the overlap. What can be said is that the name Vali appears twice in the aftermath of Baldr's death, once as the divine avenger conceived specifically to kill Baldr's slayer, and once as the instrument, transformed into a beast, of the punishment inflicted on the mastermind behind that slaying, so that the single name threads through both halves of the story's reckoning, the killing of Hodr and the binding of Loki, whether by design or by the accidents of oral transmission across the centuries before the tales were written down.