Vidar

Vidar is a son of Odin by the giantess Grid, called the silent god and reckoned second in strength only to Thor. His whole significance points to a single future moment: at Ragnarok, after the wolf Fenrir has swallowed Odin, Vidar will avenge his father by killing the wolf, setting one foot in its lower jaw, protected by a great shoe said to be made from all the leather scraps that cobblers through the ages have trimmed and discarded, and tearing its jaws apart (in the poem Vafthrudnismal, thrusting a sword through its heart). More striking still, Vidar is one of the few gods fated to survive the destruction: with his brother Vali and the sons of Thor he inherits the renewed world that rises green from the sea after Ragnarok, so that the silent god is both the avenger of the old order and an heir of the new.

A tenth-century stone cross at Gosforth in Cumbria, England, carved after the region's Norse settlement, is read by most scholars as depicting Vidar's fight with Fenrir: a figure with a spear plants one foot in the jaw of a great wolf-headed beast while gripping its upper jaw with his hand, one of the few pieces of surviving art, rather than poetry, thought to show this specific moment of Ragnarok, and evidence that the story circulated among Norse settlers in England as vividly as it did in Iceland.

Beyond the moment of his vengeance, the eddic poem Grimnismal supplies a detail found for few other gods: a description of Vidar's own dwelling, a land called Vidi, said to be overgrown with brushwood and tall grass, a wild, unworked place rather than a hall of gold and silver like those given to Odin or Forseti. The poem states plainly that Vidar will make his home there once he has avenged his father, riding out from this overgrown land to face Fenrir when the appointed time comes, so that his very dwelling place is described in advance as waiting for an event that has not yet happened within the narrative's own timeline, a rare instance of Norse mythological geography built explicitly around a future rather than a past or present event.

Scholars have connected the name Vidar and the wild, wooded character of Vidi to a possible original association with wilderness or forest itself, since several proposed etymologies link the god's name to words for wood or open, untamed land, though the precise etymology remains debated rather than settled, and it is consistent at least with the imagery of the overgrown, quiet realm Grimnismal assigns him. This picture of the silent god's own reserved, wild territory, apart from the glittering halls of the more sociable gods, reinforces the character the sources otherwise ascribe him even in his own dwelling: a solitary, self contained figure defined by a single decisive future act rather than by ongoing participation in the busy, feasting, quarreling life of Asgard that occupies so much of the mythology's surviving narrative.