Heimdall

Heimdall is born of nine mothers who are also sisters to one another. He says so himself in the Heimdalargaldr, a lost poem of which Snorri preserves only two lines: «I am the son of nine mothers, I am the son of nine sisters.» The Hyndluljóð repeats the fact and goes so far as to name them one by one. No source explains how this is possible, and the identification of the nine with the waves of the sea, the daughters of Ægir and Rán, is not in the texts: it is a conjecture of modern commentators, resting on the fact that several of those names are also names of waves. Snorri calls him «the whitest of the Æsir» and gives him two bynames that have become his mark: Hallinskíði and Gullintanni, «the gold-toothed». He lives in Himinbjörg, «the cliffs of heaven», exactly where the Bifröst meets Asgard, and rides a horse called Gulltoppr, «golden mane».

His senses are not described with adjectives but with two concrete examples that recur in every source: he sees a hundred leagues away, by night as well as by day, and he hears the grass growing in the earth and the wool growing on the backs of the sheep. He needs less sleep than a bird. The Gjallarhorn, «the resounding horn», is heard in all the worlds when he blows it. The Völuspá adds a detail that nobody has managed to explain entirely: it says that Heimdall's hljóð is hidden beneath the tree Yggdrasill, in the very place where Odin left his eye in pledge, and hljóð means both «hearing» and «sound», so that it is not known whether what lies stored down there is the horn or the god's own hearing. The Þrymskviða finally credits him with something that in principle does not belong to an Æsir: «he knew the future, like the other Vanir.» It is the line that has led more than one scholar to wonder on which side this watchman was born.

Ragnarök begins when Heimdall stands up and blows the Gjallarhorn with all his strength: the sound reaches the nine worlds, the gods wake and gather in assembly. Then he goes down to the plain of Vígríðr and there he meets Loki. Snorri is terse and leaves no room for doubt: «Heimdall and Loki will fight, and each will kill the other.» There is no victor. He is credited with no feat against giants of ice or fire, because no source grants him one: Surtr, Fenrir and Jörmungandr have other adversaries assigned to them, and Heimdall's part in the end of the world comes down to two exact and consecutive acts, to warn and to die killing. It is, at bottom, the same function he has performed his whole existence: he does not win the war, he announces it; and when at last he comes down from his post, it is to spend himself entirely in a single blow.

Heimdall's longest myth is not one he stars in under his own name. The Rígsþula tells how a god called Ríg walks the world, lodges three nights in three houses and fathers a son in each: Þræll, the thrall with knotted hands; Karl, the ruddy-faced farmer; and Jarl, the fair-haired boy with shining eyes who learns the runes and founds the nobility. From those three descend the three classes of Scandinavian society, and the poem is for that reason among the most quoted sources for understanding how that society saw itself. The poem's prose introduction states that Ríg is Heimdall, and the Völuspá backs it from its very first stanza, where the seeress addresses «the sons of Heimdall, greater and lesser», that is, all mankind. It is worth being precise about where the identification comes from: it is made by that prose preface, copied by a scribe, and not by the poem itself, and some have proposed that the original Ríg was Odin. Even with that caution, Heimdall is the only Norse god called the father of the human race, and that is a very strange role for a watchman.

Heimdall and Loki do not meet for the first time at Ragnarök, and knowing this changes the sense of the final duel. Around the year 985 the Icelandic skald Úlfr Uggason composed the Húsdrápa to describe the scenes carved in the new hall of Óláfr the Peacock at Hjarðarholt, and one of those carvings was this fight. Snorri quotes the verse and explains what could be seen: Heimdall and Loki struggled at Vágasker, beside the rock called Singasteinn, over Freyja's necklace Brísingamen, and they did so both transformed into seals. Heimdall won and returned the necklace. Of the whole poem only the stanzas Snorri chose to copy survive, so we do not know how Loki came to steal it nor how the matter ended between them. It is enough, at any rate, for the pairing of the last day to stop looking arbitrary: the two had already measured themselves once, at sea and in another shape, and the watchman had won.

Heimdall is credited in countless places with a sword called Hofuð that never misses its stroke. It does not exist. What Snorri records in the Skáldskaparmál is a poets' play on words: «the head is called Heimdall's sword» and, conversely, «a sword is called Heimdall's head». Hofuð means literally «head», nothing more. Behind the circumlocution lies a lost myth, of which Snorri notes only that Heimdall was pierced by a man's head, and whose story has not survived: only the manner of speaking that the skalds went on using for centuries, when nobody any longer remembered the tale that justified it. The magic sword with a proper name is a modern reading that took the kenning literally, and it has been repeated so often that today it sounds ancient. It is told here, with its date, because to suppress it without explaining it would leave the reader wondering why it appears everywhere else and not here.