Baldrs Draumar — Baldr's Dreams

The gods and goddesses meet in council, troubled: the bright Baldr, fairest and best-beloved of them all, has been visited by terrible dreams, and the powers seek to know what they mean.^[1] Foreboding hangs over the assembly — for when the best of the gods dreams of death, the whole order has cause to fear.

The poem opens at the edge of the mythology's central catastrophe. Baldr's death is the hinge on which everything turns toward Ragnarök, and here the gods feel it coming as a shadow in their favourite's sleep, without yet knowing its shape. The dreams are the first tremor of the doom. And so the question is put — what do they portend? — a question only the dead can answer, which means only Odin can go and ask.

Odin rises — the old enchanter — and lays the saddle on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, and rides down the long road to Hel, the realm of the dead.^[1] At the gate a hound, bloody on its breast, howls at him from afar; but Odin rides on, the earth booming under him, to the eastern door where, he knows, a dead wise-woman lies in her grave.^[2]

It is one of the great journeys of Norse myth — the god riding alive into the country of the dead, past its monstrous guardian, to wring knowledge from a corpse. This is Odin entire: there is no price he will not pay, no road he will not ride, for knowledge — even down into Hel itself. The bloodied hound, the booming earth, the grave by the eastern door: the poem renders the underworld in a few stark strokes, and sends the Allfather into it without a tremor.

At the grave Odin speaks his death-magic and corpse-spells, and against her will the dead seeress is forced to rise and answer.^[1] She is unwilling, heavy with the grave — who is this, she demands, that has laid the hard road on her and dragged her from her rest? — but the god's compulsion holds her, and he begins to question.

The scene is grim and powerful: the living god compelling the dead woman, raising her by force from her long sleep to serve his hunger to know. The same völva-craft that the living seeress practises in Völuspá is here turned on a corpse, the prophetess summoned not by choice but by spell. Odin's wisdom is never gentle; here it is frankly violent, a grave broken open and a dead mouth forced to speak the doom.

Odin questions her, bidding her not cease: who shall be Baldr's slayer, and who shall avenge the death?^[1] The seeress answers the doom — that the blind god Höðr will bear the deadly branch and fell Baldr, and that vengeance will come from Váli, a son Odin will father in the west for that one purpose, who will avenge Baldr before he is a night old.

This is the poem's revelation, and the heart of the whole tragedy of Baldr: the killer named (the blind Höðr, who in the fuller myth is guided by Loki and a sprig of mistletoe) and the avenger foretold (Váli, born to kill). The seeress lays bare the machinery of the coming catastrophe before it has happened — the death, the unwitting killer, the swift revenge. The gods now know the shape of their loss, and that knowledge is itself the first step of the long road down to Ragnarök.

Odin presses for more, but the seeress has caught the trick of his questions and knows now who has roused her — no common traveller could ask such things.^[1] So she breaks off: home ride, Odin, and be proud; no one shall seek her again until Loki breaks loose from his bonds and the doom of the gods comes on. With that she sinks back into her grave.

The poem ends as it must — on the threshold of the end. The seeress's last words set Baldr's death in its true frame: it is the beginning of the countdown to Ragnarök, after which Loki, bound for that very murder, will break free and lead the giants against the gods. Baldrs Draumar is short and dark and complete: the gods' first hard knowledge of the death that dooms them, dragged out of a corpse by the god who would ride to Hel and back for the truth — and the truth, once known, only confirms that the fall has begun.