Baldr Dies Twice: Mistletoe or a Sword

Baldr dies twice in the medieval record, and the two deaths do not agree. In Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, a blind god throws a sprig of mistletoe at a party game and Loki aims his arm. In Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, a human hero drives a sword into a demigod's side after three battles over a woman. The two accounts use the same names, Baldr, Hod and Nanna. They tell completely different stories, and they disagree about who has to pay.

The oath and the shrub

Snorri's account in Gylfaginning opens with Baldr dreaming "dreams great and dangerous to his life" (Project Gutenberg translation). The gods take counsel, and Frigg sets out to take an oath from everything that could hurt her son. Fire, water, iron and every metal swear. So do stones, earth, trees, sicknesses, beasts, birds and creeping things. After that the gods make a sport of it. Baldr stands at their meetings while they shoot at him, hew at him and throw stones, and nothing harms him.

Loki dislikes this. He takes the shape of a woman and visits Frigg in her hall, Fensal. Frigg tells the stranger that one shrub west of Valhal, the mistletoe, "seemed to me too young to exact an oath from" (Gutenberg translation). The scholar Merrill Kaplan argued that this echoes a legal rule: young people could not swear oaths. Loki pulls the plant up and goes to the assembly.

Hod is standing far out at the edge of the ring because he is blind, and he has no weapon. Loki tells him to honor Baldr like the others and promises to show him where to aim. Snorri calls the mistletoe a wand. The popular image of an arrow comes later. Hod throws, the shaft goes through Baldr, and he falls dead. In Snorri, the hand is Hod's and the plan is Loki's.

What the poems say, and who they leave out

The older poems divide the blame differently. In Völuspá, the seeress sees the mistletoe standing "famous and fair in the lofty fields" (Henry Adams Bellows), and then, in Bellows' words:

From the branch which seemed so slender and fair / Came a harmful shaft that Hoth should hurl

Ursula Dronke translates the half-line as "Hǫðr started shooting." Loki does not appear in it. Baldr's Dreams also names Hod alone. There, Odin rides to a dead seeress's grave under the name Vegtam, the Wanderer. She tells him the mead is already brewed for Baldr below, and that Hod will steal the life of Odin's son.

Among the poems quoted here, Loki claims the killing only in Lokasenna, a flyting in which he trades insults with the gods at Aegir's feast. In Jackson Crawford's translation he tells Frigg: "I'm the one who made it so that Balder will never ride home again." That is a boast. It does not tell the story. The full scene of Loki guiding Hod's hand comes from Snorri's prose, set down in thirteenth-century Iceland. The Swedish poet Viktor Rydberg later argued that Snorri had misread images on a hall's walls described in the poem Húsdrápa, where Hod was shown with closed eyes and Loki guiding his aim.

The vengeance Gylfaginning omits

The poems punish Hod. Völuspá says a brother of Baldr is born soon after and "one night old fought Othin's son" (Bellows). He neither washes his hands nor combs his hair until he has carried Baldr's foe to the pyre. Baldr's Dreams names him Vali, born to Rind in the western halls. The short Völuspá counts eleven gods at the burning and says Vali "the slayer slew" (Benjamin Thorpe).

Gylfaginning leaves all of this out. Snorri writes that the gods knew who had done it, "but none might take vengeance, so great a sanctuary was in that place" (Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur). He did know the story, though. In Skáldskaparmál, his handbook for poets, Vali's kennings include "Baldr's Avenger, Foe and Slayer of Hödr" (Brodeur). Gylfaginning still does not tell Hod's death.

The funeral and the ride to Hel

Gylfaginning gives that space to the funeral instead. Before any of it, while the gods still stand speechless over the body, Frigg asks who will ride to Hel. Hermod the Nimble goes, on Sleipnir. Then the gods carry Baldr to the shore. His ship Hringhorn is the largest of all ships, and the gods cannot launch it. They send to Jotunheim for the giantess Hyrrokken, who rides a wolf with serpents for reins. It takes four berserks to hold the wolf, and they manage only by throwing it to the ground. She launches the ship with one push. Fire springs from the rollers and the earth shakes. Thor would have crushed her skull if the gods had not asked peace for her.

Nanna sees the body carried aboard. Her heart breaks, she dies, and she goes onto the fire with Baldr. Thor hallows the pyre with Mjolnir and kicks a dwarf named Lit into the flames. Odin lays on the pyre his ring Draupnir, which drops eight rings of equal weight every ninth night.

The Gutenberg text calls Hermod "Odin's swain", and a few lines later calls Baldr "his brother", so the passage itself does not settle who Hermod is. He rides nine nights through dark valleys to the Gjallar bridge, which is thatched with gold. The guard Modgud tells him five bands of dead men crossed the day before, yet the bridge shakes as much under him alone. Hermod jumps Sleipnir over Hel's gate and finds Baldr in the foremost seat. Hel sets her terms. If all things, alive and dead, weep for Baldr, he goes home. If one refuses, he stays.

Dry tears and a rumour

The world weeps. Snorri explains it as the wet that forms on things when they come out of frost into heat. Then the messengers find a giantess named Thok in a cave. She will weep "with dry tears", she says, and "Let Hel keep what she has!" (Gutenberg translation).

Snorri does not say Thok is Loki. He writes: "It is generally believed that this Thok was Loke." So even in his own prose, Loki's second crime rests on what people believe. He punishes Loki anyway. Loki hides as a salmon until Thor catches him by the tail. The gods turn his son Vali into a wolf, the wolf tears his brother Narfi apart, and Loki is bound with Narfi's entrails. His wife Sigyn holds a bowl under the serpent's venom. The poems burn Hod. Snorri binds Loki.

Saxo's Balderus

Saxo Grammaticus, writing in Denmark at the end of the twelfth century, removes the gods and tells the story as history. Hotherus is a human prince, skilled at swimming, archery, fighting and music. Nanna, daughter of King Gevarus, loves him. Balderus, son of Othinus, sees her bathing and decides to kill his rival. Wood maidens warn Hotherus that Balderus is a demigod, and common steel cannot wound him. One sword can, and it belongs to Mimingus, a satyr of the woods. Hotherus forces Mimingus to give it up, along with a bracelet that increases its owner's wealth.

They fight three times. At sea the gods fight for Balderus, and Hotherus cuts Thoro's club off at the haft. Hotherus marries Nanna. Balderus wins the second battle but gets nothing from it: lovesick and haunted by phantoms in Nanna's likeness, he has to be pulled about in a cart. In the end Hotherus drives the sword into his side. Balderus has himself carried back into battle on a litter and dies three days later. Years afterward, Bous, son of Othinus and Rinda, kills Hotherus and dies of his own wounds the next day. A later Danish adaptation, the Gesta Danorum på danskæ, puts Saxo's view plainly: "They were seen as gods, even though they weren't" (Peter Tunstall).

The name and the return

The name Hǫðr is usually read as "battle" or "warrior", and skalds used phrases like "Höðr of battle" for fighting men. A blind god who needs help to aim is an odd model for a warrior, and Saxo's swordsman fits the name better. Even so, the Eddic poems and Saxo share a skeleton: a son of Rind avenges Baldr, Vali in the poems and Bous in Saxo. Gylfaginning has no vengeance at all.

At the end, the Eddic tradition goes where Saxo does not. Völuspá says that after Ragnarök "Baldr comes back" and that he and Hod dwell together (Bellows), and Snorri has the two walk out of Hel side by side. Vafthrudnir's Lay names the survivors as Vidar, Vali, Modi and Magni and leaves both brothers out.

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