Baldur: A Norse Mythology Sleep Story

Full transcript

High in the radiant hall of Bredeblic, in the fairest dwelling that has ever stood, Baldur wakes before the others, and the light that seems to pour from his own skin does not comfort him, for he has dreamed of his own death. Baldur, second son of Odin and the goddess Frigg, younger brother of Thor, is the best loved of all who dwell in Asgard, and no shadow has ever lain on him until this one. And so a question settles over the bright hall, asked of no one at all. How does Baldur, the god whom all things living and dead are said to love, come to die by the one small plant no one thought to bind with an oath, death, and why can not even the weeping of the whole cosmos call him back?

If these ancient stories help you rest, subscribe so the next story can find you at bedtime. We will follow that one dream from the moment it first troubles him, down through a mother's fear, a father's ride into the land of the dead, a game of stones that harm no one, a single sprig of green, and at last a funeral ship and a plea to hell, that fails by the width of a single refusal. It is a long road, and it begins gently, in a hall so beautiful that grief seems to have no door by which to enter.

Bridablick was said to be the most flawless place in all the nine worlds, a dwelling where nothing unclean could stand, where no lie could take root, and where the very walls held a kind of calm. Baldr had lived there in easy gladness for ages beyond counting. He was radiant in the old and simple sense, for Snorri Sturluson, who gathered these tales in Iceland long after the last altars had gone cold, wrote that Balder was so fair and so bright that light appeared to shine out of him as if he carried a lamp beneath his own face.

To sit near him was to feel warmed, to hear him speak was to feel that quarrels softened and hard things eased, so when the dream came it did not merely frighten him, it felt wrong, the way a false note feels wrong in a familiar song. The dream itself is not spelled out in full detail by the old poets, and perhaps that is fitting, for the worst dreams are often the ones we cannot quite describe when we wake. What the sources tell us is plain enough. Boulder dreamed that his life was threatened.

He dreamed of his own ending, and to the Norse, who held that dreams were not idle pictures, messages sent up from the roots of fate, such a dream was not a thing to shrug away with the morning. A dream like this was a warning that had already half come true, a shadow thrown ahead of an approaching shape. So Baldr, who had never in all his years known dread, sat in the fairest hall that exists, and felt the cold edge of something he could not yet name. His usual brightness dimmed, those who loved him, and that was very nearly everyone, saw the change in him, and grew quiet. Then the unease deepened, in the way that a single worry becomes a true fear when another voice repeats it. For Frigg, his mother, the wife of Odin, and the foremost of the goddesses, confessed that she too had dreamed. Not a different dream, but the same one.

The same darkness, closing over her radiant sun. Among mortals, one may tell oneself that a dream is only a dream, a trick of a tired mind. But when two who love each other dream the very same warning on the very same nights, it is far harder to call it nothing. The gods of Asgard understood this at once. Fate did not usually speak twice by accident. When When it doubled its voice, it was because it meant to be heard. And here is the heart of the mystery that would trouble even the gods.

Of all the beings in all the worlds, why should this one be marked? Baldur had wronged no one. He was gentle where his kin were fierce, fair where others were grim. He was the son of the ruler of the gods and the queen of the goddesses, brother to the strongest of them all, and he was beloved without exception. That such a one should be the first to be claimed, that the brightest thread should be the first cut, seemed to overturn the natural order of things. Yet the double dream insisted.

was coming for Baldr, and though none of them knew it as they gathered in their worry, this single omen was the first link in a long chain, the first small crack in the world, that would one day widen into Ragnarok, the great ending of gods and giants alike. Before that shadow unfolds, it is worth pausing to know fully who this god was, for a death means little unless we first know the life it took. Boulder was brother not only to Thor, the Thunderer, but also to Hirth, the blind god, a quiet figure who dwelt among the others and whose blindness would matter more than anyone could guess.

His wife was the goddess Nanna, and their love was counted among the truest in Asgard. Their son was Forseti, the god of justice and reconciliation, who sat in the shining hall called Glitnir, whose name means the one who shines. Where it was said that all who came with a dispute went away with it settled, and their peace restored. So Baldr stood at the centre of a whole web of gentle things. A husband, a father of justice, a brother, a son. His name itself carried weight. Scholars trace it back to a proto-Germanic word, Baldrass, which is thought to mean bold, or brave and defiant, or else lord and prince, a hero's word, a ruler's word. And yet, as the scholar Rudolf Simmek has noted, that fierce meaning does not sit easily with the gentle god the myths describe, and so there has long been another reading, older and softer. Some early students of these tales, and Jacob Grimm among them, connected the name instead to an ancient root meaning white, and through white shining, and through shining, the idea of a god of light.

Snorri's own description of a figure who seems to glow from within fits that reading well. We cannot be certain which is true. Perhaps both echoes live in the name, the bold prince and the shining one, and bolder is large enough to hold them together. He was rich in the way that mattered to the old storytellers. He owned Hrringhorney, the greatest of all ships, a vessel larger than any other that had ever been launched or ever would be. He held the Hall of Braidablik, the Flawless Place, and he held the love of every god and every mortal who had ever heard his name.

Every one, the tales say, save a single exception. There was one among them who did not love bolder, one who smiled, and sat at the same benches, and drank from the same horns, and yet felt, beneath it all, something colder. That one was Loki, the cunning one, the shapeshifter, of the company of the gods and half apart from it, and it was Loki whose mind would turn the double dream into a death. But he keeps his silence for now, and so the story keeps it too. When the dreams could no longer be ignored, the gods held counsel. They gathered, they did in times of trouble, to weigh the omen and to ask what might be done.

Talk went back and forth among them, fear and counsel and half-formed plans, but Odin, the father of them all, the one-eyed wanderer, who had given an eye at the well of wisdom and hung nine nights on the windy tree to win the secrets of the runes, was not a god content to sit and debate a thing he might go and learn for himself. Knowledge was his hunger and his burden. He had crossed strange thresholds before to gain it, and he would cross another now, for this was his son, and no council of worried voices could tell him what the dead already knew.

So Odin rose from the council and went out to where his horse waited. The grey, eight-legged Sleipnir, swiftest of all steeds, the only horse that could run the roads between the worlds. He mounted and he turned its head downward, away from the bright fields of the living and toward the long cold road that leads to hell, the realm of the dead, which lies far down beneath the roots of the world. This part of the tale comes to us chiefly from the old poem called Baldr's Dreams, a spare and shadowed piece of verse, and in it we ride with the father of the gods as as he goes down alone to question death itself about the fate of his own child. Down he went, past the misty marches, past the high gate where a hound came out to meet him, with blood on its breast, and howled at the rider from the world above.

did not turn, he rode on, grim and silent, until he came at last to the place he sought. There on the eastern side of the Halls of Hell, near a grave heavy with age, lay one who could answer him. She was a Velva, a Cyras, a woman of prophecy, who had died long before and been laid in the cold earth, and whose wisdom had gone down into death with her. The living may guess at fate. The dead sometimes can see it whole. Odin drew near her grave, and he began to work the deep magic that he alone among the gods fully commanded, the songs that can trouble the sleep of the buried, and call words up out of the silence of the tomb.

him, he sang the spells that razed the dead, he chanted the corpse-rousing words, and slowly, unwillingly, dragged back from a rest she had not wished to leave, the old seerus stirred beneath the ground and woke. Her voice, when it came, was the voice of one long dead, weary and cold. She asked who it was that had disturbed her, who had called her up along the hard road out of death, telling him that snow had fallen on her, and rain had beaten her, and dew had lain on her, and that she had been dead a long, long while.

Jaden did not give his true name. He almost never did. He named himself Vegtam, the wanderer, and called himself the son of a warrior, a traveller, come from the world above with questions. And then he asked her the things he had come so far and gone down so deep to learn. For whom, he asked, were the benches of hell strewn with rings and the halls decked out fair? For whom did the gold gleam in that grim place? And why, he asked, was mead being brood there, precious mead covered over with a bright shield, as if in readiness for an honored guest who had not yet arrived?

These were not idle questions. In the world of the living, such preparations meant that a great one was expected, that a feast was being made ready for a coming lord. To see them made ready in the halls of the dead was to see a place set at a table for someone still walking in the sunlight above. The Cirrus answered him, though it grieved her to be woken and to speak. The mead, she said, stood brood and waiting for Baldr. The bright drink was covered and kept for him, and the gods above would fall into despair.

She named the coming guest, and in naming him she confirmed the very thing the doubled dream had whispered. Baldr was expected in the land of the dead. The place was already being adorned for his arrival. Odin, hiding his heart behind the mask of the wanderer, pressed her further, for he had to know how. She answered again, and her words were a stone dropped into still water. Hirth, she said, the blind brother, would be the one to bear the fatal branch. Hirth would send it. Hirth would bring that high glory down.

It was a strange and terrible thing to hear, that the harmless blind god, who had never sought a quarrel, would be the hand that struck the beloved one. Let the dead do not soften their words to spare the living, and she gave him no comfort, only the naming of the killer to come. Still Odin was not finished, for a father wishes to know not only how his son will fall, but whether that fall will be answered. So he asked who would avenge it, who would take vengeance on Hrtha for the slaying, and the killer on the burning pyre, and the seerus told him of a birth not yet come to pass.

In the western halls, she said, Rinda would bear a son to Odin himself, and that child, called Valli in the tellings, would grow with uncanny speed. One night old he would go forth to the deed, he would not wash his hands nor comb his hair until he had brought Baldur's Slayer to the fire. A child a single night old, already a hand of vengeance, so fate had arranged its answer even before the wound was given. Here Odin might have stopped, having learned the shape of the sorrow to come. But he was Odin, and his hunger for knowledge reached always one question too far. He asked her one more thing, a stranger question, about the women who would weep at the ending, who they were that would cast their veils to the wind and grieve. And at that question something shifted in the cold grave. The seerus fell still.

She looked at the one who called himself Wanderer, and the disguise fell away from him in her dead sight, and she knew him. No Wanderer, she said. You are Odin, you are the father of the The slain. Go home, she told him, and be proud of your visit, for no one else will come to wake me again until Loki slips free from his bonds, and the destroyers ride down at the last. With those words she sank back toward her rest, closing herself to him and would say no more. The name of Loki hung in the cold air of hell, like a promise not yet kept, and Odin, having heard both the doom and the vengeance, turned Sleipnir's head once more toward the long road home, carrying up into the light a knowledge that would give no god peace.

was waiting, when the eight-legged horse came back through the gates of Asgard, and she read the knowledge in her husband's face before he spoke a word of it. The doom had been confirmed in the halls of the dead. The mead was brewing. Yet a mother does not receive such news and simply fold her hands. Where Odin had gone downward to learn the shape of the ending, Frigg turned outward to undo it, and she set herself against fate with the only weapon a mother has, which is a refusal to accept that the thing must be. If Baldr was to die because the world could wound him, then she would go to the world itself and and ask it, one thing at a time, to lay its wounding down.

So she began the long circuit of the realms, and it was a patient labor without haste or rest. She went first to fire that oldest and hungriest of powers, and she drew from the flames a a solemn promise that they would never burn her sun. She went to water in all its forms, to the still melt water of the high places and the grey weight of the sea. And the water swore, she went to iron and to every metal drawn cold and gleaming from the deep places of the earth, and each of them gave its word that no blade nor point nor edge of its making would ever bite the flesh of boulder.

The oath passed from the great to the small, and left nothing between. Stones swore it, the rough boulders of the mountainsides, and the smooth pebbles of the riverbeds alike. The earth itself swore, the very ground a man walks upon. She did not stop at the things that lie still. She went among the trees and asked each kind in turn, the oak and the ash, the thorn and the pine, and the trees bent their heads, and promised that no branch nor beam of their wood would harm him. She went to the sicknesses, to the fevers and the wasting agues, and the quiet grey illnesses that come in the night, and take the strong without a mark.

And even these agreed to spare him. She sought out the beasts of the field, and the wild places, the wolf and the bear, and the horned things of the wood, and they swore. She asked the birds of the air, and the birds swore. She went down to the serpents, to the cold coiled creatures with their venom, and the serpents too gave their word. And here is the wonder of that journey, the thing that makes the sorrow to come feel heavier than it should. All of them swore gladly. Not one grudged the oath. Fire and iron, stone and serpent, the fever and the wolf, each gave its promise freely and with something like joy, because Baldr was loved, loved by all things that were, loved in a way that asks for nothing and is given everything in return.

The whole of creation leaned toward the shining God and wished him well. To be asked to promise him safety was felt not as a burden laid on them, but as a gift they were permitted to give. So Frigg went from realm to realm, gathering vows the way a farmer gathers a harvest, and each promise was a bar drawn across a door, and one by one the doors through which death might enter were closed and barred and made fast, until it seemed that every road to Baldur had been shut. But a mother had reasoned with the world, and the world had agreed.

It seemed, for one bright and breathing moment, that fate had been outmatched by love, and that the doom brewed in hell would find no way up into the light. Yet the world is wide, and even the most careful counting overlooks a small thing here and there. There was one plant that Frigg did not ask. West of Valhalla, in a place where the light falls soft, there grew a slip of mistletoe, a young and slender green thing clinging, where it had taken root, bearing its pale berries, and asking nothing of any one. When When Frigg came near it on her great circuit of oath-taking, she considered it and passed it by.

It seemed to her too young to matter and too slight to trouble, a sprig so small and so newly grown, that no harm could possibly live in it. Why bind a thing that could not lift a hand? So she did not ask the mistletoe to swear, and she went on her way, and the small green plant kept its silence, unbound and unpromised, the single thread left loose in a net otherwise drawn tight. The old tellings pause here, as if they too can hardly believe that so much would turn on so little, and they offer their reasons for the omission.

The plain explanation, the one handed down longest, is simply that the mistletoe seemed too unimportant to bother with, a plant so young and so small, that no one thought it worth the asking. That is the answer the story gives on its own face. Yet a later reader of these things, the scholar Meryl Kaplan, set beside that old reason a subtler one, drawn from the customs of oath and law. Among the people who told this tale, a person too young was not yet fit to swear a binding oath, for the young were held to be not yet answerable, not yet bound into the web of promises that holds a community together.

By that reading, Frigg did not merely overlook the mistletoe out of carelessness. She passed it over because it was too young to swear, ineligible for the oath in the way a child is ineligible, its very youth placing it outside the reach of the vow. Whether it was scorned as trifling or excused as underage, the result was one and the same. From that single, overlooked sprig, growing quietly west of the hall, the whole of the tragedy would rise. But no one in Asgard knew that yet, and for a while there was only joy.

When it was known among the gods that Baldr could not be harmed, that fire and iron and stone and every living thing had sworn to spare him, a new delight took hold of the assembly, and it became a kind of sport. They would set Baldr in their midst at the gathering place, and then, laughing, they would test the great gift that had been given to him. One of them would take up a stone and fling it hard at the shining god, and the stone One would swerve, or fall short, or strike him, and glance away, without leaving so much as a bruise.

Another would cast a spear straight at his breast, and the point would turn aside, or drop harmless to the grass at his feet. Some drew their blades and swung at him, and the edges would not bite, and through all All of it, Baldr stood among them, and smiled, untouched and unafraid, while the weapons of the gods rained down and did him no more harm than falling leaves. It became an honor to throw at him. To hurl a spear at Baldr and watch it fail was to bear witness to the love the whole world had sworn.

To see the oath made visible, in the bouncing of a stone, and the turning of a blade. The gods delighted in it, and there was much laughter in that place, the good, easy laughter of those who believe a danger has been safely put away. Some hewed at him with swords, and some cast great stones, and whatever was done to him, harm came, and it seemed to all of them a fine thing and a proof of glory. Their favourite could not be touched. The doom that had been dreamed and confirmed and carried up from Hell appeared to have been turned aside by a mother's care, and the gods stood in the sunlight and threw their weapons at the one they loved, and every failed blow was a small celebration. There was one who did not laugh. Loki, the cunning one, the single being in all the worlds who did not love Baldr, could not bear to look upon the game. The sight of the shining god standing whole and smiling amid the storm of harmless weapons, galled him past enduring, and where the others saw a cause for joy, he saw only a wall he had not yet found the way through.

It was not in his nature to let such a thing stand unbroken. So he set himself to find the floor, the one loose thread, the single road, that Frigg in all her careful journeying might have left unclosed, and Loki, who could wear any shape and speak any part, did not go looking among fire and iron and stone. He went, disguised, to the one who knew where every door had been shut, and that was Frigg herself. In the form of a woman, an ordinary and unremarkable figure that drew no suspicion, Loki came to Frigg and fell into speech with her. He spoke of the game at the assembly, of the marvel of it, of the weapons that would not bite, and he let his wonder draw her out.

Was it truly so, he asked, that nothing at all could harm her son? Frigg, warm with the pride and relief of a mother who believes her child is safe, answered freely. Neither weapon nor tree would wound Baldr, she said, for she had taken an oath from all of them. And then, because she suspected nothing, and because the memory was a small one, she let slip the single thing she had withheld. There grew a chute of mistletoe, she said, west of Valhalla, and that one she had passed over, for it had seemed to her too young to ask an oath of it.

She thought it nothing, she spoke it as one speaks of a trifle already forgotten, and And Loki, hearing it, had what he had come for. He left her without haste, so as to rouse no alarm, and then he went straight to the place she had named. West of Valhalla he found the young plant growing, where she had left it unbound, its pale berries pale against the green, so slight a thing that a careless eye would pass it a a hundred times, and never mark it. Loki marked it. He took hold of the mistletoe, and pulled it up, and he carried it away, and he set to shaping it. From the soft green wood he cut and trimmed, and worked a slender shaft, a thin dart of a thing, and he made of it a spear, a pointed length fit to be thrown. In some of the later tellings the weapon he fashioned is not a spear, but an arrow, drawn to a bow-string rather than cast from the hand, and the tail is told both ways, in different mouths and different ages. But whether spear or arrow, the thing was the same in its heart. It was the one weapon in all the nine worlds that could pierce the flesh of Baldr, made from the one green thing that had never sworn to spare him, and Loki held it, and he carried it toward the laughing assembly. There, at the edge of the gathering, stood a god who took no part in the game. Herðr, the brother of Baldr, was blind, and because he could not see he could not aim, and so he stood apart in the darkness that was always with him, while the others threw and laughed. He had no weapon in his hand, and no share in the sport, for what could a blind man throw at a mark he could not find. To him Loki came, quiet and reasonable, and asked why he did not honour Baldr as the rest were doing. Hoth answered plainly. He could not see where Baldr stood and he had nothing to throw. Then Loki offered what seemed a kindness. He would give her the something to cast, and he would guide the blind hand, so that it might find its mark, so that her the too might do his brother the honour the others were doing him.

Herthe, who suspected nothing, for why should a brother suspect a helping hand at a game of love, agreed. Loki set the shaft of mistletoe into his grip and closed the blind fingers around it. He turned the god's body and lifted his arm and pointed it true, aiming for him the throw that Hirth could not aim for himself. In some of the tellings, Loki does no more than this, setting the weapon and the direction, and leaving the cast to Hirth her own strength. In others it is Loki himself who steadies and drives the aim, so that the blind hand is little more than the glove upon his own.

However the deed was shared between them, the shaft went out from Hrtha's hand toward the shining god, who stood smiling in the storm of harmless things, certain as all of them were certain that nothing thrown at him could do him any hurt. And this time the world's oath did not hold, for this one green thing had never given it. The mistletoe flew straight, and did not swerve, and did not fall short, and did not turn aside at the last. It struck boulder and pass through him, clean through the body that fire and iron had promised never to harm, and the shining god fell down among the gods, dead upon the ground, where a moment before he had stood laughing.

So it happened in the sight of all of them, in the bright assembly, in the middle of their The Cirrus in Hell had named the branch and named the brother, and now the branch had flown, and the brother had thrown it, and the vision was fulfilled to the letter. In the vulva's telling he is called the bleeding god, Baldr the Bleeding One, fallen by the slender shaft, and his death is remembered as the first and the greatest of all the misfortunes ever to come upon gods and mortals alike.

The laughter stopped, the weapons lay where they had fallen, and a silence spread across the assembly that no one there had the power to fill, for the thing they had all believed impossible lay before them on the grass, and the long grief of the gods had begun. For a long moment none of them moved. The gods stood in the grass where the game had been, and the smiling had gone out of their faces, and no word came to any of them. Grief closed their throats before thought could form. It is one thing to hear a prophecy, and another to see it lying on the ground before you, and the thing they had all believed impossible was now the plainest fact in the world.

Baldr, the radiant one, the best beloved of gods and mortals alike, lay still, and the light that had been in him was gone out of the assembly like a lamp carried into another room. They looked upon one another, and in the looking there was a helplessness that the mighty are not used to feeling. For this had happened upon holy ground, in a place of peace, where no blood might be avenged, and no hand raised in answer, the custom of that ground bound even the strongest of them. A death had been done, where no vengeance could be taken, and so the first thing that rose in every heart, the wish to strike back at whoever had done this, had nowhere to go.

It turned inward, and became weeping. They could not act. They could only mourn, and stand, and gaze at the fallen god, and at each other, as if hoping some one of them would say that it was not true. Odin stood among them, and he wept as the others wept, yet his grief was of a heavier kind. The rest mourned a brother, and a friend, and a light gone dark. man mourned all of that, and something more besides, for he alone truly understood what he was looking at. He had ridden down the long road to hell, and woken the dead Cirrus, and heard her name the branch, and named the brother. And he had learned that a death was forming. Now he saw the whole shape of it. This was not one sorrow standing by itself.

This was the first stone loosened on a hillside, the first small crack running through the ice of the world. The greatest of misfortunes had come, and behind it, patient and certain, came all the others, the brightest hall in all the cosmos had gone dark, and though no horn had sounded and no wall had fallen, the long road that leads down to the last day of the gods had quietly opened before them, and Odin, alone of all who stood there, could see how far it ran. So the grief had its slow beginning, and out of that grief the story turns toward the one answer that the holy ground could not forbid forever. For though no hand might be raised in that sacred place, the seerus had spoken of a vengeance that would come, and her words did not fail. She had said that a son would be born to avenge Baldr, one who would be but a single night old when he took up the deed, who would neither wash his hands nor comb his hair until he had laid the slayer low. And now that saying began to come true, far from the mourning field, in the way that such sayings do.

Odin went to the goddess Rindr. The old tellings are brief about it, and they say only that from their union a son was got, and the son was named Vali. This was a strange child, for one purpose, and hurried toward it, by a law that belongs to stories, and not to the ordinary passing of days. He was born, and he did not lie long in the manner of infants. Within a single day he grew from a new-born to a god, in the fullness of his strength, tall, and grim, and ready, as though the years of a life had been poured into the hours of one turning of the sun.

He did not pause to wash the newness from his hands. He did not stop to comb his hair. The seerus had foretold that he would do neither, and he did neither, but went straight out with the single errand for which he had been made. He sought out Hertha, the blind god, who had thrown the fatal shaft without sight and without malice, who had meant only to honour his brother, as the others were honouring him, was found by the day-old Avenger, and Vahli slew him for the killing of Balder.

There is a hard justice in it and also a great sorrow, for Hertha had been a weapon in another brother's hand as surely as the mistletoe had been a weapon in his. Yet the old law of the tale asked a life for a life, and the sun born for that one purpose fulfilled it, and so two brothers were now gone from the halls of the gods, where before there had been one bright company. Here the tellers are careful, and it is worth being careful with them, for there is more than one Vali in the old stories, and they must not be mistaken for each other. This Vali, the Avenger, is the son of Odin and the goddess Rinder, got and grown for the single deed of answering Baldr's death.

There is another who bears a name that sounds the same, a son of Loki, and he belongs to a different and darker part of the tale, and has no share in this one. When the old poems speak of the one-night avenger, it is the son of Odin they mean, and no other. So the vengeance the seeris named came to pass, exactly and swiftly, while the greater grief still lay heavy upon the gods. And when the answer had been given, as far as answer could be given, the gods turned to the last honour they could pay to Baldr, which was to send him from the world in the manner that befitted him. They took up his body and carried it down from the fields toward the sea, for a god so great was not to be laid quietly in the earth.

He would be sent out upon the water in fire, and the ship that would carry him was his own. It was called Hringhorny, and it was the largest of all ships that had ever been built, a vessel worthy of the greatest of the sons of Odin, and upon its deck they made ready the pyre that would bear him into the dark. They laid him there with care, and they brought to the ship the treasures that should go with him. Odin came, and placed upon the pyre, the ring drove near, that wonder among rings, out of which every ninth night there dripped eight more rings of equal weight to itself, gold breeding gold without end.

It was among the most precious things the gods possessed, and Odin gave it to the fire and to his son, laying it beside him, as a father lays a last gift beside a child. All the proper things were gathered, the wood and the treasures and the offerings, and the great ship stood ready, with its sorrowful burden on the rollers at the edge of the sea. But when the gods set their hands to the ship, to send it down into the water, so that the fire might be kindled beneath the dead god, and the whole be carried out upon the waves, the ship would not move.

They pushed, and Herringhorny stayed where it was. The greatest of all ships sat unyielding upon the rollers, too vast and too heavy for even the strength of the gods to stir. There is something fitting and something terrible in this, that the vessel meant to bear Baldur away refused, at the first, to bear him at all, as though the very timbers of the world were reluctant to let the shining god go, so the morning was halted at its solemn work. The pyre was built, the god was laid upon it, the treasures were placed, and the god stood by a ship that would not move, unable to complete the last thing they had it in them to do.

went out then, of what was needed, and it went where such strength could be found, into Jürtenheim, the land of the giants, for there was one there who could do what the gods could not, and the gods, in their need, sent for her. Her name was Hierachin, and when she came, she came in a manner that told all who watched how far the ordinary order of things had been overturned. She did not come on foot, or in a fair chariot, she came riding upon a wolf, a great grey beast for a mount, and for reins she held vipers, living serpents twisted in her hands in place of leather and bit.

It. The gods were the keepers of order, and here came orders opposite. A giantess out of the wild lands, astride a wolf with snakes for rains, summoned to the very heart of the gods' grief, because their own might had failed them. When she came down to the ship, they say the wolf was so fierce that it took four of the strongest to hold it, and they could master it only by throwing it down. Then, Hirokin went to the prow of Hring Horny, and she set her hands to it, and she pushed. She did not strain long. At the first heave the great ship that all the gods together had not been able to stir went forward, and it went with such violence that fire leaped from the rollers beneath it, sparks and flames springing up from the friction of that enormous weight, driven suddenly into motion, and the whole earth trembled. The land itself shook at the shove of the giantess, and hearing horny ran down into the sea. It was a moment of restrained and dreadful power. One single figure from the giant lands accomplishing in one motion what the assembled gods could not. And the trembling of the ground under her hands was a sign, if any there needed one, of how the world had shifted upon its foundations since Balder fell. The ship was in the water now, and the last part of the funeral could go go forward. They bore Baldur's body aboard, up onto the deck of his own great vessel, to lay him upon the wood that would burn. And here the tellers set down one of the strangest and most quietly haunting moments in all the old stories.

As his dead son was carried up and laid down, Odin bent close over him. The father leaned turned down to the ear of the child who could no longer hear, and he whispered something. What he said no one knows. The old poems and the tellers who gathered them all draw the same veil across it. They tell that Odin whispered into the ear of the dead Balder, and they tell no more, and so the words are lost, sealed forever, a secret between a father and a son at the threshold between the worlds. Many have wondered what a god who could see the shape of the last days might choose to say to the sun he was sending on ahead of him into the dark.

The story keeps it. It was spoken, and it was not written, and it will not be known. Then came another grief to stand beside the first. Baldr's wife was the goddess Nuna, and she had come down to the sea with the rest to look upon her husband a last time. When she saw him laid upon the pyre, cold and still upon the deck of his own ship. The sight was more than her heart could bear. Her grief broke her utterly, and she died there of it, sank down, and died on the spot for sorrow over Balder. So the gods, who had come to burn one of their own, now had two to burn.

They lifted Nanna and laid her upon the pyre beside her husband, so that the two who had shared a hall in life should share the fire in death and be sent out together upon the water. With them, in the old way of such funerals, they placed still more. Baldr's horse was brought and its harness and trappings with it, and set upon the pyre as well, so that the god should not go without his mount into whatever country lay ahead. The wood was heaped and the offerings laid, the ring gleaming, the wife beside the husband, the horse in its gear, all of it ready for the flame.

Those who have long studied these old tales have looked closely at Nanna's death and her burning, and some have seen in it a gentled echo of an older and harder custom, a toned-down instance of the practice that scholars call sati, in which a wife followed her husband onto the fire. They have set it beside the account left by the traveller Ibn Fadlan, who long ago wrote down what he saw at the funeral of a great man among the Rus' by the river, where the dead lord did not go alone into the flames. Whether Nanna's death is a soft memory of such rites, or a thing that belongs only to the story of Baldr, the tellers do not finally say. What they say is that she died of grief and was laid beside him, and that the ship now held the two of them, and the horse, and the gold, and waited only for the fire and the blessing that would send it out to sea. Now Thor came forward to the edge of the water.

He was Bolder's brother, and he had a part to play that no other could take from him. In his hand he carried Mjolnir, the hammer that shattered mountains and hallowed what it touched, and he raised it now not to break but to bless. For the hammer was more than a weapon in the old belief. It was the sign that sanctified a marriage, that consecrated a birth, that made a thing holy and set it apart, and here at the sea's edge it would consecrate the pyre and the god upon it. Thor stretched out his arm over the ship and the body and the gathered offerings, and he hallowed the fire that was about to be lit, giving to his brothers going the last blessing that the strongest of the gods could give.

And in that solemn instant, when every eye was bent upon the raised hammer and the still figure on the deck, a small quick shape darted across the sand. It was a dwarf named Litter, and for reasons the tellers never explain, he ran in front of Thor's very feet, crossing the space between the god and the pyre at the worst of all moments. Thor was a god of sudden weather. His temper could rise as fast as a squall off the water, and grief had already wound him tight as a bow-string. In a flash of that temper he lashed out with his foot and kicked the dwarf, and litter was flung forward into the burning ship and consumed there in the flames, along with Balder and Nanna and the horse.

The old story sets this down plainly and without comment, a strange dark thread woven into the great grief, one small life caught up and ended in the fire, meant for a god. The tellers do not pause to mourn him, they simply record that it happened, that litter ran, and that Thor kicked him into the flames, and then they turn their eyes back to the The fire took hold now in earnest. It climbed the heaped wood, and it wrapped the mast and the folded sail. And Herringhorny, the greatest ship that was ever built, burned as it drifted out upon the water, carrying the radiant god and his wife, and all that was given them, into the grey distance.

The smoke rose up over the sea, and the gods stood along the shore and watched it go, and there was nothing more that any hand among them could do. The greatest funeral the gods had ever made was complete. Every honor had been paid, every right observed, the hammer raised, the ship launched, the fire lit. By every measure of the old world it was finished, and Baldr had been sent onward in a manner fitting the best of them. Yet Frigg, his mother, stood upon the shore and could not let it be finished.

She had dreamed the dream that foretold this. She had gone out across the whole world and taken the oath of every stone and tree and beast and sickness, and she had built with her own care a wall of safety around her son that one small overlooked plant had brought down. She watched the fire dwindle on the water, and she could not accept that so bright a life was simply gone into hell's cold country and would never return. Grief in her did not collapse as it had in Nana. In Frigg it hardened into a question, and the question was whether the dead were truly beyond reach, or whether some road, however long and dark, might still be ridden down after him.

So she turned from the sea to the company of the gods, and she asked among them who would undertake it. Who would ride the long road down into the realm of the dead, and seek out the goddess hell in her own hall, and ask her whether Balder might be ransomed back to the light. It was no small thing, she asked. The way down was known to lead into cold and silence, into valleys where no sun reached, and few would choose to travel it living and return. But one of them stood forward. His name was Hermoth, called the Bold, another of Odin's sons and a brother to the god they mourned.

He said that he would go. He would carry the plea of the gods down into the dark and lay it before Hel herself. They brought him Sleipnir for the journey. Odin's own horse, the grey steed with eight legs that could run over sea and sky and down beneath the roots of the world, where no other horse could carry a rider. Herrmår the mounted and he set out and the story follows him down into a country that grows darker with every league. He rode nine nights. through valleys so deep and so black that he could see nothing at all, not the ground beneath him nor his own hands upon the rains, he rode on, trusting the sure feet of Slapenia beneath him, downward and ever downward toward the country of the dead.

There was no light in that descent to mark the passing of time, only the steady motion of the horse, and the cold thickening around him, nine nights of dark valleys, with nothing to see, and nothing to do but go on. At last he came to a river, and the river was called Gjöll, and across it lay a bridge. The bridge was roofed and paved with shining gold, and it rang under him as he crossed, it was a strange property of that span, that it echoed and thundered beneath the tread of the living, far more than beneath the quiet feet of the dead.

A maiden named Malthgwyrth kept the bridge, and she called out to him that the whole span boomed no less under his single horse than under five companies of dead men who had ridden over it the day before, and she asked why his face still held the color of the living, and by what right he rode the road to hell. He answered that he was Hermor, that he came seeking Baldur, and he asked whether she had seen his brother pass that way. She told him that Baldur had indeed ridden over Gjöl's bridge, and that the road to the dwellings of hell lay still further, downward and to the north. So he rode on until he came to the barred gates of that realm. The gates were high and shut fast, but Hermohed did not turn aside. He dismounted, and he tightened the girths upon Sleipnir, and he climbed again into the saddle, and set his heels to the horse, and Slapenare gathered himself and leaped, clearing the great gate of hell by so wide a margin that he never came near it.

So the living rider passed within the walls of the dead, and there, when he came into the hall, all, he saw a sight to lift and to break his heart at once. In the highest seat, in the very seat of honour, at the centre of that pale country, sat Balder his brother. Balder was there among the dead, seated where a guest of the greatest worth would be seated, and Beside him was Nanna, his wife, who had followed him down through the fire. Hermod went to him, and there was a night to be spent in that hall before anything could be asked or answered, a night among the shades with the brother he had ridden so far to find.

In the morning of that lightless place came, Hemodra went to Hel herself, the goddess who ruled the country, and he made his plea. He told her how Balder was mourned, how the gods and all the world grieved for him, and he begged that she release him and let him ride home. And Hel gave her answer, and it was not a refusal, but it was a condition, and the condition was a single sharp thread on which everything would hang. She said that it should now be put to the test whether Bolder was as beloved as men claimed.

If all things in all the worlds, living and dead alike, would weep for him, then she would let him go back to the gods. But if any one thing refused, if a single creature or object anywhere held back its tears, then Baldr would stay with her, and she would keep him. That was her bargain. Everything must weep, or nothing would be given. Emoth carried this answer back into the hall, and now there was a strange sweetness in the dark before he had to leave. Baldr and Nanna kept him through the night as honoured kin, and at the parting they gave him things to bear back up into the light, tokens from the dead reaching after the living.

Baldr took the ring drop near, the gold arm ring that had been laid upon his pyre, the ring from which eight rings of equal weight dropped every ninth night, and he sent it back up to Odin his father, a gift returned from the far side of the fire, so that the old god should have some sign in his hand, that his son had received it and remembered him. Nanna sent gifts of her own. She sent a robe of linen to Frigg, her husband's mother, and she sent a finger-ring to the goddess Fuller, and other small tokens besides, quiet gifts of cloth and gold, from the Hall of the Dead into the Halls above, as though to say that love did not end at the gate that Slapeneer had leaped, that the dead still thought of those they had left.

Then Hermoth took his leave of his brother, and mounted, and rode the long road back up through the dark valleys, and came again into the light of the living, with Hell's terms held ready on his lips. He brought his message before the gods, and hope woke in them, for the condition Hell had set seemed one that could be met. All the world had loved Baldr, surely all the world would weep. So the gods sent out messengers in every direction, over all the lands and into every hidden place, and everywhere they went they asked the same thing, that each and every thing should weep bolder out of hell.

And the world answered, the people wept, the beasts of the field wept, and the birds, and The creeping things, the trees wept, and the stones wept, and the metals in the ground, and the earth itself. All things wept for him, freely and readily, as things weep when they are carried out of a hard frost into a warm room, and the ice upon them turns to running water. the Messengers passed, the whole of creation bent to the task and shed its tears for the Shining God, and it seemed the condition would be wholly and gladly fulfilled. But as the Messengers were returning, their errand all but done, they came upon a cave, and in the cave there sat a giantess. Her name was Thok, which means thanks, and she alone would not do what all the rest of the world had done. The messengers asked her, as they had asked everything else, to weep Balder out of hell, and she gave them an answer, wrapped in cold and mockery.

She said that Thok would weep only dry tears over Baldur's burning, that she had gotten nothing from the son of Odin, living or dead, and that Hel might keep what she held. With those words she turned the whole labour of the world to nothing. One creature in one cave had refused, and the bargain of Hel required every last thing without exception. Because Thok would not weep, Balder could not come home. He must remain among the dead, seated in the high seat of that pale hall, until the end of all things should change the order of the worlds. And it was widely believed, both by those in the story, and by those who have told it since, that Thok in the cave was no true giantess at all, but Loki, wearing that shape. Loki, who had guided the mistletoe to Baldur's heart, had followed his work to its end, and had crept into a cave in a stranger's form, make certain that the one door left open should be shut for good. The single thing in all the worlds that would not weep for the beloved God was the very one who had contrived his death, hidden now behind a woman's face and a bitter name.

So the last hope was closed, and the gods understood at last, past all denying, both that Baldr was truly lost to them, and by whose hand and cunning it had all been done. Now the patience of the gods was ended. They had borne much from Loki over the long years, his mischief and his malice and his sharp tongue. But this was past bearing, and they turned on him with a single purpose, to take him and to punish him for the death he had engineered, and the ransom he had ruined. Loki fled and changed his shapes and hid himself, but they hunted him down at the last and took him, and they brought him to a place beneath the earth to bind him there. The binding was a cruel one, made crueler by its instrument.

They took one of his own sons, and made of the sons' entrails a cord, and that cord in the binding turned to iron, and with it they fastened Loki down across three sharp-edged stones, one beneath his shoulders, one beneath his loins, one beneath the hollows of his knees, so that he lay stretched and pinned in the dark and could not rise. Then the goddess Skarthi came, and she brought a serpent, and she fixed it upon the rock above his upturned face, so that its venom should drip down upon him, drop by burning drop for as long as he should lie there.

But Loki was not left wholly without mercy, for his wife would not leave him. Sigan, faithful through all of it, took her place beside him, and held a bowl up beneath the serpent's mouth, and she caught the falling venom in the bowl, so that it should not touch him, and so long as she held it steady, he lay in peace. the bowl filled, as bowls will, and when it was full she had to turn away and carry it off to empty it, and in that little space while she was turned the venom fell freely upon his face. Then the burning of it was so great that Loki writhed against his bonds with all his strength, and his struggling shook the whole earth, so that the ground trembled and split, and the people above felt the land shudder beneath their feet.

And there, the old tellers say, he lies still, bound across the three stones with the serpent above him, and Sigyn beside him with her bowl, in pain and impatience by turns, ends, waiting through the long ages for the loosening that is foretold, when he shall break free at last, at the coming of Ragnarök. The binding of Loki closes the deed itself, but it does not close the story of Baldr. There is more still to hold, gathered from the older books and the stranger corners of memory, before the light is finally let down. The tale as the gods lived it has been told to its end. What remains is the long echo of it, the many voices that carried the shining god's name down the centuries and could not always agree on what it meant, and the one far promise, that the oldest of those voices kept quietly in reserve.

Not every teller of Baldr agreed on the shape of him, and the disagreements are worth walking through slowly, for they are part of what he is. The clearest rival account comes from a Danish writer of the late twelfth century, Saxo Grammaticus, who set down in Latin a long history of the Danes and folded the old gods into it as though they had been kings and warriors of the ancient north. In his telling, the shining god of the Icelanders becomes Baldurus, a demigod, a man of half-divine blood who could not be cut by common steel, and the gentle brother who never meant harm becomes here a rival, a competitor, a suitor at odds with another suitor over the love of a single woman. That woman is Nana, and in Saxo's book she is not yet a goddess, but the daughter of a king, Gevor of Norway, sought by two men who would not both be satisfied.

The two men are Baldurus and Huthurus, and their story is not a single sorrow but a long feud, fought over and over across many pages. Where the Icelandic telling gives Baldur a blind and unwitting brother, Saxo gives him a flesh and blood rival, who wants the same bride and will fight for her. They meet in battle again and again. The gods themselves take sides, for Saxo keeps them in his history as powers who can be moved. Odin lends his weight to Balderus, and Thor comes with his crushing strength, and the whole company of heaven leans toward the shining one, and still he loses.

Against all that help, Hothorus holds his ground, and in the end it is he who wins Nanna, for in this version her heart was never with Baldorus at all. She loved only Hothorus, and Baldorus, denied, began to waste. He was worn down not by a spear, but by longing, tormented by nightmares of the woman he could not have, thinning and failing under the weight of his own dreams. The end, when it comes in Saxo, is nearer to the other tellings than all that Quarrelling would suggest, for the demigod who could not be harmed by ordinary iron is at last brought brought down by an extraordinary blade. There was a sword kept by Mimir, a weapon apart from the common run of steel, and it was this that Hothorus turned against his rival. Boldorus took a mortal wound from it, and even a demigod so struck cannot linger long. He lay three days dying, the strength going out of him by slow degrees, and on the third day he died.

They did not scatter him or forget him. They raised a barrow over him. A mound of earth heaped high above his rest, and there the Danish history leaves him, a slain half-mortal prince beneath a hill rather than a radiant god burned upon the greatest of ships. It is the same death seen through a different glass, colder, more human, stripped of the funeral fire, and it stands beside the Icelandic tale rather than replacing it. There are fainter traces still, scattered far from Iceland and Denmark, and the careful teller must weigh them with an honest hand, for not every mark that looks like Baldr is truly his.

In the old German lands there survives a small handful of charms, spells written down in the tenth century, and lost again for centuries until they came to light once more, in the year the world counts as 1841. One of these Merseberg charms names a figure who might be called Baldur, and for a long time this seemed a precious thread, a sign that the shining god was known far to the south as well as in the north. Yet the thread is frayed. Later scholars looked again and were not sure the boulder of that charm was boulder at all. Some judged that another god was meant, that the name pointed rather to Freya, the lord of fair weather and increase, and that the by-name joining the two figures was never conclusive. So the charm is set down here as a maybe and not a certainty, a shape half seen in old firelight.

Fainter yet is an inscription from the Low Countries, from Utrecht, cut in stone in the third or fourth century of the common era, in which some have read a form that might be Baldur's name. But the reading is doubted, and the meaning doubted with it, and honest scholars will not build a house upon so cracked a stone. It is right to name these fragile things, and to name them as fragile, to keep them separate from the firm old tradition of the Eddas, for the truth of a myth is not helped by pretending that every shadow is a proof. What stands sure is the story of the beloved God, who died by mistletoe and and could not be wept back, what stands uncertain is gathered here beside it, honestly and left uncertain. From the tangle of names and rival tales, the story turns to a quieter question, which is how the later ages chose to remember Baldr, and what they thought his very name was trying to say. The early scholars who studied him fixed on his brightness on Snorri's description of a god so radiant and so fair that light seemed to come off him, and they read him as a light god, a shining power set among the darker forces of the north.

Jacob Grimm, writing in the year the world counts as 1835, traced a path through the sounds of the old languages, moving from a route that meant white, toward a sense of shining, and onward toward a sense of strong, as though whiteness and radiance and power were three stations on a single road, and Balder stood at the end of it, white and bright and mighty all at once. Yet the name will not sit entirely still, and later students were honest about the strain. Rudolf Simek pointed out that the likeliest root of the name carries a sense of brave, of bold, of forceful, the meaning that gives the word its old force of hero or prince, and that this warlike sound sits uneasily upon so gentle a figure.

The Baldur of the myths is not a fighter. He is the loved one, the mild one, the God of whom no harsh deed is told, and it is strange that his name should ring with boldness and defiance. The unease is not resolved, it is only noted, one of the small honest puzzles that cling to old gods, that the meaning of the name and the manner of the God do not quite agree. Other forms pull the name in another direction still. On the continent and among the Anglo-Saxons the name appears as Baldag and as Beldag, and in these shapes it seems bound up with the word for Day, so that some have wondered whether the figure behind the name was once Day itself, the daylight personified, the bright span between one darkness and the next, and in England the name was remembered not only as a god, but as a forefather. The old chronicle of the Anglo-Saxons set Baldur into the family trees of kings, naming him an ancestor of the royal houses of Kent, of Bernicia, of Dera and of Wessex, tracing their lines back to him through a sun called Bronn'd.

So the shining god became a root of dynasties, a name at the head of a scroll of kings, remembered less as a story than as a source, the far origin of the men who wore the crowns of the English kingdoms, whether as light, as day, or as the sire of royal houses, Balder was kept, worn down into other shapes, but never quite let go. Beyond all the quarrels of the tellers and the scholars, there lies one consolation, and the sources allow only this one, held out at the very end of the world, like a small light kept for later. For the death of Baldr was the first link in the chain that drags the gods toward Ragnarök, the doom in which the old order burns, and it might seem that his story ends in loss with no return.

But the vision of the Volva sees past the burning. She sees the fire spend itself, the old world sink beneath the waters, and then a new earth rise green and clean out of the sea, washed of all that was before, waiting to be lived upon again. And into that renewed world, the vision says, Baldr comes back. He rises out of hell at last, released not by weeping, but by the ending and remaking of all things, and he walks upon the new green earth, in the morning of a world made over, he does not come back alone, and this is the strangest mercy of the tale. With him comes Hirth, the blind brother whose hand had thrown the fatal shaft, and the The two are no longer Slayer and Slane, but brothers reconciled, the wrong between them dissolved in the general renewal.

They rule together. Alongside the Sons of Thor, who survive the breaking of the world to carry their father's strength into the new age, Baldr and Hertha hold the renewed earth in peace. The enmity spent, the vengeance finished, The long account of blood at last closed and paid. The scholar bellows, reading this quiet return, Saw in it the symbol of a new age, A world past its wars, And there is a rightness in that reading. The whole cycle of the north is a cycle of vengeance, of blow answering blow, of Vahli born only to avenge, and Loki bound only to break free and avenge in his turn.

And here at the end that wheel stops. The shining god is restored, precisely when the killing has run out of victims, when there is no one left to be avenged upon, and brother sits with brother in the light, without a weapon between them. It is the one place in the whole vast story where the sorrow is undone, and it is set deliberately at the farthest edge beyond fire and flood, as if to say that such peace is real but distant, kept for a world that has first to be unmade. With the The tale carried through to that far green morning, the story may look back upon itself and wonder at its own quiet shape.

For here is the heart of the mystery, and it is worth turning over slowly. The best loved of all the gods died precisely because he was loved. It was love that set the whole engine going, love that sent frig across the world to gather the oaths of every living and unliving thing, love that made the very stones and metals and sicknesses swear to spare him. And it was love, in a way, that overlooked the one small plant. The mistletoe too young and too slight to be asked, spared the oath because it seemed too tender to matter.

The great net of protection was woven by devotion, and devotion, reaching so wide, missed the smallest thread, and through that one missed thread the whole doom came in. So the central question of the story finds its gentle answer. Why could no weeping reclaim him when the whole cosmos wept, when stones and trees and beasts and metals all let fall their tears for the shining god? Because a single unwilling heart stood outside the grief of everything else. One creature in one cave would not weep, and that one refusal was enough, for the ransom of hell required all without exception, and Loki, hidden as Thok, made himself the one exception on purpose. The grief of the whole world could not outweigh the malice of one, and yet, and this is the mercy folded inside the sorrow, his death was never truly the end.

It was a threshold. The bright God was not lost forever, but only laid aside, set in the high seat of the pale hall to wait, kept back until the world itself was worn out and ready to be made new. Death held him, but did not keep him. He was a light covered over, not a light put out. Before that light is finally let down, the figures who carried the story deserve to be named again, slowly, each stepping once more into the glow, before the telling closes. There is Baldr first of all, Baldr the radiant, second son of Odin, dreaming his dark dreams in the fair hall of Bredeblik, the most beautiful dwelling that exists, beloved of gods and mortals alike.

There is Frigg his mother, moving patiently across the whole wide earth, to gather from everything its oath, and forgiving herself nothing, when the one thing she passed over undid her care. There is blind Hirth, the brother who saw nothing and meant nothing, whose hand was lifted and guided by another, standing forever in the memory as both the killer and the innocent. There is Loki, the shaper of the whole grief, who found the mistletoe and made of it a spear, and set it in the blind God's grip, and who then, when the world had almost wept his victim free, crept into a cave as the giantess thock, and let fall only dry tears, refusing at the last the mercy he had made necessary.

There is Odin the father, bending over the body on the ship, to whisper into the dead ear, a word that no living soul has ever learned, a secret carried down into the fire and never spoken since. There is Hyrukin the giantess, come riding her wolf out of the wastes, setting her hand to the great ship Ringhorny, and driving it down toward the water, so hard that fire leapt from the rollers, and the earth shook beneath the gods. There is Nanna, the wife, whose heart broke at the sight of her burning husband, so that she died of pure grief, and was laid upon the pyre beside him, to go with him even into There is Hermold, the messenger, riding the long dark road down to the gates of the dead, to beg for Baldur's release, carrying back only gifts and a refusal.

And there is Vahli, born in a single night for a single purpose, grown to a man before a day was out, come into the world only to avenge his brother and set the wheel of vengeance turning one more turn. And there, last of all in the naming, stands the ship itself, Ringhorny, the greatest vessel ever built, too vast for the gods to move by their own strength, carrying its bright burden out toward the deep water, while the fire climbed, and the shore fell silent behind it. These were the ones who moved through the tail, the mother and the father, the two brothers bound together in a single wound, the wife who would not stay behind, the messenger who rode for nothing, the giantess on her wolf, the child born for vengeance, and the schemer who unmade them all. Each of them did only what love or grief or malice asked of them, and out of those small and certain acts the first great sorrow of the gods was made. So The tale turns, at the last, to face the one who has listened to it.

The way still water turns back the face of anyone who bends above it. Its griefs are older than any of us, and far larger, being the griefs of gods and giants, and the burning of a world, and yet the shape of them is a shape that every waking life already knows, in smaller measure. Something bright is loved, and guarded with all the care that love can gather, and lost anyway through the one small opening that no one thought to close. A sorrow arrives that no cleverness can argue with, and no weeping can buy back, and still, the farthest edge of that sorrow, when the fire has spent itself and the flood has drawn back, something clean and green waits to begin again. The old poets set these truths inside gods on purpose, so that they could be looked at without flinching, held at the safe distance of a story, and felt fully without being suffered in the flesh. That is the mirror the tale holds up to whoever will lie still and gaze into it, and what it shows in the end is kinder than all its griefs would lead one to expect. For the name did not die with the god. It went out from that one island in the cold north, and travelled farther than the funeral ship could ever have carried him, into long Latin histories, written far to the south, into charms half burned and half remembered, into inscriptions worn nearly past reading, and into the family trees of English kings who wished a shining god at the head of their line. Every hand that carried the name, shaped it a little as it passed, softening the fierce sound of it or hardening the gentle one, keeping him a god here and making him a mortal prince there, until no two tellers held quite the same boulder in their mouths.

There is no loss in that disagreement, and no failure in it. A figure who can be remembered in so many shapes at once, is a figure that no single age was willing to let fall silent, remembered because he was loved, and loved because he was gentle, and carried so from tongue to tongue across all the long centuries that lie between his burning and this quiet room. And of all the things the old poets did with him, the boldest by far was the ending they refused to stop short at. Every current in the story runs downward, toward the double dream and the overlooked sprig and the branch that flew straight and the single tear withheld in the cave, and and a lesser telling would have let the fire drifting out upon the dark water stand as the whole of the truth. These tellers would not allow it. Having followed the sorrow all the way down to the shore, sparing themselves no part of it and softening no single loss along the road, they still lifted their eyes past the burning, toward a morning they could only just make out, a new earth risen green from the sea, where the slayer and the slain walk side by side, as brothers and the long account of blood is at last closed and paid.

To look that far into the dark, unblinking, and then to look one step further still, and To find light standing where a lesser sight would have found only more dark, is perhaps the truest and the bravest thing the old poets ever did. So the story is whole now, every thread followed all the way to its end, the dream carried through to the burning and the burning through to the promised morning, with nothing left unfinished, and nothing left tugging quietly at the mind to be resolved before sleep. It has been carried honestly, and for that reason it can be set down honestly, and a thing set down whole and entire does not follow anyone into the dark or come loose again in the night, the God himself, whose long waiting in the high seat has already been spoken of and asks for no repeating, but the tale of him, which has done its patient work from the first dream to the last ember and needs only to be released now, gently, into the quiet that has been waiting for it all along. Let the last image of the tail come slowly now, and then let it drift away. The great ship stands out from the shore on the dark and level water. Its sail hangs still, and along its hull length the fire moves with a low and steady sound, not violent any longer, bright, gold and amber, climbing the timbers into the night air.

Balder lies at its heart in the calm of the dead. The ring dropped near him, his good horse laid beside him, Nanna at his side who chose to go where he had gone. On the receding shore the gods stand small and silent, Odin among them, with the ravens dark upon his shoulders. The secret he whispered still sealed inside the flame and carried out to sea. The earth no longer trembles from Hierokin's great shove, the rollers no longer smoke, there is only the ship and the fire, and the widening water between the living and the one they loved, and the sky above it, strewn with cold and distant points of light that but do not judge and do not grieve, but simply shine, as they have shone over every parting since the first of the ages. And now, gently, let that whole shore begin to move away. Let the ship grow smaller on the dark water, its fire softening to a single warm point far out on the deep, and let the mind loosen its hold on the grief that filled the hall, on the mother's careful weeping, and the father's unspoken word, and the long cold road down to hell. All of that is done now, all of that is finished and safely told, and it asks nothing further of anyone who has followed it here to the end.

Imagine the shore of Baldr's burning far behind you, its long fire, and its old sorrow no longer pressing on your thoughts. In your mind, reach back and close an invisible door to that shore, feeling it move on silent hinges, sealing the grief of the shining god, in calm and order. Then see a single candle, its flame steady in the darkness. With a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Rest well, sleep deeply and let the ancient stories carry you into the night.