Heimdallr

Heimdallr stands at the edge of the sky in his hall Himinbjörg ("Heaven-cliffs"), where the burning rainbow bridge Bifröst meets Asgard. Born of nine mothers — often read as the nine daughters of the sea — he is made for watching: he needs less sleep than a bird, sees a hundred leagues by night as by day, and hears wool growing on sheep and grass growing in the fields.

When the jötnar come at Ragnarök, it is Heimdallr who blows the Gjallarhorn, the blast heard in all worlds. In the last battle he and Loki — old enemies who once fought as seals over Brísingamen — slay one another. Under the name Rígr, he is also said to have fathered the three classes of humankind: thrall, farmer, and noble.

The sentinel at the world's edge

Snorri's portrait in Gylfaginning gathers the essentials: Heimdallr is called the white god, great and holy; nine maidens bore him, all sisters; he is also called Gold-Toothed, for his teeth are of gold, and Hallinskíði; his horse is Gulltoppr, "Gold-top," which he rides to Baldr's funeral among the Æsir. He dwells at Himinbjörg by Bifröst's end and guards the bridge against the mountain-giants, sitting there — as Grímnismál has it — drinking good mead in his comfortable hall while keeping the most demanding watch in the cosmos. He needs less sleep than a bird; he sees equally by night and day to a distance of a hundred leagues; and he hears grass growing on the earth and wool on sheep, and everything that sounds louder. No arrow, no army, no shape-shifted infiltrator should be able to cross into the gods' realm unannounced while he stands there.

His strangest birth is glanced at in the poem Hyndluljóð, where one was born in the elder days, of divine strength, at the world's edge: nine giant-maids bore the spear-glorious man, and he was reared with the strength of the earth, the cold sea, and sacrificial blood. The nine mothers, all sisters, are most often read as the nine wave-daughters of the sea-giant Ægir and Rán — making the gods' watchman a son of the sea itself, born where water meets land, the boundary he spends eternity guarding. The identification is attractive rather than certain: the names given for his mothers do not quite match the named waves, and scholars flag the join. Fragments of a lost poem, Heimdalargaldr, quoted by Snorri, preserve the god's own voice: "Offspring of nine mothers am I, of nine sisters am I the son."

What is the Gjallarhorn?

The "resounding horn" is the alarm-clock of the apocalypse. Snorri says Heimdallr's trumpet-blast can be heard in all worlds, and that when the enemies of the gods advance at Ragnarök, Heimdallr will stand and blow it with all his might to wake the gods to their last council. Völuspá paints the moment: Heimdallr blows loud, the horn aloft, while Odin speaks with Mímir's head and Yggdrasil shudders.

There is a genuine tangle in the sources here. Völuspá also says that "Heimdallr's hljóð" — his hearing, or his horn — lies hidden beneath the bright holy tree, pledged in Mímir's well as Odin's eye is; and Snorri elsewhere shows Mímir drinking from the well out of the Gjallarhorn itself. Did Heimdallr, like Odin, deposit a sense-organ (his ear, matching Odin's eye) for supernatural perception? Or is the horn simply stored at the well until it is needed? The Old Norse word hljóð can mean both "hearing" and "sound/horn," and the debate has never been settled. Either way, the god who hears everything and the well of hidden wisdom are joined at the root of the world-tree.

Rígr, father of humankind

The most remarkable of Heimdallr's myths barely mentions his usual post. The Eddic poem Rígsþula opens with a prose note identifying the wandering god Rígr with Heimdallr, and Völuspá's first stanza supports it, addressing all humanity as "greater and lesser sons of Heimdallr." Rígr walks the green ways of Midgard and lodges three nights each with three couples: Ái and Edda (Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother) in a hovel, Afi and Amma at a tidy farmstead, and Faðir and Móðir in a fine hall. In each house he sleeps between the couple, and nine months later a child is born: swarthy Þræll, from whom come the thralls; sturdy Karl, from whom come the free farmers; and fair Jarl, from whom come the nobles. Rígr returns to claim Jarl, teaches him runes, names him his son and heir, and Jarl's youngest boy Konr ungr — a play on konungr, "king" — surpasses even his father in rune-craft. The watchman of the gods is thus the ancestor and orderer of human society itself: a god of boundaries who drew the boundaries between the classes, as medieval Scandinavia understood them. Why this office fell to Heimdallr rather than Odin is another of his mysteries; some scholars suspect Rígr originally was Odin and the prose note reassigned him, but the poem as transmitted belongs to Heimdallr.

Heimdallr and Loki

The mythology pairs its watchman with its infiltrator as natural enemies. Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, quoting the skaldic poem Húsdrápa, preserves the outline of a lost tale: Heimdallr and Loki fought in the shape of seals at a place called Singasteinn over the "sea-kidney" — understood as Freyja's necklace Brísingamen, which Loki had stolen. Heimdallr won it back. In Þrymskviða the two nearly cooperate: it is Heimdallr, "wisest of the Vanir-like, who sees the future as the Vanir do," who proposes dressing Thor as the bride to recover Mjölnir — the plan Loki gleefully executes. And in the prose of Lokasenna, when Loki insults him at the feast — mocking the "mud-back" fate of standing watch forever — Heimdallr answers with the weary dignity of the permanently on-duty.

At Ragnarök

The end begins with his breath. Heimdallr sounds the Gjallarhorn as the hosts converge on Vígríðr: Surtr from the south, the frost-giants by sea, Loki steering Naglfar with the dead of Hel. When the great single combats are assigned — Odin to Fenrir, Thor to Jörmungandr, Freyr to Surtr — Heimdallr gets the opponent he was always going to get. He and Loki kill each other, watchman and saboteur cancelling out at the last, and Snorri places their duel among the final acts before Surtr flings fire over the world. A strange kenning preserved by Snorri calls the sword "Heimdallr's head," explaining that Heimdallr was struck through with a man's head — a lost myth, flagged as such since the Middle Ages, that hints his death-tales were once richer than what survives.

In the primary sources

Heimdallr opens Völuspá (humanity as his children) and sounds through its climax; Grímnismál gives him Himinbjörg and the mead; Rígsþula gives him humankind; Þrymskviða gives him the bridal plan; Lokasenna gives him his exchange with Loki; Hyndluljóð gives the nine-mothered birth. In the Prose Edda, Gylfaginning assembles his portrait and his Ragnarök, while Skáldskaparmál preserves the seal-fight, the Heimdalargaldr fragment, and his kennings — including "whitest of the Æsir" and the enigmatic sword-kenning. He has left almost no cult traces: no certain place-names, no recorded temples — a god, perhaps, more cosmological than devotional.

Legacy

Heimdallr left little on the map but much in the imagination: the incorruptible sentinel, the horn that ends the world, the god whose senses reach everywhere. Nineteenth-century Scandinavian nationalism painted him at his post; modern fantasy and film keep station with him at the rainbow bridge. Every story of the lone watcher at the gate, waiting out eternity for the one alarm that matters, is telling his story.