Asgard

Asgard ('Enclosure of the Æsir') is the gods' walled stronghold, connected to Midgard by the burning rainbow bridge Bifröst, which Heimdallr watches night and day. Within its wall stand the halls the poems love to catalogue: Odin's Valhalla with its roof of shields, Frigg's Fensalir, Baldr's Breiðablik, Heimdallr's Himinbjörg, and Glaðsheimr where the gods sit in council; at its heart lies the plain of Iðavöllr and the well of Urðr, where the gods hold court daily.

The name tells you what the place is. A garðr is an enclosure — a fenced yard, a defended homestead — and the Norse cosmos is organized by exactly this logic: the worlds that matter are the worlds inside a wall. Asgard is the innermost enclosure of all, the fortified farm of the gods, set apart from the human garðr of Midgard and from everything unfenced beyond, which belongs to the giants of Jötunheimr. To ask where Asgard "is" — above the sky, at the world's center, at the top of Yggdrasil — is to ask a question the sources answer differently at different moments. Snorri sometimes places the gods' judgment-seats by the well of Urðr beneath the world-tree, sometimes has Bifröst arc from earth to heaven; the poems care less about a map than about the wall.

The halls of the gods

Grímnismál, the great catalogue-poem of the Poetic Edda, walks the listener hall by hall through the gods' dwellings, and Snorri repeats and organizes the tour in Gylfaginning. Valhalla, the hall of the slain, is roofed with gilded shields like shingles, raftered with spears, its benches filled with the einherjar — the battle-dead whom the valkyries carry home to fight all day and feast all night until they are needed. Glaðsheimr, 'Glad-home', holds the high seats of Odin and the twelve; Vingólf serves the goddesses. Frigg keeps her own hall, Fensalir; Baldr's Breiðablik is the place where nothing unclean may be; Heimdallr's Himinbjörg, 'Heaven-mountain', stands at the bridgehead of Bifröst, where the watchman of the gods drinks his good mead and listens — for his hearing is so fine he can hear grass growing — for the sound of the enemy.

At the center of the enclosure lies Iðavöllr, the shining plain where, in the morning of the world, the gods built their first forges, smithed gold, and played at tables with golden game-pieces — an image Völuspá plants early precisely so it can harvest it at the end. And beneath the ash Yggdrasil wells the spring of Urðr, where the norns shape the fates of men and where the Æsir ride each day over Bifröst to sit in judgment. The gods' government, such as it is, happens at a well under a tree.

The wall and the builder

Asgard's great wall has a story, and it is one of the mythology's best. In the young days of the world the gods' fortification lay broken, and a lone builder appeared with an offer: he would raise a wall proof against any giant in a single winter — and his price was the sun, the moon, and Freyja herself. On Loki's advice the gods agreed, shaving the terms: one winter only, no help from any man. The builder asked only the use of his stallion, Svaðilfari, and Loki saw no harm in a horse.

The horse was the harm. By night Svaðilfari hauled boulders that would have broken teams of oxen, and the wall climbed at impossible speed. Three days before summer, with the work nearly rung shut around the gate, the gods convened in something close to panic and asked the obvious question: who had advised this bargain? They laid hands on Loki and promised him an ugly death unless he unmade what he had made. So Loki went out that evening as a mare, and whinnied at Svaðilfari from the woods, and the stallion snapped his traces and ran, and the builder's schedule ran with him. When the builder flew into a giant's rage — revealing what the gods had begun to suspect — they called for Thor, who paid the builder's fee with Mjölnir and sent him down to Niflhel with a shattered skull. Asgard got its wall a few stones short of the price; Loki, some months later, gave birth to a grey foal with eight legs, and Odin got Sleipnir, the best of horses. Völuspá remembers the affair sourly: oaths were broken, it says — the gods' own oaths — and something went out of the world's innocence when they were.

Is Valhalla in Asgard?

Yes. Valhalla (Valhöll, 'hall of the slain') is one hall among many inside Asgard's wall — the most famous, but a building, not a realm of its own. Grímnismál sets it in Glaðsheimr's precinct and gives it its furniture: five hundred and forty doors, through each of which eight hundred warriors will march abreast when they go out to fight the wolf. The einherjar who feast there are guests of Odin inside Asgard; the popular modern picture of "Valhalla" as the Norse afterlife in general flattens a system in which most of the dead never see Asgard at all, but go instead to Hel's grey country, and in which even Freyja takes half the battle-slain to her own field, Fólkvangr.

What are the Nine Realms?

Norse poems speak of "nine worlds" — the völva of Völuspá remembers nine, and the dying Vafþrúðnir has seen through all nine — but no medieval source ever lists them. The tidy canonical roster (Asgard, Midgard, Jötunheimr, Vanaheimr, Álfheimr, Svartálfaheimr, Niflheimr, Múspellsheimr, Helheim) is a modern reconstruction stitched together from names scattered across the Eddas. Asgard's place at the top of that list is secure enough — it is the realm the sources describe most lovingly — but the enumeration itself is our tidiness, not the skalds'.

In the primary sources

Asgard is best attested in Grímnismál, where Odin, tortured between two fires, recites the roll of the gods' dwellings; in Völuspá, which shows Iðavöllr at the world's beginning and again after its end; and throughout Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning in the Prose Edda, which supplies the connected narratives — the building of the wall, the daily ride over Bifröst, the geography of halls and wells. Snorri's prologue and his Ynglinga saga also offer a euhemerized Asgard, a city in "Asia" from which a human Odin led his people north: medieval scholarship's way of keeping the old stories while disarming them. Where the poems and Snorri disagree — chiefly on cosmic geography — the poems are older and vaguer, and Snorri is the systematizer trying to draw the map they never drew.

At Ragnarök

Asgard's defenses are built against the day they will fail. Heimdallr will see the enemy coming and sound Gjallarhorn; the einherjar will pour from Valhalla's doors onto the plain of Vígríðr. The sons of Múspell, riding out of the fire behind Surtr, will shatter Bifröst beneath them — the bridge, Snorri notes, was always going to break, for nothing in this world is of a kind to be trusted when Múspell's sons ride. In the battle the enclosure's great households fall with their lords: Odin to Fenrir, Thor to Jörmungandr, Freyr to Surtr's fire. And then, in the world that rises green from the sea, the surviving gods — Baldr returned, Thor's sons, Odin's sons — gather again on Iðavöllr, talk over what happened, and find in the grass the golden game-pieces their elders played with in the morning of time. Ragnarök destroys Asgard's wall but not, it turns out, its lawn.

Legacy

Asgard has had a busy afterlife: it names everything from Marvel's science-fantasy city to spacecraft, companies, and a Norwegian ski resort, and "the halls of Asgard" has become English shorthand for any gods' citadel. The older legacy is subtler — the garðr idea itself, the sense that civilization is an enclosure holding the wild at bay, runs from these poems through the whole medieval North (Midgard's direct descendant is Tolkien's Middle-earth). The archaeology of great Norse halls at sites like Lejre and Gudme shows the earthly template: a chieftain's gold-rich hall inside a fence was Asgard in miniature, or rather Asgard was the chieftain's hall raised to the scale of the sky.