The Hall of the Chosen Slain

Valhalla's most vivid details come from two source layers written centuries apart. The Eddic poem Grimnismal, the older source, gives the count of five hundred and forty doors and states that eight hundred warriors will walk out abreast through each one when the final battle of Ragnarok comes, but it says comparatively little else about daily life inside the hall. The fuller narrative of the einherjar's daily routine, fighting each day, healing and feasting each night on the boar Saehrimnir and the mead from Heidrun's udder, comes mainly from Snorri Sturluson's thirteenth-century Prose Edda, written more than two hundred years after Iceland's conversion to Christianity and drawing on the older poetry to construct a far more systematic account than the Eddic poems provide on their own.

Multiplying Grimnismal's own figures gives a total of four hundred and thirty two thousand warriors housed in the hall, a number the comparative mythologists Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, in their 1969 study Hamlet's Mill, called "one remarkable and disturbing coincidence" with vast cosmic time-cycles elsewhere in the ancient world, among them numerology in Hindu cosmology, a possible echo of shared numerical symbolism across distant traditions, though the comparison remains a scholarly hypothesis rather than an established fact about either tradition.