Heimdall

Heimdall is the ever-watchful guardian of the gods, who dwells where the rainbow bridge Bifrost meets the sky and keeps the road to Asgard. His senses are supernaturally acute: he needs less sleep than a bird, can see for a hundred leagues by day or night, and can hear the wool growing on a sheep and the grass growing in the earth. His great possession is the horn Gjallarhorn, whose blast will summon the gods to the final battle when the enemies of Asgard advance across Bifrost at the world's end. A curious detail of his origin is that he was born of nine mothers, usually understood as nine sisters, possibly the waves of the sea, and he is called the white god, the shining one.

Heimdall's obscure self-description, that he is the child of nine mothers, comes down to us only as a fragment: Snorri Sturluson quotes a single line, said to be from a now otherwise lost poem called Heimdalargaldr, Heimdall's Chant, in which the god states this directly, and no fuller version of the poem has survived, leaving the nine-mothers tradition a tantalising remnant of a text scholars can no longer read in full. A separate saga tradition, the late Sorla thattr, tells how Heimdall and Loki once fought each other in the shape of seals off a skerry to determine who would win back Freyja's stolen necklace Brisingamen, a myth outside the main Eddic corpus that nonetheless casts Heimdall in his familiar role as guardian and recoverer of what belongs to the gods.

A separate tradition, preserved in the poem Rigsthula, casts Heimdall in a quite different role: wandering the world of men under the name Rig, he visits three households in turn, poor, prosperous and noble, and fathers in each a son who becomes the ancestor of a social class, so that thrall, farmer and lord all descend from him. The poem thus makes Heimdall the origin of the ordered ranks of human society. At Ragnarok his story reaches its appointed end: he and Loki, long opposed, meet in the last battle and kill one another. Between the watchman with the horn, the god born of nine mothers, and the wandering Rig who fathers the estates of mankind, Heimdall gathers several strands that the surviving sources do not fully reconcile, and he remains one of the more enigmatic of the major Norse gods.

Comparative mythologists have long grouped Heimdall with other Indo-European guardian figures who stand watch at the threshold between the human and divine worlds, a role that, unlike most other Norse gods, gives him almost no independent adventures of his own outside his function as sentinel; nearly everything told about him circles back to watching, warning or, in the Rigsthula, founding the social order that the gods themselves oversee from a distance. This narrow but structurally central role has led some scholars to read Heimdall less as a fully developed personality, in the way Thor or Odin are, than as a personification of vigilance and boundary itself, given just enough myth to explain his indispensable place at the edge of Asgard.