Heimdall
Heimdall was the watchman of the Norse gods, who guards the rainbow bridge Bifröst against the giants. His symbol is his horn, Gjallarhorn, which he blows to call the gods to their last battle at Ragnarök.
Meaning
Heimdall, said HAYM-dahl in English (Dictionary.com), is the god who keeps watch for the Æsir and guards the bridge Bifröst into Ásgard, Store norske leksikon says. Snorri’s Prose Edda calls him “the White God”, great and holy, born of nine maids who were sisters, with teeth of gold and a horse called Gold-top. He lives in Himinbjorg beside Bifröst, needs less sleep than a bird, sees a hundred leagues by night as well as by day, and “hears how grass grows on the earth or wool on sheep”. His horn Gjallarhorn “is heard throughout all worlds”. Lex calls his function a riddle, and Store norske leksikon notes that his stories are fragmentary, so that it is hard to form a whole picture of him. Everything known of him comes from the poems and Snorri, written by Christian writers at the start of the Middle Ages, as the National Museum of Denmark says of both Eddas. The Troth lists Heimdall among the gods Heathens worship today.
Origin and history
Lex sets out how scholars have read the fragments. His name has been taken as “the one who shines over the world”, which would make him an old sun god, the white god whose attributes are golden and belong to the sky; or as a world tree or pillar at the centre of the universe, his nine mothers matching the nine worlds the tree runs through. Others connect his name with a word for ram. Some see him as a god of entrances and beginnings like the Roman Janus, and others above all as Loki’s opposite. Store norske leksikon adds that Snorri once calls him Odin’s son, a fatherhood no other source mentions, and that the closing stanzas of Voluspo and Hyndluljoth, which speak of an unnamed ruler to come after Ragnarök, may mean Heimdall.
The horn Gjallarhorn
Lex translates the name Gjallarhorn as “the horn with the ringing sound”, and Bellows’s note to the Poetic Edda gives “Shrieking Horn”. At Ragnarök, in the Eddic poem Voluspo, “Loud blows Heimdall, the horn is aloft”, and Bellows explains that with it Heimdall “calls them to the last battle”. Earlier in the same poem the seeress knows “of the horn of Heimdall, hidden Under the high-reaching holy tree”, which is Yggdrasil. Lex notes that the word used there, hljóð, may be the horn itself or Heimdall’s hearing, which he has left in pledge at the tree. The horn is a drinking horn as well. In Grímnismál the “warder of heaven” drinks “the good mead gladly” in his house Himinbjorg, and Snorri’s Edda puts the horn in the hands of Mimir, who drinks from his well of wisdom with it.
Heimdall and Loki
Heimdall and Loki are enemies. In the Eddic poem Lokasenna Loki mocks him for the watchman’s life fixed for him, “With back held stiff must thou ever stand, As warder of heaven to watch”. The skaldic poem Húsdrápa, only partly preserved, tells of a fight between them, which Store norske leksikon reads as the two in the shape of seals racing for Freyja’s necklace Brísingamen. At Ragnarök, Snorri says, “Loki shall have battle with Heimdallr, and each be the slayer of the other.” They are on the same side once: in Thrymskvitha it is Heimdall, “whitest of the gods”, who proposes dressing Thor as the bride to win back the stolen hammer.
Rig and the sons of Heimdall
Voluspo opens with the seeress asking a hearing “From Heimdall’s sons, both high and low”, and Store norske leksikon explains “Heimdall’s sons” as a poetic name for humankind. In the prose introduction to the Eddic poem Rigsthula, Heimdall walks among men under the name Rig and fathers a son at each of three farms: Thrall, Karl and Jarl, the ancestors of the three ranks of Viking society. Store norske leksikon and Lex both take this as Heimdall’s story. Bellows, translating the poem in 1923, was less sure: it is a fourteenth-century annotator who identifies Rig with Heimdall, “on what authority we do not know, for the Rig of the poem seems much more like Othin”.
Nine mothers
Snorri gives Heimdall nine mothers, all sisters. The Eddic poem Hyndluljoth tells of a god of great might whom “Nine giant women, at the world’s edge” bore, and names them: Gjolp, Greip, Eistla, Eyrgjafa, Ulfrun, Angeyja, Imth, Atla and Jarnsaxa. Store norske leksikon notes that the poem never says the god is Heimdall, but that the two sources are naturally read together.
Read next
- Next in Norse gods and their symbolsBragiBragi is the Norse god of poetry and eloquence, a son of Odin and the husband of Idun. Snorri calls him the long-bearded god and the first maker of poetry, and an Eddic poem names his tongue among the things runes were carved on.
- Voluspo hides Heimdall’s horn under the holy treeYggdrasilThe world tree of Norse myth: an evergreen ash that stands at the centre of the world, its branches spreading over everything and its three roots reaching into the realms of gods, giants and the dead.
See also
Loki, Thor, Odin, Frigg, Baldr, Tyr.
Sources
- Heimdall (Store norske leksikon), Ellen Næss, Store norske leksikon, Heimdall
- Heimdal (Lex), Finn Stefánsson, Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon, Heimdal
- Gjallarhorn (Lex), Claus Jensen; Finn Stefánsson, Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon, Gjallarhorn
- The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation), Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (trans.), 1916, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Internet Archive), Gylfaginning, chapters XXVII and LI
- The Poetic Edda (Bellows translation), Henry Adams Bellows (trans.), 1923, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Project Gutenberg), Voluspo, stanzas 1, 27 and 46, and notes; Grimnismol, stanza 13; Lokasenna, stanza 48; Thrymskvitha, stanza 14
- Gods, The Troth, table of gods
- The old religion, National Museum of Denmark
- Heimdall (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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