by Neil Gaiman
Balder’s body flamed like the sun.
Thor stood in front of the funeral pyre, and he held Mjollnir high. “I sanctify this pyre,” he proclaimed, darting grumpy looks at the giantess Hyrrokkin, who still did not, Thor felt, appear to be properly respectful.
Lit, one of the dwarfs, walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the pyre, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse.
“I don’t like this,” said Thor testily. “I don’t like any of it one little bit. I hope Hermod the Nimble is sorting things out with Hel. The sooner Balder comes back to life, the better it will be for all of us.”
V
Hermod the Nimble rode for nine days and nine nights without stopping. He rode deeper and he rode through gathering darkness: from gloom to twilight to night to a pitch-black starless dark. All that he could see in the darkness was something golden glinting far ahead of him.
Closer he rode, and closer, and the light grew brighter. It was gold, and it was the thatch of the bridge across the Gjaller River, across which all who die must travel.
He slowed Sleipnir to a walk as they crossed the bridge, which swung and shook beneath them.
“What is your name?” asked a woman’s voice. “Who are your kin? What are you doing in the land of the dead?”
Hermod said nothing.
He reached the far end of the bridge, where a maiden stood. She was pale and very beautiful, and she looked at him as if she had never seen anything like him before. Her name was Modgud, and she guarded the bridge.
“Yesterday enough dead men to fill five kingdoms crossed this bridge, but you alone cause it to shake more than they did, though there were men and horses beyond all counting. I can see the red blood beneath your skin. You are not the color of the dead—they are gray, and green, and white, and blue. Your skin has life beneath it. Who are you? Why are you traveling to Hel?”
“I am Hermod,” he told her. “I am a son of Odin, and I am riding to Hel on Odin’s horse to find Balder. Have you seen him?”
“No one who saw him could ever forget it,” she said. “Balder the beautiful crossed this bridge nine days ago. He went to Hel’s great hall.”
“I thank you,” said Hermod. “That is where I also must go.”
“It is downward, and northward,” she told him. “Always go down, and keep traveling north. You will reach Hel’s gate.”
Hermod rode on. He rode northerly, and he followed the path down until he saw before him a huge high wall and the gates to Hel, which were higher than the tallest tree. Then he dismounted from his horse, and he tightened the girth strap. He remounted, and holding tight to the saddle, he urged Sleipnir faster and faster, and at the last it leapt, a jump like no horse has made before or since, and it cleared the gates of Hel and landed safely upon the other side, in Hel’s domain, where no living person can ever go.
Hermod rode to the great hall of the dead, dismounted, and walked inside. Balder, his brother, was seated at the head of the table, at the seat of honor. Balder was pale; his skin was the color of the world on a gray day, when there is no sun. He sat and drank the mead of Hel, and ate her food. When he saw Hermod he told him to sit beside him and spend the night with them at the table. On the other side of Balder was Nanna, his wife, and next to her, and not in the best of tempers, was a dwarf called Lit.
In Hel’s world, the sun never rises and the day can never begin.
Hermod looked across the hall, and he saw a woman of peculiar beauty. The right side of her body was the color of flesh, but the left-hand side of her body was dark and ruined, like that of a week-old corpse that you might find hanging from a tree in the forest or frozen into the snow, and Hermod knew that this was Hel, Loki’s daughter, whom the all-father had set to rule over the lands of the dead.
“I have come for Balder,” said Hermod to Hel. “Odin himself sent me. All things there are mourn him. You must give him back to us.”
Hel was impassive. One green eye stared at Hermod, and one sunken, dead eye. “I am Hel,” she said simply. “The dead come to me, and they do not return to the lands above. Why should I let Balder go?”
“All things mourn him. His death unites us all in misery, god and frost giant, dwarf and elf. The animals mourn him, and the trees. Even the metals weep. The stones dream that brave Balder will return to the lands that know the sun. Let him go.”
Hel said nothing. She watched Balder with her mismatched eyes. And then she sighed. “He is the most beautiful thing, and, I think, the best thing, ever to come to my realm. But if it is truly as you say, if all things mourn Balder, if all things love him, then I will give him back to you.”
Hermod threw himself at her feet. “That is noble of you. Thank you! Thank you, great queen!”
She looked down at him. “Get up,” she said. “I have not said I will give him back. This is your task, Hermod. Go and ask them. All the gods and the giants, all the rocks and the plants. Ask everything. If all things in the world weep for him and want him to return, I will give Balder back to the Aesir and the day. But if one creature will not cry or speaks against him, then he stays with me forever.”
Hermod got to his feet. Balder led him from the hall, and he gave Hermod Odin’s ring, Draupnir, to return to Odin, as evidence that Hermod had been to Hel. Nanna gave him a linen robe for Frigg and a golden ring for Fulla, Frigg’s handmaiden. Lit just grimaced and made rude gestures.
Hermod clambered back on Sleipnir. This time the gates of Hel were opened for him, as he left, and he retraced his steps. He crossed the bridge, and eventually he saw daylight once again.
In Asgard Hermod returned the arm-ring Draupnir to Odin, the all-father, and told him all that had happened and all that he had seen.
While Hermod was in the underworld, Odin had had a son to replace Balder; this son, named Vali, was the son of Odin and the goddess Rind. Before he was a day old, the baby found and slew Hod. So Balder’s death was avenged.
VI
The Aesir sent messengers across the world. The messengers of the Aesir rode like the wind, and they asked each thing they encountered if it wept for Balder, so that Balder could be free of Hel’s world. The women wept, and the men, the children, and the animals. Birds of the air wept for Balder, as did the earth, the trees, the stones—even the metals the messengers encountered wept for Balder, in the way that a cold iron sword will weep when you take it from the freezing cold into the sunlight and warmth.
All things wept for Balder.
The messengers were returning from their mission, triumphant and overjoyed. Balder would soon be back among the Aesir.
They rested on a mountain, on a ledge beside a cave, and they ate their food and drank their mead, and they joked and they laughed.
“Who is that?” called a voice from inside the cave, and an elderly giantess came out. There was something vaguely familiar about her, but none of the messengers was entirely certain what it was. “I am Thokk,” she said, which means “gratitude.” “Why are you here?”
“We have asked each thing there is if it would weep for Balder, who is dead. Beautiful Balder, killed by his blind brother. For each of us misses Balder as we would miss the sun in the sky, were it never to shine again. And each of us weeps for him.”
The giantess scratched her nose, cleared her throat, and spat onto the rock.
“Old Thokk won’t weep for Balder,” she said bluntly. “Alive or dead, old Odin’s son brought me nothing but misery and aggravation. I’m glad he’s gone. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Let Hel keep him.”
Then she shuffled back into the darkness of her cave and was lost to sight.
The messengers returned to Asgard and told the gods what they had seen, and that they had failed in their mission, for there was one creature that did not weep for Balder and did not want him to ret
urn: an old giantess in a cave on a mountain.
And by then they had also realized who old Thokk reminded them of: she had moved and talked much like Loki, the son of Laufey.
“I expect it was really Loki in disguise,” said Thor. “Of course it was Loki. It’s always Loki.”
Thor hefted his hammer, Mjollnir, and gathered a group of the gods to go looking for Loki, to take their revenge, but the crafty troublemaker was nowhere to be seen. He was hiding, far from Asgard, hugging himself in glee at his own cleverness and waiting for the fuss to die away.
THE LAST DAYS OF LOKI
I
Balder was dead, and the gods were still mourning his loss. They were sad, and the gray rains fell unceasingly, and there was no joy in the land.
Loki, when he returned from one of his journeys to distant parts, was unrepentant.
It was the time of autumn feast in Aegir’s hall, where the gods and elves were gathered to drink the sea giant’s fresh-brewed ale, brewed in the cauldron Thor had brought back from the land of the giants so long ago.
Loki was there. He drank too much of Aegir’s ale, drank himself beyond joy and laughter and trickery and into a brooding darkness. When Loki heard the gods praise Aegir’s servant, Fimafeng, for his swiftness and diligence, he sprang up from the table and stabbed Fimafeng with his knife, killing him instantly.
The horrified gods drove Loki out of the feast hall, into the darkness.
Time passed. The feasting continued, but now it was subdued.
There was a commotion at the doorway, and when the gods and goddesses turned to find out what was happening, they saw that Loki had returned. He stood in the entry to the hall staring at them, with a sardonic smile on his face.
“You are not welcome here,” said the gods.
Loki ignored them. He walked up to where Odin was sitting. “All-father. You and I mixed our blood long, long ago, did we not?”
Odin nodded. “We did.”
Loki smiled even more widely. “Did you not swear back then, great Odin, that you would drink at a banqueting table only if Loki, your sworn blood brother, drank with you?”
Odin’s good gray eye stared into Loki’s green eyes, and it was Odin who looked away.
“Let the wolf’s father feast with us,” said Odin gruffly, and he made his son Vidar move over to make room for Loki to sit down beside him.
Loki grinned with malice and delight. He called for more of Aegir’s ale and gulped it down.
One by one that night Loki insulted the gods and the goddesses. He told the gods that they were cowards, told the goddesses that they were gullible and unchaste. Each insult was woven with just enough truth to make it wound. He told them that they were fools, reminded them of things they thought were safely forgotten. He sneered and jeered and raised old scandals, and would not stop making everyone there miserable until Thor arrived at the feast.
Thor ended the conversation very simply: he threatened to use Mjollnir to shut Loki’s evil mouth for good and send him to Hel, all the way to the hall of the dead.
Loki left the feast then, but before he swaggered out, he turned to Aegir. “You brewed fine ale,” said Loki to the sea giant. “But there will never be another autumn feast here. Flames will take this hall; your skin will be burned from your back by the fire. Everything you love will be taken from you. This I swear.”
And he walked away from the gods of Asgard, into the dark.
II
Loki sobered up the next morning and thought about what he had done the night before. He felt no shame, for shame was not Loki’s way, but he knew that he had pushed the gods too far.
Loki had a home on a mountain near the sea, and decided to wait there until the gods had forgotten him. He had a house on the top of the mountain with four doors, one on each side, allowing him to see danger coming toward him from any direction.
During the day Loki would transform himself into a salmon, and he would hide in the pool at the bottom of Franang’s Falls, a high waterfall that tumbled down the mountainside. A stream connected the pool to a little river, and the river led directly to the sea.
Loki liked plans and counterplans. As a salmon he was fairly safe, he knew. The gods themselves could not catch salmon as they swam.
But then he began to doubt himself. He wondered, Could there be a way of catching a fish in the deep waters of the pool beneath the waterfall?
How would he, the craftiest of all, the most cunning planner, catch a salmon?
Loki took a ball of nettle yarn, and he began to knot and weave it into a fishing net, the first such net ever to be made. Yes, he thought. If I used this net, I could catch a salmon.
Now, he thought, to work out a counterplan: what will I do if the gods weave a net like this one?
He examined the net he had made.
Salmon can jump, he thought. They can swim upstream, even travel up waterfalls. I could jump over the net.
Something drew his attention. He peered out from first one door and then another. He was startled: the gods were coming up the mountainside, and they had almost reached his house.
Loki flung the net into the fire and watched it burn with satisfaction. Then he stepped into Franang’s Falls. In the shape of a silver salmon, Loki was swept over the waterfall, and he vanished into the depths of the deep pool at the base of the mountain.
The Aesir reached Loki’s house on the mountain. They waited by each door, cutting off Loki’s escape, if he was still inside.
Kvasir, wisest of the gods, walked in through the first door. Once he had been dead, and mead had been brewed from his blood, but now he was alive once more. He could tell from the fire and from the half-drunk cup of wine beside it that Loki had been there only moments before he arrived.
There was no clue to where Loki could have gone, though. Kvasir scanned the sky. Then he looked down at the floor and at the fireplace.
“He’s gone, the sniveling little weasel,” said Thor, coming in through another of the four doors. “He could have transformed himself into anything. We’ll never find him.”
“Do not be so hasty,” said Kvasir. “Look.”
“It’s only ashes,” said Thor.
“But look at the pattern of it,” said Kvasir. He bent down, touched the ash on the floor beside the fire, sniffed it, then touched it to his tongue. “It is the ash of a cord that has been thrown into the fire and burned. Cord just like that ball of nettle twine in the corner.”
Thor rolled his eyes. “I do not think that the ashes of a burned cord are going to tell us where Loki is.”
“You think not? But look at the pattern—a criss-cross diamond shape. And the squares are perfectly regular.”
“Kvasir, you are wasting all our time admiring the shapes that the ash makes. This is foolishness. Every moment we spend staring at the ash is time in which Loki is getting farther and farther away.”
“Perhaps you are right, Thor. But to make the squares in the cord that regular, you would need something to space them with, like that piece of scrap wood on the floor by your foot. You would need to tie one end of the cord to something as you wove it—something like that stick jutting from the floor over there. Then you would knot and thread your rope, weaving it, so that one piece of cord would form a . . . Hmm. I wonder what Loki called it. I will call it a net.”
“Why are you still jabbering?” said Thor. “Why are you staring at ash and at sticks and scraps of wood when we could be chasing Loki? Kvasir! As you ponder and talk your nonsense he is getting away from us!”
“I think that such a net as this would be best used to trap fish,” said Kvasir.
“I am done with you and your foolishness,” sighed Thor. “So it’s to be used to trap fish? Well, bully for you. Loki would have been hungry, and so he must have wanted to catch fish to eat. Loki invents things. That’s what he does. He always was
clever. That’s why we used to keep him around.”
“You are correct. But ask yourself, why would you, if you were Loki, invent something to trap fish with, and then throw the net you made onto the fire when you knew we were coming?”
“Because . . .” said Thor, creasing his brow and pondering so hard that distant thunder could be heard in the mountaintops. “Er . . .”
“Exactly. Because you would not want us to find it when we arrived. And the only reason for not wanting us to find it is to stop us, the gods of Asgard, from using it to trap you.”
Thor nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. Then, “Yes, I suppose so,” he said. And finally, “So Loki . . .”
“. . . is hiding in the deepwater pool at the foot of the waterfall, in the shape of a fish. Yes, exactly! I knew you would get there in the end, Thor.”
Thor nodded with enthusiasm, not entirely certain how he had come to this conclusion from ashes on the floor but happy to know where Loki was hiding.
“I will go down there, to the pool, with my hammer,” said Thor. “And I will . . . I will . . .”
“We will need to go down there with a net,” said Kvasir, the wise god.
Kvasir took the remaining nettle twine and the piece of spacing wood. He tied the end of the twine to the stick, and he began to wrap the twine around the stick, to weave it in and around and through. He showed the other gods what he was doing, and soon each of them was weaving and knotting. He attached the nets they made one to the other until they had a net as long as the pool, and they made their way down the side of the waterfall to the base of the mountain.
There was a stream that ran out of the pool where it overflowed. That stream ran down toward the sea.
When they reached the base of Franang’s Falls, the gods unrolled the net they had made. The net was huge and heavy, and long enough to go from one end of the pool to the other. It took all the warriors of the Aesir to hold up one end of it and Thor to hold up the other end.