Valhalla: The Complete Guide to the Hall of the Slain in Norse Myth

The bravest Norse dead hoped for Valhalla, where they feast and fight each day. But the hall is not a reward: it is an army gathered for the end of the world. This is the complete guide.

Not every Norse warrior wanted to die in bed. The greatest of them hoped for Valhalla, the hall of the slain, where the god Odin gathers the bravest of those who fall in battle. There the chosen dead, the einherjar, spend their days fighting and their nights feasting, healed of every wound by morning, eating the boar that is boiled each day and whole again each night, drinking the mead that never runs dry. But they are not there for reward. They are an army, kept against the day of Ragnarok, when they will march out to die beside the gods.

This is the complete guide to Valhalla and the Norse vision of the afterlife of the warrior. The golden hall of Odin with its roof of shields and spears for rafters; the Valkyries, the choosers of the slain, who carry the dead from the battlefield; the daily round of battle and feast; the other halls of the Norse dead, including the field of Freyja that takes half the slain; and the grim purpose behind the paradise, the gathering of an army for the end of the world.

The book draws Valhalla from the sources rather than the films, working from the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda of Snorri, and every chapter cites where it comes from.

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