Balder

Balder is the shining, beloved son of Odin and Frigg in Norse tradition, made invulnerable by an oath sworn from every thing in the world save the mistletoe, and killed by that one omission through Loki's contrivance.

Balder appears in the Norse sources as the most beautiful and best-spoken of the gods, a figure whose radiance is remarked on wherever he is named. The fuller prose accounts describe how he begins to dream of his own death, and how his mother Frigg travels through the world taking an oath from fire, water, metals, stones, trees, sicknesses, beasts and birds that none of them will harm him. The gods then make a game of his invulnerability, throwing weapons at him for entertainment while nothing bites.

The mistletoe is passed over as too young to swear, and Loki learns of the omission. In the best-known telling he puts a shaft of it into the hands of Balder's blind brother Hod, guides the throw, and Balder falls. The gods send a messenger to the realm of the dead to ransom him, and the answer is that he may return if every thing in the world weeps for him; one giantess refuses, and he stays below. Accounts differ considerably in emphasis — one major source treats Balder as a warrior killed in rivalry over a woman rather than an innocent undone by a trick — and the two versions have long been read against each other rather than reconciled.

What is consistent is the shape: a death that the community cannot prevent despite total precaution, brought about through the single gap in an otherwise complete protection, and a mourning that fails by one refusal. The tradition also places Balder's return after the world's ending, which gives his story a forward reach that most divine deaths lack. He is a god defined less by deeds than by being loved and then lost.

[Generated Content] Read as a personality, Balder comes across as gentle, luminous, and strikingly passive — a figure things happen to rather than one who acts. The sources give him beauty, eloquence and the goodwill of everyone around him, but almost no initiative; even his premonition of death is handled by his mother rather than by him, and he submits to the gods' throwing-game without objection. That suggests a temperament trusting to the point of defencelessness, socially warm, and untroubled by suspicion, with his significance carried by how others feel about him rather than by anything he sets out to do.