Valhalla: The Norse Hall of the Slain, and Who Could Enter

Ask most people where Vikings went when they died and they’ll say Valhalla. The sources say something narrower and stranger.

What was Valhalla?

Valhalla, Old Norse Valhöll, means hall of the slain. It was the hall of the god Odin in Asgard, where warriors who had died in battle were brought to spend the time until Ragnarok, the final battle in which the gods and their enemies destroy the world. The World History Encyclopedia describes it as the afterlife realm for fallen heroes selected by Odin’s Valkyries to join the army he was gathering for that day.

The hall is described in detail in the Poetic Edda poem Grímnismál, where a disguised Odin describes his own hall, and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (the Gylfaginning) draws on the poem and adds that the warriors, the einherjar, fight each other every day, are restored each evening, and feast on a boar that is cooked and comes back to life, and on mead from a goat.

Who could enter?

Only people who died in battle, and only some of them. The clearest statement is Grímnismál stanza 14, which in Henry Adams Bellows’s translation says that Fólkvangr is where Freyja decrees who shall have seats in the hall, that she chooses half the dead each day, and that Odin has the other half. Snorri repeats the stanza in Gylfaginning and adds that whenever Freyja rides to battle she gets half of the slain.

So the goddess Freyja, better known for love and fertility, took half the battle-dead to her own field, Fólkvangr, and her hall Sessrúmnir, the hall with many seats. The World History Encyclopedia notes that the sources give no reason why each deity chose the warriors they did. A scholar writing on the Norse afterlife cautions that the stanza is obscure and that the traditional reading, a simple fifty-fifty split of warriors, is one interpretation among several.

What is clear is who did not go to Valhalla: everyone who died of sickness or old age. They went to Hel, the realm of the dead ruled by the goddess of the same name, which in the older sources was not a place of punishment but simply where the dead were. Hel is the ordinary Norse afterlife; Valhalla was for a select few.

What did the einherjar do all day?

Fight and feast. According to the Prose Edda, they armed themselves each morning, battled in the courtyard, fell, rose again whole, and returned to the hall to drink. The point was training: they were Odin’s army for Ragnarok, when they would march out of Valhalla’s doors to fight beside the gods and lose. The World History Encyclopedia glosses einherjar as those who could handle any situation but still honed their skills. See Viking funerals: what archaeology shows versus the myth.

How reliable are the sources?

Less than the vivid picture suggests. Almost everything we know comes from two Icelandic works written down in the 13th century, two to three hundred years after Scandinavia converted to Christianity. The Poetic Edda collects older poems of uncertain date, and the Prose Edda was written by Snorri Sturluson, a Christian politician and scholar, who organized the myths and, most scholars agree, filled gaps and added Christian coloring. Fólkvangr is mentioned only twice in all of Old Norse literature, according to Norse Mythology for Smart People, and the Prose Edda’s mention simply quotes the poem. How ordinary Vikings pictured death is largely unknown; grave goods and ship burials show they expected a journey, but not necessarily to Odin’s hall.

Why does Valhalla loom so large today?

Because it is a good story, and because 19th- and 20th-century art, Wagner’s operas, and modern films, comics, and video games made it the Norse heaven. The sources describe something more limited: a warrior cult of a war god, reserved for those who died with a weapon in hand. For most people in the Norse world, death led somewhere quieter. See how other cultures pictured the afterlife in death around the world.

Beliefs vary between traditions, teachers, and families. Everendium describes what the sources say and encourages readers to consult their own teachers or community where appropriate.