Baldur was the toast of Valhalla, but Loki was determined to take him down.
In Think and Speak (1929), NL Clay challenged his pupils to stage a mock trial of Loki for the death of Baldur, Odin’s second son. Snorro Sturluson in The Younger Eddas, dating from 1223-23, doesn’t leave much room for doubt, unless we imagine that our Court is not privy to Loki’s shape-shifting wiles. These were the events, as Har explained them to Gangler.
Among the oldest surviving fragments of Norse poetry are some lines of rugged common sense which any age would do well to heed.
What follows is a selection of proverbs from The Guest’s Wisdom, which Frederick York Powell traced to western Norway in the eighth century. He saw in their spirit something ‘essentially British’: a people steady and sturdy, fast in friendship and fair-minded, but a little grim, neither putting on airs, nor shirking the responsibilities of civilisation.