Odin’s Wooing of Rind
At a Glance
- Central figures: Odin, the Allfather, seeking to fulfill a prophecy; Rind, a Jotun maiden and daughter of Billing, who resists him; and Vali, the son born of their union, destined to avenge Baldr’s death.
- Setting: The nine worlds of Norse myth, following the death of Baldr and in the shadow of his unavenged killing; drawn from skaldic and Eddic tradition.
- The turn: Odin, having failed twice in disguise, uses sorcery to afflict Rind with illness and then enters her chamber as a healer to break her will and father Vali upon her.
- The outcome: Vali is born, grows to a warrior’s full size within a single day, and kills Hodr - Baldr’s blind brother and the unwitting instrument of his death.
- The legacy: The prophecy of vengeance is fulfilled, but at the cost of another god’s life, and Odin’s actions leave Rind no willing part in the fate the Norns had written for her.
Baldr was dead. The gods knew his killer was Loki, but Loki’s punishment was a separate matter - the prophecy concerned Baldr’s brother Hodr, the blind god who had thrown the mistletoe dart without knowing what it would do. Vengeance required a particular hand, and Odin went to learn whose.
What the seeress told him was unambiguous: only a son born of Rind, the Jotun maiden and daughter of the frost giant Billing, could carry out the killing. Odin had sired children for stranger reasons. He set out to find her.
Rind, Daughter of Billing
Rind was not easy to approach, let alone win. She was a frost giant’s daughter, strong-willed and proud, and she had seen enough of the Aesir to want nothing to do with them.
Odin came to her first as a noble warrior - polished speech, gifts, the usual overtures. Rind looked at him and refused.
I will not wed an Aesir. Not even the Allfather.
He left.
The Warrior’s Offer
Odin returned as a fighter this time, trading courtly words for a show of martial strength. He offered to prove himself, to win her by force of arms if need be.
Rind was unmoved.
I will not be claimed as a prize.
Two refusals. Odin, who had hung nine nights on Yggdrasil for wisdom, who had traded an eye for a single drink from Mimir’s well, was not accustomed to being told no. He left again, and thought on it.
The Healer’s Trick
The third approach was the ugliest. Odin put on the shape of an old healer, and he brought sorcery with him. He used it to strike Rind with a wasting illness - one that would persist, that she could not cure herself, that left her dependent on whoever came to treat her. Then he walked through her door as the healer she needed.
Once inside her chamber, he whispered his final enchantment. Her will bent. She accepted him.
There is no romance in the telling of this. The skalds did not dress it up. Odin needed Rind to bear his child, and when persuasion failed, he took what he needed by other means. The prophecy required it. He did not require that she be willing.
Rind conceived. Odin left.
Vali
The child came, and his name was Vali.
He was not born to a long childhood. He grew at a speed that was not natural even for the sons of gods - within a single day he stood a full-grown warrior. He had not been put in the world to play or feast. He had been put in the world for one purpose.
He found Hodr.
Hodr had not known what he was throwing. Loki had handed him the mistletoe dart and guided his arm, and Hodr had loosed it blind, and Baldr had fallen. Ignorance is not the same as innocence in the reckoning of the Norse dead. The prophecy had named Hodr, and Vali killed him without hesitation.
Baldr’s death was answered.
What Remained
The gods had what the prophecy promised - Hodr dead, the debt settled, the count closed. Whether they felt any lighter for it, the sources do not say.
Odin knew, as he always knew, that none of this changed what was coming. Ragnarok was not delayed by a single killing. The wolf was still bound at Lyngvi. The serpent still coiled in the deep water. The fire-jotunn Surt still waited with his sword in the south.
Vali had done his work. Rind had played the role the Norns wove for her, willing or not. And the Allfather, who had given up an eye and submitted to a noose in the branches of the world-tree, had added one more act of ruthless necessity to the long account of what he had done to hold off the end.
The end was coming anyway.