Höðr

Summary

Höðr is a blind god, one of the sons of Odin in the Scandinavian myths, the brother of Baldr and his killer. Snorri says in Gylfaginning that he is blind and strong, and that the gods would rather his name were never spoken, because the work of his hand will be remembered among gods and men for a long time.

His story is the story of a single throw. Frigg had taken an oath from everything not to harm Baldr, leaving out the mistletoe because it was so small, and the gods made a game of shooting and throwing stones at Baldr in their assembly, and nothing hurt him. Höðr stood at the edge of the ring, because he was blind. Loki came to him with the mistletoe and said: do as the others do and honour Baldr; I will show you where he stands; shoot at him with this wand. Höðr threw where Loki directed him, the sprig went through Baldr, and he fell dead. None of the gods could take vengeance on the spot, because the assembly was a place of peace.

So the vengeance came from a son not yet born. In Baldrs draumar the seeress whom Odin raises from her grave says that Höðr will carry the tall tree to his brother and kill him, and that Rindr will bear Váli in the western halls, who will fight at one night old and will neither wash his hand nor comb his hair until he brings Baldr's slayer to the pyre. Baldrs draumar 9–11. The Short Völuspá says that Váli killed his brother's slayer.

The idea the story turns on is that the hand that killed is not the mind that planned. Höðr did not see what was in his hand or whom he struck, and Loki, who saw and planned, did not throw. Yet the vengeance fell on the hand first: Höðr was killed, and Loki was bound afterwards. The story does not end in death. After Ragnarök Baldr and Höðr come out of Hel's house together and sit with the surviving gods in the new land, remembering what has passed. Killer and killed return to one household.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The r of Hǫðr is the Old Norse nominative ending; it drops in the accusative, Hǫð. What remains is h and ð, and ð, the sound of Arabic dh, is the sister of d: the two change places between the branches of the tongue, so that Arabic dh is d in Aramaic. So Hǫð is Arabic hudā, "guidance", once its final weak letter drops, as weak letters often do in transmission. In Lisān al-ʿArab, hadāhu aṭ-ṭarīq is "he guided him to the road", and of someone who cannot find his way one says lā yahtadī ilā jiha, "he does not know in what direction to go". On this reading Höðr is the one who needs someone to guide him, which is what the story makes him: a blind man who threw only "at Loki's direction", in the words of the Norse text, so that the guidance he needed led his hand to kill his brother.

Linguistic Root

Höðr and hudā

Lane gives hadāhu, "he directed him, or guided him, to the way", and lā yahtadī ilā jiha, "he cannot go aright, or knows not the way that he would pursue, or knows not in what direction to go". From the same root comes hadā al-ʿarūs, "he conducted the bride to her husband's house". At its core the sense is one person leading another to a place he cannot reach alone.

The comparison keeps h, sets Norse ð against Arabic d, and drops the final weak letter, as y drops in the Juthoor correspondences and as t, ṭ, dh and ẓ fall together in one group that becomes t or d in the European languages. The u of hudā matches the rounded vowel of Hǫð.

The Norse dictionary places Höðr's name right after hǫð, "war, slaughter", a word found only in personal names, and Orel derives it from a Germanic word for fighting, which also gives Old English heaþu- and Old High German Hadu- in warriors' names. The ð of that word goes back to Germanic þ. So the dictionary reads the name "the fighter", while our reading takes it as "the one guided by another", resting on the Norse sound of ð and on what Loki does in the story.

Other readings in the essay

The essay puts hadiya first and calls it reversed guidance, blindness to the truth. Then ḥadara, to descend and vanish, khadira, to grow numb, and ḥadhdhara, to warn. The last three take the r as a root letter, though in the name it is a case ending that drops in the accusative, and they set ḥ or kh against h. Khadar, which the dictionary gives as the numbness of a limb that loses its feeling, is close to the state of a hand that does not see what it does.

Key Mythic Narratives

The sprig in Völuspá

Völuspá tells the event in a few lines: from the branch that seemed slender and fair came a harmful weapon to throw, and Höðr shot it; then a brother of Baldr was born who took vengeance at one night old, and he did not wash his hands or comb his hair until he brought Baldr's enemy to the pyre, while Frigg wept in her hall. The poem does not name Loki here, nor the avenging brother.

Poetic names

Poets name Höðr, as Snorri collects the terms, the blind god, Baldr's slayer, thrower of the mistletoe, son of Odin, companion of Hel, and Váli's enemy. He is Hel's companion because he lives in her house with his brother until the world is renewed.

Hotherus in Saxo

The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, in the early thirteenth century, tells the story another way. His Hotherus is a human king, not blind, a skilled swimmer, archer and musician, fostered by King Gevarus. He loves Gevarus's daughter Nanna, and Balderus, Odin's son, wants her too. Balderus's body cannot be cut by steel, except by a sword kept by Mimingus, a satyr of the woods. Hotherus gets the sword, fights Balderus in several wars, then meets him at night and runs him through the side, and Balderus dies three days later. A seer then tells Odin that a son borne to him by Rinda, daughter of the king of the Ruthenians, will avenge his brother. Odin wins her by disguise and deceit, she bears Boe (Latin Bous), and Boe kills Hotherus in battle and dies of his own wounds the next day. In both versions the killer dies at the hand of a brother born for vengeance, but the blindness, the mistletoe and Loki's guidance belong only to the Icelandic version.

Symbolic Reading

The Arabic essay reads Höðr's blindness symbolically: in tradition blindness goes with hidden truth, many seers in the stories are blind, and Höðr's unintended killing of his brother pictures blindness to the truth. In the text itself Höðr stands outside the ring because he cannot see, enters the game only when Loki takes his hand, and at the end of time sits with the brother he killed in a single household.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Set kills his brother Osiris out of desire for his kingship, and Horus later claims his father's right. Höðr's story resembles it in that a brother kills a brother and someone of the same family takes vengeance, and differs in that Höðr neither intended nor saw, the planner was someone else, and killer and killed return together after the end of the world. Váli's vengeance has its own page at Váli.