Summary
Víðarr is the son of Odin who avenges his father on the wolf Fenrir in the last battle of the Scandinavian myths. Snorri calls him "the silent god" and says he has a thick shoe, that he is the strongest of the gods after Thor, and that the gods rely on him in every trial. His mother is the giantess Gríðr, with whom Thor once spent a night and who lent him the girdle of might, iron gloves and her staff.
His story is the story of a single long-awaited day. Grímnismál says that his land grows brushwood and tall grass, and that there the son declares from his horse's back that he will avenge his father. Grímnismál 17. When Ragnarök comes, Fenrir breaks loose and opens his jaws until the lower touches the earth and the upper the sky; Odin goes out to fight him and the wolf swallows him. At once Víðarr strides forward and sets one foot in the wolf's lower jaw. On that foot is the shoe that has been gathered since the beginning of time from the scraps people cut from their shoes at the toe and heel. With one hand he seizes the upper jaw and tears the wolf's mouth apart until it dies. That is why, Snorri says, whoever wishes to help the gods should throw those scraps away. Gylfaginning 51. Völuspá tells the vengeance with a sword: Víðarr drives his blade into the heart of Loki's son, "then is his father avenged".
The idea the story turns on is that vengeance is kept until its time comes. The texts give Víðarr no great deed before Ragnarök and call him the silent one; then he rises at the very moment his father falls, and overcomes the wolf whom the gods' fetters could hold only by a trick. His weapon is a shoe that people made without knowing it, scrap by scrap. Then he survives the fire and the sea and lives with his brother Váli where Asgard once stood, so that the poets call him "dweller in the homesteads of the fathers".
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The nominative is Víðarr and the genitive Víðars, as in "Víðarr's land" in Grímnismál. So the last r is the nominative ending, while the r before it belongs to the name, and the stem is Víðar-: w, dh and r. These are the letters of Arabic watr in their order, t and dh belonging to one group that changes places in transmission. In Lisān al-ʿArab witr and watr mean blood-revenge, the seeking of revenge for blood, and the mawtūr is the man whose kinsman has been slain and who seeks revenge for him, the one to whom the avenging of blood belongs. On this reading Víðarr is the man of the witr, the one bereaved of his father who claims his blood, which is what the story makes him and what the poets call him: "the avenging god of the gods".
Linguistic Root
Víðarr and witr
| Form | Use |
|---|---|
| Víðarr | nominative |
| Víðar | accusative, "how shall Víðarr be named?" |
| Víðars | genitive, Grímnismál 17 |
Lane, under w-t-r, gives "witr and watr: blood-revenge, or retaliation of murder or homicide, or a seeking to revenge blood", with dhaḥl as its synonym. Watarahu means he slew a relation of his and so left him alone. "The mawtūr: one who has a person related to him slain and has not obtained revenge for his blood; a seeker of blood-revenge; one to whom belongs the revenging of blood." From the same root comes witr, the single one who has no second. The sense joins the slain man whose death leaves his kin alone with the kinsman left alone to claim his blood.
The comparison keeps all three letters in order: Arabic w answers Norse v, as w answers w and v in the Juthoor laws; t answers Norse ð, because t, ṭ, dh and ẓ form one group that becomes t or d in the European languages; and r stays r. Arabic t is a voiceless stop while Norse ð is a voiced fricative, so the comparison rests on that group rather than on identical pronunciation.
Cleasby–Vigfusson has no entry for the name. The nearest word to its first part is the adjective víðr, "wide", and in Grímnismál his land is named together with viði, "wood". Either word accounts for the first part of the name, and neither accounts for the r of its stem.
Other readings in the essay
The essay puts wayada first, latent strength and strong silence, then wadda, silent love, then wadara, long waiting, then wātara, to follow on, which it glosses as continued revenge. Lane has no root w-y-d or w-d-r; strength in Arabic is ayd, with a hamza, and wadda has no r. Wātara belongs to the root w-t-r itself, the essay links it with revenge, and the dictionary gives the root the sense of revenge outright, so it is the strongest of the essay's readings in sound and sense, which is why we put it first.
Key Mythic Narratives
At Ægir's feast
In Lokasenna Loki enters the gods' feast at Ægir's hall and reminds Odin of the oath of brotherhood between them, and Odin says: rise, Víðarr, and let the wolf's father sit at the drinking. Víðarr stands up and pours a drink for Loki. The one who gives up his seat to the wolf's father is the one who will kill the wolf.
Poetic names
Poets name Víðarr, as Snorri collects the terms, the silent god, owner of the iron shoe, foe and slayer of the Fenris-wolf, avenging god of the gods, dweller in the homesteads of the fathers, son of Odin and brother of the gods.
The jaw and the heart
The witnesses differ on how he kills. Snorri's prose has him tread on the lower jaw and tear the mouth apart by hand, Vafþrúðnismál says he cleaves the wolf's cold jaws, and Völuspá says he drives his sword into its heart. Snorri quotes the Völuspá stanza after his prose without reconciling the two.
Symbolic Reading
The Arabic essay reads Víðarr as the god of silence and vengeance: he stays silent through the events and then avenges his father at Ragnarök, so for the essay he is silent love that breaks out as vengeance, latent strength that waits. The Norse rereading essay reads Ragnarök as the end of a cycle rather than the end of the world, followed by a world that turns green again, and in the texts Víðarr is among those who cross from the old cycle into the new.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
Horus avenges his father Osiris on his killer Set, and then sits in his father's place as king. Víðarr avenges his father on the wolf that swallowed him, and then dwells in the homesteads of the fathers in the new land. In both stories the son takes the father's right and inherits his place; they differ in that Horus wins his right by the judgement of the gods' council after a long dispute, while Víðarr takes it with his own hand in the very battle in which his father died. His brother Váli avenges their brother Baldr, so vengeance in these myths has two faces: for a brother and for a father.