TR’s Comments

Irish spring, babby

replied on TR entering chat · 8 years ago

If only i could miss her...

replied on Libtards · 8 years ago

According to some site which confirmed what i thought, only those who die in battle go to Valhalla.

The only Old Norse source that provides a direct statement about how people gained entrance to Valhalla is the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, a thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar. Snorri wrote many generations after Norse paganism had given way to Christianity and ceased to be a living tradition, and he often went out of his way to artificially systematize the disparate material in his sources (many of which we, too, possess). According to Snorri, those who die in battle are taken to Valhalla, while those who die of sickness or old age find themselves in Hel, the underworld, after their departure from the land of the living.

Yet Snorri blatantly contradicts this statement in his account of the tale of the death of Baldur, who was killed violently and was nevertheless borne to Hel. No other source makes this distinction – and several offer further examples to the contrary, some of which we’ll explore below. This neat, tidy distinction between Hel and Valhalla is certainly an invention of Snorri’s – a product of his tendency to attempt to systematize Norse paganism, which was never a neat, tidy system while it was still in practice.

Nevertheless, Snorri probably wasn’t entirely off-base. While entrance to Valhalla seems to have ultimately been a matter of who Odin and his Valkyries chose to live there rather than any particular impersonal standard, it seems reasonable to surmise that Odin would select those who would serve him best in his final battle. The ranks of Valhalla would therefore predominantly be filled with elite warriors, especially heroes and rulers. And, indeed, when Old Norse sources mention particular people residing in Valhalla, they almost invariably fit that description – along with elite practitioners of other roles that the hall of a Viking Age chieftain would have contained, such as the poet Bragi.

This is it, right here.

replied on FIRST · 8 years ago