Bifröst

Grímnismál names Bilröst once, in a list of best things: best of bridges, as Yggdrasil is best of trees and Sleipnir best of horses. The same poem also calls the crossing the god-bridge, Ásbrú, and says it burns. Thor wades Körmt and Örmt and the two Kerlaugar every day on the way to judgment at the ash, because the bridge is in flame and the holy waters seethe. The other gods ride. The verb in that last line is uncertain — seethe, or howl — and the way the stanza was put together is still argued. One reading keeps the fire for the last days rather than for every morning. Snorri quotes the stanza and takes it as the daily order.

In Gylfaginning he answers a plain question, what way leads from earth to heaven, by describing the bridge the gods built. It has three colors. It is very strong, and made with more craft than other works. People, he says, may call it the rainbow. The red in the bow is burning fire, so the frost-giants and the mountain-giants cannot walk up into heaven whenever they wish. Each day the Æsir ride over it to the well of Urðr, Urðarbrunnr, where they hold court. Thor goes on foot, and wades.

Neither book defines the name. Bilröst is the form in the poems. Bifröst is Snorri’s. Later dictionaries try the word and do not agree: a shimmering or swaying path, or, if the poetic form is the older one, a rainbow glimpsed and gone. Rudolf Simek records those proposals. Andy Orchard suggests “shimmering path.” They are readings of the word, not a gloss the myths provide.

Grímnismál seats him at Himinbjörg, often translated “Heaven’s cliffs.” He presides over sanctuaries there. The poem calls him the gods’ watchman and has him drink mead, glad, in his hall. That is the whole poetic picture of the place. It does not yet describe a sentry walking the span.

Snorri supplies the post. Himinbjörg stands at heaven’s end, at the bridgehead, where Bifröst reaches the sky. Heimdall — Heimdallr, in the Old Norse — lives hard by the bridge and sits at that edge to guard it from the mountain-giants. The abilities are his too, and they pass ordinary measure. He needs less sleep than a bird. He sees a hundred leagues by night as well as by day. He hears grass growing on the earth and wool on sheep, and anything louder. His horn is Gjallarhorn. Snorri says its blast is heard in all worlds.

When the end begins, in the same book, Heimdall stands and blows the horn to wake the gods. Snorri sets a verse of Völuspá beside the moment: the horn is aloft. That verse does not say he is standing on the bridge.

The bridge fails. The poem and the prose do not fail it in the same way.

In Fáfnismál the dying dragon Fáfnir speaks to Sigurd. The gods and the fire-being Surtr will meet with spears on an island called Óskópnir. Bilröst breaks as the gods ride on, and their horses swim a great river. The stanza does not say who breaks the bridge.

Snorri names the riders. At Ragnarök the sky splits, and the sons of Muspell come through, Surtr first, burning fire before him and behind him. When they ride over Bifröst, the bridge breaks. He says so twice: once when the bridge is introduced, and again in the account of the end. He does not treat the failure as a fault in the work.

The gods are not deserving of reproof because of this work of skill: a good bridge is Bifröst, but nothing in this world is of such nature that it may be relied on when the sons of Múspell go a-harrying.

Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, 1916.

Other explanations come later. Some scholars have heard the Milky Way in the bridge, or set it beside Gjallarbrú, a bridge toward the dead. John Lindow notes both ideas as interpretation. The Eddas do not state them. They also do not make the bridge a machine, or a road from every realm to every other. In these texts it is one burning way, from earth to the gods, with a watchman, and an end.

The reading above stays with the medieval texts and marks where they part. These editions are the places to check it.

1. Grímnismál, in Edward Pettit’s The Poetic Edda (opens in a new tab)

   Open Book Publishers, 2023. Open access, with Old Norse and English. Stanza 13 places Heimdall at Himinbjörg, stanza 29 has Thor wade because the god-bridge burns, and stanza 44 calls Bilröst the best of bridges.

2. Fáfnismál, in the same edition (opens in a new tab)

   Stanza 15. Fáfnir tells Sigurd that Bilröst breaks as the gods ride on from Óskópnir, and that their horses swim a great river.

3. The Poetic Edda, translated by Henry Adams Bellows (opens in a new tab)

   American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923. A public-domain English text of the poems, including Grímnismál and Fáfnismál.

4. The Prose Edda, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (opens in a new tab)

   American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916. Public-domain English of Snorri Sturluson. The bridge, Heimdall, and Ragnarök are in Gylfaginning.

5. Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, edited by Anthony Faulkes (opens in a new tab)

   Second edition, Viking Society for Northern Research, 2005. The Old Norse text Snorri wrote. Faulkes’s English translation, published by Everyman, is the scholarly standard and is not quoted here.

6. “Bifröst,” Wikipedia (opens in a new tab)

   A survey of the name, the Milky Way proposal, and the bibliography behind them. Useful as a map. The articles it cites, not the summary, are the scholarship.

On the name, see Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, translated by Angela Hall, and Andy Orchard, Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend. On the Milky Way proposal and Gjallarbrú, see John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs.