Ásgarðr

Ásgarðr (Old Norse, “enclosure of the Æsir”) is the divine realm where the primary gods of the Norse pantheon have their halls, their halls, and their great meeting place. In the Gylfaginning, Ásgarðr is described as connected to Miðgarðr by the rainbow bridge Bifröst, which the gods ride each day to reach their judgment seat beside Yggdrasil. Heimdallr keeps the watch at the bridge’s end.

The building of Ásgarðr

Völuspá stanzas 7–8 describe the earliest age of the Æsir as a building project: they raised great halls, fashioned treasuries and forges, and lived in “golden play” before the corruption brought by Gullveig’s arrival. The later prose elaborates: Ásgarðr’s walls were built (with the aid of the giant mason and his horse Svaðilfari, as told in Gylfaginning ch. 42), and within its walls each major deity has a named hall.

The halls

Grímnismál stanzas 4–17 are Odin’s catalogue of the divine halls, spoken when he sits between two fires as a captive. Each hall has a name and a nature: Þrúðheimr for Thor (stanza 4), Ydalir for Ullr (stanza 5), Álfheimr for Freyr (stanza 5), Valaskjálf for Odin’s silver-thatched hall (stanza 6), Sökkvabekkr for Skaði and Njörðr (stanzas 7–11), and so on through the twelve named residences. Valhöll receives its own extended description.

Ásgarðr and Ragnarök

The Prose Edda and Völuspá both build toward the destruction of Ásgarðr at Ragnarök: the walls breached by the Fenriswolf, Surtr’s fire consuming the halls. After Ragnarök, the survivors return to the green plain where Ásgarðr stood and find, in the grass, the golden gaming pieces of the old gods.