Yggdrasil · Described Without a Place on the Map
Gimlé
The brightest hall, which stands when heaven and earth have passed away.
In Blackwell’s translation
On the southern edge of heaven is the most beautiful homestead of all, brighter than the sun itself. It is called Gimli, and shall stand when both heaven and earth have passed away, and good and righteous men shall dwell therein for everlasting ages.
- I. A. Blackwell (translator), The Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson (the Prose Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Gylfaginning, the passage on the homesteads of heaven Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
What the sources say
Gylfaginning says that on the southern edge of heaven is the most beautiful homestead of all, brighter than the sun itself, called Gimlé. It will stand when both heaven and earth have passed away, and good and righteous men will live there for ever. Asked what will preserve it when Surtr’s fire consumes heaven and earth, the answer given is that there is another heaven above this one to the south, called Andlang, and above that a third, Víðbláinn, in which Gimlé is thought to be, though the elves of light are said to live in it now.
It is a place of the world after Ragnarök, and the sources set it in a higher heaven, so it has no dot on the map.
- attributed to Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning (13th century), the passages on the homesteads of heaven and on the higher heavens
Names and background
The name is probably the place protected from fire, from gimr (fire) and hlé (protected place), though Lee M. Hollander thought gem-roof more likely. The sources differ on what Gimlé is. Snorri's Prose Edda makes it a heaven in the realm Víðbláinn, then home only to light elves. In Völuspá a hall stands on Gimlé, which is presumably a mountain, so the hall itself is not what the name refers to.
Hollander and Rudolf Simek see Christian influence from the Heavenly Jerusalem in the description. Ursula Dronke proposed a pagan root in Valhalla, with the poet or his circle coining the name to signal safety from Surtr's fire and from the Christian Hell.
- Wikipedia contributors, Gimlé (opens in a new tab)
Where the sources attest it
Gimlé is the place where the righteous are to live after the world has burned. Völuspá stanza 64 (Bellows’s numbering) describes a hall standing on Gimlé; Bellows notes that the poem seems to use the name for a mountain, while Snorri treats it as the name of the hall. Snorri describes it in Gylfaginning as the brightest hall, fairer than the sun, which will outlast heaven and earth, and places good and righteous people there.
The name probably means “place protected from fire”; Hollander preferred “gem-roof”. Hollander and Simek see Christian influence from the heavenly Jerusalem, while Ursula Dronke suggested the poet coined the name. Bellows says the stanza after 64 is absent from Codex Regius and probably spurious.
- Völuspá (Poetic Edda), 64
- Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation) (opens in a new tab) (1916), Gylfaginning XVII, LII Rights: Public domain. Chapter numbers follow this edition.
- Gimlé (opens in a new tab) Rights: Starting point only
Later reception
The name lives on in Icelandic as Gimli, as in the town of Gimli, Manitoba.