Sindri’s Hall (The Gold Hall of Sindri’s Race)

41. On the north there stood, on Nida-fells, a hall of gold, for Sindri’s race; and another stood in Okôlnir, the Jötuns beer-hall which Brîmir hight.

“There is also a fair hall of ruddy gold called Sindri, which stands on the mountains of Nida, (Nidafjoll). In those halls righteous and well-minded men shall abide.”

Völuspá, in Thorpe’s version, says that a hall of gold stood on the north, on the Nida-fells, for Sindri’s race. In the poem the stanza belongs to the seeress’s account of the halls that stand after the world’s end, and the hall is a dwelling for a family or people, not a single named building.

Gylfaginning gives a different picture. There the speaker Thridi names a fair hall of ruddy gold called Sindri, standing on the mountains of Nida, and says righteous and well-minded men will dwell in it. Snorri here treats Sindri as the name of the hall, while the poem speaks of Sindri’s race. The two accounts agree on gold and on the Nida mountains, but not on what the name Sindri refers to.

Sindri is also the name of the dwarf smith who, with Brokkr, makes treasures for the gods in Skáldskaparmál. The glossary of the translation used here reads the name as meaning either “scintillating” or “producing dross”; both are only guesses at the root.

Some modern writers think Snorri may have taken a stanza about a dwarf lineage and made a hall of it, and that his picture of a golden hall for the righteous owes something to Christian ideas of heaven. The sources themselves say nothing of the kind, and they do not place the hall inside any realm of the nine. Whether the hall in the poem belongs to the dwarfs’ homeland Niðavellir depends on how the two place names are read, which the sources do not settle.