Yggdrasil · Gods and Their Allies
Þrúðheimr and Bilskirnir
Thor’s land and the great hall he lives in.
In Thorpe’s translation
24. Five hundred floors, and forty eke, I think, has Bilskirnir with its windings. Of all the roofed houses that I know, is my son's the greatest.
- Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Grímnismál, stanza 24 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
What the sources say
Grímnismál says Thor will dwell in Þrúðheimr until the powers perish, and that of all the roofed houses the poet knows, his is the greatest: Bilskirnir, with five hundred and forty floors. Gylfaginning calls his realm Þrúðvangr and says the mansion Bilskirnir has five hundred and forty halls and is the largest house ever built.
- Grímnismál (Poetic Edda), stanzas 4 and 24 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ)
- attributed to Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning (13th century), the passage on Thor
Names and background
The name Þrúðheimr means “home of strength”. The sources do not agree on what to call Thor’s dwelling. Grímnismál gives Þrúðheimr, whereas Snorri’s Prose Edda and Ynglinga saga use Þrúðvangr. Snorri does use Þrúðheimr in the Prologue, in a euhemerised story where Thor, called Tror, wins a land of that name, identified with Thrace.
A manuscript wrinkle adds to the confusion. In Gylfaginning, the Codex Upsaliensis gives Þrúðheimr as the home of the giants Þjazi and Skaði, while the other main manuscripts and Grímnismál read Þrymheimr there. The two names look alike, and the variants suggest they were sometimes mixed up in copying. Orchard glosses the hall’s own name, Bilskirnir, as “lightning-crack”.
- Wikipedia contributors, Þrúðheimr (opens in a new tab)
Where the sources attest it
Þrúðheimr, “the place of might”, is named in Grímnismál stanza 4 as the home of Thor, and his hall Bilskirnir is described in stanza 24 (Bellows’s numbering). Bellows considers stanza 24 almost certainly a later addition, since a description of Thor’s house has no place in a poem about Odin’s halls. Snorri quotes it in Gylfaginning, where Thor’s realm is called Þrúðvangar, “fields of might”, and Bilskirnir has more rooms than any hall known to men. Bilskirnir is also listed among Thor’s possessions in Skáldskaparmál.
The place is known from these written sources only; no archaeological or pictorial evidence is cited for it.
- Grímnismál (Poetic Edda), 4, 24
- Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation) (opens in a new tab) (1916), Gylfaginning XXI Rights: Public domain. Chapter numbers follow this edition.