Yggdrasil · Gods and Their Allies
Valaskjálf, with Hliðskjálf
Odin’s silver-roofed hall, and the high seat inside it.
In Thorpe’s translation
6. The third dwelling is, where the kind powers have with silver decked the hall; Valaskiâlf 'tis called, which for himself acquired the As in days of old.
- Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Grímnismál, stanza 6 (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 names Valaskjálf as the third dwelling, a hall the kind powers decked with silver, which “the Ás” acquired in days of old. Gylfaginning calls it the mansion of Odin, built by the gods and roofed with pure silver, and says that in it stands the throne Hliðskjálf: when the All-father sits on it he can see over the whole world. Gylfaginning also names Hliðskjálf as a place in Ásgarðr.
Valaskjálf is the hall and Hliðskjálf is the seat within it, so the map shows them as one marker.
- Grímnismál (Poetic Edda), stanza 6 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ)
- attributed to Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning (13th century), the passages on Ásgarðr and on the homesteads of heaven
Names and background
Hliðskjálf means a high seat with a wide view. Sources use it differently. In Grímnismál, Odin and Frigg sit there to watch their foster sons, and a wager over Geirröðr follows. In Skírnismál, Freyr sits in it, looks into Jötunheimr and sees Gerðr. Snorri's Gylfaginning describes it first as a dwelling and then as the seat itself, placed in Odin's hall Valaskjálf, from which Odin surveys all lands and later looked for Loki.
No surviving source connects the seat to seiðr, Odin's magic. Simek suggests it may have been the model that real seiðhjallr platforms tried to copy.
- Wikipedia contributors, Hliðskjálf (opens in a new tab)
Where the sources attest it
Valaskjálf, often read as “the shelf of the slain”, is named in Grímnismál stanza 6 (Bellows’s numbering) as Odin’s home, and Bellows says it holds his watch-tower Hliðskjálf. He adds that Gering identified Valaskjálf with Valhalla, which stanza 8 names, and so took stanza 6 to be a later insertion. Snorri describes Valaskjálf in Gylfaginning as Odin’s hall with a silver-thatched roof, containing the high seat Hliðskjálf from which he sees the whole world. Hliðskjálf also figures in the tale of Freyr’s look and in verse quoted in Skáldskaparmál.
The name’s meaning is a scholarly reading, not a certainty.
- Grímnismál (Poetic Edda), 6, 8
- Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation) (opens in a new tab) (1916), Gylfaginning IX, XVII, XXXVII Rights: Public domain. Chapter numbers follow this edition.
Later reception
Lorenz Frølich illustrated Frigg and Odin’s wager over the seat in 1895.