Heimdall is the watchman who never sleeps – the god who hears the grass grow and the wool sprout on the sheep. Born of nine mothers, he stands at the edge of the worlds and waits for the one moment he was made for: the call into Ragnarök.
Heimdall is the watchman of the gods. He dwells in Himinbjörg („heaven’s mountains"), there where the rainbow bridge Bifröst joins the sky to Midgard. He is a god who is all eye and all ear – the motionless doorkeeper at the gate of the worlds.
Heimdall needs less sleep than a bird. By day and by night he sees a hundred leagues. And he hears the grass growing on the earth and the wool on the sheep – an image of such delicacy that it stays in the memory to this day. No watchman in all literature is better made for his post.
Heimdall’s emblem is the Gjallarhorn, the „resounding horn". Its sound carries across all the worlds. When the foes draw near at Ragnarök, Heimdall will set it to his lips and call the gods to the last battle. Until then it lies hidden – some sources say by the well beneath the world-ash Yggdrasil, right beside Odin’s pledged eye.
Heimdall’s origin is unique: he was born of nine mothers at once – nine sisters whom many scholars read as the waves of the sea. He is called Gullintanni („gold-tooth") because his teeth are of gold, and his horse is named Gulltoppr („gold-mane").
In the Rígsþula a god named Ríg – by traditional reading Heimdall himself – walks through the world and fathers the three classes of humankind: the thrall, the free farmer (karl) and the noble (jarl). So Heimdall becomes the forefather of human social order – perhaps the reason the Völuspá calls all people „Heimdall’s sons".
“Hearing I ask / from the holy races, / from Heimdall’s sons, / both high and low.”— Völuspá 1, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
Heimdall and Loki are declared enemies. Once already they wrestled – in the shape of seals – over Freyja’s necklace Brísingamen. At Ragnarök they meet a final time: the watchman and the troublemaker kill each other. Order and chaos go down together.
Loki · Ragnarök · Yggdrasil · The Norse pantheon.
Völuspá, Grímnismál, Hyndluljóð, Rígsþula (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).