Heimdall’s Rivalry with Loki

At a Glance

• Central figures: Heimdall, the watchman of Asgard born of nine mothers; and Loki, the trickster god and agent of chaos among the Aesir.
• Setting: Asgard and the Nine Realms, from the gods’ golden age through Ragnarok; drawn from the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.
• The turn: Loki steals Freyja’s necklace Brísingamen and Heimdall pursues him across the Nine Realms, catching and defeating him in a seal-fight off the coast of Vanaheim - the enmity between them hardens into something that will not end until the world does.
• The outcome: Heimdall recovers the necklace and returns it to Freyja; at Ragnarok, both Heimdall and Loki kill each other in single combat, dying in the same moment.
• The legacy: The two fall together on the ruined bridge, their duel the last settled thing before the new world rises - the prophecy fulfilled exactly as it was written.

Heimdall needed less sleep than a bird. He stood at the head of Bifrost where the bridge meets the gates of Asgard, and he could hear wool growing on sheep in Midgard and see clear to the edge of every realm on a dark night. Nothing came through that he did not know about. Nothing passed him unseen. Odin had put the right god in the right place.

Loki had always hated him for it.

Born of Nine Mothers

The wave maidens bore Heimdall together - nine of them, all sisters, all jotnar. That is a strange birth even by Asgard’s standards. What it gave him was extraordinary: sight that crossed the Nine Realms, hearing that caught the sound of grass bending, a body that needed almost no rest. He carried Gjallarhorn at his hip, the horn whose sound would reach every corner of existence when the time came to blow it. Until then he stood watch. He had been standing watch for a very long time.

Against all of this Loki set himself: not through any strength of arms - Loki had no particular strength - but through the one thing Heimdall’s senses could not quite catch in advance, which was that Loki would do things no one expected. Not because they were wise. Because they were wrong.

The Flyting at Ægir’s Hall

Ægir the sea-jotunn held a feast, and Loki came uninvited, as Loki always came, and began to insult every god in the hall one after another. He worked through them methodically - Odin, Frigg, Thor, Sif, Bragi, Idunn - until he came to Heimdall.

Be silent, Heimdall. You were fated to be a servant, standing at the gates like a thrall while I walk among kings and trick the mighty.

Heimdall looked at him without raising his voice.

You are fated to be bound like a criminal, punished for your treachery. I will always stand among the gods.

Loki laughed. He laughed because the alternative was to acknowledge that Heimdall was right, and Loki had a way of turning acknowledgment into mockery before anyone noticed the difference. But the hall knew what they had both said, and so did Loki, and his hatred for the watchman went from sharp to cold after that.

The Theft of Brísingamen

Freyja’s necklace was called Brísingamen, and there was nothing else like it in the Nine Realms - gold worked by the four dwarves Alfrigg, Dvalinn, Berling, and Grerr, a thing of such beauty that Freyja had paid what she paid to have it. Loki wanted it. Not because he needed it, and not to keep it - he wanted it because it was hers, because Odin wanted him to take it, and because no one was supposed to be able to.

He changed himself into a fly. Small enough to slip through the crack in Freyja’s locked door, into the chamber where she slept with the necklace clasped at her throat. He waited until she shifted in her sleep, unclasped the necklace, and was gone before she woke.

He had forgotten Heimdall.

Nothing moved in Asgard without the watchman knowing. Heimdall heard the lock, heard the small sound of the clasp, and was moving before Loki cleared the gate. The chase went out through Asgard, down from the high places, across Midgard and further, into the grey salt air of Vanaheim and the cold surf off its coast. Loki hit the water and changed - became a seal, dark in the waves, going deep.

Heimdall went in after him.

He changed too - seal for seal, and faster in the water than Loki expected. They met in the crashing surf and fought the way seals fight: teeth, weight, the cold and the current working against both of them. It was brutal and ugly and went on longer than either of them wanted. Heimdall got a grip he did not let go of. He dragged Loki up out of the water, wrenched Brísingamen free from where Loki had clenched it in his jaw, and walked out of the surf with it.

He returned the necklace to Freyja.

Loki did not forget.

Gjallarhorn and the Last Morning

The prophecies were not secret. Every god in Asgard knew what was coming: Loki would break his chains, Fenrir would run free, Jormungandr would come out of the sea. Surt would lead fire out of Muspelheim. The dead would sail on Naglfar. And Heimdall would blow Gjallarhorn when the moment arrived, the sound of it waking every sleeping warrior in Valhalla, rolling through all nine worlds at once.

When the sky began to burn and the ice cracked and the armies gathered, Heimdall stood on Bifrost and put the horn to his lips.

The sound shook the bridge. It shook Yggdrasil. In Valhalla the einherjar reached for their weapons.

The Duel on the Bridge

Loki came with what he had gathered: giants, the dead, the serpent, fire. He came to break what Heimdall had spent his existence guarding. They met at the gates, and the battle was everything the prophecy had promised - vast, loud, final. Thor and Jormungandr killing each other. Odin taken by Fenrir’s jaws. Tyr and Garm. The whole long list of the gods’ fated deaths playing out in the smoke and wreckage.

Loki and Heimdall found each other in it.

Loki fought with a blade and with everything else he had - speed, poison, tricks, the chaos that was native to him. Heimdall fought straight and hard the way he had always done, sword out, holding ground. The duel was not quick and it was not clean. They cut each other badly.

In the end Heimdall killed Loki. And Loki’s blade, already deep in him, finished the watchman too.

They fell in the same moment, as the prophecy had always said they would. The bridge held their weight and then the bridge burned, and the sea came over everything, and the world went dark - until the new one pushed up green from underneath.