After Baldr's death the god Hermod rode nine nights down the dark road to the realm of Hel to beg for his return. Hel answered that she would release him only if every thing in the world, living and dead, would weep for him. Messengers went out, and all things wept, all but one giantess, Thokk, who refused, saying Baldr was no use to her and Hel could keep what she had; and she is generally understood to have been Loki in disguise. So Baldr remained among the dead. His funeral, on the great ship Hringhorni, is one of the grandest scenes in the mythology. Yet his story does not end in loss: the prophecies say that after Ragnarok, when the old world has burned and a new earth rises green from the sea, Baldr will return from the dead to live in the renewed world, a note of rebirth that later readers, rightly or wrongly, have often compared with other returning gods.
The eighth-century Ardre VIII picture stone from Gotland, Sweden, carved with a dense sequence of mythological scenes, is widely interpreted by scholars as including an image of a great ship being launched, generally read as Baldr's funeral vessel Hringhorni, whose launching Snorri says required the strength of the giantess Hyrrokkin because none of the gods could move it alone; if the identification is correct, the stone would be among the very few pieces of Viking Age art depicting this specific episode of the myth, predating by centuries the written Icelandic sources that otherwise preserve it.