The God Who Reconciles Every Quarrel

Forseti is the Norse god of justice, law and reconciliation, the son of Baldr and his wife Nanna. Snorri says that he sits in his hall Glitnir, which has pillars of gold and a roof of silver, and that all who come to him with disputes leave reconciled, for he is the best of judges among gods and men. That is very nearly the whole of what the medieval Norse sources tell us about him, he is a figure of a single, luminous function rather than of narrative.

Some scholars have connected Forseti with a god Fosite worshipped by the Frisians on a sacred island in the North Sea, where an account of the missionary Willibrord describes a holy spring and cattle that no one dared harm; if the link holds, it would make Forseti one of the few Norse gods with an attested cult outside Scandinavia, tied to law and the sanctity of a particular place. The connection is plausible but not certain, and Forseti remains chiefly what his name and hall proclaim: the divine embodiment of fair judgement and the settling of strife.