The God Born to Avenge Baldr

Vali is the god of vengeance, a son of Odin by the giantess Rind, and he exists in the mythology for a single purpose: to avenge the death of Baldr. The prophetic poem Voluspa and Snorri's account tell that Vali was conceived and born expressly to punish the killing, and that he grew to full manhood in a single day, neither washing his hands nor combing his hair, the sources say, until he had brought the slayer to the funeral pyre.

The one he kills is Hodr, the blind brother whose hand Loki had guided to throw the fatal mistletoe. Vali is thus a personification of the duty of blood-vengeance that lay at the heart of the old Norse moral world, in which a death within the family demanded requital and a designated avenger. He is one of the gods named among the survivors of Ragnarok: when the old world has burned and a new earth arises, Vali is said to be among those who live on to inhabit it, so that the god born of a single act of vengeance outlasts the destruction of the very order he avenged.