Vidar is a son of Odin by the giantess Grid, called the silent god and reckoned second in strength only to Thor. His whole significance points to a single future moment: at Ragnarok, after the wolf Fenrir has swallowed Odin, Vidar will avenge his father by killing the wolf, setting one foot in its lower jaw, protected by a great shoe said to be made from all the leather scraps that cobblers through the ages have trimmed and discarded, and tearing its jaws apart (in the poem Vafthrudnismal, thrusting a sword through its heart). More striking still, Vidar is one of the few gods fated to survive the destruction: with his brother Vali and the sons of Thor he inherits the renewed world that rises green from the sea after Ragnarok, so that the silent god is both the avenger of the old order and an heir of the new.
A tenth-century stone cross at Gosforth in Cumbria, England, carved after the region's Norse settlement, is read by most scholars as depicting Vidar's fight with Fenrir: a figure with a spear plants one foot in the jaw of a great wolf-headed beast while gripping its upper jaw with his hand, one of the few pieces of surviving art, rather than poetry, thought to show this specific moment of Ragnarok, and evidence that the story circulated among Norse settlers in England as vividly as it did in Iceland.