The Baldr story is counted among the most celebrated tales in the corpus of Norse mythological corpus and countless studies have been devoted to the elucidation of its meaning and origin. Following interpretations by Margaret Clunies Ross and John Lindow, who both prioritize meaning over origin, the Baldr story is now generally seen as the pivotal point in a great mythological narrative that outlines the history of the flawed order of Óðinn from creation to destruction. This article will discuss two related points with a bearing on the foundations of this theory. The first deals with the interpretation of the killing of Ymir and its significance for subsequent mythological events. The second deals with the interpretation of the Baldr story as a murder within the family.

Summing up the history of research on the Baldr story some twenty years ago, Lindow wrote as follows: ‘It may be that the search for a unified Baldr theory is ultimately too grand an endeavor and should be scaled back to a series of attempts to interpret various texts or traditions’. And this is indeed what he does throughout most of his meticulous study of the Baldr myth Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology. Toward the end of his monograph, he nevertheless proposes a well-reasoned overarching interpretation of the Baldr material as it has been recorded in writing in thirteenth-century Iceland.