The word Valhalla originally meant rock of the slain, not a golden hall, and the afterlife it described was a house built out of weapons. This deep dive uses the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the sagas to reconstruct what Valhalla meant to the Norse on the ground: a hall roofed with bloodstained shields, raftered with spear shafts, benched with chainmail, with 540 doors each wide enough for 800 warriors to march out side by side.

The episode describes the daily routine of the Einherjar, who fight each other to the death every morning to train for a Ragnarok they already know they will lose, and the infinite buffet of the resurrecting boar and the mead-producing goat that answered real fears of starvation. It covers Odin tossing his meat to his wolves, the dead hero Helgi turning his old enemy into a servant, the burial laws that required ...