Dagr was the Norse personification of the day — the shining god who rode across the sky each morning on a gleaming horse, bringing daylight to gods and men. Son of the dark goddess Nott (Night), he is the bright half of the eternal turning of day and night, the radiant rider whose passage lights the world.
The Bright Rider
Dagr (Old Norse Dagr, “day”) was the god who personified the daylight, a being radiant and fair as befitted his nature. He was the son of Nott, the goddess of night, by her third husband Delling (“the shining one”), an Aesir — and from this union of night and a shining father came the bright day. The gods gave Dagr, like his mother, a horse and chariot with which to ride around the earth every day, so that night and day followed one another in endless succession across the sky.
Skinfaxi, the Shining-Mane
Dagr's horse was named Skinfaxi (“shining-mane”), and it was from the gleaming of this horse's mane that the light of day was said to spread across the sky and the earth. As Skinfaxi galloped along Dagr's course, his radiant mane lit the air and the land, so that the very coming of daylight was the shining of the day-horse's mane streaming across the heavens. It is one of the loveliest images in Norse cosmology: the dawn as a bright horse's mane catching fire with light as it runs.
The Turning of Day and Night
Dagr and his mother Nott together made the ceaseless alternation of day and night that ordered the lives of gods and mortals. Mother and son rode the same circular course one after the other — Nott first, drawing her dark horse with its dewy mane across the sky to bring the night, then Dagr following with shining Skinfaxi to bring the day — each completing the circuit in turn, around and around, so that the world passed forever from darkness into light and back again. The Norse thus personified the most basic rhythm of existence as a family riding in eternal procession across the heavens.
The Coming of the Light
Dagr endures as the Norse personification of the day — the bright rider on the shining-maned horse, son of night, bringer of the daylight that floods the world each morning. He embodies the northern wonder at the daily return of the light, especially precious in lands of long dark winters, and completes the Norse vision of time itself as something living and divine: not an abstraction, but a god and his mother riding their horses in turn across the sky, weaving day and night into the endless fabric of the world.
Each morning the bright god rides out on a horse whose shining mane sets the sky alight — for to the Norse, the coming of day was the gleaming of Skinfaxi's mane across the heavens.