Vali was the Norse god of vengeance — a son of Odin begotten for a single purpose, who grew to full strength in one day and avenged the death of Baldr before the night was out. Born of the All-Father's grief and need, the avenger-child who came of age in a single morning, he too is among the gods fated to survive the end of the world.
The Avenger Born in a Day
Vali (Old Norse Váli) was a son of Odin by the giantess Rind — a union the All-Father pursued precisely because it was foretold that a son of Rind would avenge Baldr. When the shining god Baldr was killed and the gods sought vengeance, Odin won Rind (in some tellings by harsh magic and disguise), and she bore Vali. And the new god was extraordinary: he grew from infant to full-grown warrior in the space of a single day, and that very day, neither washing his hands nor combing his hair, he set out to do the deed for which he had been born.
The Vengeance for Baldr
Vali's single, defining act was the avenging of Baldr. Though it was Loki who engineered Baldr's death, the immediate killer was the blind god Hodr, whose hand had thrown the fatal mistletoe. And so Vali, the day-old avenger, slew Hodr — paying blood for blood, fulfilling the prophecy and the demand of vengeance that hung over the gods after Baldr fell. It was a grim deed, the killing of one brother to avenge another, the day-old god dispatching the blind innocent who had been Loki's tool. But in the Norse code of the blood-feud, vengeance was a sacred obligation, and Vali existed to discharge it.
The Binding of Loki
Vali appears, too, in the grim aftermath of Loki's crimes. When the gods finally bound Loki for his evils, the tale tells that they transformed one of Loki's own sons into a wolf, who tore apart his brother — and it was with the entrails of that slain son that Loki was bound to the rocks. In some versions of the tale it is a Vali (Loki's son) involved in this horror, a confusion of names that tangles the avenger-god with Loki's doomed offspring — a reminder of how the threads of vengeance and ruin wove through the gods' final days.
The God Who Outlives the End
Like his brother Vidar, Vali is numbered among the gods fated to survive Ragnarök — to live on past the burning of the world and dwell in the new age that rises after. He endures as the god of vengeance born of necessity, the child who came of age in a day to pay a blood-debt, and one of the seeds of the future who passes through the world's ending into the world reborn. He embodies the Norse conviction that vengeance is a sacred duty, swift and unflinching — and that even from grief and killing, something survives into the renewed world.
Begotten to avenge a murdered god, he grew from babe to warrior in a single day and slew the killer before nightfall — and of all that grief, he is one of the few to walk on into the world reborn.