Gróa

Gróa was a Jötunn seeress and the most powerful practitioner of seidr in the Nine Realms. The wife of the warrior Aurvandil, she devoted herself to gathering arcane knowledge in the hope of finding her lost husband, and in doing so became the first being ever to foresee Ragnarok. Her gift drew the attention of Odin, who murdered her to hoard her vision, never realizing that what she had given him was a lie. Generations later, Kratos and Atreus uncovered the truth she had hidden within her shrine.

The seeress of Jötunheim#

Gróa was a Jötunn of great power, a sorceress and practitioner of seidr born of the line of the giants. At some point she married Aurvandil, and when Thor asked the warrior to aid him on a quest, Aurvandil went with the thunder god and was lost in the tundra, never to return. Grieving and determined to learn his fate, Gróa traversed the realms in search of ancient tomes that might augment her prophetic powers.

In the course of her searching she became one of the most gifted practitioners of seidr the realms had ever known, so accomplished that even Odin would come to her seeking knowledge. Yet for all her power she could learn nothing of her husband's whereabouts, because Odin himself had used his enchantments to conceal Aurvandil's death at Thor's hands from her sight.

The prophecy of Ragnarok#

After reading a set of runic incantations in an ancient tome, Gróa's powers swelled to such heights that she beheld a vision of the end of the world. She saw a three-year winter in which the realms quaked and the skies split, a terrible figure emerging with a flaming sword, an enormous wolf, the gods turned against one another, and a white ghost from another land standing with his son at the center of the events that led to it all. She was the first being ever to foresee Ragnarok.

Odin sensed that she had glimpsed the future and came to her library demanding to know what she had seen. She knew him as a longtime patron of her services and welcomed him as a friend. He pressed her, and at last confessed that it had been Thor who killed Aurvandil. Refusing to give him the prophecy, Gróa was seized by the throat and strangled to death by a smiling Odin, who took her library and her knowledge for himself.

The hidden truth#

What Odin believed he had taken from Gróa was not the truth. The prophecy she had revealed to him was a deception, told so that the real vision of Ragnarok would remain secret. The true prophecy lay sealed in her shrine, where she had hidden it against the day it might be needed. Long after her death, Kratos and Atreus reached her shrine in Alfheim, opened the portal within, and learned the truth she had guarded. Gróa remained the first to see the end of the world, and Odin, for all his cruelty, was only the second, and even then only by theft.