Ivaldi: the dwarf who poisoned Niflheim

Ivaldi was a dwarf of Svartalfheim who left the forges of his own realm to settle in Niflheim, the primordial land of ice, and there taught himself to draw power out of its cold. His creations were spoken of across the Nine Realms with a mixture of awe and unease, and his renown grew large enough that Odin could not bear it. The quarrel that followed ended with the realm itself ruined. Ivaldi cursed Niflheim's mists into a poison that killed him where he worked, and the workshop he left behind stayed sealed for centuries until Kratos and Atreus walked into it.

A dwarf out of Svartalfheim#

Ivaldi came from Svartalfheim, the realm of the dwarves, where craft was measured in what a smith could put into another's hands. His own reputation ran ahead of the ordinary run of that trade. Where Brok and Sindri were remembered for weapons, Ivaldi was remembered as an alchemist, a maker who worked on the properties of things rather than their edges, and the accounts kept of him name him famous rather than merely skilled.

One piece of work was set down against his name long after his death. The notes kept in Lúnda's workshop credit Ivaldi as the creator of Gungnir, the spear the Allfather carried and never lost. When he forged it, and under what terms, was never recorded. That silence sits oddly beside what came later, since the same hands that armed Odin were the hands Odin eventually tried to strip of their power.

The workshop in the realm of ice#

At some point Ivaldi went to Niflheim and raised a workshop there. Before he ruined it, the realm was a land of cold and darkness rather than of death. Fog lay over fields and mountains of ice beneath clouded blue skies, and the only growing thing was the Raven Tree, its trunk sheathed in jagged crystals of ice, where the souls of Odin's ravens came to roost. Far out in the canyons past the mist fields lay the scattered skeleton of Auðumbla, the primordial cow, in the pieces where she had fallen.

What drew Ivaldi was the cold itself. He found a way to harness the frosty power of the realm and turned it into materials and devices, and the marvels he produced were said to have shocked the realms of both men and gods. He was not working at the edges of the Nine Realms by accident. Niflheim was one of the two primordial realms, and its energy was of a kind no ordinary forge could supply.

Odin's envy#

Word of that success reached Asgard. Odin could not stand the idea of a dwarf possessing greater power than his own, and he intervened. What form the Allfather's first move took was not written down, only that Ivaldi received it as an attack and answered in kind. Furious, the alchemist began building lethal contraptions, arming his workshop against whatever Asgard intended to send.

The exchange escalated past the point where either side could govern it. In the course of that retaliation Ivaldi began meddling with forces he should have left alone, and the result fell on the realm rather than on his enemy. The icy mist around his workshop was permanently cursed, transformed into a foul-smelling fog that killed anything that lingered in it. The snow and ice vanished from that district, the wind died, and what remained reeked of death. Beyond a certain distance the realm reverted to its old frigid state, so the poison marked out the exact reach of the dwarf's failure.

Ivaldi did not escape it. He was the fog's first victim, dying of his own curse in the confines of the workshop he had built. He had set out to make Niflheim yield to him and had instead made it uninhabitable, and the Allfather's problem solved itself.

What his sons did afterward#

Ivaldi had two sons, and both were shaped by what happened in the mist. Mótsognir was with his father in Niflheim when the mists were weaponised and had to watch the consequences. Horrified, he wrote a message and left it outside the workshop warning anyone who came to the realm to flee, then renounced his own kind and went into self-imposed exile in Midgard. There he built a castle, took a crown, and ruled the mortals of a territory large enough to span two lands. He made his subjects hunt dragons and other monsters for his collection, and a dream of his people dying drove him to pursue a legendary dwarven armour that demanded ingredients taken from captured dragons and murdered innocents. He was remembered at the end as the Bane of Mankind, and he vanished at Konunsgard, where his corpse was eventually found walled up behind his own throne.

Andvari took the other half of his father's inheritance, the alchemy. He became a powerful enchanter who learned to strip the souls out of Ancients so that dwarves could drive them as beasts of burden, and when one of the hollowed things turned on its masters in the Landsuther Mines he named the breed soul eaters and understood he had made an abomination. He was torn apart by one of his own creations, but not before he locked his soul inside his ring. In that shape he outlived his brother, his father and the realm his father had poisoned.

The sealed workshop#

The workshop stayed shut for many winters. It was entered at least once in that interval by Sigrún, queen of the Valkyries, who used one of its chambers to imprison Hildr after Odin corrupted her and drew her into physical form. The place had become useful for exactly one purpose, which was holding things that should not be let out.

When Kratos and Atreus reached Niflheim by way of the realm door in Týr's Temple, they came out inside the poisoned district and found the workshop still standing in it. The fog could be escaped by climbing above it, and gear built out of Ivaldi's own leavings let a body breathe in it longer than flesh should allow, which meant the dead alchemist supplied the only protection against the thing he had done.

Niflheim did not recover until Fimbulwinter fell across all Nine Realms and stripped the curse away, returning the realm to the cold it had been before Ivaldi arrived. By then the workshop had been standing empty for generations, marked by a dead son's warning and holding nothing but the last of its maker's work.