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The Einherjar, the great champions or chosen warriors, are intimately connected with Ragnaroek.  All warriors who fall in battle are taken to Odin’s hall of the slain, Valhalla.  According to Grimnismal, he “chooses every day men dead by the sword”; his Valkyries ride to battle to give the victory and bring in the fallen.  Hence Odin is the giver of victory.  Loki in Lokasenna taunts him with giving victory to the wrong side:  “Thou hast never known how to decide the battle among men.  Thou hast often given victory to those to whom thou shouldst not give it, to the more cowardly”; this, no doubt, was in order to secure the best fighters for Valhalla.  That the defeated side sometimes consoled themselves with this explanation of a notable warrior’s fall is proved by the tenth-century dirge on Eirik Bloodaxe, where Sigmund the Volsung asks in Valhalla:  “Why didst thou take the victory from him, if thou thoughtest him brave?” and Odin replies:  “Because it is uncertain when the grey Wolf will come to the seat of the Gods.”  There are similar lines in Eyvind’s dirge on Hakon the Good.  In this way a host was collected ready for Ragnaroek:  for Grimnismal says:  “There are five hundred doors and eighty in Valhalla; eight hundred Einherjar will go out from each door, when they go to fight the wolf.”  Meanwhile they fight and feast:  “All the Einherjar in Odin’s courts fight every day:  they choose the slain and ride from the battle, and sit then in peace together” (Vafthrudnismal,) and the Valkyries bear ale to them (Grimnismal).

It is often too hastily assumed that the Norse Ragnaroek with the dependant Valhalla system are in great part the outcome of Christian influence:  of an imitation of the Christian Judgment Day and the Christian heaven respectively.  Owing to the lateness of our material, it is, of course, impossible to decide how old the beliefs may be, but it is likely that the Valhalla idea only took form at the systematising of the mythology in the Viking age.  The belief in another world for the dead is, however, by no means exclusively Christian, and a reference in Grimnismal suggests the older system out of which, under the influence of the Ragnaroek idea, Valhalla was developed.  The lines, “The ninth hall is Folkvang, where Freyja rules the ordering of seats in the hall; half the slain she chooses every day, Odin has the other half,” are an evident survival of a belief that all the dead went to live with the Gods, Odin having the men, and Freyja (or more probably Frigg) the women; the idea being here confused with the later system, under which only those who fell in battle were chosen by the Gods.  Christian colouring appears in the last lines of Voeluspa and in Snorri, where men are divided into the “good and moral,” who go after death to a hall of red gold, and the “perjurers and murderers,” who are sent to a hall of snakes.