Then Gangleri said, ‘Now you tell me such wondrous things, that Valhalla must be a huge house with doorways so crowded that it is difficult to pass through them.’
High answered: ‘Why don’t you ask how many doors are in Valhalla, or how big they are? When you hear the answers, then you will surely say that it would be remarkable if everyone were unable to pass in and out freely. In truth, it is no harder to find places for people inside the hall than it is to enter it. Listen to The Lay of Grimnir:
Five hundred doors[^fn58] and still forty more, I believe, are at Valhalla. Eight hundred Einherjar will go together out each door when they go to fight the wolf.’
(The Lay of Grimnir. 23)
-
Five hundred doors : If the counting is in long hundreds of 120, which is probable, then five hundred doors would be six hundred. ↩