The songs never agree on the road, only on the door. Behind it the hall runs on further than torchlight ought to reach, and the roof-beams shine bright as dawn though no dawn comes. Shields hang along the walls rim to rim. Spears stand stacked in the corners like a winter's firewood. Every bench is full. Horns go round, meat steams on the boards, and the noise is the noise of any feast hall in Skeldheim with the fear taken out of it. Each day the gathered dead go out and fight, and each night they sit down together again, whole. Beyond the doors, thunder walks. At the high end, half lost in smoke, sits Odin, who receives the slain he chooses and no others. The funeral singers say a mother will find her son on those benches. The law-singers answer that dying by the sword proves nothing. Both songs end in the same hall.
What the songs tell
Valhal is the Skeldr name for Valhöll, Odin's hall for those of the battle-slain whom he receives. There the dead, the einherjar, feast, fight and make ready for the last great crisis of the world. It is not the reward of every good person, nor even of every warrior who falls: Freyja takes a share of the battle-dead to Fólkvangr, and many honored dead who die outside battle go to Hel, or to places other peoples' traditions describe.
No map places it. Some say the chosen are carried beyond the Aurora Veil; others tell of a hall reached through death, storm, dream, or the last pass of the far north. The songs of Myrvand add their own images to the old ones: rafters bright as dawn, thunder beyond the doors. Funeral laments sing of reunion, war chants of courage, and law-songs warn that a violent death is no proof of a right life.
What is disputed
The Skeldr do not treat Valhal as a mere figure of speech, and nothing the Aethyr have proposed has displaced their testimony. Aethyr scholars have spoken of resonance, of another realm, of a shared vision, of a passage through the Veil; none of it explains how the hall lies in relation to the world. Meanwhile everyone invokes it. The Skeldr auxiliaries who marched for the Crown sang in Dread of the North that a far-off death under orders earns honor, and that belief carried them south. Whether the gods approved of their campaign is another matter, and no song can settle it.