Váli (Old Norse: Váli) is the son of Odin and the giantess Rindr, born for the sole purpose of avenging the death of Baldr by killing Baldr’s slayer Höðr. His birth and act of vengeance are referenced in multiple Eddic poems including Völuspá (st. 33), Baldrs draumar, and the prose sections of Gylfaginning. According to Gylfaginning, Váli did not wash his hands nor comb his hair until he had killed Höðr, and he accomplished this on the same day as his birth.

The tradition of deliberate divine generation for the purpose of vengeance appears in both the Eddic corpus and in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (Book III). The giantess Rindr is the object of an elaborate and coercive courtship by Odin in multiple sources — one of the episodes cited against Odin in Lokasenna. Baldrs draumar connects Váli’s birth explicitly to the revenge mission.

Beyond his role as avenger and his survival after Ragnarök, Váli has no independent cult evidence and almost no mythological narrative in the surviving sources.