Dvalin

Dvalin is among the dwarves named in the Norse catalogues, and appears in several distinct connections. He is listed among the craftsmen associated with the making of the most famous dwarf-work, and he is named in the verses that distribute the runes among the orders of beings — the runes going to the dwarves by way of Dvalin, as they go to the gods by way of Odin. That places him as a transmitter of knowledge to his own kind rather than merely a smith.

A separate appearance has him among the dwarves caught out by the sun and turned to stone, and a poetic phrase for the sun refers to the deceiving of Dvalin — the sun as the thing that tricks him. He also appears in a story where dwarves obtain something from a god's daughter, and in the genealogical lists that the tradition produced in quantity. The material is scattered, and reading it as a continuous biography would be a mistake.

The name additionally belongs to one of the four stags described as browsing the branches of the world-tree, and the reference literature often carries both together. Whether the tradition understood these as the same being under one name is not clear and probably was not consistent; the catalogues that preserve such names were themselves collecting from several directions.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

Read as a personality, Dvalin comes across as a maker of great skill with an unglamorous relation to the world above — a being whose products are famous and whose person is barely characterised. The rune-transmission suggests something of the teacher about him, an established figure among his own kind rather than a solitary craftsman. The sun-deceived detail gives the one hint of vulnerability: for all the skill, he belongs underground and is undone by simply being caught out in the open.