You have felt this. There is where you stand, and there is where the meaning is — and the way between them never feels solid under your foot. It sways. You cross it anyway, because you have to.
Hall reads the Norse world as one body, not a scatter of places. When Odin brought order out of chaos, he planted a tree — Yggdrasil — up through the three worlds, like the spinal cord of a giant. The great disk of the earth set around its middle. Its roots running down past the world of men into the cold dark. To climb it or descend it is not to travel to another country. It is to move between the levels of one connected thing.
So the crossing is real. And a real crossing has a border, and a border is watched. The old poems set a watchman at the edge of the ordered worlds, a keeper of the way between them. What the material in front of me holds is not his face — it is his post. The boundary, Hall says, is real, and patrolled, and still permeable. Things get across. That is the whole reason it needs keeping.
Because on the far side are the giants. The rune Thurisaz names them — the Þurs, the primal chaos-being, the thorn. Older than the gods. The forces that were there before order was hammered out. Odin's own grandfather was one. These are not simply enemies to be shut out. Odin deals with them constantly. But never — the Old Norse sources are plain about this — never by pretending they are not what they are.
That is why the bridge trembles. Not because it is weak. Because it bears real weight, and joins a settled world to an unsettled one, and something on the other side is always leaning against the gate. The Anglo-Saxon poem says the thorn is exceedingly sharp — it harms you because you did not look, or because you had to reach past it for something you wanted. A crossing worth making is like that. It costs attention. It asks you to keep your eyes open the whole way over.
And the watch matters most at the end. In Ragnarok the dead come sailing in, the chains break, and the last battle joins in the narrow gap between the mountains. The border does not hold forever. Nothing built does. But it holds long enough — long enough for the crossings that had to be made, to be made.
So when the way ahead of you sways, do not read it as a warning to turn back. Read it as proof it is load-bearing. Someone is keeping the far end. Put your foot down and go.