Gróa

“	All-Father, your presence honors me, but now is not the best time.	”
–Gróa's last words

Template:Infobox gods Gróa was a powerful Jötunn seeress in Norse Mythology, and the wife of Aurvandil.

Norse Mythology

Gróa is a völva and practitioner of seiðr, the wife of Aurvandil the Bold.

In the God of War Series

The Lost Pages of Norse Myth

Gróa was a gifted sorceress who at some point married the warrior Aurvandil. At some point, Thor asked for Aurvandil's help for a quest in Vanaheim. During the quest, Aurvandil apparently suffered from a bout of frostbite and had to be carried by Thor, who eventually lost Aurvandil in the tundra.

After his disappearance, Gróa traversed the Realms looking for ancient tomes that would augment her prophetic powers in order to discover Aurvandil's whereabouts. In the process, Gróa became one of the most powerful practitioners of seiðr in the Realms, so powerful in fact that even Odin often asked for her knowledge.

However, she still could not find out anything about her husband's whereabouts. After reading the runic incantations in an ancient tome, her powers became so great that she saw a vision about Ragnarök: a three-year winter where the Realms quaked and the skies split, a horrible terror emerging with a flaming sword, an enormous wolf, Gods fighting against each other, and a white ghost from another land with his son.

Odin felt her vision, and paid a visit to Gróa's library, demanding to know what she had seen in her vision. Gróa hesitated, and Odin threatened to kill her, while confessing that Thor had killed Aurvandil. After hearing this, Gróa refused to tell Odin anything, and was strangled to death by Odin, who took all her knowledge in the process.

Shrine Story

Atreus: “Mimir – there was a shrine about a Giant lady, with lots of books, and visions...“

Mimir: “Ah, that would be Gróa, the Knowledge Keeper. She was a gifted sorceress who gathered every tome of arcane wisdom she could find in the realms, all in the hopes of augmenting her powers of prophecy that she might find her lost husband, Aurvandil. But it was not her husband she would glimpse in her visions – for it was Gróa, seeing longer and farther than any before her or since, who witnessed Ragnarök – the end and the beginning. When Odin caught word of her ultimate prophecy, he manoeuvred to obtain her knowledge and hoard it for herself. Gróa knew Odin as a longtime patron of her services, and so she welcomed her into her library as a friend. What she did not know is that Odin himself was behind her husband’s disappearance, having used his enchantments to conceal his death at Thor’s hands from her sight. Smiling, jealous Odin took her by the throat, and with his very hands he stole her library and her life for his own.”

Atreus: “I always knew Odin was bad. But that’s just...”

Mimir: “Ruthless? Barbaric? Heartless? That’s Odin. In fact, we would do well to sit here in silence for the next few moments and reflect on Odin’s capacity for cruelty.“

Trivia

• Gróa was the first person to ever foresee the coming of Ragnarök.