Rind was a Norse goddess (or giantess) destined to become, by Odin, the mother of Vali — the avenger born to slay Baldr's killer. Her difficult and troubling wooing by the All-Father, who resorted to disguise and dark magic to overcome her resistance, is one of the more shadowed tales of how the gods bent fate to their purpose.
The Reluctant Mother of the Avenger
Rind (Old Norse Rindr) was, in the tradition, a princess or goddess whom prophecy named as the future mother of an avenger for the slain Baldr. When the shining god was killed and the gods needed someone to take vengeance — for the immediate killer, the blind Hodr, could not easily be slain by the existing gods, and a new avenger was required — Odin learned through prophecy (some say from a seeress, or from the wisdom he gained at Mimir's well) that a son born to him by Rind would grow to avenge Baldr. And so the All-Father set out to win her, whether she would or no.
Odin's Dark Wooing
Rind, however, refused Odin again and again. The tale (told most fully by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus) relates how Odin came to her in a series of disguises — as a warrior, a smith, a young man — and was each time rebuffed, even struck and humiliated. At last, in his determination to fulfil the prophecy, Odin resorted to dark and troubling means: disguising himself as a woman healer, he gained access to Rind when she fell ill, and by magic (and, in the grim telling, by force) at last overcame her resistance and lay with her. The episode is one of the darker passages of Norse myth, showing the lengths to which even the All-Father would go — sacrificing his dignity and worse — to bend fate toward the vengeance that had to be.
The Birth of Vali
From this union Rind bore Vali — the avenger-god who, growing to full strength in a single day, slew the blind Hodr and avenged Baldr, exactly as the prophecy had foretold. Rind's role, however unwilling, was thus essential to the working-out of the gods' fate: she was the mother through whom the necessary vengeance came into the world. Without her, the prophecy could not be fulfilled, and the blood-debt for Baldr could not be paid.
The Mother Fate Required
Rind endures as the reluctant mother of the avenger Vali, and as the subject of one of the most uncomfortable and revealing of the Odin-myths — a tale of prophecy, resistance and the troubling means by which the gods forced fate to its appointed end. She embodies the harsh undercurrent of the Norse vision of destiny: that what is fated will come to pass, that even an unwilling woman could be made the instrument of prophecy, and that the gods themselves were bound to, and would stop at little to fulfil, the demands of fate and vengeance.
Prophecy named her the mother of Baldr's avenger — and to make that prophecy come true, even the All-Father stooped to disguise and dark magic against her will.