An Old Norse mythological name borne by a god associated with vengeance and survival after Ragnarok.
Vidar stands among the most ancient and mythologically charged names in the Norse tradition. Its Old Norse components — víðr, meaning wide or forest, and the warrior suffix -arr — yield a name that can be read as wide warrior or forest fighter, though the precise etymology has been interpreted variously by scholars. What is beyond dispute is Vidar's identity in the Eddic cosmology: he is one of Odin's sons, a god of silence and vengeance, fated to avenge his father's death at Ragnarök by slaying Fenrir the wolf.
Where other gods fall in the final battle, Vidar survives — he is one of the deities who inherits the renewed world. This mythological profile gives the name an unusual gravity. Vidar is not a god of thunder or war in the conventional sense; he is associated with silence, with the endurance of the deep forest, with patient inevitability.
In the Poetic Edda he is called the silent god, and his role is to act at the appointed moment rather than to speak or boast. For the Norse, this restraint was its own form of power. In Scandinavia, Vidar has remained in continuous use, particularly in Norway and Iceland, never quite fashionable in the modern sense but never abandoned either — a name that belongs to the landscape and to the long national memory.
Outside Scandinavia, it has attracted parents drawn to Norse mythology through literature, gaming, and media. Its sound is unmistakable: short, hard, complete, with no softness to pad it. It does not ask to be liked. It simply stands.