Disir

The dísir are known first of all from a sacrifice held in their name, the dísablót. Heimskringla says the Swedish king Aðils was at the dísablót and rode a horse through the dísarsalr, the hall of the dís, when the horse stumbled and threw him; his head struck a stone and he died at Uppsala. The verse Snorri quotes for the death, Ynglingatal, has Aðils fall from his horse and die at Uppsala, and blames a 'creature of witchcraft'; it does not mention the dísablót. In Egils saga (ch. 44) Bárðr of Atley holds a feast with a dísablót for King Eiríkr and Queen Gunnhildr, and Egill's verse that evening speaks of the place 'where you sacrificed to the dísir'. Víga-Glúms saga (ch. 6) has a feast and a dísablót at the winter nights, at the home of Glúmr's grandfather Vigfúss on Voss in Norway. None of these texts describes the rite itself.
In the Eddic poems the dísir have a stake in a person's life and death. In Sigrdrífumál 9 the valkyrie teaches help-runes for delivering a woman of her child: they are cut on the palms and clasped around the joints, and the dísir are asked for help. Elsewhere they are hostile. Near the end of Grímnismál, Odin tells King Geirröðr 'úfar ro dísir', 'the dísir are hostile' (st. 53), and in the closing prose the king stumbles and falls on his own sword. In Reginsmál 24 Hnikarr, a name of Odin, warns Sigurðr that stumbling on the way to battle is a bad sign, because treacherous dísir stand on both sides and want to see him wounded. In Hamðismál 28 Hamðir says the dísir urged him to kill his brother Erpr. In Atlamál (st. 28 in the heimskringla.no text) Gunnarr's wife Glaumvör dreams that dead women came in the night to choose him and call him to their benches, and she tells him his dísir have lost their power.
The fullest story is Þiðranda þáttr, preserved in Flateyjarbók. At a feast at the winter nights, the seer Þórhallr warns that no one should go outside that night. After three knocks at the door, Þiðrandi, the well-liked son of Hallr of Síða, goes out with a sword. From the north he sees nine women in black clothes with drawn swords, and from the south nine women in light clothes on white horses. The women in black attack him; he is found wounded and dies the next morning. Þórhallr says he cannot know, but guesses they were none other than the fylgjur of Hallr's kin: the family's dísir, who had followed the old faith, foresaw the change of religion and would not part from the family without taking a tribute. The better dísir had wanted to help him but could not. The tale is told by a Christian writer, as a sign of the conversion to come.
Dís is also a plain poetic word for a woman: Atlakviða 35 calls Guðrún a dís. In Guðrúnarkviða I 19 she recalls seeming higher to the king's men than any of Herjann's dísir, Herjann being a name of Odin; those dísir are usually read as valkyries. Snorri calls Freyja Vanadís, 'the dís of the Vanir' (Gylfaginning 35), and Skaði öndurdís, 'the ski-dís' (ch. 23). In Skáldskaparmál he says a woman may be referred to by any of the ásynjur, valkyries, norns or dísir, naming the four groups side by side. Outside Scandinavia, the first Merseburg charm, written down in the 10th century, opens with idisi who once sat here and there: some fastened bonds, some held back an army, some picked at fetters. That they are the same beings as the dísir is a scholarly hypothesis; the word forms do not match exactly.