One stanza. That is the whole Norse record for Forseti, and it is Grímnismál 15: a hall called Glitnir stands on golden pillars and is roofed with silver, and there Forseti dwells most days and settles all disputes.
Snorri quotes it in Gylfaginning, calls him the son of Baldr and Nanna, and adds one line of his own — that all who come to him with legal quarrels go away reconciled, and that this is the best court known to gods and men.
Then he adds a curious remark: that Forseti is the best judge among gods and men. Snorri does not usually let a god's jurisdiction extend to human courts, and it is worth asking whether that reflects something real.
The name is not a title of nobility
Forseti in modern Icelandic is the word for "president," and in Faroese it means chairman. The Old Norse compound means "the one who sits in front" — the presiding officer of an assembly, the man in the chair at a þing.
That is a precise term from the operating vocabulary of Norse legal life, not a poetic epithet. A god whose name is "the chairman" and whose only recorded activity is settling cases indicates that the Norse imagined judicial procedure as having divine backing, which is otherwise attested only obliquely — through the oath-rings of Ullr, the þing-connection of Týr on the Housesteads altar, and the norns laying down law at the well.
Fosite of Heligoland
There is a second figure with a very similar name, in a genuine historical document, and the relationship between the two has been argued about for two centuries.
Alcuin's Vita Willibrordi, written around 800, describes the missionary Willibrord landing on an island between Frisia and Denmark called Fositesland, sacred to the god Fosite. Everything on it was untouchable: cattle grazed unharmed, and there was a spring from which water had to be drawn in silence. Willibrord baptised three men in the spring, killed some of the cattle for food, and was brought before the Frisian king Radbod, who cast lots for three days to determine which of the party should die. One man was executed.
Altfrid's later Life of Liudger records the same island — now identifiable as Heligoland, whose name preserves heilig, holy — being cleared of its shrines, and the shrine's wealth taken.
Fosite is therefore a genuinely attested, actively worshipped continental Germanic god with a sanctuary, a taboo spring and a documented martyrdom, in a source written by a Northumbrian scholar within a lifetime of the events.
Are they the same god?
The linguistic argument is not straightforward. Fosite to Forseti requires accounting for the r, and phonologically the derivation is possible but not clean. Some scholars have proposed that the Frisian name is the original and the Norse form arose by folk-etymology — a foreign god's name reanalysed as a familiar compound meaning "he who presides." Others argue the reverse, or that the resemblance is coincidence.
What tips it for many is a piece of later Frisian legend. Medieval Frisian law-books tell of Charlemagne demanding that the Frisians produce their own law; twelve representatives, unable to answer, were set adrift in a rudderless boat, and a thirteenth man appeared at the helm with a golden axe, steered them to land, threw the axe to create a spring, and taught them their laws before vanishing. That figure came to be identified with Fosite, and the island's name in Frisian tradition with him.
A lawgiver god associated with a spring, a boat and an axe, on an island in the North Sea, whose name closely resembles the Norse word for a presiding judge, is either the same figure or a remarkable coincidence. The Frisian legend is late — thirteenth-century and later — so it cannot be used as independent early evidence, but Alcuin's account is early and solid.
What the golden hall is doing
Glitnir means "the shining one," and its gold pillars and silver roof are the most opulent architecture in Grímnismál's catalogue — more so than Odin's own dwellings in the same poem.
That a courthouse is the richest building in Ásgarðr is an argument in itself. Norse society had no police, no prisons and no executive power; the þing worked because people chose to bring cases to it and abide by the outcome. A mythology that puts its most splendid hall around a reconciliation service is telling you what it valued, and doing so with one adjective.
Nothing afterwards
Forseti has no myths, no Ragnarök role, no genealogy beyond his parents, no Scandinavian place-names and no modern reception worth the name. He appears in a handful of fantasy novels and games as a generic judge. The Icelandic word forseti is used daily by people who have never thought about a god.
For his father's death, which is the event that gives the family tree its shape, see Baldr; for the wider tradition and the thinness of much of the record, the Norse overview.
Was Forseti a real object of worship in Scandinavia?
There is no direct evidence — no place-names, no personal names, no amulets, no saga references to sacrifice. If the Fosite identification holds, then a version of him was certainly worshipped in Frisia and on Heligoland, with a sanctuary important enough for two missionary biographies to record its destruction. That produces the odd situation of a god better attested in cult outside Scandinavia than inside it, known in the north only as a name in a poem.
Why is he Baldr's son rather than Týr's?
Nothing explains it, and it is not obvious. Týr has the stronger legal credentials — the assembly connection, the oath-ring associations, the Roman-era identification with a law-court Mars — and would be the intuitive father for a judge. Snorri instead attaches Forseti to Baldr and Nanna, which gives the reconciler a descent from the god whose killing could not be avenged and the woman who died of grief. Whether that is inherited genealogy or Snorri arranging his material for effect is unknowable from a single stanza, but it produces a striking piece of family logic either way.