The Binding of Fenrir · Norse Mythology Sleep Story · 3 Hours

Good evening.

Or perhaps good night, if you've made your

way here in the long hours after midnight

the difference may already have stopped mattering.

You've come back, perhaps, because the last three episodes

helped you sleep.

Or you've come for the first time.

And the fourth episode happened to be the one

the algorithm offered.

Either is fine.

The almanac is patient.

Tonight stands on its own.

If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you

to do very little.

Close your eyes.

Let your jaw loosen.

Let your shoulders drop, even a little

even if you didn't know they were tight.

The story does not need your attention.

It will keep moving whether you follow it or

not.

If you drift, that is the point.

If you wake briefly to catch a single sentence

and then sink again, that is good.

In the first episode, we walked the shape of

the world, nine realms joined by one great

tree.

In the second, we met the wanderer, the Allfather

the hanged god.

In the third, we went down into the dwarven

forges and watched, in a single strange wager

the making of the hammer that would defend the

gods.

Tonight, we follow a quieter and a sadder story.

A story about a wolf.

A wolf who was a child.

A wolf who was raised in the high halls

of Asgard among the very beings who would one

day decide they had to bind him.

This is the story of how that binding was

done.

And of the small ribbon, woven of impossible things

that finally held the wolf.

And of the god, the brave god

the just god, who put his hand into

the wolf's mouth so that the binding could be

made.

Now, let us begin.

Chapter One.

The Three Children of Loki.

Before we go to the wolf.

And before we go to the chain.

We should sit, for a while, with the figure

who gave the wolf his life.

We met him, briefly, in the last episode.

The trickster.

The one who cut Sif's hair while she slept

and who then was made to descend

by Thor's anger, into the underground halls of the

dwarves to bring back gifts of recompense.

We saw him there at the bellows.

We saw him take the shape of a fly.

We saw him try, in his way

to ruin the work of the smiths.

And we saw the work be made anyway

despite him.

Loki.

The Old Norse sources do not give us a

tidy biography of him.

They give us scattered passages, in the Eddic poems

and in Snorri's Prose Edda, and from those passages

we are meant to assemble a figure.

The figure that emerges, when you look at the

texts together, is more complicated than the figure who

appears in modern films and comic books.

The modern Loki is, often, a quick and witty

schemer with the suggestion of a redemption arc.

The Norse Loki is something stranger.

He is something older.

And tonight's story is one of the places where

his strangeness shows.

The texts call him, sometimes, a son of giants.

His father, in the surviving accounts, was a giant

named Fárbauti.

Whose name means, roughly, Cruel Striker.

His mother was Laufey, whose name means Leafy.

Or Leaf-Island.

There has been long argument among scholars about whether

Laufey was a giantess or a goddess.

The surviving texts are not certain.

What is certain is that Loki, by birth

was not of the Æsir.

He was a being who came into Asgard from

outside, and who was made a member of the

Æsir by oath of blood-brotherhood with Odin.

The texts preserve this oath.

The Eddic poem Lokasenna refers to it.

Loki and Odin had, at some point in the

deep past, sworn together that they would drink no

ale that was not poured for them both.

They had become brothers in the older Germanic sense

bound by ceremony, bound by ritual

bound to share a single fate.

This is worth holding in mind, as we walk

through tonight's story.

Loki is, by oath, Odin's brother.

Even when he is doing things the gods do

not approve of, he is doing them inside the

bonds of that brotherhood.

The gods cannot simply expel him.

He has the rights of one of their own.

Loki had a wife in Asgard.

Her name was Sigyn.

She does not appear often in the surviving sources.

But when she appears, she is faithful to him

beyond any reasonable measure.

There is a story we will tell

in a later episode, in which she stands beside

him for ages with a bowl held above his

face.

We will not tell that story tonight.

Tonight is not that story.

What Loki had, that we do need tonight

were three other children.

By another woman.

A giantess.

Her name, in the surviving accounts, was Angrboða.

Angrboða.

The name means, in Old Norse, Sorrow-Bringer.

Or Grief-Bringer.

The texts do not describe her closely.

They tell us only where she lived

which was in Jötunheim, the world of the giants

in a forest the sources call Járnviðr

the Iron Wood.

They tell us she had relations with Loki, somehow

at some point.

And they tell us that she bore him three

children.

The Iron Wood.

The Sorrow-Bringer.

The three children.

This is the kind of detail that

in the older Norse imagination, would have settled

in the listener's mind, the kind of children we

are about to meet.

They were not going to be ordinary.

They were not going to be welcome.

They were going to be of the wild forests

of the giants' world, of the deep places that

the high halls of Asgard did not reach.

And they were not.

The first of Loki's children by Angrboða was a

daughter.

Her name was Hel.

She came into the world, the texts tell us

half one color and half another.

One half of her body, the surviving accounts say

was the color of living flesh.

The other half was the color of corpse.

She was, from her birth, marked.

The second of Loki's children was a serpent.

He had no proper name at first.

He grew.

He kept growing.

He grew until he was longer than the world

could contain.

The third of Loki's children was a wolf.

We will get to him in a moment.

The gods, the sources tell us, did not know

about these children at first.

The trickster had kept them in the Iron Wood

away from Asgard, away from the eyes of the

Æsir.

He was raising them, perhaps.

Or he was hiding them.

The text does not specify which.

But Odin, the Allfather, who saw far

whose ravens flew across the nine worlds at dawn

and brought him back what they had seen

Odin learned of them.

Whether through his ravens or through one of the

seers he sometimes consulted, the texts do not say.

He learned.

And what he learned alarmed him.

He learned that these three children of Loki had

been seen, by those who could see such things

in the visions of the future.

He learned that all three would be present at

Ragnarǫk.

The great unmaking at the end of the world.

He learned that the daughter, Hel, would gather the

dead under her cold rule.

He learned that the serpent would rise from the

sea and poison the air with his breath.

And he learned that the wolf

the wolf would do something terrible.

Something the surviving sources hint at but

in the early passages, do not yet describe.

So Odin acted.

He sent for the three children to be brought

to Asgard.

And when they came, the gods sat in their

hall, and they looked at them, and they decided

what was to be done.

Hel, the daughter, the gods sent down.

They sent her into Niflheim, the lowest of the

cold worlds beneath the world, and they gave her

dominion there.

They gave her a hall called Eljúðnir.

They gave her a table called Hunger and a

knife called Famine.

They gave her authority over the dead who had

not died well, those who had died of

sickness or of age, the dead who would not

feast in Valhǫll or in the halls of Freyja

the great gentle mass of the unspectacular dead.

The gods made her queen of those.

She would gather them under her hand and rule

them in the cold dark below.

This is, in its way, one of the strangest

acts of administration in any mythology.

The gods looked at a half-dead child and said:

you.

You will look after the half-dead.

You will look after the ones who go quietly.

There is something honest about it.

There is something, too, that is cruel.

The texts do not say which the gods intended.

Jǫrmungandr, the serpent, the second child

Odin took him and threw him into the sea.

The great sea that surrounds Midgard.

The serpent kept growing in the sea.

He grew until he could encircle Midgard entirely.

Until he could put his own tail in his

own mouth.

He lies there still, in the world's ocean

biting his tail, his body coiled around all of

the lands of men.

The sailors of the old Scandinavian world knew his

name.

They knew that what they were sailing on was

in some long old reckoning, the back of him.

He waits in the sea.

He will rise at Ragnarǫk.

And then there was the wolf.

The wolf was different.

The wolf, the gods decided, they could not yet

send away.

They brought him into Asgard.

They thought, perhaps, that if he was raised among

them, if he was raised in the high halls

he might grow up to be something other than

what the seers had foretold.

They thought, perhaps, that the future was not yet

certain.

That the wolf could be loved into something gentler.

They were wrong.

But they were not, in the beginning

foolish to try.

We will come to what happened.

His name was Fenrir.

In the Old Norse, Fenris-úlfr, the wolf of

the fen, or the wolf of the wetland.

The lowland wolf.

The wolf of the dark wet places at the

edges of the settled world.

The name carries, in its sound, the kind of

cold the old Scandinavians would have known well.

The marsh in winter.

The mist over the bog.

The wolf that you heard at the edge of

your light at night, and that you knew

even in the safety of your hall

was there.

He came to Asgard as a child.

As a pup, the texts tell us

though the texts do not use that word.

He was small.

He was the kind of small that grows.

The gods looked at him in their hall

and they took him in.

And the texts pause here, before they tell us

what came next.

We pause too.

Sleep, if you are ready to.

The next chapter will tell you what it was

like to feed him.

Chapter Two.

The Wolf Brought to Asgard.

Imagine, if you can, the high hall of the

gods.

The hall is built of timber and gold.

The roof is shielded with shields

the texts use that phrase, that the roof of

Valhǫll was thatched with the war-shields of the slain.

The fires are kept burning in long stone hearths

down the center of the hall.

The benches along the walls are long and broad

and meant to hold many.

The Æsir gather here at evening to drink

to talk, to argue, to settle the business of

the worlds.

Into that hall, the gods brought a wolf-pup.

He was small, at the beginning.

The texts make this point.

He was small enough that the gods could carry

him.

He was small enough to be set down on

the bench beside them.

Small enough to be looked at, in the firelight

as a curious and unusual ward.

But he grew.

Wolves, in the natural world the old Scandinavians knew

grew quickly.

A wolf-pup at six weeks was a small bundle.

A wolf-pup at six months was a creature you

would not lightly approach.

A wolf at one year was, in the eyes

of any farmer in the long north

fully a wolf, already capable of taking a

sheep, already capable of running with a pack across

a frozen field, already wearing the full silvered coat

of the adult.

The growth of a wolf, the people of the

old north knew, was fast and frightening and could

not be slowed.

Fenrir's growth was faster.

The texts do not give us numbers.

They do not say in what week he doubled

in size, in what month he tripled.

They give us, instead, the impression of growth that

exceeded its own kind.

They give us a wolf who, in the great

hall of the gods

grew.

And kept growing.

Until he was the size of a horse.

Until he was the size of two horses.

Until he was the size of one of the

high benches in the hall.

This is a detail worth letting settle.

The benches in a Norse longhouse were long enough

to seat many warriors and broad enough to sleep

on.

To say a wolf was the size of one

of those benches is, in the imagination of the

old Scandinavian world, to say a wolf that would

not fit in any normal hall.

A wolf that bowed the timbers when he moved.

A wolf whose breath, when he panted

fogged the fires.

The gods watched him grow.

They had taken him in for a reason.

They had thought, and the texts hint at

this even where they do not say it

that if the wolf was raised among them

if he was given the kindness of the high

hall, he might be made gentle.

They had thought, perhaps, that the prophecies of what

he would do at Ragnarǫk could be unmade by

love.

It is one of the most poignant choices in

all of Norse mythology.

The gods, knowing what the seers had said.

The gods, having looked at the future.

Choosing, nonetheless, to try.

And the wolf, in the early years

did not refuse the kindness.

He came into the hall.

He ate what was given to him.

He grew.

But he was not, the texts tell us

a tame wolf.

He was not a pet.

He was not, in the way of a dog

of the household, a being that lay at the

feet of the gods and looked up at them

in trust.

He was something else.

He was something the gods had brought into their

own hall, and that was changing, week by week

into something they had not foreseen.

The wolf grew not just in body.

He grew in the strangeness of his eye.

He grew in the depth of his voice.

He grew in the way the other gods

when they came past him in the hall

found themselves walking a little wider.

Found themselves not making eye contact.

Found themselves, without knowing why, holding their breath.

There came a point, the texts tell us

at which only one of the gods was still

willing to feed him.

Before we go to that god, who is the

heart of tonight's story, we should sit a little

longer with the wolf himself.

The Old Norse word for wolf, úlfr

is one of the oldest words in the Germanic

family of languages.

It is related to the German Wolf

the English wolf, the Gothic wulfs.

It is, in the long deep past

one of the words that the Germanic peoples carried

with them from their earliest reckoning of the world.

And the wolf, in the imagination of those peoples

was not one thing.

It was many.

The wolf was, in some readings, the enemy.

The animal at the edge of the firelight that

took the sheep from the fold and that

in the long cold winters, came into settlements when

the snow lay deep.

The wolf was the thing the hall was built

against.

The thing the door was barred against.

The thing the children, in their straw-stuffed beds

learned to listen for in the night-quiet.

But the wolf was also, in other readings

the kindred figure.

The animal that, of all the animals in the

Norse imagination, was closest to the warrior.

The wolf-warriors of the old Germanic peoples, the úlfheðnar

were a specific class of fighters who

in the surviving sources, took on the strength and

the savagery of the wolf in battle.

They wore wolf-pelts.

They were said, in the older heroic poems

to fight as wolves fight.

They were the kindred of the wolf.

And there were the wolves of the gods themselves.

Odin, the Allfather, kept two wolves at his throne.

Their names, we learned in the second episode

were Geri and Freki.

Greedy and Ravenous.

Odin fed them, from his own table

the meat that came to him in Valhǫll.

The wolves of Odin were not, in the surviving

sources, a problem.

They were, in their way, members of the household

of the gods.

They were honored.

They were kept.

So when Fenrir came to Asgard as a small

thing, the gods were not afraid of him because

he was a wolf.

They were not, in the early days

afraid of him at all.

They had wolves at the Allfather's own throne.

Wolves were known.

Wolves were, in their way, kindred.

What changed was not the kind of being Fenrir

was.

What changed was the scale of him.

The simple terrible fact that, week by week

the small thing they had taken in was becoming

larger than any wolf had ever been.

He was passing out of the country of the

familiar wolf.

He was passing into the country of the unfamiliar.

The country of the monstrous.

The country in which the gods, who had known

wolves all their long lives, no longer knew what

was sitting in their hall.

There came a point, the texts tell us

at which only one of the gods was still

willing to feed him.

We will come to that god in the next

chapter.

He is the heart of tonight's story.

What you should hold, from this short telling

is the shape of the situation that had come

slowly, to be true in the hall of Asgard.

The gods had taken in a child.

The child had grown into something the gods could

no longer pretend was a child.

The gods had not yet, in their council

decided what to do about it.

They were watching.

They were waiting.

They were hoping, perhaps, that the growth would slow.

Or that the wolf would, by some unforeseen change

become something other than what the seers had said.

But the wolf did not slow.

And the day was coming when the gods would

have to act.

Before we walk into that day, we should meet

the god who fed him.

Chapter Three.

Týr, the One Who Fed Him.

There was a god whose name was Týr.

The name, in Old Norse, was spelled in three

letters, T-Ý-R.

In runic carving, it was a single rune

the Týr rune, which stood for both the god

and for the sound at the start of his

name.

The rune itself is shaped like a small upward-pointing

arrow.

↑.

A figure with arms raised.

A figure standing, looking up, with arms open.

In the old Scandinavian world, warriors would sometimes scratch

this rune onto the hilt of a sword before

battle, as a quiet asking of the god's protection.

The rune is one of the most often found

in the surviving inscriptions of the runic age.

The god, even in the late telling of the

Norse stories, had not been forgotten.

But by the time of the surviving texts

by the time, that is, of Snorri Sturluson in

the thirteenth century, sitting at his desk in Iceland

writing down what was left of the old religion

the god of Týr had become a thinner

figure than he once had been.

There are passages in the Prose Edda where Snorri

pauses before describing him, as if reaching

in his own thirteenth-century way, for a memory that

was already fading from the world.

Týr.

What the surviving texts do tell us is that

he was, in the older Germanic religious system

one of the highest gods.

There is good reason to believe

and many scholars have argued this

that Týr was, in the deep past

before Odin became the chief of the gods

the chief of the gods himself.

The name Týr is etymologically related to the Greek

Zeus and the Latin Iupiter (which we say as

Jupiter), all of them descended from a single Proto-Indo-European

root meaning sky, or shining

or sky-god.

Týr was, once, the sky-father of the Germanic peoples.

By the time the Norse texts were written down

that role had passed to Odin.

But the older, simpler god of justice and of

law and of the right outcome

that god was still Týr.

He is described, in what survives of him

as the bravest of the gods.

Snorri uses this exact word.

He says, in Gylfaginning, that Týr was the bravest.

He says that Týr was the wisest.

He says that anyone who wishes to surpass the

rest of men in courage and good sense should

call upon Týr.

Týr was the god, that is, that you went

to when you needed a hard thing done.

A right thing.

A thing that other gods, more cunning or more

clever or more politic, would not do.

The texts do not give us a long biography

of him.

They give us, in passing, that he had only

one hand.

That his right hand had been lost.

We will come to how he lost it.

And the texts give us, almost as an aside

what he did for the wolf.

When Fenrir was first brought into Asgard

when he was small, the gods all took turns

with him.

They all, in the texts' careful phrasing, fed him.

They all, in the early days, were willing to

walk to the wolf and lay food before him

and stand beside him while he ate.

But the wolf grew.

And as he grew, the other gods

one by one, stopped going to him.

By the time the wolf was at the size

that bent the timbers of the hall

only Týr was still willing.

Only Týr would walk, each day, to where the

wolf was lying.

Only Týr would carry the meat.

Only Týr would set it down.

And only Týr would stand there, his hands empty

and his eye open, while the wolf ate.

We should pause on this.

The other gods of Asgard had, by then

the high cunning.

The far-seeing.

The names that had been earned across worlds.

Thor had his hammer.

Odin had his ravens.

Heimdallr could hear the grass grow.

Freyr had his shining sword.

Freyja could fly, in her cloak of falcon-feathers

across any sky.

The Æsir were, in every account, beings of enormous

power.

And none of them, the texts tell us

would walk up to Fenrir.

Only Týr.

There is, in this, something the texts do not

need to say in so many words.

Týr was the bravest.

Not because he was the strongest.

Thor was stronger.

Not because he was the wisest.

Odin had drunk from Mímir's well and Týr had

not.

Not because he was the highest.

By the time the texts were written

Týr had been, for centuries, no longer the chief

god.

Týr was the bravest because Týr did the thing

that needed doing.

The wolf needed to be fed.

So Týr fed him.

The other gods, who had taken the wolf in

who had brought him into their hall

who had decided that they would try to raise

him, the other gods had, by then

stepped back.

They were watching from a distance.

They were leaving the daily task to one of

their own.

Týr did not refuse.

The texts give us very little of what passed

between Týr and the wolf in those long quiet

feedings.

They do not give us conversation.

They do not give us a slow growth of

understanding.

They give us, only, the steady fact:

Týr fed him.

Daily.

Without fail.

While the gods watched from the high benches.

There is a question worth asking, here.

Did the wolf, in those years, know what Týr

was doing?

The Norse sources do not believe in unintelligent monsters.

Fenrir, in the surviving texts, is not portrayed as

a brute or as a beast.

He is portrayed, when he speaks, as articulate.

He is portrayed as suspicious, as careful

as alert to the meanings of what is done

to him.

He is, in his own way, a person

a person in a wolf's shape and at a

wolf's terrible scale, but a person.

So when Týr came to him with meat

day after day.

When Týr stood quietly beside him while he ate.

When Týr did not pull back, did not show

fear, did not look away.

What did the wolf understand of that?

The texts do not tell us.

In my reading, and the texts do not

tell us this, the wolf came

in those long quiet feedings, to understand Týr in

a way he did not understand any of the

other gods.

Not as a friend, exactly.

The wolf was not, by any reading of the

texts, a being who had friends.

But as the one god whose presence did not

carry the small flicker of fear that the wolf

was, by then, accustomed to seeing in every other

face.

Týr came to him steadily.

Týr fed him steadily.

Týr stood beside him steadily.

And the wolf, in his huge intelligent watching

came to know that this god was not afraid

of him.

The moment that comes later, the moment when

the wolf, having seen through the gods' deception

asks for one of them to put a hand

in his mouth as surety, has

when you sit with it, a particular shape.

The wolf does not ask for any hand.

He asks, by his refusal to be tested otherwise

for the hand of the god who has been

willing to come close to him.

The text does not give us the wolf's reasoning.

But the wolf's reasoning, in my reading

is there beneath the surface of what the text

gives us.

But the texts do tell us this.

When the moment came, much later, when the gods

needed someone to put a hand into the wolf's

mouth as surety.

When they needed a god to step forward and

offer that hand.

The wolf knew which god to ask for.

He did not ask for Odin.

He did not ask for Thor.

He asked for Týr.

The bravest.

The just.

The one who had fed him.

We will get to that moment.

What you should hold, from this chapter

is the shape of Týr in the hall of

the gods.

He is not loud.

He is not in the front of the stories.

He is the god who, when the other gods

stepped back, walked forward.

He is the god who, when the cost would

be paid, was the one to pay it.

He is the figure who, in tonight's story

will lose more than any other.

In the next chapter, we go to the first

of the gods' attempts to bind the wolf.

Chapter Four.

The First Two Chains.

The gods, the texts tell us, came at last

to their council.

The wolf could no longer be hosted in the

high hall.

The wolf had become too large, too suspicious

too aware.

The Æsir gathered, the texts say, and they spoke

of what was to be done.

And what they decided was this.

The wolf, the gods said, must be bound.

Not killed.

The texts are clear on this.

Not killed.

Even in the height of their alarm

the gods did not move to kill Fenrir.

There has been long argument among scholars about why.

One reading is that, because the gods had taken

him in as a foster-child, killing him would have

been the breaking of the most ancient and most

binding of social obligations, the obligation of the

foster-parent to the foster-child.

Another reading is that, because Fenrir was Loki's son

and Loki was Odin's blood-brother, killing the wolf would

have been the killing of a kinsman.

A third reading is that the gods, foreseeing Ragnarǫk

knew the wolf could not be killed by ordinary

means.

He was to be the killer of Odin himself

at the end of the world.

Such a being could not be put down with

a sword.

Whatever the reading, the texts agree.

The decision was not to kill but to bind.

And to bind, the gods first thought

would be simple.

They were gods.

The wolf, after all, was only a wolf

even a wolf of unusual size and strangeness was

in the imagination of the Æsir at this council

a creature that could be wrapped in iron and

held.

So they made a chain.

The first chain was called Lœðingr.

The etymology of the name is not entirely certain

the Old Norse scholars have argued about it

for a long time.

One reading connects it to a root meaning to

lay down.

Another connects it to the kind of binding-word used

in legal proceedings.

Whichever reading is right, the name carries the sense

that this was a chain meant to settle the

wolf.

To hold him in place.

The Æsir made this chain themselves, in their own

forges.

They did not yet go to the dwarves.

They thought, at this stage, that the work of

binding could be done with their own hands.

They forged the iron.

They linked the links.

They tested the strength of the chain against the

strength of their own arms, and they were satisfied.

Then they brought the chain to the wolf.

The texts give us, here, one of the most

quietly cunning passages in all of Norse literature.

The gods did not come to Fenrir and say

this is a chain.

We have made it to bind you.

Lie still while we place it around you.

They did not say that.

They said, instead, and the surviving accounts preserve

this almost as a joke, they said: Fenrir

we have made this chain.

We do not know how strong it is.

Would you let us try it on you?

It will be a test of your strength against

the chain's.

We will see which is the greater.

It is one of the small dark comedies of

the surviving Edda.

The gods, in their first attempt to bind the

wolf, came to him in the language of sport.

As if it were a game.

As if there were no consequence.

As if they were saying, come, friend

let us see how strong you are today.

The wolf agreed.

He agreed, the texts say, because he was confident

in his own strength.

He had grown to the size he had grown

to.

He had felt the bones of horses give way

under his jaw.

He had felt the timbers of the hall flex

beneath his weight.

The wolf looked at the chain.

He looked at the gods.

And he said, in effect: very well.

Place it on me.

We will see.

The gods placed the chain Lœðingr around him.

They drew the chain tight.

They stepped back.

Fenrir kicked once.

The chain Lœðingr fell to the ground in pieces.

The gods looked at it.

The wolf looked at it.

And the wolf, the texts tell us

was not displeased.

He had won the game.

He had proven his strength.

He was, perhaps, even a little pleased to be

in a game with the gods, who had until

now never tested him in this way.

The gods were silent.

They went away to their council and they spoke

again of what to do.

It was decided that they would make a second

chain.

A stronger one.

Twice as strong, the texts tell us

as the first.

Or, in some readings, of a stronger metal

of an iron worked with secret runes by the

gods' best smiths.

The chain was called Drómi.

The name, in Old Norse, comes from a root

meaning fetter or bond.

It was a fetter in the most literal sense.

A binding-thing.

The gods brought Drómi to the wolf.

They came, again, in the language of sport.

They came, again, as if it were a game.

They said, and this is where the surviving

texts begin to give us, very gently

the suggestion that the wolf was no longer entirely

fooled, they said: Fenrir, your fame for breaking

Lœðingr has spread among us.

We have made a stronger chain.

Will you not test your strength again?

Will you not be praised by all of the

Æsir for the breaking of this one too?

The wolf looked at Drómi.

It was visibly heavier than Lœðingr.

It was visibly thicker.

The eye of the wolf, the texts tell us

was beginning to grow wary.

But the wolf said: very well.

Place it on me.

I am willing.

The gods placed Drómi around him.

They drew it tight.

The chain was so heavy that even the gods

the texts say, strained to lift it.

They stepped back.

The wolf gathered himself.

He had to work this time.

He kicked once.

The chain held.

He kicked again.

The chain bent but did not break.

He bucked.

The chain creaked.

The wolf, the texts tell us, had to put

forth, for the first time, his real strength.

And then the chain broke.

The links of Drómi flew apart across the field.

The pieces, the surviving sources say, lay scattered.

The wolf rose, panting.

He looked at the gods.

And the wolf was even more pleased now than

before.

He had proven his strength a second time.

He had broken even the strongest chain the gods

themselves could make.

The gods, the texts tell us, were beginning to

be afraid.

They went away again to their council.

And they spoke of what was to be done.

And there was, by now, the slow heavy understanding

in the council that they could not bind the

wolf with the strength of their own forges.

The gods of Asgard could not, by themselves

make a chain that would hold him.

They would have to send for help.

They would have to send for the dwarves.

In the next chapter, we go down again

as we did, last week, for the hammer

into the underground halls of Svartalfheim.

Chapter Five.

Down to Svartalfheim Again.

We were last in Svartalfheim only the week before

in the long telling of how Mjǫllnir was made.

We walked there with Loki, then, on the long

road down.

We watched him stand at the bellows.

We watched the dwarves Sindri and Brokkr work at

the anvil.

We watched the gold form into the boar Gullinbursti.

The ring Draupnir.

The hammer that would, from that night forward

hang at Thor's belt.

Tonight we go back.

The gods, having failed twice to bind the wolf

with chains of their own making, send a messenger

down to the same dark country.

This time, it is not Loki who goes.

The texts give us the name of the messenger.

He was called Skírnir.

The bright one.

The shining one.

He was the servant, or, in some readings

the friend and follower, of the god Freyr.

Freyr, who we will meet at length in a

later episode of this season, was one of the

Vanir, the second tribe of gods, who had come

into Asgard after the long Æsir-Vanir war.

Freyr was the god of fertility, of the sun

in summer, of growing things.

Skírnir was his messenger, his runner, the one he

sent on tasks the surviving texts portray as urgent

delicate, and almost diplomatic.

It is interesting that the gods chose Skírnir for

this errand and not, for example

Loki.

Loki had been to Svartalfheim before.

Loki, in the previous episode, had stood at the

bellows and watched the dwarves work.

Loki knew the road.

Loki, in the trickster's way, would have been the

obvious messenger.

But the gods, by this point in the story

no longer entirely trusted Loki.

They knew that Fenrir was Loki's son.

They knew that Loki, while sworn to the Æsir

had his own loyalties and his own ambivalences.

They did not want, on this errand

the trickster's hand on the message.

They wanted someone simpler.

Someone bright.

Someone whose loyalty to the high gods was uncomplicated.

So they sent Skírnir.

Skírnir went down.

The texts do not describe his journey in detail.

They give us only that he went.

He passed through whatever roads the messengers of the

gods knew, perhaps along Bifrǫst, the rainbow bridge

perhaps along older paths that the surviving texts do

not name.

He came to Svartalfheim.

He came to the door of the smiths.

This time, the smiths are not Sindri and Brokkr.

The surviving texts do not name them.

Snorri tells us, in the Prose Edda

only that Skírnir came down to "certain dwarves." He

does not give them faces.

He does not give them lineages.

They are, in the only account that has come

down to us, simply dwarves of the deep country

the unnamed smiths of Svartalfheim, who already

the texts hint, knew why Skírnir had come before

he had spoken.

You will remember, perhaps, that in the previous episode

the dwarves we met were named.

The sons of Ívaldi, who made Sif's new gold

hair and the spear Gungnir and the ship Skíðblaðnir.

The brothers Sindri and Brokkr, who made the boar

Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir, and Mjǫllnir itself.

Those dwarves the surviving sources named because the story

of the wager required them to be named

the wager was between two specific sets of smiths

and the gods needed to know who had made

which treasure.

Tonight's story is different.

Tonight's story has no wager.

Tonight's story has only a binding.

The makers of the binding the texts have not

preserved by name.

We can, in our own imagination, hold them as

unnamed.

As deeper, perhaps, even than the named dwarves.

As the dwarves of dwarves.

The smiths the other smiths went to when the

work was beyond what they themselves could do.

Skírnir came to them in their hall.

He brought a message from the gods.

The message, in the surviving telling, was this.

The gods, said Skírnir, need a binding.

They need a thing that will hold a wolf.

The wolf is large, very large, larger than the

gods' own forges can make a chain to hold.

The gods have failed twice.

They need a third binding.

They need it to be different.

They need it to be of such a kind

that the wolf, when he sees it

will not believe it can hold him.

And they need it to hold him anyway.

The dwarves listened.

The texts do not give us their faces.

They give us, only, that they listened.

And that after they had listened, they were quiet

for a while.

And that after they had been quiet

they said, and this is the part the

surviving sources preserve almost as a riddle

they said: we will make it.

We will make it of six things.

The things we will use, we will use up.

There will not be any of them left in

the world after we are done.

Skírnir, the texts tell us, did not understand.

He asked, what six things?

And the dwarves said: you will see.

And they began.

The dwarves of Svartalfheim, in the long old Norse

imagination, were the keepers of the deepest crafts.

They were the ones who knew the runes that

the gods themselves did not yet know.

They were the ones who could draw

from the materials of the deep world

the qualities that lived in those materials.

The hardness of stone.

The brightness of gold.

The silence of shadow.

For Gleipnir, the texts give us the name

of the binding here, Gleipnir, which means

in rough Old Norse, the open one

or the deceiver, the one that catches

the dwarves used six things.

Six things that, in the world before the binding

of Fenrir, the texts tell us, were present and

known.

And that, after the binding of Fenrir

were no longer present in the world.

The dwarves used them up.

The world has been thinner ever since.

We come, in the next chapter, to what those

six things were.

Sleep, if you are ready to.

The list is one of the most beloved passages

in all of Norse mythology.

And the listing of it is, in its own

quiet way, a lullaby.

Chapter Six.

The Six Impossible Things.

The first of the things the dwarves used in

the making of Gleipnir was the sound of a

cat's footfall.

This is what the texts say.

The Prose Edda preserves the line.

The first of the six was the sound that

a cat makes when it walks.

The slight, almost-not-there pressure of a cat's foot on

a wooden floor.

The almost-silence of it.

The way a cat can cross a room while

a person who is sitting in it does not

look up.

The dwarves took this.

They took the sound.

They wove it into the cord.

This, the surviving Edda tells us, is the reason

that cats now walk silently.

The sound, before, had been in the world.

The dwarves used it.

The sound that remained, the sound that a

cat now makes when it crosses a floor

is what was left after the dwarves had taken

what they needed.

Cats walk silently because the dwarves needed the sound

of their footfalls for the binding of the wolf.

This is a beautiful piece of mythic reasoning.

It is also, in the way the old Norse

sources sometimes do, a small piece of folk explanation.

Why do cats walk silently?

Because the dwarves used up the rest of the

sound long ago.

The second of the things the dwarves used was

a woman's beard.

This may sound strange to a modern ear.

But the texts are specific.

The second ingredient was the beard of a woman.

And the explanation, and this is one of

the small dry jokes of the surviving sources

is that, before the binding of Fenrir

women had beards.

After the binding of Fenrir, they did not.

The dwarves used them up.

The Old Norse word for beard, skegg

would have been familiar to every household.

The beard of a man was, in the old

Scandinavian world, one of the markers of his standing.

The beard of Thor, of Odin, of every warrior

in the longhouse, was groomed and tended.

The texts of the Edda do not tell us

what a woman's beard, in the time before the

binding, had looked like.

The texts tell us, only, that there had been

one.

And that, after the binding, there was no longer.

The third of the things the dwarves used was

the roots of a mountain.

This one, perhaps, lands more easily in the modern

ear.

The roots of a mountain.

The deep parts of stone that go down into

the earth, that anchor the mountain to whatever is

below, that hold it in place against the slow

turning of the world.

The dwarves, the texts say, took those roots.

Used them.

The mountains have, since the binding of Fenrir

been rootless.

They are held in place now only by their

own weight.

By their own resting.

The roots are gone.

This is the kind of detail that

when you sit with it for a long quiet

moment, does something to your sense of the world.

It says, the mountain is heavier than it looks.

It says, the mountain is balanced now where once

it was anchored.

It says, the world has been, since this story

a little less steady than it once was.

The fourth of the things the dwarves used was

the sinews of a bear.

Sinew, the tough silvery cord that runs along

the muscle of an animal and connects it to

the bone.

In the old Scandinavian world, the sinews of large

animals were used for the strings of bows

for binding the iron-head onto a spear-shaft

for the silent strength inside every craft.

The sinew of a bear was particularly valued.

A bear was the largest land animal of the

Norse imagination.

Its sinew was the strongest of the bindings the

human craft could make.

The dwarves took the sinews of a bear.

Used them.

Wove them into Gleipnir.

The fifth of the things the dwarves used was

the breath of a fish.

You may, listening now, find your eye opening a

little at this.

The breath of a fish.

What does a fish breathe?

A fish, in the old Norse imagination

did not breathe the air that humans breathe.

A fish moved through the water, opening its mouth

and from its gills came a slight pulse

a small almost-silent rhythm that the old Norse people

who knew their cold rivers and their cold seas

would have noticed as they pulled fish from the

water and watched them lie in the bottom of

the boat.

The breath of a fish was that pulse.

That small last quiet exhalation.

The dwarves took it.

Used it.

And the sixth, the last, of the things the

dwarves used was the spittle of a bird.

The Old Norse texts pause on this one too

in the way they do.

The spittle of a bird.

The almost-nothing, the just-barely-there, the moisture inside a bird's

beak that you would not see unless you looked

very closely.

The dwarves used it.

These were the six things.

The sound of a cat's footfall.

A woman's beard.

The roots of a mountain.

The sinews of a bear.

The breath of a fish.

The spittle of a bird.

You may notice, if you let the list settle

that each of the six is a thing that

the old Norse imagination would have called almost-not-there.

They are not, like iron, or like gold

or like stone, the things you can pick up

and hold.

They are not, like the strength of a god

or the speed of a wind, the things you

can name and measure.

They are the things at the very edge of

presence.

The sound a cat makes that is just barely

a sound.

The beard of a woman that, even when it

was in the world, was not the central marker

of her.

The roots of a mountain that no one had

ever seen, only inferred.

The sinew of a bear, which is the strength

inside the strength.

The breath of a fish, which is the breath

inside an animal that does not seem to breathe

at all.

The spittle of a bird, which is the smallest

moisture inside the lightest of all flying things.

The surviving texts do not tell us why the

dwarves chose these six things.

The Prose Edda lists the ingredients without explaining the

reasoning behind them.

What I would offer here, as one way of

understanding the choice, is this.

The gods had tried to bind the wolf with

the things he could feel.

The iron of Lœðingr.

The iron of Drómi.

The chains of the high forges.

The wolf had felt them and had broken them.

So the dwarves, when the gods came to them

in their need, may have reasoned in the deep

way of the dwarves, that the wolf could

not be bound by anything he could feel.

He could only be bound by what he could

not feel.

By the absences.

By the things at the edge of presence.

By what was barely there.

This is, perhaps, the kind of reasoning the old

Norse imagination loved.

The kind of reasoning that says, the thing you

cannot see is stronger than the thing you can.

The thing that is barely there is the thing

that holds.

The lightest binding is, in the end

the only binding that lasts.

The Eddic poets did not write this down for

us in so many words.

But the listener, even the listener at the

edge of sleep, can sit with the possibility.

And the possibility is, in its way

the most Norse of all the things in the

story.

The dwarves took the six things and they wove

them into a single cord.

And the cord, when it was done, was

the texts tell us, smooth as a silken

ribbon, light as a thread of spider's silk

soft enough to be coiled into the palm of

a single hand.

It was so light that it seemed almost not

to be there.

It was so smooth that it seemed it could

not possibly hold anything.

This was Gleipnir.

The deceiver.

The open one.

The one that catches.

The dwarves gave it to Skírnir.

Skírnir, the messenger, took the small soft ribbon in

his hand.

He looked at it.

He must, the texts hint, have wondered how this

small thing was meant to hold the wolf.

He must have wondered whether the dwarves had played

some joke on him.

But the dwarves, in the surviving sources

gave him no further explanation.

They said only: take it.

Bring it to the gods.

They will know what to do.

And Skírnir, holding the small ribbon of impossible things

in his closed fist, climbed back up the road

from Svartalfheim.

And he came home to Asgard.

And he gave the ribbon to the gods.

In the next chapter, we walk to the island

where the binding will be made.

Chapter Seven.

The Ribbon in the Hand.

When Skírnir came back to Asgard, the gods were

waiting in their council hall.

He set the small bright thing on the table

before them.

The texts give us the scene.

The gods looked at it.

They did not, at first, believe it.

This, they said.

This is what the dwarves made.

Skírnir said: yes.

This, they said again.

This silken ribbon.

This little soft cord that we could break between

our fingers.

Skírnir said: yes.

They said it would hold him.

There was, the surviving sources tell us

a long silence in the council.

The gods looked at the ribbon.

They looked at one another.

Some of them, in the slow way of the

long-lived, took the ribbon in their hands and tested

it.

They pulled gently at it.

They pulled harder.

They strained against it with the strength of gods.

The ribbon did not break.

The gods, the texts say, were astonished.

They tried again.

The strongest of them, Thor was not yet

at Mjǫllnir's side in this telling, but Thor was

nonetheless there, with his bare hands and the great

strength of his bare hands, Thor took the

ribbon and pulled.

The ribbon did not move.

The ribbon did not stretch.

The ribbon held.

The gods began, slowly, to understand what the dwarves

had given them.

It was not a thing of weight.

It was not a thing of mass.

It was not a chain in the sense the

gods had been thinking about chains.

It was a binding made of qualities that had

been taken out of the world and woven together.

And the qualities, the silence of cats

the softness of women, the steadiness of mountains

the strength of bears, the patience of fish

the quiet of birds, were not the kind

of thing that strength could break.

The strongest god in Asgard, pulling on Gleipnir

was pulling against the deep order of the world.

The gods, the texts tell us, were satisfied at

last.

But they were also, the texts tell us

beginning to be afraid of how they would get

the wolf to allow it to be placed on

him.

Because Fenrir was not, by this point in the

story, a foolish child.

He had been brought to Asgard as a small

thing.

He had grown in the high hall.

He had watched the gods, one by one

step back from him.

He had felt their eyes change.

He had broken Lœðingr.

He had broken Drómi.

He had heard, in his huge intelligent ears

the conversations of the gods at council.

He had seen, the texts hint, the messenger Skírnir

come back from the deep places carrying something small

in his closed fist.

He had noticed.

The wolf, by this point, was watchful in a

way the gods could not have anticipated when they

took him in.

The wolf was, perhaps, even sad.

The texts do not say.

But the wolf was certainly suspicious.

He knew that the gods were planning something.

He knew that whatever they were planning involved him.

And he knew that the small soft ribbon they

had asked him to be tested with would not

be the simple game the chains had been.

The Æsir came to him.

They came in their numbers this time.

Not just one or two of them.

Not just the messenger.

They came in a small procession.

Odin at their head, in his blue cloak with

his hood drawn forward.

Thor beside him, the great red beard catching the

light.

Skírnir holding the small ribbon.

And, near the back of the procession, walking quietly

Týr.

They came to the wolf.

They did not, this time, immediately go into the

language of sport.

They did not say, immediately, come try this against

your strength.

They paused.

The texts give us the pause.

They looked at the wolf, and the wolf looked

at them.

And there was, in the long moment before anyone

spoke, the understanding on all sides that the game

had moved into a different country.

Then Odin spoke.

He spoke, the surviving texts tell us

in the easy voice the Allfather used when he

wanted to make a thing seem smaller than it

was.

He said: Fenrir.

We have come to you again with a binding.

This one is small.

As you can see.

It is no more than a silken band.

It has been made by the smiths of the

deep country, and they have given it certain qualities.

Will you not test it against your strength

as you tested the others?

Will you not break this little thing for our

entertainment, and we will be done?

The wolf looked at Gleipnir.

The wolf, the texts say, was silent for a

long while.

The wolf, when he spoke, spoke quietly.

He said: I see that this is small.

I see that it is light.

I see that it looks like a ribbon a

child would tie in its hair.

The gods waited.

The wolf went on.

He said: I see also that it has been

brought from the deep country.

I see also that the gods of Asgard

who have failed twice now to bind me

would not bring me a third binding unless they

thought it would hold.

I see also that you would not all of

you have come to watch this small entertainment unless

you thought there was something to watch.

The gods, the texts tell us, did not answer.

The wolf, in the silence that followed

raised his enormous head a little.

He spoke again.

He said: there is no honor in my breaking

of a thing that has clearly been made to

hold me.

There is no honor in pretending we do not

all know what this is.

I will not be made foolish by this game.

The gods, the texts tell us, did not yet

despair.

They had expected this.

They had thought, in their council, about what to

do if the wolf saw through them.

And they had a thing prepared.

In the next chapter, we go to the test

the wolf himself proposed.

Chapter Eight.

The Test the Wolf Proposed.

The wolf, having seen through the gods' game

made a counter-proposal.

He said: I will allow you to place this

ribbon on me.

I will allow you to make the test.

But only if one of you will put your

hand into my mouth, and keep it there

while the test is made.

So that, if I am being deceived

so that, if you have made a thing meant

to hold me and you have brought it here

to put it on me by trickery

I will know that the cost of the trick

will be the hand of one of the gods.

The texts pause here.

They give us the long quiet of the gods

looking at one another.

This is one of the most carefully constructed moments

in all of Norse mythology.

The wolf has not refused the binding.

The wolf has not run.

The wolf has not turned.

He has, instead, set a condition.

A condition that, on its face, sounds reasonable.

He is willing to be tested

but only with a pledge.

A pledge in the form of a hand.

The gods, the texts say, were silent.

Because the gods knew, exactly and without any doubt

what the wolf was asking for.

The wolf was asking for a sworn oath.

A pledge that, in the old Norse legal imagination

would bind the entire community of the Æsir to

the truth of what they were claiming.

And the gods knew that they were lying.

They knew that Gleipnir was meant to hold him.

They knew that, when Fenrir failed to break it

they would not release him.

They would leave him bound.

The trick was the whole point.

So the wolf, by asking for the hand

was asking for the gods to make a pledge

they could not honor.

And the cost of the failed pledge

the cost the wolf was naming

would be the hand of the god who put

it in.

The Æsir looked at one another.

Odin, the texts tell us, said nothing.

Odin, the wise one, the one who had given

his eye at the well of Mímir

the one who had hung nine nights on the

world-tree, was not, even in his bravery

willing to give a hand.

He had given enough.

Thor, the texts tell us, said nothing.

Thor, in some readings of the surviving sources

was not yet at the council when this was

discussed.

In others, Thor was there but did not speak.

Thor was strong.

Thor was loud.

But Thor did not, at this council

put his hand into the wolf's mouth.

Heimdallr, the watcher of the bridge, said nothing.

Freyr, the bright god of fertility, said nothing.

Bragi, the god of poetry, said nothing.

The texts walk us, one by one

through the gods of the council.

None of them spoke.

None of them stepped forward.

And then, the texts tell us, Týr stepped forward.

Týr.

The bravest.

The just.

The one who had fed the wolf in the

high hall when no other god would walk to

him.

The one who had stood beside him daily and

watched him grow and known what he was growing

into and not turned away.

Týr stepped forward.

Týr said: I will do it.

The wolf, the texts tell us, looked at Týr.

There is, in this moment, something the surviving sources

do not need to spell out.

The wolf had known Týr.

The wolf had eaten from his hand.

The wolf, in the long quiet years of the

high hall, had been fed by this god.

Had been the recipient of his daily steady kindness.

And now, in the moment when the wolf was

asking for a pledge, the only god who would

step forward was the one god who had not

turned away from him.

This is the cruelty at the heart of tonight's

story.

The bravest god, the god who had been

most faithful to the wolf, who had been most

willing, who had not withdrawn his hand

was the one who would have to lie to

him.

Týr knew it.

The wolf, the texts hint, may have known it

too.

We will return to that question in a moment.

Týr walked forward.

He came up to the wolf.

He stopped at the wolf's great head

which was at the level of his own chest.

He raised his right hand.

The right hand, the texts are specific

the sword-hand, the hand that, in the old Norse

imagination, was the hand of a warrior's identity.

The hand that held the blade in battle.

The hand that, on a warrior, was the hand

he could least afford to lose.

Týr raised his right hand.

He put it forward.

The wolf opened his mouth.

Týr placed his hand inside.

The texts pause here, in the way they do

at the deepest moments.

They give us, only: he placed his hand inside.

The wolf closed his jaws.

Not hard.

Not yet.

He closed his jaws gently around Týr's wrist

and he held the hand there.

Týr did not pull back.

Týr did not flinch.

In the next chapter, the gods make the binding.

Chapter Nine.

The Binding.

The Æsir, with Týr's hand in the wolf's mouth

came forward with Gleipnir.

They came quietly.

They did not laugh, the texts tell us.

They did not joke.

They did not now pretend, as they had in

the binding of Lœðingr and the binding of Drómi

that this was a game.

The mood had passed beyond the language of sport.

The mood was now, in the surviving sources

the mood of an execution.

A binding.

A solemn thing.

Skírnir, the messenger, held one end of the ribbon.

Another of the gods held the other end.

Slowly, slowly, they wound Gleipnir around the wolf.

The wolf did not resist them while they wound

it.

He stood, with Týr's hand still in his mouth

and he let the gods do the binding.

He had to.

He had made the pledge that he would.

He had bound himself to the test by his

own word.

The gods wound Gleipnir around his legs.

Around his chest.

Around his neck.

The ribbon, being light as a silken thread

took only a few wraps.

It did not feel heavy on him.

It did not feel, the wolf would have said

if he could speak in the moment

like a chain.

It felt like a thing a child had tied

around him in a game.

The gods stepped back.

They had taken him to an island for the

binding.

The texts give us the name of the island.

It was called Lyngvi.

In Old Norse, the name comes from a root

meaning heather or heathland.

It was a small island in a lake.

The lake itself was called Ámsvartnir.

The black lake.

The dark water.

The island was in the dark water

in the middle of the world, in a place

the wolf could not easily walk back from even

if he could break free.

They had chosen the place with care.

They stepped back.

They let the wolf stand free on the island

with the ribbon around him.

They watched.

The wolf gathered himself.

He kicked once, as he had done with Lœðingr.

The ribbon did not break.

He kicked harder, as he had done with Drómi.

The ribbon did not give.

He pulled.

He twisted.

He threw his enormous weight against the ribbon.

He brought to bear the strength that had broken

the first two chains and that, until this moment

he had not believed any binding could resist.

The ribbon did not break.

The wolf, the texts tell us, understood.

He understood, in that moment, that he had been

deceived.

That the small soft ribbon was not a small

soft ribbon.

That it was a binding made by the dwarves

of the deep country out of the qualities of

the world.

That the gods had brought it to him in

trickery.

That the test had not been a test.

That the pledge had not been a pledge.

And so, the wolf, doing what he had said

he would do, closed his jaws.

He closed them on Týr's hand.

He bit through.

Týr's right hand, his sword-hand, came off at the

wrist.

The texts give us this moment, again

in very few words.

They do not linger.

They do not draw it out.

They give us, only, what happened.

The wolf bit through.

Týr lost the hand.

The Æsir, the surviving sources tell us

did not laugh.

They had bound the wolf.

They had succeeded in the thing they had come

to do.

But they had paid for it.

And they had paid for it through the body

of one of their own.

The bravest.

The just.

The one who had fed the wolf.

Týr stepped back from the wolf, his right arm

ending now at the wrist.

He did not, the texts say, cry out.

He did not, in the surviving sources, complain.

He turned, and he walked back to the gathered

company of the gods.

And the gods received him in silence.

And then the gods did the last of what

they had come to do.

They took a great sword.

They drove its hilt deep into the ground at

the wolf's feet.

They placed the point of the sword in the

wolf's lower jaw, and they propped his upper jaw

open against the point of it.

So that the wolf, from that moment on

could not close his mouth.

The wolf's mouth would not close.

And from his mouth, from the open mouth

of the bound wolf, on the island Lyngvi

in the dark lake Ámsvartnir, there began

the texts tell us, to flow a river of

saliva.

A long quiet steady flow.

The river had a name.

The river was called Vón.

In Old Norse, Vón means hope.

The river of hope flows still, the texts say.

It flows from the mouth of the bound wolf.

And there it will continue to flow until Ragnarǫk.

Until the wolf, in some far-off cold morning

finally pulls himself free.

We will come to that morning in a later

episode of this season.

We will not come to it tonight.

Tonight is the binding.

The binding holds.

In the next chapter, we sit a while with

Týr.

With what he lost.

With what he became.

Chapter Ten.

The God Who Could Not Hold a Sword.

Týr returned to Asgard with one hand.

The texts do not tell us how he was

received by the other gods.

They do not give us a scene of welcome

or of grief.

They give us, only, that he came back.

And that he was, from that day forward

known as Týr the One-Handed.

This is one of the quieter changes that the

surviving Norse sources record.

The change in what a god was called.

Before the binding of Fenrir, Týr was Týr

the just, the brave, the sky-god of the older

Germanic religion, the one whose rune was scratched on

the hilts of swords for good fortune in battle.

After the binding of Fenrir, he was Týr the

One-Handed.

The texts had a new epithet for him.

The texts noted, almost in passing, that he could

no longer hold a sword in the way a

warrior held a sword.

He could not, the surviving sources hint

hold a shield.

He could no longer, in the simple physical sense

be the warrior-god he had been.

And yet.

The texts continue to tell stories about him.

He continues to appear in the council of the

gods.

He continues to be present.

He continues to be, in some readings

the figure the gods turn to when a hard

thing must be done.

Týr the One-Handed was, in the surviving Norse imagination

no less a god than Týr the Two-Handed had

been.

He was, perhaps, more.

There is a reason for this.

There is a reason that, when the late Norse

poets thought about Týr, they thought about him not

in terms of what he had lost but in

terms of what he had given.

What he had given was his sword-hand.

The surviving sources do not, in so many words

tell us what was in Týr's mind when he

stepped forward.

They tell us only that he did.

They tell us that he placed his right hand

in the wolf's mouth, and that the wolf

when the binding held, closed his jaws on it.

The texts are spare.

They do not give us his thoughts.

But what we can see, from the larger shape

of the story, is this.

Týr had stepped forward at the council when no

other god would.

He had walked to the wolf.

He had placed his hand in the wolf's mouth.

And the rest of the gods had

in their council, already decided what was going to

happen with Gleipnir.

They had already decided that the binding was meant

to hold.

They had already decided that the test was not

a test.

They had already decided that the wolf would not

be released.

It is one thing to lose a hand by

misfortune.

It is another to lose it by knowing what

you are walking into.

The text does not put this in those words.

But the situation, and the silence of the

surviving sources, which is itself a kind of speaking

invites us to ask whether Týr knew.

Whether, when he stepped forward, he understood that the

binding was meant to hold and that the wolf

being honorable, would take what had been pledged.

I believe, in my own reading, that he did.

The figure who emerges from the larger Norse sources

is not a god who would have been unaware.

Týr was the bravest.

Týr was the wisest in matters of right outcomes.

Týr had been the one feeding the wolf

and so Týr had seen, perhaps more clearly than

any of the other gods, what the wolf was

and what the binding would do.

He was not, perhaps, the unlucky one.

He was the one who had volunteered for the

cost.

The texts may not say it.

But the texts may not need to.

This is, in the long old Germanic religious imagination

what justice looked like.

Not the absence of cost.

Not the avoidance of harm.

Not the careful navigation of the rules so that

no one had to pay.

Justice was the willingness, when the cost had to

be borne, to bear it yourself.

And Týr, the brave Týr, the just Týr

the god who had fed the wolf in the

high hall, had been the one to bear

it.

The wolf had bound himself by his word.

The gods had bound themselves by their word too.

They had pledged.

And the pledge was paid, not in some abstract

way, not in some symbolic way, but in the

actual hand of the actual god who had given

it.

The wolf, in his terrible moment, had been more

honorable than the gods themselves had wanted to be.

The wolf had honored the pledge by taking the

hand.

And Týr had honored the pledge by giving it.

This is a strange thing to sit with in

the modern ear.

It is strange because the modern ear is used

to mythologies in which the heroes are simply right

and the monsters are simply wrong.

The Norse myths do not work this way.

The Norse myths give us a wolf who has

been treated unjustly and who, in his treatment

conducts himself with a kind of awful dignity.

The Norse myths give us gods who

in their fear of the future, do a thing

the rules of their own justice condemn

and who pay, through the body of their bravest

the cost that justice demands.

The Norse myths give us, in this single story

a kind of moral honesty that the modern ear

is not always ready for.

Týr was the god who paid.

The texts call him, in some of the older

Eddic passages, the one-handed god of victory.

This is, in its way, a strange title for

a god who had just lost the part of

his body most useful for fighting.

But the title is honest.

Týr was a god of victory because Týr had

won the thing that needed to be won.

The wolf was bound.

The world was, for now, safe.

Týr had paid for it.

There is more to the figure of Týr than

this one story.

There are other tales of him in the surviving

sources.

Some of them are funny, Týr's father

in some genealogies, was a giant of nine hundred

heads.

Some of them are quieter, Týr was

in some readings, the god you called on when

you needed a thing to be settled rightly between

two parties.

Týr was the god of the thing-meeting.

The local council.

The place where, in the old Scandinavian world

free men gathered to decide questions of law.

Týr, in this larger sense, was the god of

right outcomes.

Of binding agreements.

Of the moment when a word, once given

had to be honored.

There is a small thing the surviving texts tell

us about Týr that is worth pausing on.

He was, the older Eddic sources hint

the god of the thing-meeting.

The thing, in Old Norse, þing

was the local council of free men

gathered at a set place at a set time

of year, who decided the questions of law that

had to be decided.

Whether a debt was owed.

Whether a wrong had been done.

Whether a marriage was lawful.

Whether a man, who had killed another man

owed wergeld, the man-price, for the killing

or whether he was to be made an outlaw.

These were the questions of the thing.

The thing was, in the old Scandinavian world

one of the most ancient institutions.

It predated, by a great deal, the coming of

kings.

It predated, by even more, the coming of Christianity.

The thing was the place where the law was

made, by the free men of the community

in the open air, under the eye of whatever

god watched over the giving and the receiving of

words.

That god was Týr.

We can see this even in the modern map

of northern Europe.

The town in Denmark called Tinghøj.

The Norwegian Tingvoll.

The Icelandic Þingvellir, where the Alþing met for nearly

a thousand years.

The English place-names that end in -ting or -thing.

All of these are the descendants of the old

Germanic thing, the place where the people gathered

under the sky-god, to settle their questions.

The day of the week named for Týr is

Tuesday.

In Old English, Tīwesdæg, the day of Tīw

who is the same god as Týr by a

different name.

In the modern Germanic languages we still say it.

Tuesday in English.

Tirsdag in Danish.

Dienstag in German.

The god of the thing, the god of right

outcomes, the god who paid for the binding of

Fenrir with his hand, that god is still

in our calendar.

Every week.

Quietly.

Unremarked.

The way many old things still are.

This is the figure that the surviving Norse sources

give us, when we look at him in full.

Not just the warrior who lost a hand to

a wolf.

But the older quieter sky-god of justice, who

by the time the Norse texts were written down

had been displaced from the center of the religion

by his younger more cunning relative Odin.

But who had not been forgotten.

Whose rune was still on the swords.

Whose day was still in the week.

Whose name was still spoken at the thing.

Týr, in this larger sense, was the god of

right outcomes.

Of binding agreements.

Of the moment when a word, once given

had to be honored.

And it is fitting, in a way that the

surviving Norse sources may have known and may have

chosen, that Týr was the god who lost his

hand in the binding of Fenrir.

Because the binding of Fenrir was the moment in

the deep Norse imagination when the gods themselves had

had to step outside of right outcomes.

They had had to lie.

They had had to deceive.

And the god of right outcomes had paid for

it.

That is the figure we should hold

from this episode, in the back of the mind

as we drift.

Týr.

The bravest.

The one who paid.

Chapter Eleven.

What Was Lost.

What Was Held.

The wolf is bound on Lyngvi.

Týr has gone back to Asgard.

The gods have, by the end of this story

gotten what they came for.

The wolf will not roam free.

The wolf will not, in the years between this

story and Ragnarǫk, walk into the high hall and

devour the gods one by one.

The threat that the seers had spoken of has

been deferred.

The world has been given time.

But the world has been given time at a

cost.

The cost has been Týr's hand.

The cost has been the trust of the wolf

which the gods had at first cultivated and which

they have now broken.

The cost has been the binding of Fenrir himself

which was not justice in the simple sense.

The wolf had not done anything yet

when he was bound.

He had not yet attacked the gods.

He had not yet killed Odin.

He had not, in the timeline of the surviving

stories, committed any crime.

He had been bound for what he would do.

He had been bound for the prophecy.

He had been bound, the surviving sources hint

on the strength of a vision the seers had

had, a vision of a far cold morning

at the end of time, a vision of a

wolf swallowing the sun, a vision of the death

of the Allfather.

This is a difficult thing to sit with.

The Norse myths do not soften it.

They do not tell us, in the way some

other mythologies might, that the wolf was wicked and

deserved his binding.

They tell us, instead, that the gods bound him

because they were afraid.

They were afraid of what he would become.

They were not, in the moment of the binding

acting on what he was.

The wolf had, at the time of his binding

been a guest in their hall.

He had eaten their food.

He had grown among them.

He had been kind, in the way a wolf

can be kind, to the one god who had

fed him.

He had not, until the moment of the binding

lifted a paw against any of them.

And they bound him for what he would

one day, do.

There has been long argument among readers of the

surviving Norse sources about whether this is a story

of justice or of injustice.

The argument does not, in the texts themselves, resolve.

The Eddic poets did not, it seems

want it to resolve.

They wanted us, when we listened, to feel both

sides.

To feel the gods' fear and to feel the

wolf's grievance.

To feel that the binding was necessary and to

feel that the binding was wrong.

To feel that Týr was the bravest god and

to feel that Týr had been forced into a

betrayal of someone who had trusted him.

This is what the Norse myths give us

when they are at their best.

They give us moral situations that do not resolve.

They give us actions that have costs and that

nonetheless had to be taken.

They give us heroes who have paid prices that

no fully just hero should have had to pay.

The binding of Fenrir is, in this sense

a story about the moral cost of the future.

The gods bound the wolf because the future required

it.

The future, in the Norse imagination, was not a

thing the gods could avoid.

They could only meet it earlier or later

sooner or later, on better terms or on worse.

By binding the wolf, they were meeting the future

earlier and on better terms.

They were buying time.

They were trading Týr's hand and the wolf's freedom

for the deferral of Ragnarǫk by an unknown number

of years.

This was, in their reckoning, worth the cost.

We do not have to agree with their reckoning

to understand it.

We can, in the long quiet evening of this

episode, sit with the story as the Norse poets

gave it to us.

We can hold the gods and the wolf and

Týr all in the mind at once.

We can feel the strangeness of it.

We can feel the weight of it.

There is one last thing the surviving texts tell

us, and we should not leave it out.

The wolf, on Lyngvi, in the dark lake Ámsvartnir

bound by the ribbon Gleipnir, with his jaws propped

open and the river of saliva flowing from his

mouth, the wolf is said to be growing.

He is growing.

The texts do not say this in many words

but the suggestion is there.

The wolf, even bound, is not still.

The wolf is doing, slowly, what wolves do.

He is increasing.

His body is, year by year, becoming larger.

The ribbon Gleipnir is, year by year

accommodating his growth.

The ribbon does not break.

The ribbon holds.

But the wolf inside the ribbon is

by some long quiet measurement, larger than he was

when the gods first bound him.

This means that the binding is not

in the long Norse imagination, a binding outside of

time.

It is a binding inside of time.

It is a binding that exists while the world

exists.

And the wolf, inside the binding, is preparing

slowly, patiently, year after year, for the day

the binding will end.

That day will be Ragnarǫk.

We will not, tonight, walk into Ragnarǫk.

Ragnarǫk has its own episode, much later in this

season, when we will sit with the wolf again

as he finally pulls himself free, and as the

long quiet of his binding finally ends.

Tonight we sit with the binding itself.

With the long patience of the wolf.

With the long patience of the gods who put

him there.

With the steady flow of the river Vón.

The river of hope.

The river that the wolf's open mouth feeds.

It is a strange detail, the name of that

river.

Hope.

The texts do not tell us whose hope.

They do not tell us whether it is the

gods' hope, that the binding will hold.

Or the wolf's hope, that one day it will

not.

Or some older deeper hope, the hope of

the world itself, that whatever comes at the end

of time will, in some far-off form

be made right.

The Norse poets, when they named the river

did not say.

We can sit with the ambiguity.

We can let it be what it is.

In the last chapter, we say goodnight.

Chapter Twelve.

Goodnight.

And the Wolf at the Edge of Time.

It is late.

Or it is, by now, perhaps, the very early

hours of a new morning.

If you are still awake, I'd like to draw

you back, gently, from the island and from the

lake and from the bound wolf.

We are leaving Fenrir on Lyngvi.

We are leaving Týr in Asgard with his one

hand.

We are leaving the gods at their council

where they have done a hard thing and where

they will, in the years to come

have to sit with the cost of it.

There is no neat closing to this story.

The Norse myths do not close neatly.

They open into other stories.

They open into the long arc of the season.

The wolf on the island is waiting.

The trickster, who is the wolf's father

is still in Asgard and is still

though the gods do not yet know how

preparing what will become his own long binding.

The serpent in the sea is biting his tail.

The daughter, Hel, is gathering the dead in her

cold halls below.

The world, in the long Norse reckoning

is moving toward the cold morning that the seers

had seen.

But not tonight.

Tonight, the wolf is on the island

and the ribbon holds, and the river of hope

flows from his mouth, and the gods sleep in

Valhǫll, and Týr, the brave Týr

the just Týr, the god who paid

sits at the high bench with one hand resting

on the table where, until recently, he had two.

The world is, for now, held.

This is one of the small gifts of the

Norse imagination.

It does not pretend that the holding is permanent.

It does not pretend that the cost was not

paid.

It gives us, instead, the long quiet of an

evening in which the thing that needed to be

done has been done.

And in which we, the listeners, can sit beside

the gods at the long fire, and we can

hear the wind outside, and we can know that

for tonight at least, the wolf is not at

our door.

If you have been listening since the first episode

you have come, by now, through a great deal

of the shape of the Norse imagination.

You have walked the nine worlds.

You have followed the Allfather through his long search

for wisdom.

You have gone down with Loki into the dwarven

country and seen the hammer made.

And tonight you have sat with the gods at

the council where the wolf was bound.

You have seen, in this single season

the structure of the world.

The wisdom of its highest god.

The making of its greatest weapon.

The first of the bindings that the world depends

on.

There is a great deal still to come.

There is the theft of Iðunn's apples

which will be the next episode.

There is the death of Baldr, which will be

the most beautiful and the saddest of all of

these stories, the story that the Norse poets themselves

believed was the turning of the world.

There is the long punishment of Loki

who has been with us through every episode so

far and whose own binding will, in its own

way, mirror the binding of his son.

There is the mead of poetry, which will be

a lighter and a stranger and a kinder story.

There is the second tribe of gods, the Vanir

whom we will meet at last.

There is the long human story of Sigurð and

the dragon.

And there is, at the end of the season

Ragnarǫk itself.

And then, after Ragnarǫk, the quiet morning of the

new world.

But all of that is for the weeks ahead.

For tonight, we leave the wolf bound on Lyngvi.

We leave Týr with his hand gone.

We leave the gods in their hall

looking at one another across the long fire

knowing what they have done.

If you have fallen asleep in the middle of

this story, the river of hope is still flowing.

The wolf is still bound.

The ribbon is still holding.

None of it requires your attention.

It will continue without you.

If you have stayed awake to the end

thank you.

I do not know who you are

but I am glad to have walked this far

with you.

There will be another episode in a few days.

And another after that.

And another after that.

The almanac is patient, and the almanac will continue.

Sleep well.

Let me, before we close, take you through one

more long quiet round of the worlds

so that you have the shape of the season

in your mind as you drift.

In the high hall of Asgard, the Allfather is

in his seat.

His ravens, Huginn and Muninn, have come home from

their long day's flight across the nine worlds

and they are perched, now, one on each of

his shoulders.

They are quiet.

They have already told him everything they have seen.

They will fly out again tomorrow.

They will come home again.

This is the long rhythm of the Allfather's days.

In the same hall, at his own place

Thor is sleeping.

The hammer is on the bench beside him.

The red beard rises and falls, slowly

with his breathing.

The hall is warm with the fires.

The other gods are in their places.

Heimdallr, who watches the bridge of burning light

is at his post, the surviving texts tell

us he is the watcher who needs the least

sleep of any of the gods, but tonight even

he is quiet.

Freyr is in his own hall.

Freyja in hers.

Bragi is, perhaps, still awake, finishing a verse he

has been working on.

The hall is, for now, at rest.

In a smaller seat off to one side

Týr is sleeping.

His right arm ends at the wrist.

The wrappings have, by now, healed.

The arm has its own way of resting on

the bench.

He has learned, over the long quiet years since

the binding, how to live with one hand.

He does not, in the surviving texts, complain.

He sleeps the way a brave man sleeps

who has done a hard thing and who is

at peace with having done it.

Outside the hall, the long night of Asgard stretches

over the worlds.

Bifrǫst, the rainbow bridge, glimmers faintly in the dark.

The roots of Yggdrasill, the world-tree, descend into the

wells beneath.

The serpent Jǫrmungandr is coiled in the great sea

his tail in his mouth

asleep.

Hel, in her cold halls below, walks among her

quiet dead.

And on the small island Lyngvi, in the dark

lake Ámsvartnir, the wolf is bound.

He is awake.

Or he is asleep.

The texts do not say.

The wolf may, in the long centuries of his

binding, have learned how to be both at once.

To rest one part of himself while the other

part watches.

The river of saliva flows from his mouth.

It has its name, Vón.

Hope.

The river flows toward whatever far place rivers flow.

The mountains, which are no longer rooted to anything

below, sit by their own weight in their old

places.

The cats walk silently in the empty halls.

The women do not have beards.

The fish breathe their small silent breaths in the

rivers and the seas.

The birds, in their light bodies, hold their small

moisture inside their beaks.

The world is, for tonight, held in the way

it is held.

With the cost paid.

With the bindings in their places.

With the gods asleep.

With the wolf bound.

With the long patient rivers running.

If you have been listening since the first episode

you have come, by now, through a great deal

of the shape of the Norse imagination.

You have walked the nine worlds.

You have followed the Allfather through his long search

for wisdom.

You have gone down with Loki into the dwarven

country and seen the hammer made.

And tonight you have sat with the gods at

the council where the wolf was bound.

You have seen, in this single season

the structure of the world.

The wisdom of its highest god.

The making of its greatest weapon.

The first of the bindings that the world depends

on.

There is a great deal still to come.

There is the theft of Iðunn's apples

which will be the next episode.

There is the death of Baldr, which will be

the most beautiful and the saddest of all of

these stories, the story that the Norse poets themselves

believed was the turning of the world.

There is the long punishment of Loki

who has been with us through every episode so

far and whose own binding will, in its own

way, mirror the binding of his son.

There is the mead of poetry, which will be

a lighter and a stranger and a kinder story.

There is the second tribe of gods, the Vanir

whom we will meet at last.

There is the long human story of Sigurð and

the dragon.

And there is, at the end of the season

Ragnarǫk itself.

And then, after Ragnarǫk, the quiet morning of the

new world.

But all of that is for the weeks ahead.

For tonight, we leave the wolf bound on Lyngvi.

We leave Týr with his hand gone.

We leave the gods in their hall

looking at one another across the long fire

knowing what they have done.

If you have fallen asleep in the middle of

this story, the river of hope is still flowing.

The wolf is still bound.

The ribbon is still holding.

None of it requires your attention.

It will continue without you.

If you have stayed awake to the end

thank you.

I do not know who you are

but I am glad to have walked this far

with you.

There will be another episode in a few days.

And another after that.

And another after that.

The almanac is patient, and the almanac will continue.

Sleep well.

The Allfather is in his hall.

The hammer is at Thor's belt.

The wolf is bound on the island.

The river of hope is flowing.

And the long quiet of the night is

for once, held.

Goodnight.