The Theft of Iðunn's Apples · Norse Mythology Sleep Story · 3 Hours

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.
Tonight we follow a story about apples. About three gods on a road, and the eagle who would not let them eat. About a goddess who tended an orchard of gold, and the giant who carried her away in his wings. About what happens to the gods of the north — even to the gods — when the fruit that holds the years at bay is no longer in their hands.
This is the story of Iðunn, who kept the apples of youth in a small wooden chest she carried at her hip. And of Loki, who promised her to a giant, and then was made to bring her home. And of Þjazi, who wore an eagle's shape and lifted a goddess into the sky. And of Skaði, his daughter, who came down from her mountain in skis and a coat of mail, looking for a debt to be paid.
It is the story of the first gray hair to appear in the beard of a god. The story of the falcon-cloak that Freyja kept on a peg beside her door. The story of a pole that stuck to an eagle's back and would not let go. And the story of two pale eyes thrown up into the cold winter sky, where they remain to this night as two small stars.
Episode 5 of a complete twelve-part season. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday at 8pm ET.
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Settle in.
Lower the lights.
Let your shoulders drop.
We begin in a forest a long way from Asgard, where three travelers have made a fire and a fourth has come to perch in a tree above them.

Chapter One. The Hunger of Three Wanderers.
There is a kind of restlessness that takes the Æsir sometimes. It is not a need, exactly. They are not in want. Their halls hold mead enough for a thousand winters, and the apples of Iðunn keep their years from coming. But still, sometimes, a god will leave the gates of Asgard and walk out into the broader worlds — into Miðgarðr, into the wild lands, into the great forests where men do not go.
Óðinn was such a wanderer. He took the road often. He left Hliðskjálf, the high seat from which he could see all the worlds, and he took to his feet, and walked. Why he did this the sources do not say. Perhaps it was the seeing itself. Perhaps a god who looks down at all things from a high place sometimes wishes to walk among them, to feel the wind on his face the way a mortal does, to be small for a while.
On this journey — and the sources do not tell us exactly which journey, only that it was one of his many — Óðinn was not alone. He walked with two others. The first was Hœnir, a quiet god whom the Eddas describe only sparingly. Hœnir was tall, the texts suggest, and given to long silences. He had stood beside Óðinn at the making of the first humans — at the moment two trees on the shore became Ask and Embla, the first man and the first woman. What he gave them, in that older story, is described in the poem Vǫluspá by a single word: óðr. The word is debated. Some readers take it to mean sense. Some take it to mean spirit. Some take it to mean the breath of mind itself. We will not settle it tonight. The point, for our purposes, is that Hœnir had walked beside Óðinn a long time, and he had been there at the beginning, and he was on the road again now. On the road he said very little. He walked beside Óðinn and watched the trees. There is a way that an old companion can be a presence in your life without needing to speak, and Hœnir was that for Óðinn.
The third traveler was Loki. And Loki, by now, you know.
Loki was Óðinn's foster-brother, the son of a giant taken into Asgard long ago, in a story we have not yet told. He was clever. He was beautiful, when he wished to be. He could change his shape into anything that ran or flew or swam. He had brought the gods their greatest treasures. He had also brought them many of their greatest troubles. The gods could not be free of him, because he had sworn brotherhood with the Allfather, and that bond could not be undone. So they kept him close. And they watched him.
These three were walking together through the wide world. The road they followed went through mountains. It crossed two rivers that had no name. It went past a small lake where no birds were singing. It descended at last into a deep forest, and the trees stood close on either side, and the moss was thick on the floor of the wood. They had been walking for many days. The road, in their walking, had taken them slowly from the long bright country of summer into the slower country of autumn — the leaves above them had begun to turn, and the air at night had begun to bite at the edges of their cloaks, and the smell of pine and the smell of woodsmoke from distant farmsteads had begun to mix in the lower air. They were tired in a way that gods do not often allow themselves to be tired. They were hungry.
In the wide silence of those woods, hunger does something to the gods that it does not always do in Asgard. It makes them ordinary. The Æsir, on their high seats, do not feel the cold the way a mortal feels it, and they do not feel hunger the way a mortal feels it. But on the road, in the deep forest, the body of a god remembers that it is a body. Their boots had begun to wear thin. Their cloaks had taken the smell of pine smoke and wet earth. They were three figures in the woods, like any three figures, walking with the slow gait of those who have walked too long without eating.
Then they came to a clearing, and in the clearing was a herd.
There were cattle moving among the trees — slow, dark-coated cattle, half-wild, the kind that wander the edges of the deep wood and belong to no man. They were grazing the moss and the low ferns. Their breath went up in little clouds in the cool air. The three gods watched the herd from the edge of the trees for a long moment. They did not speak. Then Loki gestured with his chin, and the three of them moved.
They chose a single ox. A great gray-brown bull, slow and heavy with the autumn weight. The kill was easy. The Æsir are strong, and the bull did not see them until the spear was already in him. He went down on the moss without a sound, and his breath went out in a long sigh, and he was still.
The three of them set about the work of preparing it. Hœnir gathered wood for a fire and built it carefully, in a small ring of stones at the center of the clearing. Loki cut the meat. Óðinn watched the trees, the way Óðinn always watches. The fire took quickly. The smell of pine sap rose into the cold air. The blue-gray smoke went up through the branches and up into the higher sky.
They put the meat on a spit of green wood and turned it over the fire.
And they waited.
They were very hungry. The smell of the roasting meat should have driven them mad with anticipation, the way it does a hungry man. But something — and they did not at first know what — was wrong. The fire was hot. The smoke went up. The flames licked the meat. But the meat did not cook.
The outside of it stayed pink. The fat did not render. The juices did not rise. The fire would burn the wood of the spit until the green wood began to char, and they would have to cut a new spit, and still the meat would not be done.
Hours passed.
The sun began to drop behind the trees. The gold of late afternoon turned to the slate-blue of evening. The cold began to come down from the high places. The smell of pine smoke became sharper as the air around the fire cooled. Loki turned the meat. The meat did not cook. Hœnir laid another piece of wood on the embers. The fire took the wood but did not seem to grow any hotter. Óðinn sat on a stone with his cloak pulled around him and his hood up, and he said nothing, but his eyes were moving across the clearing in a slow careful way that the other two recognized. He was looking at the edges of the trees. He was looking up into the higher branches. He was checking each part of the clearing in turn, the way an old man checks the rooms of a familiar house when he is sure he has misplaced something.
Loki cursed. Hœnir said nothing. Óðinn looked up.

Chapter Two. The Ox That Would Not Cook.
There is a moment, on a long journey, when the world stops behaving the way the world behaves. A fire that should warm does not warm. A path that should lead home does not lead home. A meal that should fill the belly does not fill the belly. When this happens, an ordinary man might blame himself. He might blame the wood. He might blame the meat.
But the gods know. The gods have lived long enough to recognize the signs. When the world stops behaving like the world, it means something other than the world is interfering. It means a power has come into the clearing that was not there before. It means there is a watcher in the trees.
Óðinn looked up.
In the highest branches of an old oak — a tree that had stood at the edge of the clearing the whole time and that none of them had remarked on, because it was just another tree — there was sitting an eagle.
He was enormous. He was the size of a small house. His feathers were the dark brown of old bronze, and they caught the failing light along their edges so that he looked almost to be made of metal. His talons were as long as a man's hand. His beak was sharp and curved. His eyes were yellow, with the small black pupils that all hunting birds have, and the eyes were looking down at the three travelers and at the fire and at the ox.
Óðinn drew breath. He did not speak. He nudged Loki with his elbow and tilted his head upward, and Loki followed his gaze.
When Loki saw the eagle his face went hard. He had grown up in Asgard, and he had spent his whole long life learning the difference between a thing and a thing that wore the shape of a thing. He knew at once that what he was looking at was not an eagle. It was someone in the form of an eagle. Someone large and old and powerful, who had come down out of the sky to keep their meat from cooking, and who was now perched in the tree above them, watching, waiting.
The eagle spoke. His voice was deep and rasping, the way one might imagine a hunting bird would speak if a hunting bird had a voice. He said: "Your meat will not cook because I have willed it not to cook. I am hungry. I have not eaten in a long time. If you will give me a share of the ox, I will let it cook for you. Otherwise we shall all go hungry."
The three of them looked at one another.
There was no real choice. Hœnir said nothing, as Hœnir always said nothing. Óðinn drew breath again and gave a small nod that meant agreement. Loki shrugged and held up his hands as if to say: very well.
The eagle came down from the tree.
He did not land softly. He came down with the full weight of his huge body, and the branches above the clearing shook and dropped their needles into the fire as he passed. He landed on the moss not far from the spit, and his shadow covered the three travelers and the meat and the fire all at once. He was tall. Standing on the moss with his wings half-folded, he was taller than any of the three Æsir. The light from the fire ran along the edges of his feathers and made him look enormous and strange.
There is a moment, when a great wild creature comes very close to you, when you understand in a way your mind had not understood before how much larger than you the world can be. The three gods sat very still. None of them reached for a weapon. None of them spoke. The eagle's smell was on the air — the smell of cold feathers and old meat and the long sky he had come down from. It was not an unpleasant smell. It was simply the smell of a thing that did not belong in a clearing in a forest on a cool autumn evening, but was here anyway.
He bent his head down to the spit. He took the meat in his curved black beak. He pulled.
He pulled, and the spit came apart in his beak, and he took half the ox — half the entire ox, including both of the hindquarters and most of the loin — and lifted it back into the air with him, and stepped a few paces away, and began to eat.
The Æsir watched. There was nothing left for them but the head and the foreshoulders, and even that was unfair, but they had no choice. They began to roast what was left over the fire. The flames now caught. The meat now cooked. The smell of it rose into the trees properly, the way the smell of cooking meat rises in the right kind of world. The eagle had done what he promised. He had let the fire work.
But Loki, watching the eagle eat — watching that enormous bird tearing through the hindquarters of the ox with the easy speed of a thing that had not eaten in many days — Loki felt something go up in him. He felt the heat of having been taken from. He felt the slow burn of having been made small by someone larger.
He looked around the clearing. He saw a long pole — the kind of stout pole that a traveler carries to walk with, that doubles as a tent-pole and a fire-poker and a fighting-staff. It was leaning against a stump. It was almost a fighting length. It was Loki's.
He picked it up.
He walked, very quietly, in the long shadows that the firelight cast across the moss. He came around behind the eagle. The eagle was bent low over the meat, tearing at it, paying no attention to the small figure that had risen from beside the fire and was now circling behind him with a pole in his hand.
Loki raised the pole high above his head, and brought it down with all of his strength, across the eagle's broad bronze back.

Chapter Three. The Pole That Stuck.
What happened in the next moment is, in the surviving sources, described very briefly. Snorri Sturluson tells it in a few short sentences. But it is worth dwelling on, because in those few sentences is a small terror that the long form of myth so often hides.
The pole struck the eagle's back. The eagle did not cry out. The eagle did not fall. The pole, when it landed, did not bounce. The pole stuck.
Loki tried to pull it back. He could not. The pole was caught in the feathers of the eagle the way a needle is caught in cloth. It was held there. It would not come free. And Loki found, then, that the other end of the pole — the end he was still gripping — would not let him go either. His hand was stuck to the wood. He could not open his fingers. He could not drop it. He had become attached to the eagle, through the length of the pole, like a fish on a hook attached to the line.
The eagle, who had been bending over the meat, straightened slowly. He folded his wings. He turned his great head on its long neck and looked back at Loki. He did not say anything. He spread his wings.
Loki later would tell the story this way: that the eagle moved at first in small hops, low along the ground, dragging Loki behind him through the moss. That his arm was nearly pulled from its socket. That his feet caught on every root and rock and old fallen branch. That he cried out for help, but neither Óðinn nor Hœnir moved — they sat by the fire and watched, because the speed of the thing was such that even if they had risen there was nothing they could have done, and besides — Loki had struck the bird first.
Then the eagle rose into the air.
He rose slowly at first. He took a single hop and then he beat his wings, and Loki was lifted off the ground. The eagle climbed past the tops of the trees. Loki hung from the pole below him, swinging. The eagle climbed higher. The cold air took Loki's face. The forest fell away below. The clearing where the fire was and where Óðinn and Hœnir sat became a small bright dot, and then was lost beneath the canopy. The eagle climbed.
He flew, then. He flew above the trees. He flew at the height where the lower clouds hang, and Loki swung below him in the cold and the wet. The eagle made no particular hurry. He flew toward no obvious destination. He flew low enough that Loki's feet kept striking the upper branches of the tallest trees and the sharp tops of the hilltops. Loki's body was beaten by the branches. His face was cut. His ribs were bruised against the rocks. He felt — and this is in Snorri's account, although Snorri does not say it with this much feeling — he felt that the eagle was punishing him. That the eagle could have flown higher, easily. But he was choosing to fly low, so that Loki would be hit. So that Loki would be reminded.
Loki was a great speaker. He could talk almost anyone into almost anything. And now he began to talk.
He shouted up at the eagle, over the rush of the wind. He told the eagle that he had been hasty to strike him. He told the eagle that he was a god, a great god, of the Æsir, foster-brother to Óðinn himself. He told the eagle that he had treasures to give. He told the eagle that the gods of Asgard had wealth beyond his understanding, beyond what any eagle could carry away. He told the eagle that whatever the eagle wanted — gold, silver, mead, weapons forged by the dwarves — Loki could give it to him. He need only set Loki down.
The eagle flew on. The eagle did not answer.
The branches struck Loki's face again. The cold air filled his mouth and stopped his words. He gathered himself and spoke again. This time he spoke not of treasure but of mercy. He pleaded. He said that he had been a fool. He said that he had grown up among gods and had grown careless. He said he had not understood that an eagle who could keep a fire from cooking a piece of meat was not a creature to strike with a pole. He said he saw, now, that the eagle was greater than he had understood. He said he repented. He asked, only, to be set down.
The eagle slowed.
He still flew, but his speed dropped. The land below was now an open country, brown and gray under low clouds. There were no trees here, no soft places to land. There were only sharp rocks and a cold gray sky and the wind. The eagle hung in the wind for a moment, and then he turned his great head down toward Loki, and he spoke.
He said: "There is one thing I want. There is only one thing. If you will swear it to me, I will set you down where the moss is soft and the wind is gentle. If you will not swear it, I will fly higher, and I will fly faster, and I will not stop. Choose."
Loki said: "Name it."

Chapter Four. The Oath Sworn in the Sky.
The eagle's terms were simple. The eagle was, in fact, a giant. His name was Þjazi, and he lived in a mountain hall in the high north, in a place called Þrymheim. He was old. He was old in the way the giants of the north are old — old in stone-time, in mountain-time. He was strong. But he was not eternal. Like all giants, like all things in the world that are not the Æsir, he aged. He had felt the years gather on him as time goes. He had heard, in his long life, that there were apples in the orchards of Asgard that the gods ate to keep their years from coming. That there was a goddess who tended these apples, who kept them in a small chest, who walked among the high halls of the Æsir distributing them to those who needed them. Her name was Iðunn.
The eagle said: "Bring her to me. Bring her with her chest. Bring her outside the walls of Asgard, where I can take her up in my own claws. Swear that you will do this, and I will set you down. Refuse, and I will fly higher, and you will die."
The wind was very cold. Loki's body was numb where it had been struck against the trees. His shoulder felt as if it would come apart. He could feel the strength leaving his arm where it held the pole. He could not feel his fingers anymore. He could feel that if the eagle climbed any higher, his arm would give, and he would fall.
The fall, from this height, would kill him.
Even a god, falling that far, would not survive intact. He would be broken on the rocks. He might not die outright — Loki had a difficult time dying — but he would be unable to move for many seasons. He would lie there in the cold country until someone found him, and that someone might never come.
He could not refuse.
He spoke the oath.
He swore, by the name of the All-Father, and by his foster-brotherhood with Óðinn, and by the blood that bound him to Asgard, that he would bring Iðunn out from the walls of the city with her chest of apples, and deliver her into a place where the eagle could come and take her. By the time he was done speaking the oath, his voice was small, because the cold and the fear and the pain had taken most of his strength.
The eagle heard. The eagle nodded his great head.
He flew, then, in a slow arc down toward the earth. He flew gently this time, no longer beating his wings hard to keep Loki swinging in the rough air. He set Loki down on a hillside of soft moss, very near to the clearing where Óðinn and Hœnir were still sitting beside their fire. The pole came loose from his back at the moment of landing. Loki's fingers opened. He fell to the moss in a heap.
The eagle, without speaking, rose again into the sky. His wings beat once, twice, and then he was a small dark shape against the cloud, and then he was gone.
Loki lay on the moss for a long time.
His face was bleeding. His ribs hurt. His arm would not move. He stared up at the sky where the eagle had disappeared, and he felt his oath on him like a yoke around his neck.
He had sworn to deliver a goddess.
He had sworn to deliver Iðunn — Iðunn, who was loved by every god in Asgard, who was the wife of Bragi the skald, who walked the halls of the Æsir with her wooden chest at her hip and her apples in her hand. He had sworn to deliver her to a giant.
He thought, briefly, of refusing.
He thought of going back to Asgard and saying nothing. He thought of letting the oath stand unfulfilled and seeing what would happen. He thought, perhaps, that he could find some way to keep Iðunn safe inside the walls and let the eagle come and find that the bargain had not been kept. But he understood, even as he thought it, that this was not how oaths worked. An oath sworn between an Aesir and a giant was a kind of debt the world itself enforced. If he did not pay it, the world would find a way to extract the payment from him, or from Asgard, or from someone he loved. There was no escape from the oath. There was only the question of how to honor it, and at what cost.
He thought, then, of confessing.
He thought of walking into the council hall at Asgard and telling the gods what he had done. He thought of asking for their help. He thought of the long silence that would follow such a confession, and of the way Óðinn's one eye would look at him, and of what Frigg would say, and of what would be done. He could not face it. He had been many things — a fool, a thief, a charmer, a liar — but he had not yet been the kind of god who walks into a council hall and admits to having sold the keeper of the apples for the price of his own skin.
So he told them nothing.
He buried the oath inside himself, in the deep cold place where he kept the things he could not face, and he carried it back to Asgard the way another man would carry a small heavy stone in his pocket — not so heavy that he could not walk, but heavy enough that he was aware of it always.
He could not refuse the oath. Oaths sworn between Æsir and giants are binding things. They are not the sort of oath that a clever god can talk his way out of. They are sworn on names that cannot be unsworn. If Loki broke this oath, the eagle would have the right to come for him, and to come for every god in Asgard, and the Æsir would have to give him over, because an oath broken is a worse thing than an oath honored.
He lay on the moss and considered. He considered, in the slow and deliberate way that Loki considered everything, what he had just done.
After a long time, he rose. He brushed the moss from his cloak. He walked back to the clearing where the fire was and where Óðinn and Hœnir were still sitting. He did not tell them what he had sworn. He did not tell them what the eagle had asked. He told them only that he had been carried far, that he had bargained with the giant, that he was very tired, and that they should eat what was left of the meat and rest.
They ate. They rested. They slept beside the fire.
In the morning they turned south, back toward Asgard.
Loki walked behind. He walked silently. He walked with his eyes on the road. He did not speak for many miles.

Chapter Five. The Goddess of Apples.
The orchard of Iðunn was small.
It was not at the heart of Asgard. It was not in the great hall of Glaðsheimr where Óðinn sat his high seat, or in Valhǫll where the slain warriors feasted. It was in a quieter quarter of the city, off the main avenues, in a small walled grove between two streams. The streams came down off the great tree Yggdrasill, somewhere far above, and ran through Asgard as cold and quick as mountain water. The orchard sat between them like an island.
There was only one door into the orchard, and it was a wooden door, low and narrow, with a small bronze ring at its center. The walls around the orchard were stone, weathered, gray, covered with a kind of soft moss that grew between the stones. The walls were not high. A tall man could see over them. But Iðunn kept the door, and the door opened only when she opened it.
The door, when Iðunn was inside, opened from the inside only. She could come and go. No one else could enter unless she chose to let them in. That was, as far as we can tell from the surviving sources, the arrangement. The exact mechanism of the lock — whether it was a key, or a word, or simply the willingness of the door itself — is not described, and we will not press the question.
Inside the walls, in the small grove between the two streams, was a single tree.
The sources are not entirely consistent on this. Some passages of Snorri suggest that Iðunn had an orchard — many trees, many apples. Some passages suggest there was only one tree, and that all the apples came from it. In one reading of the Eddas, it is a single tree, very old, with bark the color of dark wax and leaves that did not fall in winter. In another reading, it is a small grove. The story does not depend on the count. Either way, the apples grew on a tree that grew nowhere else, and the tree belonged to Iðunn, and Iðunn belonged to the tree.
The apples were not red. They were not, in any of the surviving sources, given a clear color. We have inferred them as a kind of golden — the color of dawn light on still water, or of new-poured honey — and we will keep that picture for the rest of the story. The apples were small. They fit in the hollow of a hand. They had the smell of cold sweet sap, the smell that you find on the air after a frost in an orchard at the very end of autumn. There is, in some surviving translations of Snorri's text, a suggestion that the apples were of a kind that had no equivalent in the orchards of men — a fruit unique to that one tree in that one walled grove. They could not be propagated. The seed of an apple from Iðunn's tree, if planted, would not grow another tree of the same kind. Whatever the apples were, they were only there, and only in that small chest, and only from Iðunn's hand.
Iðunn would walk out into the orchard each morning and gather what apples had ripened that day. There were never very many — perhaps a dozen, perhaps fewer. She would put them, carefully, into a small wooden chest. The chest was the size of a child's lunch-box. It was painted with bronze fittings at its corners. It had a small leather strap that went over Iðunn's shoulder. She carried it with her always, the way a healer carries a satchel. The apples never spoiled in the chest. They could be kept there for many days, if needed, and they would still be cold and sweet when taken out.
Iðunn would walk from the orchard, through the streets of Asgard, with her chest at her hip. She walked the same route, more or less, each morning. She would pass the long hall where Bragi composed. She would pass the council square. She would walk along the avenue of statues — the figures of older gods, gods from before the Æsir, gods whose names had been lost — and she would touch the cold stone foot of one or two of them as she passed, almost without thinking, the way one touches a familiar doorpost without remembering why.
The gods would come to her. They came in ones and twos. Some of them would be working at something — Þórr at a forge, or Týr at the sharpening of a blade — and would lift their hands, dusty from their work, and call her name. She would stop. She would open the chest. She would take out one of the apples, with care, holding it lightly so as not to bruise it, and offer it.
Each god would take an apple from her hand, and eat it where they stood. The bite of the apple was — and again, here we are reaching past what the sources state directly — the bite was the bite of fresh fruit, but more so. It was the bite of fruit at the moment of its perfection. The sweetness of it was deep but not cloying. The flesh was firm. The juice was cold. The gods would close their eyes when they bit. They would stand a moment, on the street of Asgard, with their eyes closed and the small apple in their hand, and the years that had begun to gather on them would loosen and let go.
They would open their eyes. They would thank her. They would go back to their work. The whole exchange would take perhaps a minute. Iðunn would close the chest and continue down the street, looking for whoever she had not yet visited that day. By the late afternoon, the chest would be empty. She would walk home with the empty chest at her hip, and she would put it down beside the door of her orchard, and she would go inside the small walled grove with the door closing softly behind her.
That was what the apples did. They held the years back. They did not make the gods immortal — the gods could still be killed, and would be killed, in the appointed time, at the appointed twilight. But the gods could not age. They could not grow gray. They could not weaken from the slow erosion of years that takes a mortal man in his prime and turns him, by the time he is old, into a man who walks slowly and breathes carefully and remembers his youth from a great distance.
The apples did not bring the gods their youth. They held the gods at the moment of their youth — at the moment when they were most themselves — and would not let them slide.
This is what Iðunn did. She did this every day. She woke. She walked into her orchard. She gathered. She walked the streets of Asgard. She gave.
She was the wife of Bragi, the god of poetry. Bragi was the great skald of the gods — the keeper and singer of long poems, the speaker of finely-formed words at the long feasts in the hall of the Æsir. Snorri Sturluson describes him as wise and eloquent above all others in skaldcraft. We will allow ourselves a small picture of him: a careful man, given to speaking slowly, with the deep voice of one who has chosen each word before letting it out. He had been Iðunn's husband for as long as anyone remembered. They lived together in a small hall near her orchard. He composed his poems in the mornings. She tended her tree in the evenings. In the late hours they sat together by a small fire, and sometimes he tried out lines on her, and sometimes she said nothing in reply, and sometimes she said only a single word, and he would nod and adjust the line, and they were happy in the quiet way that two people who have been happy for a long time are happy.
She was not, in any of the surviving sources, given a great deal of personality. The texts describe her chiefly through her work — the keeper of the apples — and through the affection in which the other gods hold her. We may infer kindness from this. We may infer gentleness from it. The sources themselves are quieter on the matter. She is not given the sharp wit of Freyja, or the golden splendor of Sif, or the deep council-wisdom of Frigg. She is simply the keeper of the apples. She walks the streets. She gives. She returns to her orchard. She is loved by all the gods, because all the gods depend on her.
There is a way that a person who tends a single great gift can become, in time, almost invisible — not in the sense of being overlooked, but in the sense of being so much a part of the fabric of the place that no one remembers there was ever a time without her. The smith at his forge. The harper in the hall. The miller at his stones. After enough years of doing the work, these become not so much people as fixtures of the world. The work is the person and the person is the work. Iðunn had been this for the Æsir for a very long time. The apples ripened and she gathered them and they ate them and they did not age, and that was the order of things, and they had stopped, most of them, even noticing it.
This is the woman to whom Loki was now coming.
This is the woman he had sworn to deliver to a giant.

Chapter Six. The Story Loki Told.
Loki came back to Asgard with Óðinn and Hœnir. The three travelers passed through the great gates. They were greeted by the watchman. They were welcomed home. They went each to their own halls and washed off the dust of the long road, and ate, and slept, and recovered.
But Loki did not rest.
In the days that followed, he walked the streets of Asgard with a strange slow purpose. He went to the markets. He listened in the alleys. He sat at the back of the council-hall when the gods met to speak of matters of state. He did not say much. But he was thinking.
He was thinking about Iðunn.
He had sworn the oath. He could not unswear it. He had to deliver her out of the walls. The question was only how.
He could not take her by force. The walls of Asgard were watched, and the gates were guarded by Heimdallr, whose hearing was so fine that he could hear grass grow, and whose eyes could see across the worlds. Loki could not pass with a struggling goddess thrown over his shoulder. The watchman would know in an instant. The alarm would be raised. The gods would come. He would be killed.
He could not trick her with sleep, or with drink, or with any spell of binding — at least not without drawing the kind of attention from the rest of the gods that he could not afford to draw. She was the keeper of the apples. She was watched, in the loose careful way that the gods watch what they cannot live without. A spell against her would have been a kind of small declaration of war.
He could not threaten her. There was nothing to threaten her with. She wanted nothing. She loved her husband. She loved her tree. She had no fear that another could exploit.
He thought, then, of a different approach. Not force, not spells, not threats. Something more like a story. A story is, after a fashion, the kind of thing that can persuade a person who cannot be otherwise persuaded — because a story does not ask anything of them. A story only asks that they listen, and that they wonder.
She had only one weakness, Loki thought.
She loved her apples.
Iðunn loved the apples of her orchard the way a craftsman loves his own work. She knew each one. She knew which would ripen tomorrow, which the day after. She had thought about them and tended them and turned them over in her hand for so many centuries that the apples were a kind of language she spoke. And if a man came to her and told her of apples she had not seen — apples elsewhere, apples better, apples she might want to know about —
She would want to see them.
This is what Loki understood. This is what Loki built his lie on.
He went to her on a quiet morning. He found her at the door of her orchard, just stepping out, with her chest at her hip. She was carrying her morning gather. The wooden lid of the chest was just open at the top, and Loki could see three small apples nestled inside, gold against the pale wood. She looked up at him. She smiled. She had no reason not to. She was kind to all the gods.
He bowed. He greeted her. He asked after Bragi her husband. He spoke for a little while of small things — of the weather, of the festival that was coming, of a song Bragi had sung at the last feast. She answered him politely. They walked together a little way down the street.
Then Loki said: "Iðunn. I was on the road, recently, with the Allfather and Hœnir. We traveled far. We went deep into the forests outside the worlds you know."
She looked at him with mild interest. "Yes," she said. "I heard you had been on a journey. Bragi told me. I am glad you have come back safely."
He waited a moment. He let her finish. He said:
"In a forest there, very far away, I saw a tree."
She stopped walking.
She turned to him fully now. Her hand went to the lid of her chest, almost without her noticing. "A tree," she said.
"A tree like yours," Loki said. "Or perhaps not like yours. Different. Older. The bark was darker. The leaves were a paler green. And the apples on it —"
He paused. He let the pause sit.
"I should not say. I do not want to trouble you."
She said: "Tell me."
"The apples were of a kind I have not seen before. They were small. They were the color of yours. They had the look of yours. But they were — and I do not know how to say this without giving offense — they were larger. They had a deeper color. And the smell — Iðunn, when I came close to that tree, the smell of those apples was so strong that I felt I could taste them on the air."
He stopped. He looked at her.
She was looking at him very carefully now. Her hand had not left the lid of her chest. There was a small color in her cheeks that had not been there before.
She said: "Where was this tree?"
He told her where. He told her of a clearing in a deep wood. He told her of the path that led there. He told her of the markers along the way — the cleft rock, the broken stump, the small spring with the iron taste. He told her, with the careful detail of a man who has been there, exactly how to find the tree.
He said: "I should not have told you. I am sorry. It is not my place to tell you of other apples."
She shook her head. She said: "No. No. You are right to tell me. I — Loki, I have to see. I have to see this tree. If there is a tree like mine, anywhere — I must understand it. I must know. Can you take me to it?"
He hesitated. He said: "Iðunn, I cannot leave my own work just now. But — if you wish — if you take your chest, so that you can compare your apples to those — if you walk out the eastern gate and follow the path I have told you, it is not so very far. You can be there and back in a day. You can see the tree. You can compare. And then you will know."
She did not answer at once.
She looked at her chest. She looked at the door of her orchard, behind them. She looked, for a long moment, at Loki.
Then she said: "Yes. I will go. Today. I will leave today."
He bowed to her. He stepped back. He let her go.
That afternoon, Iðunn walked out of the eastern gate of Asgard, with her wooden chest at her hip. She did not tell her husband Bragi where she was going. She told her serving women only that she had an errand outside the walls and would return by nightfall. She walked alone. She walked east, down the long road that led into the wider worlds, with the chest of apples at her hip and the small bronze fittings of it catching the late afternoon sun.
Loki watched her go.

Chapter Seven. The Wings of Þjazi.
Iðunn walked for a long time.
The path Loki had described to her ran true. The cleft rock was there. The broken stump was there. The small spring with the iron taste was there. She knelt and drank from it, and the water was cold and sharp on her tongue, and she went on. The path took her into a wood she did not know. The trees here were older than any she had seen in her own orchard. Their trunks were great and dark. The light that came down through them was a low green light, the color of moss in deep places.
She walked. She walked further than she had meant to walk. The sun, which had been on her face when she set out, was now slipping behind the tops of the trees, and the light was changing from gold to amber. She paused once or twice, and looked back, and considered turning around. But she had come so far. The tree, she thought, must be close. Loki had said it was not far. She would walk a little further. She would find the tree. She would see it once. Then she would turn around and go home.
She did not see the eagle.
The eagle had been watching her for a long time. From the high places. From the tops of the trees. From far above, where Iðunn could not see, the great bronze shape of him had been circling, patient, careful, certain.
When she came at last into a clearing — a small clearing in the deep wood, with no tree at its center, with only the moss and the silence — when she stopped and looked around and understood that the tree Loki had described to her did not exist, that she had been deceived —
That was the moment Þjazi descended.
He came down with the speed of a hawk on a hare. His shadow passed across the clearing first, and Iðunn had time only to look up, and to see the enormous bronze shape blot out the sky above her, and to draw a single breath.
His claws closed around her shoulders. They closed around her chest and her wooden box of apples. They closed around her arms and pinned them at her sides. He lifted her. He lifted her without slowing. The trees of the clearing fell away below her. The forest fell away. The wide brown land fell away. She rose into the air with the great wings of the eagle beating slowly above her, and she could not move.
She did not cry out.
She was not, in the surviving sources, given the kind of voice that cries out. She was a goddess. She had lived a long time. She understood, in the moment Þjazi's claws closed on her, that she had been taken. She understood that she had been tricked. She understood that the tree Loki had told her of was not a tree at all but a story made to draw her past the walls of Asgard. She understood that she would not be eating dinner with Bragi that night.
She closed her eyes. She held the small wooden chest tight against her chest with both hands, so that the apples in it would not fall. The wind took her hair. Þjazi flew north, and the cold of the high air came down on her, and the world she knew became smaller and smaller below.
Þjazi flew for many hours. He flew north, into mountain country. He flew over high snow-covered peaks where no man lives. He flew above the deep gray seas. At last, in a high valley between two black cliffs, he came down into his hall. His hall was called Þrymheim. It was made of stone. It stood at the high edge of the world. The wind came through it constantly. The hall was tall, with a single great hearth at its center, where a fire burned even in summer because the cold of the high places was always reaching in.
He set Iðunn down inside his hall.
He did not bind her. He did not need to. He had taken her so far from any road or any house that she could not have walked home in a season. The mountains around Þrymheim were the highest mountains in the world. The cliffs below it dropped into a sea so cold that a person who fell into it died before they reached the bottom. The doors of the hall opened only onto a narrow ledge of stone. There was nowhere to go.
He told her she was his guest. He spoke to her, even, kindly. He brought her food. He brought her wine. He brought her a chair to sit in beside his fire. He said: "I will not harm you. I want only your apples. Eat one, each day, and give one to me, each day. We will both stay as we are. The years will not gather on us. We will live together in this hall as long as the apples last."
Iðunn said nothing.
She did not eat. She did not drink. She sat in the chair he had given her, beside the great fire, with the wooden box on her knees, and she held the box closed.
Þjazi waited. He waited a day. He waited two days.
On the third day, he went away. He had work to do — the work of a giant, which is the work of the deep mountains and the deep sea, the work of stones and storms and old grudges that need to be tended. He went down from his hall through some passage Iðunn could not see. He left her alone in Þrymheim, in the high stone hall, with the fire and the cold wind and the wooden box. He locked her door, and a door locked by a giant is a door that does not open easily.
She sat in the chair beside the fire.
She did not cry. She did not, in the surviving sources, give any sign of being overcome. She sat there, very still, with the box of apples on her knees and her hands folded over it.
She waited.
She did not know who would come for her. She did not know if anyone would come. She did not know if the gods of Asgard had even noticed her gone. She did not know how long the apples in her box would last, if she did not eat any of them and did not give any of them away. She did not know if the Æsir would begin to age, soon, without her. She did not know what would become of Bragi, of Óðinn, of any of them.
The days in Þrymheim passed strangely.
There was a window in the upper part of the hall — a single narrow slit in the stone, no glass in it, open to the wind. Through that window, in the long afternoons, Iðunn could see a wedge of the gray sky outside. She could see, sometimes, a line of dark birds passing in the high distance. She could see, when the clouds parted, the steeper rock face of the next mountain over, and the small white veins of snow that ran down its sides even in summer. She could not see Asgard. She could not see any country she had ever walked in. She was at the top of the world, and the world from this height looked like nothing she recognized.
Þjazi came and went. He would be gone for a day, two days, sometimes three. He would come back with fish, or with the carcass of some animal she did not know the name of, or with nothing at all but cold sea-water still beaded on his beard. He spoke to her sometimes. He did not threaten her, after that first day. He did not even ask her, after that first day, about the apples. He seemed to be waiting. He seemed to think that, in time, she would tire of refusing, and would offer him an apple of her own accord, the way a hungry traveler will eventually accept bread from any hand that offers it.
She did not.
She held the box.
She held the box on her knees and she waited.
And in Asgard, the days began to pass.

Chapter Eight. The First Gray Hair.
In Asgard, at first, no one noticed.
This is the strange thing — the thing the surviving sources do not dwell on, but which the long shape of the story makes clear. The gods, when their healer is gone, do not at first realize that they need her. The apples had become so ordinary a part of the daily round of Asgard that a missed apple, or a missed visit from Iðunn, was not the kind of thing a god would think to remark on. They thought, each of them, that they had had an apple recently enough. They thought she would come tomorrow. They thought, more often than not, of nothing about her at all.
The first day passed. Iðunn was thought, by those who saw her serving women, to be in her orchard, or in Bragi's hall, or about some quiet errand of her own. The second day passed. The third. By the fourth, Bragi had begun to ask after his wife.
Where was she. Why had she not returned. What was the errand she had spoken of, when she walked out the eastern gate.
He asked her women. He asked the watchman at the gate. The watchman remembered her, only because she was the only one who had walked east that morning with a small wooden box at her hip. He had thought nothing of it. The goddess of apples sometimes walked out alone. She had always come back.
But she did not come back.
On the fifth day, a council was called. It was small at first, only Bragi and Óðinn and Frigg and one or two others. They sat in the council hall and asked one another what could have happened to her. They sent riders out the eastern gate to look for her. The riders found the cleft rock. They found the broken stump. They found the small spring with the iron taste. They followed the path she had taken until it ran out into a deep wood, and there they lost it. They came back without her.
The council met again, a larger council this time. Many of the Æsir came. They sat in the hall and discussed what had happened. They tried to remember when each of them had last seen her. They went around the room, each in turn, naming the day on which they had last received an apple.
This is where, the sources tell us, the gods began to feel something.
Snorri's text on this is short and almost reportorial. It says only that the Æsir began to age and to grow gray. It does not describe the moment of recognition. We will fill in the moment, here — not by inventing facts, but by letting the moment have the weight it must have had, because the weight of it is the heart of this story. Bear with us. We are at a small interpretive expansion.
Frigg was the first to say it. She had been sitting at the council table, listening to the others speak, and as the talk went around the room, she found that she had been twisting a strand of her hair between her fingers, the way she did when she was thinking hard. And when she looked down at the strand of hair in her hand — when she looked at it carefully in the light of the council hall — she saw, at the root of that one strand, a single thread of silver.
She held it up. She turned to Óðinn beside her. She said: "Look."
Óðinn looked. He did not speak. He reached up and touched his own beard. He pulled a single hair free and held it before him. The hair, at one end, was gray.
There was a long silence in the council hall.
Then, one by one, the gods began to look at themselves. They looked at their hands. They looked at the skin of their hands, which had been smooth and full a week ago, and which now, in the long light of the council hall, showed the first small creases at the knuckles. They looked at one another's faces. They saw the small new lines at the corners of one another's eyes. They saw, on the foreheads of those who had lived the longest, the first soft shadows of furrow.
The gods were aging.
It had started slowly. They had not noticed it for the first day or two. But now, sitting in the hall together, they could not help but see it on each other. A god who had been the very portrait of vigor a week ago now looked tired in some small way that he had not been before. A goddess whose hair had been the bright color of new wheat now had, at one temple, a single fine streak of pale.
It was happening. It was happening, slowly, but it was happening.
In the days that followed, the gods began to look at themselves in a way they had not had to look at themselves before. Some of them found small things they had never seen on their own bodies. Þórr, in his own hall, sat by the fire one night and turned his great hand back and forth in the firelight, and saw — at the back of his hand, in a soft fold of the skin — a small old crease that he did not remember being there. Frigg, who had never known what it was like to brush her hair and find a strand come loose at the roots, found one strand and then another. Bragi composed nothing in those days. He sat in his hall with his hands folded over his lap, and looked at the floor.
The mood of Asgard, in that week, was a quiet one. There were no great announcements. There were no proclamations. The gods went about their days, but they went about them slowly, and they spoke a little less, and they looked at each other a little more carefully than they had before. They were measuring. They were seeing what each had lost. They were preparing themselves, perhaps, for what they did not yet know how to name.
The youngest among them — those who had been brought up never knowing the gathering of the years, who had never felt the small daily attrition of time on a body — those were the most disturbed by what they saw. They went to their elders. They asked, quietly, what was happening. The elders did not have good answers. They had not lived in a world where the apples were not. They knew, in a kind of old far-off way, what aging was — they had seen it in mortals, they had seen it in animals, they understood the principle of it — but they had never expected to feel it on their own faces. They told the younger ones to be patient. They told them that Iðunn would come back. They told them, in the careful tones of older people speaking to younger people about something the older people are themselves not certain of, that it would be all right.
The watchman at the eastern gate, Heimdallr, walked his post longer hours than usual in those days. He stood at the highest tower of the gate and looked east, into the country Iðunn had walked out into. He looked for her. He saw birds, and farmers, and the smoke of distant villages, and clouds. He did not see her. He stood his post anyway. He was not, in those days, a god who slept much.
Bragi, in the small hall he had shared with his wife for a thousand years, did not eat. He sat in his chair by the cold fire. The harp he composed on was on the table beside him. He did not pick it up. The food his servants brought him grew cold and was taken away. He did not sleep well. When he slept, it was in the chair, with his great hands folded in his lap. The lines at his eyes deepened a little more each day. He did not look in any mirror.
And the cause was obvious. The apples had run out.
Each god had a small store. Each had kept perhaps one apple, perhaps two, from their last visit to Iðunn. Those stores would not last long. And there was no orchard now that Iðunn was gone. The tree of Iðunn would still grow apples, perhaps, in her absence — but the door to her orchard was locked by whatever means Iðunn locked it, and only she could open it. They could have broken the door if they wished. They had not yet wished to. They had not yet wished to think that she would not come back.
But now they understood that she was not coming back of her own accord.
Now they understood that something had taken her.
The council moved, then, to a darker thing. They began to think about who would have known the way she had walked. Who would have been on the road, in those days. Who would have spoken to her, before she left.
The riders had reported only one strange thing. They had spoken, in the village near the gate, to the people of that road. The villagers remembered seeing the goddess walk past. They remembered her serving women had said she had an errand outside the walls. But the villagers also remembered something else: they remembered that, on the day before, they had seen Loki in their village. Loki had stopped at the well. Loki had spoken to the elder. Loki had asked, of all things, whether anyone had seen any unusual eagles in the woods to the east, in the recent days.
The villagers had remembered this only because it had seemed an odd thing to ask. Why would the foster-brother of Óðinn ask after eagles in a particular wood. The villagers had no answer for him. He had thanked them and walked on.
The riders brought this back to the council.
The council heard it.
The council went very quiet.
Then Óðinn turned to the captain of his guard, and he said, very gently — and his gentleness was a worse thing than his anger, the gods knew — he said: "Bring Loki here. Bring him now."
They brought him.
He came into the council hall a little out of breath, as if he had been working at something when they came for him, as if he had not expected to be summoned. He looked around at the faces of the gods. He saw the silver in Frigg's hair. He saw the lines at the corners of Óðinn's eyes. He saw Bragi sitting at the far end of the hall, with his great hand laid flat on the table, looking at him.
He understood, then, that they knew.
He did not try to lie. He was a clever god, but he was not such a fool as to lie when he had already lost. He sat in the chair they pointed him to. He folded his hands. He looked at the table.
He told them.
He told them about the eagle. He told them about the pole. He told them about the long flight, and the cold, and the oath he had sworn so that he would not be flown higher and dropped. He told them about Iðunn. He told them about the tree he had described to her. He told them about her walking out the eastern gate alone, with her wooden box at her hip.
He told them everything.
When he was done, no one spoke. The hall was very quiet.
Óðinn looked at him for a long time.
Then he said: "You will bring her back."
Loki said: "I am only one god. The eagle is large. The mountain hall of Þjazi — if it is Þjazi, and I believe it is — is at the top of the world. I cannot fly there. I do not have wings."
Óðinn turned to Freyja.
Freyja sat to his left. She had said nothing the whole council. Her cloak hung on a peg by her own door — the falcon-cloak, the great gift she had brought into Asgard from the world of the Vanir, which let the wearer fly as a great hunting bird flies, and see as a hunting bird sees. She had used it sometimes when she traveled the worlds in her own private errands. She rarely lent it.
Óðinn said: "Freyja. Lend him your cloak."
Freyja looked at Loki for a long moment. She did not like Loki. No one in the council hall liked Loki, in that moment. But Freyja, like the rest, had a strand of silver in her hair that had not been there a week before. She understood the math.
She said: "Bring her back. Bring her back, Loki, or do not come back yourself."
Loki said: "I will bring her back."
He rose from the chair. He bowed to the council. He walked out of the hall, and Freyja walked out behind him, and at her own hall she took the falcon-cloak down from its peg and put it into his hands.

Chapter Nine. The Falcon-Cloak.
The falcon-cloak was a beautiful thing.
The surviving sources call it a *fjaðrhamr* — a feather-form, or feather-cloak — but they do not describe its appearance. We will imagine it briefly. We will picture feathers — feathers of a deep red-brown, with bands of cream and white along their edges. We will picture a cloak sewn with thread that did not look like ordinary thread, that hung in long folds when not worn, and weighed almost nothing. This is our picture, not the texts'. The texts only tell us that the thing existed, and that it belonged to Freyja, and that the wearer could fly.
When a god put on the falcon-cloak — when they wrapped it around their shoulders and pulled the hood up over their head — they did not look like a god wearing a cloak. They looked like a falcon. The shape of the cloak became the body of a bird. The arms became the wings. The hood became the small sharp head. The cloak did not transform the wearer in the way that Loki's own shape-shifting transformed him; the wearer was still a god, underneath, and could remove the cloak and return to their own shape. But while they wore it, they had the body and the eyes and the speed and the high cold knowledge of a falcon. They could fly.
Loki had used the falcon-cloak once or twice in his life. He had asked Freyja for it on errands of his own. She had given it grudgingly. But he knew how to wear it.
He took it down to the courtyard of Asgard. He put it on. He wrapped it close around his shoulders. He pulled the hood up. He felt the change come on him — the strange small lightness in his bones, the sudden sharpening of his eyes, the way the world became at once smaller and clearer, the way the sky above him became a place he could move through rather than a place that hung above him.
He spread his wings.
He pushed off from the stones of the courtyard. He climbed. He climbed past the towers of Asgard. He climbed past the great tree Yggdrasill. He climbed into the high blue cold of the sky.
He turned north.
He flew.
He flew faster than any eagle. The falcon-cloak made him swift in a way that no eagle could match. He cut through the air the way a sharp knife cuts through water. The wind he made as he passed could be heard from the ground below as a long thin whistle, like the sound of a single high note held in the throat of a singing woman.
He flew north over the lands of men. Below him, the small fields of farmsteads passed like brown patches on a long green coat. Smoke rose from cottages. A few people, here and there, looked up at the strange high call of the falcon's wings, and then went back to their work. None of them suspected that they were watching, in that small dark shape against the cloud, the foster-brother of the king of the gods, on an errand to save the world from age.
He flew north over the mountains. The mountains here were dark. Their peaks were sharp. The wind that ran along their tops was the kind of wind that no man could walk in. Loki, in his falcon shape, rode the cold currents and made good time.
He flew north over the great gray sea. The sea was vast. There was no land in sight for hours. Below him, the long swells moved slowly, like the breathing of a great sleeping animal. He saw, in the far distance, the occasional white shape of a whale rising and going down again. He did not stop. He did not slow.
He flew north until he came at last to the country where Þrymheim stood — to the cold place at the top of the world, where the mountains were so high that they cut the clouds, and where Þjazi's stone hall stood at the very edge of the cliff above the gray sea.
Loki flew low over the hall. He circled. He looked.
The hall was empty.
That is to say — Þjazi was not in it. Loki could see, with the long sharp sight of the falcon, that the door of Þrymheim had been left locked from outside. The fire still burned in the great hearth at the center of the hall. There was movement, inside — a small figure, sitting beside the fire, holding a wooden box on her knees.
Iðunn.
Loki dropped down. He landed on the narrow ledge of stone outside the door of the hall. He looked around. He saw, far below, on the cold gray sea, a small dark shape moving on the water. It was Þjazi. The giant had gone out to fish, or to gather seaweed, or to attend to whatever errands took giants out into the cold seas of their high country. He was far away. He would not be back for some hours.
Loki had time.
He shrugged off the falcon-cloak for a moment. He stood, in his own shape, on the cold ledge of stone. He went to the door of the hall. He broke the lock — it was a giant's lock, made for a giant's strength, but Loki was a clever god, and he knew how to break locks that were not meant for him. The door swung open.
He stepped inside.
Iðunn looked up from her chair.
She saw him. She did not, at first, react. Her face was very still. The fire of the great hearth made shadows on her face. She had not eaten. She had not slept well, Loki could see. Her hair was loose and unbrushed. She held the wooden box on her knees.
Loki crossed the hall. He came to her. He knelt by her chair.
He said: "Iðunn. I have come to take you home."
She said, slowly: "You are the one who brought me here."
He said: "I am. I am the one who brought you here. I am sorry. I will not make excuses. I will only do what I came to do. We must go. Now. He is far away but he will not be far always. We must go quickly."
She looked at him for a long time.
Then she stood. She lifted the wooden box. She held it tightly against her chest. She nodded.
Loki said: "I cannot carry you in this shape. Þjazi would see us. He would catch us. I will turn you small. I will turn you into a nut. I will carry the nut in my talons. The wind will move me faster than the eagle can fly, but only if you are small. Do you understand?"
She said: "Yes."
He raised his hand. He spoke a word over her — and the word is not preserved in the sources, and we will not invent it for the listener — but he spoke a word, and Iðunn became a small brown hazelnut, the kind that falls from a tree at the end of summer. She lay in the palm of his hand. The wooden box, which she had been holding, became small with her. It was a tiny chest now, the size of a thimble, set neatly into the soft side of the nut. He closed his fingers around her.
He put on the falcon-cloak. He stepped to the ledge. He spread his wings.
He flew.

Chapter Ten. The Nut and the Fire.
Loki flew south.
He flew fast. The wind sang in the long brown feathers of his wings. The cold air parted before him. The hazelnut — which was Iðunn, which was the goddess of apples folded small enough to carry — was held tight in the curl of his talons. He kept her safe. He flew low at first, hugging the rocks and the gray water, so that Þjazi would not see him.
But he could not hide for long.
Þjazi, far out at sea, saw him.
The giant had been sitting in a boat. He had a fishing line down. He had been thinking about the fire in his hall and about the goddess sitting beside it. He had been thinking about whether she had eaten any of the apples yet. He had been thinking, perhaps, about the apples themselves — about taking one for himself, that night, when he returned. He had been thinking, in the slow way that giants think, about how good it would be to feel the years lift away.
He looked up.
He saw, against the long pale sky, a small dark shape moving fast.
It was moving the wrong way. It was moving south. It was moving away from Þrymheim.
He understood at once. He stood up in the boat. He stretched. He took the form of an eagle. He spread his wings. He launched himself into the air. He climbed. He climbed fast. He fixed his great yellow eyes on the small shape ahead of him, and he flew.
The two birds raced south.
Loki was faster. The falcon-cloak was faster than the body of any eagle. But Þjazi was much, much bigger. He was the size of a small house, and the wind he could move with the beating of his enormous wings was greater than any wind a falcon could ride. He could not match Loki in speed, but he could close the distance through brute force. He flew, behind Loki, faster than any eagle had ever flown. The gap began to close.
Loki saw the giant behind him. He saw, in his small sharp falcon-eyes, the great bronze shape coming up out of the gray air. He flew harder. He flew at the very limit of what the falcon-cloak could carry him.
The miles passed beneath them.
The cold seas became the brown lands. The brown lands became the southern forests. The southern forests became, at last, the green hills outside Asgard. Loki could see, ahead of him, the high walls of his home. He could see the towers. He could see the gate.
He could also feel, behind him, the wind from Þjazi's wings. It came on his back like a cold storm. The giant was very close now. The giant was perhaps a mile behind. Perhaps less. Loki could not turn his head to look without losing speed, and he did not turn.
In Asgard, on the walls, the watchman of the high tower had seen them coming.
The watchman called out. He shouted down into the courtyard. The gods of Asgard were already standing at the foot of the walls, ready, because they had been watching the northern sky for Loki for many days now. They saw, then, the small dark shape of the falcon, with Þjazi's great bronze shape behind it. They understood at once what they were seeing. They understood that the falcon was Loki, and that Þjazi must not be permitted to reach the city.
They began to act.
The gods of Asgard had prepared for this. They had piled, all along the inner walls, great heaps of wood-shavings. Fine dry shavings, the kind that catch fire fast and burn hot. The piles ran along the entire length of the inside of the walls. The gods had set torches ready beside the piles. They had been waiting.
Now, as the small falcon swept low over the wall and dropped into the courtyard — as Loki crossed the walls and Þjazi was perhaps only seconds behind — the gods touched their torches to the wood-shavings.
The piles caught.
The fire ran along the inside of the walls. It went up. It rose high. It rose so high that, in a moment, there was a wall of flame above the walls of Asgard, a high curtain of burning air all the way around the city.
Þjazi, behind Loki, came down at the walls with all the speed he had built up over hundreds of miles of pursuit. He did not see the fire until he was almost upon it. He could not slow. He could not turn. He hit the wall of flame at the moment his body crossed the line of the stones.
His wings, the great bronze feathers of his wings — they caught.
They went up in a great burst of orange. The smell of burning feathers filled the air. The eagle, who was Þjazi, dropped. He fell out of the air on the inside of the walls of Asgard. He landed heavily on the stones of the courtyard. He thrashed. He tried to rise. He could not. His wings were ruined. His feathers were burning. He was still, in form, an eagle, but he was an eagle who could not fly and would never fly again.
The gods of Asgard came down upon him.
They killed him there. They killed him in the courtyard, between the high walls of the city. The exact manner of his killing is not described in detail in the surviving sources, and we will not invent it for the listener. He was killed. He was a great enemy who had taken a goddess they loved and held her in the cold mountains of the north, and they killed him without ceremony and without long debate.
When it was done, Loki landed on the stones of the courtyard. He shrugged off the falcon-cloak. He opened his hand. The small hazelnut lay in his palm. He spoke a word over it, and it grew. The shape of the goddess returned. Iðunn was in the courtyard with them. She had her wooden box in her hand. She was unharmed.
The gods gathered around her. Bragi her husband came running. He took her in his arms. He did not speak. She did not speak. They stood in the courtyard of Asgard with the body of the eagle smoking on the stones beside them, and they held each other.
Iðunn opened her box.
She took out an apple. She gave it to Frigg. Frigg ate it where she stood. The silver strand in her hair, the gods saw, very slowly, very quietly, faded. She turned, and her face was the face she had had before, full and bright and unworn.
Iðunn went around the courtyard. She gave each god an apple. They each ate, where they stood. The lines at their eyes loosened. The gray at their temples faded. The first soft furrows on their foreheads smoothed away.
By the time the apples were gone, the gods of Asgard were as they had been a week before. The years had let go of them. The orchard had come home.
Iðunn went into Bragi's hall, then. She closed the door behind her. What was said between them, in the small hall they had shared for a thousand years, is not preserved in any of the surviving sources, and we will not invent it. We will only say that the door was closed for a long time, and that when it opened again, much later, the two of them came out and walked together back to Iðunn's orchard, and the door of the orchard closed behind them, and the small walled grove was quiet again for the first time in many days.
The body of the eagle, by then, had been carried away from the courtyard. The fire on the walls had been put out. The wood-shavings had been swept up. The high white smoke that had risen above Asgard during the burning had thinned into a long pale streak across the late afternoon sky, and was, slowly, drifting eastward, and being lost.

Chapter Eleven. The Daughter Who Came for Vengeance.
The body of Þjazi did not lie long in the courtyard.
The gods, when their joy had cooled a little, considered what to do with it. A dead giant is a difficult thing. He is too large to bury easily. He is too dangerous, sometimes, to leave above ground. There is a long tradition, in the surviving sources, that the bodies of slain giants are difficult and uncanny, and the gods had reasons of their own for wishing to be careful.
In the end, they did what they often did with the bodies of great enemies. They burned what could be burned. They kept what could be useful. The eyes of Þjazi, in particular — the great pale yellow eyes of the eagle — were not burned. They were taken out and set aside. They were not destroyed. Óðinn kept them. We will return to the eyes shortly.
But before the eyes —
In the high mountains, in the cold country, Þjazi had had a daughter.
Her name was Skaði.
The sources tell us very little about her early life. They tell us that she was a giantess of the high places, a daughter of the great mountains where the snow lies all year. She lived alone, the texts suggest, in a hall not far from her father's. She hunted on skis. She wore a long coat of mail. She carried a bow. She killed bears in the deep forest the way other women threaded wool. She was not, in the surviving sources, like other women of the giant kind. She was hard. She was solitary. She did not warm easily.
There is a kenning preserved in the old skaldic poetry that calls her ǫndurdís — the ski-goddess, or the goddess of snowshoes. The image is of a tall woman in fur and mail and a long bow, moving very fast across a high snowfield, leaving two long shallow tracks behind her, alone, in country where no one else can go. That is the woman who came down out of the mountains when she heard her father had been killed.
She had been close to her father. The texts do not dwell on this, but the demand she came south to make is the demand of someone who has lost a person she loved. Þjazi had been the only family she had. The two of them had lived in their high country together, in the cold places no other beings could endure, and now there was only her. The eagle who had been her father — the great bronze shape that had come and gone from Þrymheim across her whole life — was a small heap of ash on the stones of a far-off courtyard.
When word reached her — and the sources do not say exactly how the word reached her — when she understood that her father had not returned from his journey to the south, and that her father had been killed by the gods of Asgard, she did not weep.
She put on her coat of mail. She took up her bow. She put her skis under her arm. She walked down out of the mountains. She came south. She came across the same long country that her father had flown over, only she came on foot, through deep snow and across the wide brown lands. She came to the gates of Asgard.
The watchman saw her coming. He sent word ahead.
The gods met her at the gate. They came in some number — Óðinn, Frigg, Bragi, several others. They stood at the gate in the bright morning sun and watched the tall woman in the coat of mail come up the road. They watched her stop at a respectful distance, her skis still under her arm, her bow on her back, her face very still.
She did not bow. She did not speak first. She waited.
Óðinn spoke. He said: "Welcome, daughter of Þjazi. We have heard of you. We are sorry for your father's death. Speak. What do you wish."
Skaði said: "Vengeance. Or weregild. I will not leave without one of the two. If you do not give me one, I will come back at the head of an army of the high mountains. I will tell every frost-giant and stone-giant and mountain-troll in the north of the world that the Æsir have killed my father, and I will lead them down upon your gates."
The gods, in the surviving sources, do not laugh at her. They take her seriously. She is a giantess. She is the daughter of a great giant. The threat of an army of frost-giants and mountain-trolls is the kind of threat that the Æsir, in their long history, have learned not to dismiss. They consider.
They offer her weregild — the payment a killing requires under the old laws, the gold given to a family for the death of one of theirs. Skaði refuses. She says she does not want gold. She has gold of her own. She says she wants two things. The gods ask her what they are.
She says: First, I want a husband, from among the Æsir. I want to take one of you home with me, to my mountains, and live as your wife.
The gods look at one another. There is no easy way to grant this. A god who marries a giantess and goes to live in the high cold mountains will be miserable. None of them want to volunteer.
Skaði sees this. She says: I will make it easier. I will choose my husband from among you, but I will choose only by sight of his feet. You will stand all in a row, with curtains in front of you, so that I can see only your feet. I will pick. Whoever I pick, I marry.
The gods agree. They think — and this is in Snorri — that she will look for the most beautiful feet, and that she will pick Baldr, who is the most beautiful of all the Æsir, and who is also unmarried. They are not unhappy about this. Baldr is young and strong and could endure the cold of the mountains for a time.
They set up the curtains. The Æsir stand behind them in a row. Only the feet of each are visible. Skaði walks along the row. She looks at the feet. She is, the sources say, looking very carefully.
She stops at one pair of feet that are smoother and whiter than all the others. They look very clean. They look very well-cared-for. She thinks, certainly, these are the feet of the most beautiful god. She points. She says: This one. I take this one.
The curtains are drawn back.
The feet do not belong to Baldr.
The feet belong to Njǫrðr — the father of Freyr and Freyja, the god of the calm sea, who has spent his whole long life walking on wet sand and in salt water, and whose feet are accordingly the smoothest and whitest of any god in Asgard. He is older than Baldr. He is not as beautiful in the way Baldr is beautiful. He is a quiet god, a god of small waves and of ships and of harbors.
Skaði stands there for a moment, looking at him.
She has been tricked, in a sense. She did what she said she would do. The gods did what they said they would do. But she has not gotten the husband she had hoped for. She has, instead, this older quieter god of the sea, who is now her husband by her own oath, and who must come with her into the mountains.
She does not break her word. She nods.
But she says: Now. The second thing.
She says: One of you must make me laugh. I have not laughed since my father died. I will not laugh again, I think. But if one of you can make me laugh, here, in front of all the rest of the Æsir, I will count my second debt paid.
The gods look around at one another. None of them is famous for making giantesses laugh.
Then Loki steps forward.
Loki, of course. Loki, who had brought all of this on in the first place. Loki, who is responsible for the death of her father in the first place, in the truest and deepest sense. Loki, who has not been entirely forgiven by anyone for any of it.
He steps forward. He says: I will make her laugh.
What Loki does next is, in the surviving sources, described in some detail, and we will tell it lightly. Loki gets hold of a goat — a billy-goat, with horns, the kind that lives in the high places — and he ties one end of a rope to the goat and the other end of the rope to himself. He ties it in a place that, if the goat pulls, would be very painful for Loki. The goat pulls. Loki pulls. The goat does not understand and bleats. Loki cries out and grimaces. The two of them do an absurd tugging dance, the goat at one end, Loki at the other, both of them shouting, until at last the rope gives way and Loki falls forward into Skaði's lap.
He lands there, at her feet. He looks up at her, helpless and grinning.
Skaði, watching the whole absurd performance — watching the great Loki, the foster-brother of Óðinn, who had stood at the high councils, who had taken treasures from dwarves and bound great wolves, reduced to a man tied to a goat by his most private parts — Skaði laughs.
She laughs out loud. She cannot stop herself. It is the first time she has laughed since her father's death. The laugh fills the courtyard of Asgard. It is, in some sense, the strangest sound the gods have heard in many days — the sound of a giantess of the high mountains laughing, surprised by her own laughter, at a fool of a god lying tied to a goat at her feet.
When she stops laughing, she nods. She says: That counts.
The two debts — husband and laugh — are paid.
But Snorri tells us one more thing happened. After the laugh, after the marriage was sealed, Óðinn did one more thing of his own accord. He did not have to. Skaði had not demanded it. But he understood that a great enemy had been killed, and that this enemy had been a father, and that a father deserves something more than a quiet death in the corner of a courtyard.
Óðinn went to the place where the eyes of Þjazi had been kept.
He took the two great pale eyes of Þjazi out from where they had been kept. They were heavy. They were larger than any human eye. He lifted them, one in each hand. He stood in the courtyard. He looked up at the cold winter sky above Asgard.
He spoke to Skaði. He said: Daughter of Þjazi. Look up.
She looked up.
He threw them.
The eyes rise. They rise higher than the towers. They rise past the walls. They rise into the air, faster and faster, and they do not stop. They go up into the sky and they keep going up, and they pass through the lower clouds, and then the higher clouds, and then up into the deep cold air above the clouds. They become smaller, and brighter, and at last they become two small steady points of light that hang above the world, and they do not move.
The two stars are still there. They have been there since that night. They are the eyes of Þjazi, the giant who carried away the goddess of apples in his wings, and who flew through fire above the walls of Asgard, and who was killed in a courtyard between high walls on a bright autumn day. They look down on the cold winter world from a long way up. They are pale. They are steady. They do not flicker.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Wolf at the Edge of Time.
Iðunn returned to her orchard.
The door, which had been locked while she was gone, opened to her hand. The single tree at the center of the small grove, which had not been tended for many days, was still standing, with apples ripening on its branches. Iðunn walked into the orchard. She set the small wooden chest down on the grass at the foot of the tree. She knelt. She put her hand against the bark of the tree.
The tree, in the surviving sources, does not respond to her touch. The sources do not say that the tree knew she was gone. It is, after all, only a tree. But it is also the only tree of its kind, and it is hers, and we will allow ourselves a small interpretation here: in our telling, the tree did know. The tree had been waiting. The leaves shifted slightly, as if in a wind, although no wind was blowing in the small walled grove.
Iðunn rose. She gathered the day's apples. She put them into her chest. She walked back to the door of the orchard. She passed out into the streets of Asgard with the box at her hip.
The gods who saw her in the street — those who had not yet been given an apple — came to her. She gave to each in turn. There were no more lines at the corners of their eyes by the end of that day. No more silver in any hair. The years that had begun to gather on the Æsir had been turned back. The gods were as they had been.
Skaði took Njǫrðr with her into the mountains.
The story of what happened next is told by Snorri in a few short lines, and it is worth telling. They agreed, the two of them, to spend nine nights in her country — in Þrymheim, in the high cold mountains — and then nine nights in his country — in Nóatún, at the calm harbor by the sea. They would alternate. They would try.
Snorri preserves the small verses they spoke when they returned from the first nine nights. Njǫrðr, coming down out of the mountains, says that the howling of the wolves in those high cold places was hateful to him compared to the song of the swans by the sea. And Skaði, coming back from her time at Nóatún, says that she could not sleep at the harbor for the noise of the seabirds, which woke her every morning. Neither could endure the other's country. Eventually, the sources tell us, they parted. He went back to the harbor of Nóatún and the smell of salt. She went back to the high snow of Þrymheim and the smell of pine. They were not, in the end, a marriage that worked. But that is a story for another evening.
Bragi composed a poem about Iðunn's return. He sang it that night in the great hall. The poem is not preserved in the surviving sources. We do not know what it was. We can imagine that it was a slow poem, a quiet one, suited to the long warm evening at the fire and the relief of a goddess who had been taken and was now home. We can imagine that Iðunn sat near him while he sang it, with her hand on the wooden box, and that when the poem was done, she went to bed.
Loki, in the surviving sources, is not punished for this episode. The gods do not put him in chains. They do not banish him from Asgard. They do not even, in the long way, hold it against him. They simply note that, once again, a great trouble has come into the city because of Loki, and that a great trouble has been resolved because of Loki, and that they are not yet ready to do anything about the question of whether to keep him.
That question will be answered in a later story.
For tonight, the story closes here. The eyes of Þjazi hang in the winter sky. Iðunn is back in her orchard. The years, for the moment, are not gathering on the gods of Asgard.
There is a long and strange afterthought to this story that I want to share with you before we close. It is not in the sources — not as a stated thing. It is in the shadow the story casts. It belongs here.
It is this: the gods knew, even in their joy at Iðunn's return, that they had been shown something they could not unsee. They had seen the silver in their hair. They had seen the small creases at their knuckles. They had felt the years gather on them. They had understood, for a week or two, what it was to be mortal — what it was to belong to the great running stream of time that takes a young man and turns him into an old man and at last takes him from the world entirely.
The Æsir, when Iðunn was gone, had been mortal.
They had not liked it.
But — and this is the thing the sources do not say outright, but which is implied by the long arc of the season we are slowly walking together — but they had also understood, in that week, something true about themselves that they had not understood before. They had understood that the apples did not make them gods. The apples kept the years from them. But the gods were what they were because of who they were, not because of what they ate. And one day — at a day long foretold, at a twilight whose name we have not yet spoken — the apples would not be enough. The wolf at the edge of time would come for them, and not the orchards of Iðunn nor the chest at her hip nor the long memory of Bragi would be enough to keep him away.
They knew this.
They did not speak of it, in the courtyard, on the day Iðunn returned. But they knew it. Each of them.
That knowledge — the knowledge that even the gods would one day be old — entered them, in the short week of Iðunn's absence, and it did not leave. It is in the long shadow of every story we have told so far, and it will be in the long shadow of every story to come.
You may have felt it yourself, on a quiet morning, looking in a mirror, when you have suddenly seen a small new line that you had not seen the day before. You may have felt it standing at the window, watching a child grow taller than you remember. You may have felt it the first time someone you love said something that suggested they had begun to forget. It is the gathering of the years. It is the slow press of time on the body and the mind. The Norse gods, the great Æsir of the high cathedral of Asgard, the riders of the storm and the keepers of wisdom and the slayers of giants — they too knew it, just for a week, when the apples ran out. And they did not like it.
But they also knew, when Iðunn returned and the lines smoothed away and the silver in their hair faded back to its own dark color — they also knew that it would come for them again. That it would come, in the end, for everyone. That the apples could only buy them time. And that one night, at a dim twilight that the seers had already seen, the time would run out, and the wolf in the iron wood — whose binding you may remember from a different evening's story — would lift his head, and the long darkness would begin.
They sat together that night in the great hall. They ate. They drank. They were as they had been. But each of them, perhaps, looked once or twice at the door, where Iðunn had returned, and felt — under all the relief — a small cold knowledge that this evening was not as it had been before. That the world had become a little smaller. That the apples were not, after all, the answer to everything.
And that was the gift that Þjazi gave to Asgard, in the end. Not the cold mountain hall. Not the great wings that brought down a wall of fire. Not the eyes in the winter sky.
The knowledge.
That even the gods are mortal.
And now —
The fire is low. The stars of Þjazi are out, somewhere above us, two small steady points among the many others. Iðunn is in her orchard. The apples are ripening on the tree.
If you have stayed with me this far — and few do — then you have been very patient.
If you have drifted off, somewhere in the long flight north, or in the silent hours when Iðunn sat alone in Þrymheim with the box on her knees, or in the courtyard of Asgard when the eyes rose into the sky — then you are exactly where you should be.
The Almanac will return.
Goodnight, dear listener.
Goodnight.