Norse Mythology Sleep Stories · 11 Hour Compilation Part 2 · Fenrir, Loki and the World Serpent

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.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight we tell the story of the trickster who finally went too far.

Of a feast in a hall lit by gold, where the gods of the north gathered to drink the ale of the sea giant Ægir.

Of one uninvited guest who walked in alone, and would not leave until he had said every cruel and true thing he had ever been holding back.

Of the words spoken at that table, which the gods could not, afterward, pretend they had not heard.

Of a mountain hall with four doors, where one being sat alone, watching every direction at once, knowing it was only a matter of time. Of a salmon in a waterfall.

Of the first fishing net ever made, and of how it was burned, and how the gods rebuilt it from the ash. Of a hand that closed around a slippery tail in the dark water.

Of the cave the gods carried him to. Of three stones.

Of a wife named Sigyn, who held a bowl above her husband's face for the rest of time, because what else was there for her to do.

Of the earthquakes that mortals would feel for the next thousand years, and would not know were one being's pain. We are telling this story tonight from three places.

From Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, especially the fiftieth chapter of Gylfaginning, which immediately follows the chapter we told you last time, the chapter of Baldr's death.

The two stories belong together. Snorri knew it. The poets before him knew it. Tonight we are telling you what comes next.

We are telling it also from Lokasenna, Loki's flyting, one of the oldest and strangest poems of the Poetic Edda. A poem made almost entirely of insults.

A poem in which the gods of the north sit at a table together, and one being walks among them, and speaks out loud the things that none of them, in all the centuries before or since, had ever spoken.

And we are telling it from the Vǫluspá, the seeress's prophecy, which knows already, from the beginning of the world, that Loki will be bound, and that Sigyn will sit beside him, and that he will not stay bound forever.

The Vǫluspá knows where this ends. It ends with a ship.

Where the surviving sources go quiet, and there are several places where they do, we will tell you we are imagining. We will not pretend otherwise.

The truth is that almost no one knows what Sigyn was thinking. The truth is that we do not know what the cave looked like.

The truth is that we do not know what Loki's face did when the venom dripped. But we know what happened. We know what the bowl was for.

And we know that one of the gods who fixed the serpent above his face was Skaði, the mountain bride whose father, Þjazi, the gods had killed long before, in the story we told you of Iðunn's apples.

Skaði had not forgotten. None of them had. This is the story of the night the trickster ran out of room. Settle in. Let your shoulders drop.

We begin at the threshold of a hall by the sea, where the gods are arriving for a feast.

Chapter One. The Hall by the Sea. The hall of Ægir stood at the edge of the world. Ægir was a jǫtunn, but not the kind of jǫtunn the gods feared. He was a sea giant.

A keeper of the deep places.

His hall stood on an island where the western edge of Miðgarðr fell away into the ocean, and the surf came in slow against the dark rock, and the stars at night were so close to the water that they seemed to be floating on it.

Ægir had a wife named Rán, who walked the waves and gathered drowned men in a net. Ægir had nine daughters who were the waves themselves.

Ægir, in his way, was kin to the gods. He had been a friend of theirs as long as anyone could remember. And Ægir brewed ale. He brewed the best ale in the nine worlds.

He brewed it in a cauldron so vast that Þórr himself had once had to go to the giant Hymir to fetch a bigger one for the brewing.

The cauldron Þórr brought back, by force, from Hymir's hall, was the cauldron Ægir used.

And the ale that came from it was the ale the gods drank when they wished to drink the finest ale that had ever been made.

So when Ægir invited the gods to his hall for a great feast, every god who could come, came. Óðinn came.

Þórr did not come, he was away in the east that night, killing trolls, as he often was. But almost everyone else came.

Bragi came, with his wife Iðunn, the goddess of the apples we told you about, the goddess of the gods' youth.

Týr came, the one handed god, who had given his right hand to the wolf so long ago.

Njǫrðr came, the sea god of the Vanir, and his son Freyr, and his daughter Freyja, Freyja with her golden necklace, who knew how to weep.

Heimdallr came, the bright watcher of the bridge. Skaði came, the mountain bride who had taken a husband from among the gods, long ago, for the killing of her father.

Sif came, Þórr's wife, with her hair of gold. And the lesser gods came too, Gefjun, the goddess of unmarried girls. The servants Byggvir and Beyla, who attended Freyr.

And Vidar, who said almost nothing. They came from every direction.

They came across Bifrǫst, and they came across the water, and a few of them came by paths that the sources do not name.

They came in their finest cloaks, and they came carrying nothing but themselves, because at Ægir's table no weapons would be allowed. That was the rule of the feast.

The hall, when they entered, was not lit by fire. It was lit by gold.

Ægir had set out gold around the walls of the hall, the way another host might have set out torches.

Gold that glowed of its own accord, the way that some gold in the old stories did. The gold lit the long tables. The gold lit the carved beams of the ceiling.

The gold lit the faces of the gods as they entered and took their seats. There was no smoke. There was no flame.

There was only a soft warm light, everywhere, that fell on everyone equally and did not move. It was beautiful. And there was a rule.

The rule of Ægir's feast was the rule that all old halls had. At Ægir's table there would be peace. No weapon would be drawn inside the hall.

No old quarrel would be raised inside the hall. No insult would be given.

The hall was a place out of the world, a place where the gods and their friends would simply drink, and eat, and tell stories, and let the long winter night pass without trouble.

That was the rule. Everyone knew it. Everyone honored it. The gods had honored it for as long as anyone could remember. And the ale was being poured by two servants.

They were called Fimafengr and Eldir. They were not gods. They were servants Ægir kept in his hall.

Fimafengr was the one who moved through the hall with the pitcher, refilling the cups, smiling, never spilling, never spoken to but appreciated.

Eldir was the one at the door. Eldir stood at the threshold and met each new arrival and took their cloak and welcomed them in. The gods sat. The ale flowed.

The hall warmed with conversation. Bragi told a story. Iðunn laughed at something Freyja said. Týr, the one handed, drank slowly with his left hand and listened.

Njǫrðr nodded over his cup.

Skaði, who did not love feasts, was nonetheless smiling, because Ægir's hall was beautiful, and the ale was good, and the long night was at last warm.

Outside, the sea was very dark. Outside, the stars were very close. And outside, on the path that led up to Ægir's hall from the shore, someone was walking.

Someone who had not been invited. Someone who, in the long memory of the gods, did not need to be invited. Eldir, at the door, looked up. He saw who was coming.

He set his hand on the doorframe, the way a servant does when something has begun to go wrong, and a servant cannot yet say what.

Chapter Two. The Seat He Claimed. Loki came up the path alone. He was dressed plainly. He did not look like someone who had come a long way.

He did not look angry, or hurried, or grand.

He looked the way Loki always looked when something was about to happen, slightly amused, as if he had a small private joke that he might choose to share with you, or might not.

His auburn hair was longer than it had been when we last told you of him. His face was thinner.

He had been moving in the world a long time, since the day Baldr fell in the courtyard, and the gods had begun, slowly, to suspect. He had been moving carefully.

He had not, yet, been caught. And tonight he had come to Ægir's hall. Eldir, at the door, did not let him in. Eldir was a servant. He had no authority.

But he was also a being who had been told, by his master, that this feast was for the gods of Asgard, and that the night was to be a peaceful one, and that the doors of the hall were to be opened to those who came in friendship.

Eldir, looking at Loki, did not see friendship. Eldir saw a being walking toward him whose eyes already knew what they were going to do.

"You are not invited tonight," Eldir said, gently. "Stand aside, friend. Walk on." Loki considered him.

Loki said many things to Eldir that night, short things, sharp things, things that the poem Lokasenna preserves for us, about what was being said inside, and about how he had a right to be there, and about how Eldir had better step aside before something he did not want to happen, happened.

Eldir replied to him in kind.

The two of them stood at the doorway, talking, the gold from inside falling out onto the path between them, and inside the hall the gods went on drinking, not yet knowing.

And then Fimafengr, the smiling one, with the pitcher, came out to the threshold to see what was keeping Eldir. Loki killed him there. The poem does not say with what.

The poem does not say how. The poem says only that Loki killed Fimafengr at the door of the feast, on the threshold of the hall, with the gold falling over them both.

And inside the hall, the gods heard it. They heard what they did not yet understand they had heard, a small sound, a wet sound, a falling. They came to the door.

They came pouring out, Óðinn in front, and they saw Loki standing over the servant's body, and the gods drove Loki out of the hall, out into the dark, out down the path toward the sea.

They drove him out without ceremony. They did not even speak to him. They simply turned him out, because there was nothing to say. He had broken the rule of the feast.

He had broken it in the worst way it could be broken. There was no question of his continuing inside. The gods went back in. They closed the door behind them.

And they tried to begin the feast again, to set down their cups and pretend that what had happened at the threshold had not, in some small way, ended the night.

They could not quite. The light from the gold was the same. The ale in the cups was the same. But something at the heart of the hall had gone slightly cold.

They knew it had. They went on anyway. What else could they do. Outside, on the dark path, Loki turned around. He came back. He came back not as a stranger.

He came back as a god, as he had every right to do.

Because Loki, in the long ago, before any of this, before Baldr, before the dart, before the chase that had not yet begun, Loki had sworn a blood oath with Óðinn himself.

The two of them had mixed their blood. They had become brothers.

And the rule of the old north was the rule that no man, and no god, would ever drink at a feast unless his blood brother could drink beside him too.

It was a rule older than the hall. It was a rule older than Ægir. It was a rule Óðinn could not refuse. Loki walked back up the path. Loki opened the door.

And Loki, standing in the doorway with the dark sea behind him, said to the assembled gods of Asgard, quietly: I am the blood brother of Óðinn.

I will drink at this table tonight. Or Óðinn will drink at no table tonight, ever again. The hall was silent. The gold was still warm.

Óðinn, old Óðinn, who had stood at the well of Mímir and had given an eye for wisdom, who had hanged himself from Yggdrasill for nine nights, who had known this day was coming since before any of them, Óðinn looked at his son Vidar.

And Óðinn said: rise. Give Loki your seat. Pour him a cup. The blood oath is the blood oath. He will drink with us tonight. Vidar rose. He poured Loki a cup.

He set the cup before the seat he had been sitting in. And he stepped aside, silent, the way Vidar always was, and let Loki take the place where Vidar had been.

Loki sat down. He took up the cup. He drank from it slowly, looking at every god at the table one by one.

And then he set the cup down, and he opened his mouth, and he began.

Chapter Three. What He Said to Bragi and Iðunn. The first one he turned to was Bragi. Bragi was the god of poetry. He was Iðunn's husband.

He had a long silver gold beard and gentle hands and he had spent his entire life among the bright halls of the gods, drinking their ale and singing their stories and making them feel that the songs the world told about them were songs the world remembered.

Bragi was the god whose voice carried across the long mead benches. Bragi had never lifted a weapon. Bragi had never had to.

Loki looked at Bragi and said: Hail to all the gods, except to you. Bragi was silent for a moment. Bragi did not know what to say to this.

He had not expected to be the first one Loki spoke to.

He had been preparing, every god at that table, in the breath after Loki had taken his seat, had been preparing, for Loki to look across the hall and find them.

To find their face.

To find the worst thing they had ever done and to say it out loud at this table where the gold was still warm and the ale was still good and the rule of peace had been broken once already tonight.

Bragi had not thought it would be him. Bragi tried to be generous.

Bragi offered Loki a horse from his stable, and a sword from his hall, and a ring from his arm, gifts, the way a host would give gifts, to settle the quarrel before it began.

Loki rejected the gifts. Loki said that Bragi was no warrior. Loki said that Bragi was a bench decorator. A man who sat down. A man who hid behind other men's swords.

The poets of the old north would have said it harder than I can, there is a particular phrase in Lokasenna here that translates roughly to that Bragi was a coward, and that any time anyone needed something done, Bragi was the last one to volunteer.

Bragi heard this. Bragi stood up. Bragi said that if they had been outside the hall, he would have answered Loki for this. He said that they were not outside the hall.

He said that the rule of the feast held him from doing what he would have done if they had been on any field anywhere else in the nine worlds. Loki smiled.

And then Iðunn, Iðunn whose apples the gods had nearly lost, whom we told you about three episodes ago, Iðunn put her hand on her husband's arm. She said: please.

Bragi. Sit down. He is not worth this. Please. Loki turned to her. He looked at Iðunn.

He looked at the small soft face of the goddess of youth and renewal, the goddess who held the apples that kept the gods of the world from aging into death.

He looked at her and he said, and what he said was unsayable. What he said was that Iðunn had embraced the man who had killed her own brother.

That she had wrapped her arms around her brother's killer. That she of all the gods at this table was the one whose own kin had been spilled, and who had then forgotten.

The hall, the hall did not move. Iðunn did not answer. Iðunn had no answer. Whether what Loki said was true is a question that the surviving sources do not answer.

The Eddas do not tell us who Iðunn's brother was, or what happened to him, or whose arms killed him. The Eddas have lost that part of the story.

The Lokasenna preserves Loki's accusation and Iðunn's silence, and nothing else. We can read it as a wound the old north knew but the modern world has lost.

We can read it as a wound Loki invented in that moment and that no one knew how to deny. Iðunn lowered her hand from her husband's arm. Bragi sat back down.

He did not look at his wife. And the gods around the table understood, finally, that this was what the rest of the night was going to be.

That Loki was not going to throw stones at glass. That Loki was going to throw stones at the soft tender private heart of each one of them in turn.

That the rule of the feast, the rule that said no old quarrel, was being broken, not from outside, but from one of their own.

That the gods of Asgard were, tonight, going to be made to listen to their own buried things, said out loud, at a table where they could not stand and walk away.

Some of them had wondered, in the silence after Iðunn dropped her hand, whether they should rise and leave. None of them did.

You do not, when a thing like this begins, rise and leave. You sit. You listen. You wait to see whose turn is next.

You hope, in a small ungenerous corner of yourself, that yours will not be the worst. Loki turned, slowly, to the next god.

Chapter Four. The Old Wounds. He turned to Gefjun. Gefjun was the goddess of unmarried girls.

She was, in the old north, the patron of women who had not yet given themselves to anyone. She was a quiet goddess. The sources tell us little about her.

We know she had once ploughed an island free from the body of Sweden, using four giant sons in the shape of oxen, and we know that she walked among virgins and watched over them.

We know that she was kind. We know that in the brightness of the Asgard halls, she had a small and gentle place.

Loki looked at her, across the table, and said: I know about the youth. Gefjun's face did not change. She did not look up. Loki said: I know about the necklace.

I know what you gave for it. I know which youth gave it to you, and what you gave him in return, that he might give the necklace to you.

I know what your hand did under your cloak that night, Gefjun, when the bright lamp was burning low. I know. There is no other source for this specific accusation.

The Lokasenna preserves it; no other Eddic text confirms a youth and a necklace ever traded hands at Gefjun's bedside.

What the old sources do say of Gefjun is that pattern we mentioned a moment ago, the ploughing of the island, the night with King Gylfi.

The bargain of the body for the land. So the shape of the accusation is not foreign to her.

The shape of the accusation is something the old north could have believed of Gefjun.

But the specifics, the youth, the necklace, the lamp burning low, those are Loki's alone.

Whether they were a real wound the old north remembered, or a real wound Loki invented in the moment, or a slight twisting of the Gylfi story to make a familiar shape feel like a private hurt, that we cannot tell you.

Gefjun did not deny it.

The gods of the table, looking at the small quiet goddess of unmarried women, suddenly were not sure what they had been told before, and what they had not. Óðinn spoke.

Old Óðinn, the All father, the one who had given an eye, the one who had hung himself from the great tree for nine nights, the one who had brewed war and wisdom, Óðinn said: Loki, stop.

He said it gently. He did not raise his voice. He simply said: stop. You are doing a thing that does not need to be done tonight. Loki turned to Óðinn.

And Loki said: you have given victory in battle to the worse warrior, all father. Do not pretend otherwise.

I have stood beside you when you gave your favor to the man who did not deserve it, and you took your favor from the man who did.

I have seen which judgments of yours were just, and which were not. I have stood at the back of every battle you have judged, and I have known. So have you.

Do not lecture me about what does and does not need to be done tonight. Óðinn looked at him.

Óðinn, and this is the part of Lokasenna that the modern reader, when they meet it, cannot quite forget, Óðinn did not answer about the battles.

What Óðinn said instead was: Loki, you were eight winters underground as a milkmaid. You bore children there. You took the form of a woman.

Do not lecture ME about what is and is not shameful for a god to have done. The hall, for a moment, did not breathe.

What Óðinn was saying was that Loki, in the long ago, had taken on the shape of a woman. Had lived as a woman. Had borne children, the way women bear children.

The sources, Snorri elsewhere, the Eddas in fragments, confirm at least part of this.

Loki had, at one point, transformed himself into a mare and borne the eight legged horse Sleipnir to a stallion.

Loki had crossed the line that the old north had between male and female, and had borne, from his own body, a child of that crossing.

Sleipnir was the horse Óðinn rode now. Óðinn rode Sleipnir to every battle. Óðinn rode Sleipnir to every council of the worlds.

Sleipnir had eight legs because of what Loki had done. What Óðinn was saying, in that hall, was that Loki had been a mother.

And Loki, who in any other quarrel would have laughed at this, Loki who had laughed at this, in lesser quarrels, before, Loki this time did not laugh.

Loki said to Óðinn: and you, all father. You who have practiced seiðr, the magic the old north called woman's magic. The magic of foresight and influence.

The magic that no man among the gods practices because it is shameful for a man to practice it. You have practiced it. I have seen you.

You have whispered into the runes the way only women whisper. You have danced the dance that only women dance. You have done with magic what only women do.

Óðinn lowered his cup. Óðinn said: I have. The hall heard the all father admit it.

The hall heard Óðinn, the highest of the gods, the one who held the spear Gungnir and rode the eight legged horse, heard him say, at his own table, that yes, he had practiced the woman's magic.

He had whispered into the runes. He had crossed the same line Loki had crossed.

And then Frigg, Frigg, who had walked the worlds asking every living thing not to harm her son, Frigg spoke. Frigg said: husband. Do not give him this.

Do not give him your old secrets here. He is not worth them. Loki turned to Frigg.

He looked at the goddess whose son had died, only a season before, on a courtyard in Asgard, with a small mistletoe dart in his chest.

He looked at the goddess who had walked the entire world asking each rock and each plant to spare her son. He looked at her and he said: Frigg.

When Óðinn was banished, long ago, and his throne stood empty, you took his brothers Vili and Vé into your bed. Both of them. You did not wait.

You did not wait for your husband.

You took his brothers into the place that was his place, and you held them there, and you let them have what they wanted, the way a wife does. I know this.

The whole hall knows this. The whole world knows this. Frigg sat very still. Frigg did not answer. The sources are silent about whether Loki's accusation was true.

There is a fragment in one source, only one, that suggests Óðinn was once exiled by his brothers, and that Frigg did, in his absence, share his throne with the brothers who had taken it.

The fragment is unclear. The fragment may be a misremembering. The fragment may be Loki's invention. But Frigg, in the Lokasenna, does not deny it.

Frigg, in the Lokasenna, looks at Loki and looks away. And then Frigg spoke. Not loudly. Not in anger. The way a mother speaks when she has nothing left to lose.

Frigg said: Loki.

If my son Baldr were sitting at this table tonight, if my son Baldr were at this feast with the rest of us, you would not be allowed to leave this hall alive.

You would not be allowed to finish your cup. You would not be allowed another breath at the gods' table.

My son Baldr is the only god in all of Asgard who would have stopped what you are doing tonight by standing up and saying no. The hall, for a moment, almost relaxed.

Almost.

It almost felt, for a breath, like a normal thing, a mother speaking the name of her dead son to remind the room that loss had been suffered here, that even Loki should have the grace to be quiet in the face of it.

Then Loki spoke. Loki said: Frigg. Do you want to know why your son Baldr is not sitting at this table? Frigg looked at him.

Loki said: do you want to know why Baldr did not ride into the hall this evening? Why he is not laughing at his father's side?

Why his mother walks the worlds with red around her eyes? Frigg did not answer. Loki said: it was my doing, Frigg. It was me.

I was the one who learned that you had missed a plant in your walking. I was the one who found the mistletoe west of Valhǫll and shaped it into a dart.

I was the one who put the dart into the hand of the brother who could not see. I was the one who guided Hǫðr's arm.

I am the reason you no longer see your son ride into this hall. I am the reason. Me. The hall was silent.

The hall, and this is the moment the whole Lokasenna has been building toward, the hall heard Loki, at the gods' own table, in front of every god who had ever loved Baldr, say plainly that he had killed him.

The thing the gods had suspected. The thing they had said quietly to each other since the funeral on the great ship Hringhorni.

The thing no one had dared accuse him of in public. Loki had just said it himself. The Lokasenna preserves this moment as stanza twenty eight. The poem is unambiguous.

Loki does not hedge. Loki does not soften. Loki tells Frigg that he is the reason her son is dead, and he tells her at the table where she cannot rise.

The gods around the table understood, then, that something had passed that could not be unpassed. Not even by being silent. Not even by waiting it out.

They were going to remember this confession. They were going to act on it. Not tonight. Not in this hall. The peace rule still held.

But tomorrow, when the doors of Ægir's hall opened and the gods walked back out into the world, they were going to hunt the being who had just told the mother of Baldr, at her own table, that he had been the one who killed her son.

Frigg did not weep. Frigg, in the poem, does not speak again after this moment. Frigg, in the long surviving Norse tradition, almost does not speak again at all.

The story keeps going around her. Frigg, for the rest of the night, sat very still, and looked at the place at the table where her son was not.

The hall was beginning, very slowly, to feel cold. The gold around the walls was still glowing. The ale in the cups was still warm.

But something at the heart of the room had gone wrong. Each god who had been spoken to so far had not been spoken to about a thing they had done in public.

They had been spoken to about a thing they had done in private.

The private things were the things they had not, in the long history of their being gods together, ever expected to hear said out loud at a table.

The private things were the things they had carried alone. Loki was taking them out, one by one, and putting them on the table beside the ale.

And no one, no one, was going to be spared.

Chapter Five. The Vanir's Shame. He turned next to Freyja. Freyja was the goddess of love. Of beauty. Of seiðr, which Óðinn himself had just admitted to practicing.

Freyja was the one who had once wept tears of gold for the husband who had gone wandering and not returned.

Freyja was the one who wore the golden necklace called Brísingamen, which she had bought, the old stories said, from four dwarves in a cave, by sleeping one night with each of them in turn.

Freyja was beautiful, and Freyja was complicated, and Freyja knew, of all the goddesses at the table, exactly what Loki was about to say.

Loki said: Freyja, every god at this table has been your lover. Every elf at this table has been your lover. Every dwarf in the caves below has been your lover.

Even your own brother has been your lover. I have seen it. Do not deny it. I have stood at the doors of your hall on the nights you brought your brother through them.

I know what the two of you do. I know what your father once caught the two of you doing. The world knows. Do not pretend otherwise.

This accusation, unlike the others, has a small thread of source evidence behind it.

The Ynglinga Saga preserves a faint tradition that among the Vanir, the older family of gods to which Freyja and her brother Freyr both belonged, sibling marriage had once been the custom.

The Vanir, the saga says, had practiced incestuous marriage in the long ago, before they joined with the Æsir.

When they came to live among Óðinn's people, that custom was set aside. But it had existed. The accusation was not pure invention.

The accusation was the dragging out, into the bright light of the gold lit hall, of a Vanir custom the Æsir had agreed to forget. Freyja did not answer.

Freyja, in Lokasenna, only said: Loki, your tongue is a thing that will be silenced.

There will come a day when the gods bind you, and when your mouth is closed for what comes after. I will live to see that day. Loki laughed.

He laughed a small laugh, not loud, as if she had said something gently amusing. He turned to her father.

Njǫrðr was the god of the sea, the patron of sailors, the father of Freyja and Freyr.

He was an older god, he had come into Asgard from the Vanir, in the long ago hostage exchange that had ended the war between the two families of gods.

Njǫrðr had been a hostage. Njǫrðr had been sent to Asgard to live as a sign of peace, the way kings of small countries used to send their sons.

Njǫrðr was not, by birth, of the Æsir. Njǫrðr was, by treaty, among them. Loki looked at Njǫrðr and said: you were a hostage. Do not forget what you were.

And what is more, the daughters of the giant Hymir, when they passed by you on the eastern road, urinated into your mouth, the way they would into a chamber pot.

They mistook you for one. They did not even know who you were.

They saw a man of the sea standing by the road, and they thought him a vessel, and they relieved themselves into him. I have heard the story.

The whole north has heard the story. Do not pretend the story is not yours. Njǫrðr, and this is one of the strangest things in Lokasenna, Njǫrðr did not deny it.

Njǫrðr said: yes. But what does that matter. I have a son. I have a son who is the joy of every god at this table. Freyr is loved by every house in Asgard.

Freyr is the one we look to when we wish to remember why we joined our two families. My shame, if I had any, would not outweigh the gift of my son. Be silent, Loki.

Loki looked at Njǫrðr's son. Loki turned to Freyr. And the room, gently, knew what was coming next.

Chapter Six. Týr's Hand and Freyr's Sword. But before Loki could speak to Freyr, Týr did. Týr was the one handed god. We told you of him three episodes ago.

He was the god who had laid his right hand in the mouth of the wolf, knowing the wolf would close, because someone had to.

Someone had to be the one whose hand the wolf took. Týr had been that one.

Týr had walked through the rest of his life with one hand, with the long shame of an absence at the end of his arm, and Týr had never complained, because the binding of Fenrir had to happen, and someone had to pay.

Týr was a good god. The old north loved him. Týr said to Loki: leave the boy alone. Leave Freyr alone. He has done nothing to you.

You will not speak to him the way you have spoken to the others. Move on. Loki turned to Týr. Loki said: ah. The one handed. Tell me, Týr, where is your hand.

Tell me what happened to it. Tell me the story of the wolf you fed. Týr did not flinch. Týr said: my hand is gone because I gave it. I gave it because I had to.

I would give the other if I had to. Be silent, Loki. Loki said: and tell me, Týr, who is the father of your son.

Tell me how it is that I, of all the gods at this table, am the one your wife came to.

Tell me how you have not noticed, all these years, that the boy who calls you father has my eyes.

Tell me how you sleep in the same bed as a woman who has, more than once, opened her door to me in the dark. Tell me, Týr, what your hand truly cost you.

Týr, for the first time, lowered his head. The hall did not know what to say. What Loki had just said is not preserved elsewhere.

There is no source other than Lokasenna that says Loki and Týr's wife had ever met.

There is no son of Týr's whose paternity has ever been doubted, in any of the other Eddas. The accusation may be true. The accusation may be Loki's invention.

The accusation may be a poetic exaggeration the poet of Lokasenna had heard somewhere and chose to include. We do not know.

What we know is that Týr, in Lokasenna, did not deny it. Týr lowered his head. Týr let the accusation stand. Loki turned then to Freyr.

He looked at the boy whose father had just been silenced.

He looked at the bright golden god of summer and harvest, of fields and ships, of the gentle warmth that came back to the world each spring. He looked at Freyr.

Loki said: Freyr. Tell me about your sword. Freyr's hand went, by old habit, to his belt, and found nothing there. Loki smiled. Loki said: you gave up your sword.

You gave it up for the love of a giant's daughter. You sent your servant Skírnir to ride into Jǫtunheimr to win her for you, and the price of that wooing was your sword.

The sword that would, in the last days, have defended you. The sword you will need at Ragnarǫk.

The sword you will not have, when the day comes that Surtr rides up from Múspell with a flame in his hand, and the worlds burn.

You will stand on the field of the last battle, Freyr, with nothing in your hand at all. Because of a woman. Freyr did not answer.

This accusation has full source evidence behind it.

The poem Skírnismál, which we will tell you the story of in another episode, preserves the entire story of how Freyr fell in love with Gerðr, the daughter of the jǫtunn Gymir; how he sent his servant Skírnir to woo her on his behalf; and how Skírnir's price for going was Freyr's sword, the sword that would fight on its own, the sword that had been Freyr's most prized possession.

Skírnir succeeded. Gerðr came to Freyr. And the sword was gone, and would not come back, and Freyr will indeed, in the prophecy of Ragnarǫk, fall on the field without it.

It is one of the saddest small details of the end of the world. And Loki, at the table, had said it out loud. Freyr did not lift his head.

His servant Byggvir, a small loud nervous voice, started to speak in defense of his master, the way a servant who loves his lord cannot keep himself from doing.

Byggvir said: if I were as great as Freyr, Loki, I would crush you. I would grind your bones the way the mill grinds corn. I would, Loki turned.

Loki said: what is this little chattering thing. What is this small thing. Tell me, Byggvir, where you were when the gods of Asgard fought.

Tell me what corner you hid in. Tell me what bench you crept under. Tell me which crumbs of bread you swept up at the feet of your master while real beings died.

You are not a god. You are not a man. You are a little thing that lives at Freyr's heel. Go back there. Be silent. I have not yet finished. Byggvir sat down.

Byggvir did not speak again.

The hall, by this point, the hall that had been bright and gold and warm at the beginning of the evening, the hall had become a place where the gods of the north were sitting, very still, looking into their cups, listening to the rain begin against the high windows of Ægir's hall.

None of them were drinking. None of them were eating.

None of them were speaking, except when Loki addressed them, and then only as long as it took to be told what they had done, and to lower their heads, and to let the next god be addressed.

Loki had not yet finished. There were still others at the table.

Chapter Seven. Heimdallr and Skaði. Loki turned next to Heimdallr. Heimdallr was the watchman.

The watcher at Bifrǫst, the rainbow bridge that linked Asgard to the world of men.

Heimdallr was the god who slept very little, the god whose hearing could pick up the sound of grass growing on the earth, the god whose eyes could see for a hundred days' ride in every direction.

He was the one who would, at the end of all things, blow the Gjallarhorn, the great horn whose sounding meant Ragnarǫk had begun.

He was, of all the gods at this table, the one who watched the longest. And the one who slept the least. Heimdallr looked at Loki and said, calmly: Loki. You are drunk.

You are out of your mind. You should be quiet now. A drunk man who keeps talking only buries himself deeper. Loki turned slowly. Loki said: Heimdallr. Quiet yourself.

You are the god who has stood at the gate of Bifrǫst since the dawn of time, with the wet wind blowing on your back, watching for the riders who will come at the end of the world.

You have never sat in a hall and warmed yourself. You have never slept in a bed for longer than a single night.

You have a wet back, Heimdallr, that is what they say of you, in the deep wells where the stories are kept. The gods gave you a bad fate. A fate of always watching.

A fate of never resting. A fate of being the one who waits. Heimdallr did not answer. Heimdallr knew this was true.

Heimdallr had stood at Bifrǫst since the worlds were young, and would stand at Bifrǫst until the day the worlds ended and the horn was blown.

The wet back was not a metaphor.

The wet back was the actual condition of Heimdallr at the edge of the bridge, where the rain off Niflheim never stopped, and the cold of Jǫtunheimr blew across him at his unsleeping post.

Heimdallr did not deny what Loki said. The hall heard the watcher of the worlds receive what was, in some quiet old way, a true description of his condition.

And then, and this is the moment, in Lokasenna, where the next voice rises, Skaði spoke. Skaði had not, until now, spoken at the feast. Skaði was the mountain bride.

The daughter of Þjazi, the jǫtunn the gods had killed.

We told you that story two episodes ago, the long winter when Iðunn had been stolen, and how the gods had killed her father in retribution, and how Skaði had walked down out of the mountains in armor, demanding payment in marriage, and how Njǫrðr had married her in restitution, and how the marriage had not held because Skaði loved the mountains and Njǫrðr loved the sea.

She had returned to her father's hall. She had become a god of winter. Of skis and snow and the high places. She was not a daughter of the Æsir.

She had been brought in by treaty, after the killing of her father, and the treaty had not been kind to her. She looked at Loki across the table.

And she said: you laugh tonight, Loki. You will not laugh long. There is a rock waiting for you. A rock with sharp edges.

They will lay you on that rock, and they will bind you, and they will bind you with the entrails of one of your own children. Not your daughter. Not your wife.

One of your children, Loki. The cold one. The son whose body will be turned into a cord to hold you down. They will lay you on that rock and they will leave you there.

You will not laugh on that rock, Loki. You will scream on it. And you will scream on it for a very long time. The hall went very still.

The Lokasenna gives this stanza to Skaði. Skaði, alone among the gods at the feast, speaks not of Loki's past but of his future. She names the rock. She names the cord.

She names the child whose body will be unmade to make the cord. She does this calmly, as a winter goddess does. As if she has seen it already.

As if she is reporting from the future. The other gods stop drinking when Skaði speaks. The other gods understand, then, that the rock is not a threat.

The rock is a thing that is going to happen. Loki met her eye. Loki said: Skaði. If they bind me on a rock. If my own son's body is what they use to do it.

Let it be remembered that I was first and foremost when we killed your father. I was the one who lured Þjazi into the trap.

I was the one who guided the gods to the place where they could burn his wings as he flew. Your father died because of me. Not because of Óðinn. Not because of Þórr.

Because of me. So when you sit in your halls of winter and miss your father, Skaði, remember whose hand placed the spark. Skaði did not flinch. Skaði had known this.

The gods had known this. The killing of Þjazi was the thing that had brought Skaði down from the mountains.

Skaði had walked into Asgard with that knowledge in her chest, and had taken Njǫrðr in restitution. The marriage had failed, but the wound had not.

And Loki had, by speaking it tonight, made the wound public again. Made it stand up in the hall and breathe. Skaði said: yes. Loki. You were the one.

So all the kindness I have shown you since then, every council you sat in at my mountain halls, every hospitality I gave you in winter, was given to the man who had killed my father.

I gave you my temple. I gave you my house. I gave you bread at my own hearth. And you, in return, gave nothing.

The hall watched the winter goddess and the trickster look at each other across the gold. Loki said one more thing.

Loki said, and this is the line, from stanza fifty two, that the modern reader of Lokasenna finds the cruelest of all the night, Loki said: lighter words, Skaði, were the words you spoke when you wanted me in your bed.

I remember those words. Do you? The hall heard it. Skaði had, at some point, in some way the surviving sources do not preserve, said warm things to Loki.

The sources do not tell us whether she had ever invited him to her bed. The sources do not tell us whether Loki was lying. The sources tell us only that Loki said this.

And that the hall heard it. And that Skaði did not answer. And the hall, again, watched a woman be made small. The rule of the feast still held.

No one rose to strike Loki. But the gods were beginning, very quietly, to count the seats between them and the door.

Chapter Eight. Sif and the Coming of Þórr. Loki turned to the next goddess.

But this time, the surviving poem tells us, this time the next goddess rose, before Loki could speak. Sif rose. Sif was the wife of Þórr.

She was a goddess of the harvest, a goddess of the fields, a goddess whose hair, golden, long, famous in the old north, was said to be the wheat itself.

The standing grain of late summer. She was, by the time of this feast, one of the calmest gods at the table. She had not, until now, spoken to Loki. Sif rose now.

Sif took a horn from the table. A crystal horn.

The Lokasenna names it, and tells us it was old, that the mead inside it was old, that it was the kind of cup the gods kept for ceremonies that did not happen often.

She filled it. She walked it to Loki. She set it down in front of him with both hands. And Sif said: Loki. Drink this. And be welcome.

And consider, when you drink it, that there is at least one woman of the Æsir who has done nothing against you.

There is at least one woman in this hall who has nothing to confess. Drink. And let that be the truth that ends this conversation.

The hall, quietly, almost broke into relief. The hall almost, for the small space of Sif's gesture, believed the night might still be salvaged.

Sif was offering Loki a way out. She was offering him the chance to stop.

She was telling him, with the cup in front of him, that some of the things at this table were still good. That the rule of the feast might be honored.

That she, the wife of the absent Þórr, was inviting him to be small enough to step back. Loki picked up the cup. He looked at the gold mead inside it. He drank.

He set it down. And he said: yes, Sif. Yes. There is one woman at this table who has done nothing wrong, if you do not count the night that you and I lay together.

The night when Þórr was away. The night when you came to me, Sif, in the hall where your husband sleeps. You and I lay together. You and I knew what we were doing.

Þórr did not know. Þórr still does not know. But I will tell him, Sif. I will tell him when he comes home. I will tell him what his wife did when he was away.

Sif lowered the cup. Sif sat down. Sif did not, in the surviving poem, answer. The sources do not, anywhere else, tell us that Loki and Sif had been together.

The story of Loki and Sif is, in the wider sources, the story of Loki cutting her hair.

A famous old prank, where Loki sneaks into Sif's chamber while she sleeps and shaves her head, and the gods make him put it right by procuring the wig of gold from the dwarves.

That story is known. The story of Loki and Sif as lovers, however, is preserved only in this stanza of the Lokasenna.

The sources do not say whether Loki was telling the truth, or telling a cruel improvisation, or telling a half truth twisted into a wound. Sif did not deny it.

Sif sat back down. The hall heard Loki say it. And the hall did not know what to believe. And then. And then the hall heard something else. The hall heard footsteps.

The hall heard the heavy footfall of a god approaching from outside.

Beyla, who had been silent all evening, Beyla, the small servant goddess, the wife of Byggvir, Beyla looked up at the door, and she said: the mountains are shaking.

Þórr is coming. The hall heard it then. The cups on the table rattled. The walls of Ægir's hall trembled. The gold around the walls swayed, very slightly.

Þórr had been in the east. Þórr had been killing trolls. Þórr had not been at the feast.

But somewhere, in some way that even the surviving Eddas do not fully explain, Þórr had heard. Some messenger. Some bird. Some shimmer in the air. Þórr knew.

And Þórr was coming. The hall held its breath. The door of Ægir's hall opened. Þórr stood in the doorway. He was wet from the rain. He was muddy from the road.

He had Mjǫllnir in his hand. His beard, in the light of the gold glowing walls, was the color of wet oak. His eyes were not angry, exactly. His eyes were patient.

The eyes of a god who had ridden a long way to do something that he had been ready to do for a very long time. Þórr stepped into the hall. Loki turned to him.

Þórr said: Loki. Stop talking. It was not an order. It was not a threat. It was a request, almost. The way a tired god speaks when he has heard enough. Loki said: Þórr.

Son of the Earth. Why are you angry? You will not be so brave when the wolf opens his jaws and swallows your father whole. You will not be so brave at Ragnarǫk, Þórr.

Your hammer will not save him. Your hammer will not save you. You will fight the World Serpent. You will kill him. You will take nine steps. And then you will fall.

I have seen this. The Vǫluspá has seen this. You and I both know what is going to happen, Þórr.

So do not stand in this doorway with your hammer and pretend you are not afraid. Þórr lifted Mjǫllnir. Þórr said: I will send you to the gates of Hel, Loki.

I will end this feast with one blow. Loki said: you remember, Þórr, the night you crawled into the giant's glove.

The night you and your companions huddled in the dark thumb of Skrýmir's glove and shook with fear at his snoring. You were the great Þórr that night, too.

And you were the small one in the giant's glove. I was there. I remember. You can swing your hammer at me now, Þórr. But I remember when you hid.

Þórr's hand tightened on Mjǫllnir. The rule of the feast still held. No weapon would be drawn inside Ægir's hall. Not even by Þórr. Not even tonight.

Þórr stood in the doorway with the hammer in his hand and his eyes on Loki, and Loki stood at the table with the cup in his hand and his eyes on Þórr, and the hall held its breath, and the rule held.

Loki set down his cup. Loki said: I have said what I came to say. I have addressed every god at this table. I have placed every secret on the wood beside the ale.

I am done. I will leave now. And I will leave because of you, Þórr. Because I know that even the peace rule will not stop you if I stay another breath. So I leave.

And Loki walked out of the hall. He passed Þórr at the door. Þórr did not strike him. Þórr, the law of the feast still binding him, let him pass.

And as Loki stepped over the threshold, he turned, one last time, to Ægir behind him. And he said: Ægir. Your hall will burn. Your gold will go cold.

No peaceful feast will gather here again.

The world remembers the gods who hosted this night, and the world will remember Ægir's hall as the place where the peace of the gods broke.

The world will not forgive you for what you let happen tonight. Then Loki was gone. The door closed behind him. The rain, somewhere outside, was still falling.

And the gods of the north, all of them, every one of them, sitting at the tables of Ægir's hall, looked at one another in silence, and understood, finally, that this had been the last feast.

Chapter Nine. The Mountain Hall. The story leaves the hall of Ægir behind. The story walks, with Loki, up into the mountains.

The Lokasenna ends with Loki stepping over the threshold. The Lokasenna does not tell us where he went, or how long he ran, or what he did with the time.

For that part of the story we go to Snorri Sturluson.

To the fiftieth chapter of his Gylfaginning, which preserves, in his calm thirteenth century prose, the part of the myth that the older poems leave dark. Loki ran.

He did not, the source tells us, run home. He did not return to Sigyn, his wife, who waited for him in his own hall in Asgard with their two boys.

He did not return to his old places.

He understood, the way a hunted thing understands, that the moment the gods finished their feast at Ægir's hall, they would come for him. So he ran. He ran east.

He ran into the mountains that stand at the edge of the world. He ran into the cold high country where the gods do not often go.

Where the streams are clear and bright, and the rocks are sharp, and the wind moves between the peaks in a constant low hush.

He ran until he could not see Asgard behind him. And then he ran further. And then he stopped. He stopped at a high mountain.

The mountain, Snorri tells us, was crowned by a flat stone shelf, broad enough to build a small hall on.

Below the shelf, the mountain fell away in cliffs on every side.

And in the cliffs below the shelf, the streams that came down off the mountain gathered into a single waterfall. The waterfall of Fránangr, the source calls it.

Which fell in a long white ribbon into a dark pool at the bottom of the cliffs. Loki stopped at the shelf. He built a hall there. He did not build it like a god's hall.

He did not build it for warmth, or for company, or for feasting. He built it for one purpose only. He built it so that he could see who was coming.

He gave the hall four doors, one in each wall, facing the four directions of the world.

From the eastern door he could see the rising sun and the path that came up out of the valley below.

From the western door he could see the setting sun and the place where the wind came down from the high peaks. From the northern door he could see the cold country.

And from the southern door he could see the way that ran back toward Asgard. He sat inside the hall. And he watched. He watched all four doors at once.

He turned, and turned, and turned. He did not, in this part of the story, sleep, or if he slept, the source does not tell us so. He kept the four doors in his eye.

He watched for the gods. And then. When watching exhausted him. He went down to the waterfall. This is the part of the story the old north remembered most clearly.

Loki, who could take many shapes, who had been a mare, and a fly, and an old woman, and a hawk, Loki took the shape of a salmon. The salmon was a careful shape.

A salmon is a thing that lives in a current. A salmon is a thing that knows where to lie in the water so that the moving current itself becomes a hiding place.

So that the very water that should reveal you becomes the shadow that hides you.

A salmon, lying in the dark pool below the waterfall, can be invisible even to a watcher standing two paces away. The light bends. The shadow moves.

The eye loses the fish. Loki, in this part of the story, became that fish. He slipped into the cold water of the pool below Fránangr. He felt the current take him.

He felt his body, his god's body, his trickster's body, become long and silver and dark backed. He felt his breath change to the slow gill breath of a fish.

He felt the cold press against his sides. He felt the rhythm of the current. He lay in the deepest shadow of the pool with the waterfall pounding white above him.

And he waited. He did this every day. He climbed up to the hall in the morning. He sat in the hall and watched the four doors.

When the watching tired him, he went down to the waterfall, and he became the salmon, and he hid in the dark pool until evening. Then he climbed back up.

And he sat in the hall. And he watched again. This was the rhythm of his life now. A god in exile. A god who had said what he could not unsay.

A god who had no friend, no shelter, no hall to return to. He had Sigyn, his wife. She had not left him. But he had nothing else.

And in the evenings, when the watching had not tired him yet, and the salmon shape had not yet pulled at him, Loki did one other thing.

He sat by the small fire in the four doored hall. He took linen thread. And he began to make a net.

This is the part of the story that the modern reader of Snorri finds the strangest.

Loki, the hunted one, the one who knew the gods were coming for him, Loki, with his own hands, in the high mountain hall, invented the first fishing net.

The Eddas are clear about this. Before Loki sat down at his fire and began to twist the linen into knots, there had been no fishing net in the world.

The fishermen of the old north had caught fish with spears, with hooks, with weirs of stone, but they had not caught them with nets.

Loki was the one who thought of the net. Loki was the one who first looked at the pattern that catches a fish. Snorri does not tell us why he was making it.

Snorri tells us only that he made it. We might imagine, in the small space where the source is silent, that he was making it to think with.

That he was making it because that was what his hands wanted to do. That he was making it the way a worried man whittles.

Because the small careful work of the fingers steadies the mind. That he was making it without knowing why.

He sat by the fire, in the high mountain hall, with the four doors open to the four winds, and he wove the first net. He held it up in the firelight. He saw the knots.

He saw the spacing. He saw the way the linen would catch a body sliding through water.

How the gaps in the weave would let the water pass but would catch any living thing wider than a finger. He saw it.

He understood, in the small clear way that craftsmen understand, what he had made.

And in that moment, and this is the moment Snorri preserves with great care, Loki heard something on the wind. The wind was coming from the south.

The wind was bringing the smell of horses. Of riders. Of many feet moving up the mountain at once. The gods were coming. Loki dropped the net into the fire.

He did not have time to hide it. He did not have time to throw it out the door.

He did not have time to do anything but the one small careful thing that, on his very best day, he might have thought of in time. He kicked it into the flames.

The net curled. The net blackened. The net was eaten by the fire. Loki ran for the western door. He ran down the cliff path.

He plunged into the cold pool at the bottom of Fránangr. He took the salmon shape.

And the gods, who had been climbing the mountain for many days, now stood at the threshold of the four doored hall. And the gods walked inside.

And the gods looked around at the empty hall and at the cold seat by the fire and at the four open doors. And the gods, looking down at the small dying fire, saw.

Saw something in the ashes. Something woven. Something with a knot pattern. Something the gods had never seen before in their lives.

Chapter Ten. The Net of Ash. The first god to step into the four doored hall was Kvasir. Kvasir was, in this part of the story, the wisest of the gods.

He had been born from the spittle of the Æsir and Vanir mixed together, in the peace pact that ended their war.

A sign that wisdom comes from the joining of different waters. He was, in some old accounts, the wisest being who had ever lived.

He could look at anything that had been made and understand, simply by looking, what it was for.

He could pick up a piece of carved wood and tell you whose hand had carved it, and why, and to what end. Kvasir walked to the dying fire. He knelt down.

He looked at the ashes. The other gods filled the hall behind him. Þórr came in first, mud on his boots, Mjǫllnir at his hip. Then Óðinn, in his blue cloak.

Then Týr, with his one hand. Then Vidar, silent. Then Heimdallr, whose ears had been the first to hear the salmon shape leap, somewhere far below the cliff. Then Bragi.

Then Freyr. Then the others. They filled the small four doored hall. They stood around Kvasir. Kvasir did not speak for a long time.

Kvasir reached his fingers into the cold ash at the edge of the fire. He drew up a small charred fragment. A curl of black thread with knots in it.

He held it up to the light. He studied it. He turned it over. He looked at the way the knots had been tied. He saw the spacing of the gaps.

He saw the consistent pattern of loops and crossings. And Kvasir said, quietly: he was making something to catch a fish. The gods, behind him, did not understand.

Kvasir said: this is a net. He made a net. The pattern is the pattern of a thing that goes into water, and catches a thing in water, and pulls it out.

He has never made one before. We have never made one before. But this is what it is. He has invented it here, in this hall, while he was waiting for us.

And he was using it, or planning to use it, for himself. Because he is in the water below. He is the thing he was going to catch. The gods understood.

The gods understood, at the same moment, that Loki was in the pool below the waterfall, and that he was in the shape of a fish, and that the tool he had just invented to escape them was the very tool they could use to catch him.

Kvasir said: we will rebuild the net. The gods sat down in the hall. They worked through the rest of the day.

They gathered the burned thread from the fire, what they could rescue.

Where the linen was too charred to use, they replaced it with new linen, copying the knot pattern exactly. They worked by Kvasir's hand and by Kvasir's eye.

Þórr held the cord. Týr, with his one hand, tied. Bragi sat against the wall and watched. Óðinn watched everything. By evening, the net was rebuilt.

It was wider than the burned one. It was stronger. The knots were tighter.

The gods, copying the work of the trickster, had made an improvement on the trickster's own invention. The net was, by now, a god's net.

They carried it down the cliff path. They came to the bank of Fránangr.

The waterfall hammered down above them in the half light, and the pool below it lay deep and dark and shadowed under the cliffs. Loki was in there. The gods knew it.

Loki, in his salmon shape, was lying in some dark stone shadow at the bottom of the pool, holding very still, hoping the gods would not know how to find a thing that did not want to be found.

The gods stretched the net between two of them. They began at one bank. They walked it across the pool. They walked it slowly. They walked it together.

They walked it the way fishermen would walk a net for ten thousand winters after this, in every cold river of the north, because Loki had invented the net here, in this story, and the gods had reconstructed it here, on this evening, and from this evening forward the children of men would know how to take a fish from a river.

The pattern was leaving the world of the gods and entering the world of work. It would not be lost again. The net came across the pool.

Loki, on the bottom, felt the water change. He felt the small currents of the linen passing above him. He felt the shadow of the weave move across the stones.

He felt the gap between knots, a gap small enough to catch a god's body in the shape of a fish, but big enough to let the river itself pass through.

Loki, clever in salmon shape as in god shape, slipped between two stones. He flattened himself. The net passed over him.

The gods, walking it across the pool, felt the net pass cleanly. They drew it up on the far bank. They looked at the empty mesh.

The salmon they had been hunting was not in the net. Kvasir said: he hid between the stones. We need to weight it. They tied stones along the bottom of the net.

They walked it back across the pool.

This time with the weighted bottom dragging along the stone bed of the river, so that nothing could slip between the bottom of the net and the bottom of the pool.

They walked it slowly. They walked it firmly. Loki, on the bottom, felt this too. He understood, in his salmon shape, what the gods had done.

The space between stones was no longer a hiding place. The weighted hem of the net was scraping the stones now, and the river floor itself had become hostile country.

There was only one direction left. Loki gathered himself. He pushed off from the stone bed with his tail.

He shot upward through the water, through the deep dark green of the pool, through the rising columns of bubbles where the waterfall met the surface, through the white foam at the top, and he leapt clear of the water.

He leapt over the net.

He flew through the cold mountain air, his silver body twisting, the spray of the waterfall catching the late light around him, the shadow of his arc falling on the far bank where the gods watched in silence.

And for one moment, in that leap, Loki was the most beautiful thing in the world. And then Þórr stepped forward. Þórr had been waiting for this.

Þórr, who had not joined the netting, who had stood on the far bank with the water around his ankles, who had been ready since the gods first stretched the net, Þórr put out his hand.

He caught the salmon in mid air. The fish was slippery. The fish was twisting with all the strength a god could put into a fish body.

The fish was, for one moment, almost out of his grasp.

But Þórr, and this is the detail Snorri preserves with great care, the detail that became, in the long memory of the north, the explanation for a thing every fisherman knew, Þórr closed his hand around the salmon's tail.

Tightly. Very tightly. He held the salmon by its tail in his fist. And the salmon, Loki, in his shape, could not slip free. Þórr's grip was too strong.

The tail of the salmon, where Þórr's hand crushed it, narrowed to the shape of a god's grip. The flesh thinned. The bones flattened.

The wide flat tail of the salmon, in that moment, was permanently changed.

And from that moment on, Snorri tells us, salmon in every cold river of the world have had narrow tails.

Where Þórr's hand once closed around the trickster who had become a fish to escape him.

Every fisherman who has lifted a salmon and seen the narrow tail of it has been holding, in a small way, the memory of the night the gods caught Loki below Fránangr.

The shape of the fish carries the shape of the catching. The shape of the catching carries the shape of the god's hand. Loki, in Þórr's grip, twisted.

Loki tried to take his god shape back. Loki tried to become the trickster again. But Þórr did not let go.

And the gods, Kvasir, Óðinn, Týr, Vidar, all the rest, gathered on the bank around them. And the gods looked at Loki, who was still half fish in their hands.

And the gods understood that the long story of Loki at the gods' tables, of Loki at the gods' feasts, of Loki in the gods' company, that story was over.

What came next was a different story. What came next was a cave.

Chapter Eleven. The Three Stones. The gods led Loki down the mountain. They led him on foot. They did not put him on a horse. They did not let him walk free.

Þórr held him by the back of the neck. Týr held his arm with the one hand he had. Óðinn walked behind. Vidar walked beside.

The rest of the gods followed in a long quiet line. They led him to a cave. The cave was somewhere in the high country between Asgard and Jǫtunheimr.

A place that does not appear on any of the maps the surviving sources preserve. It was a deep cave, with a low mouth and a wide chamber inside. The gods knew it.

The gods had chosen it. The gods had decided, before they left the river, where they were taking him. They walked him into the cave. The cave was cold.

Three stones stood in the cave. Three large stones, set up in the cave by the gods themselves, before the gods had gone east to look for Loki. The gods had prepared this.

The gods had known, when they left Asgard, what they would do with him when they caught him. The three stones were not random stones.

They were the stones the gods had measured and placed. One stone was set so that it would be under his shoulders. One stone was set so that it would be under his loins.

One stone was set so that it would be under his knees. Loki saw the stones. He understood what they were. He did not, in the surviving sources, speak.

The sources do not preserve any further words of Loki from this moment forward. The Lokasenna had given him his last words at the feast. The capture had been silent.

The binding was silent. Loki, who had talked the gods of the table into rage, who had said every cruel and true thing he had ever held back, had no words for this.

He was, finally, mute. The gods led him to the stones. They laid him down on the three stones. His shoulders on the first stone. His loins on the second.

His knees on the third. He lay across them as if across three altars. Then the gods sent for his sons. His sons were two boys. Their names were Narfi and Váli.

They were the sons of Loki and Sigyn. Sigyn, his wife, who had been waiting for him in Asgard while he sat in the high mountain hall and watched the four doors.

Sigyn had borne them. Sigyn had raised them. They were the only two children Loki had who were also Sigyn's children.

Loki had other children, by other mothers, who were the wolf Fenrir and the World Serpent and the dark goddess Hel. But Narfi and Váli were the boys of his marriage.

They were the boys Sigyn had named. The gods brought them to the cave. This is the part of the story the modern reader of Snorri finds most difficult.

The gods, in the cave, transformed Váli. They turned him into a wolf. How they did this, the source does not tell us.

Whether it was Óðinn's magic, or some older charm, or the work of some god whose name has not been preserved, Snorri does not say. He says only that Váli was turned.

That he was a boy when he entered the cave, and a wolf when he came out of the next breath. That he no longer recognized his father, who lay across the three stones.

That he no longer recognized his brother, who stood beside him. And the wolf Váli, driven by whatever fury the gods had put into him, tore his brother Narfi apart.

The cave became, for a moment, a place no story in the surviving sources matches for darkness. Narfi was killed. The gods watched. Loki, on the stones, did not look.

Or, the sources do not say. We do not know if Loki watched, or if Loki closed his eyes, or if Loki had any choice about whether to watch or not.

We know only that his son was killed. That his son was killed by his other son. That the gods did this to him, and made the killing happen, and did not stop it.

Narfi was dead. The wolf Váli ran out of the cave and disappeared into the world. The gods turned to the body of Narfi. They opened the body.

They drew out Narfi's entrails. And as the entrails left the body, in some old magical way that the source preserves but does not explain, the entrails changed.

They hardened. They became, Snorri tells us, like iron. They were no longer flesh. They were a cord. They were the cord that the gods had needed.

The cord that nothing in the world could break.

The boy Narfi, when he died at his brother's mouth, had become, without consent, without warning, in some terrible alchemy of the old gods, the chain.

The gods took the cord. They tied Loki down with it. They bound him to the three stones. They bound his shoulders to the first. They bound his loins to the second.

They bound his knees to the third. They tied the iron cord around him in many turns. They tied it tight.

They tied it the way you tie a thing you do not want to come loose. When they were finished, Loki could not move. He could lift his head, a little.

He could open and close his eyes. He could turn his face. But his body was held to the three stones by the entrails of his own son.

And he could not, by any strength a god could summon, break free. The gods stepped back. They looked at him. He looked back at them.

His face, the trickster's face, the face that had been at every feast and council of the gods for a thousand years, was, for the first time, blank. Not angry.

Not afraid. Empty. The gods turned. And then Skaði stepped forward.

Skaði, whom Loki had taunted at the feast, whom Loki had reminded that he had killed her father, whom Loki had publicly humiliated by speaking of a private invitation she had once given him, Skaði carried something in her arms.

She carried a snake. It was a large snake. It was a venom snake. The kind that lives in the high cold rocks of Jǫtunheimr.

The kind whose fangs leak a slow burning venom that does not kill but does not stop. Skaði carried it carefully.

She had brought it down from the mountains while the gods were binding Loki. She had been gone, briefly, while the iron cord was being tied.

The gods had not asked her where she was going. Skaði had known. She came to where Loki lay. She fixed the snake above him.

She tied it to the roof of the cave so that its body hung directly over Loki's face. With its mouth open above his eyes. She left it there.

She made sure it could not slip free.

She tied it in such a way that the venom that dripped from its fangs would fall, drop by drop, onto the upturned face of the bound god below. She stepped back.

She did not speak. The Lokasenna had ended with Skaði's prophecy of the rock and the cord. The story, in the cave, had brought Skaði's prophecy to pass.

Skaði had named the binding before it happened. And now Skaði was the one who finished it. She had, Snorri tells us, closed the circle of her father's death.

The gods turned. The gods walked out of the cave.

They left Loki bound to the three stones with the entrails of his son, with the venom snake above him, with the first drop of venom already beginning to gather at the tip of the snake's lower fang.

The gods walked out into the cold mountain air. They did not, the source tells us, look back. Loki was alone in the cave. The first drop fell. It hit him on the forehead.

It burned. Snorri does not tell us in words, but the source preserves the truth of it in what happens next. The venom burned. The pain went all through his body.

He could not move because of the cord. He could not turn his face away because the cord held him too tightly.

He could only feel the venom, and feel the next drop gathering, and feel the wait. He cried out.

He cried out not in words but in the way a god cries out when his face is being burned by venom that he cannot stop. He bucked against the iron cord. He thrashed.

The three stones beneath him held. The cord held. The cave shook around him.

And the earth, far below the cave, in the deep places where the roots of the world drink at the well of Urðr, the earth itself felt his thrashing.

The mountains trembled. The valleys trembled.

The cold rivers of the north, the rivers that come down from the ridges where the gods had walked, felt the shaking of the bound god in the cave and answered with their own shaking.

The first earthquake the world had ever known passed through Midgard.

The first time men in their winter halls had felt the ground itself shudder under them, that first time was Loki, in the cave, thrashing under the venom drop.

And then, and this is the moment the story slows, the moment the cruelty of it bends, just a little, the moment a small soft thing enters the cave, Sigyn arrived.

Sigyn was Loki's wife. Sigyn had not, in the story so far, said one word. The Eddas do not give her speeches. The Eddas do not record her grief.

The Eddas tell us only what Sigyn did. And what Sigyn did, in this hour, was the smallest and the most enormous thing. Sigyn walked into the cave. She carried a bowl.

The bowl was, Snorri does not specify, but the picture is clear in the long Norse tradition that grew around this scene, a small wooden bowl.

The kind a woman uses to wash her hands at the hearth. The kind that has been smoothed by many years of use. Sigyn carried it in both hands.

She walked past the iron cord. She walked past the three stones.

She came to where her husband lay bound, with the venom snake above his face and the burning on his forehead and the cries still in his throat. She knelt beside him.

She raised the bowl. She held it under the snake's open mouth. The next drop of venom fell. It fell into the bowl. It did not fall on Loki.

He turned his face slightly to look at her. He did not, the sources are silent on this, speak. The poem does not give them a conversation.

The poem gives us only the image. Sigyn kneeling beside him. Sigyn holding the bowl above his face. Sigyn catching the venom that the gods had meant to fall on him.

And Sigyn, in the small old picture the Eddas preserve, stayed. She stayed there. She is still there. The Norse cosmology kept Sigyn in that posture.

Sigyn, wife of Loki, mother of the slain Narfi and the wolf Váli, witness of the binding, stays in the cave with her bowl until the end of the world.

The Eddas do not move her. The Eddas leave her there. She stands beside her bound husband, holding the bowl above his face, catching what she can catch.

And when the bowl fills, because the bowl is small, and the snake is large, and the venom is endless, Sigyn must turn and pour the bowl out.

She must walk to the wall of the cave and tip the venom onto the stone. She must walk back.

And in the small space of those steps, when the bowl is no longer over Loki's face, the venom falls on him again. And he thrashes again.

And the earth, far below, shakes again. That is what the Eddas preserve.

That is the picture the old north carried in its head when it lay in winter halls and felt the ground tremble. That is what the old north said an earthquake was.

That is the cosmology the cold north of the long memory gave to the shaking of the earth. Loki, in the cave. The venom on his face. Sigyn turning to empty the bowl.

The world feeling the moment when his face is bare. The gods walked away from the cave. The gods returned to Asgard.

The gods, in the old stories, did not look in on Loki again. The world kept turning. The hall of Ægir grew quiet, and grew empty, and grew dark.

The gods met at other halls. The gold around the walls of other halls glowed. The cups of other halls were filled.

Spring came, and summer came, and autumn came, and winter came. The wheel of the world turned. The gods went on with the work of being gods. And Loki stayed in the cave.

And Sigyn stayed beside him. And the bowl was raised. And the bowl filled. And the bowl was tipped. And the bowl was raised again.

The slow rhythm of a wife's hands in the dark. The slow rhythm of love that has nowhere left to go but service.

The Vǫluspá, the great prophetic poem we have been carrying with us all season, the Vǫluspá tells us, in stanza fifty one, what will end the binding.

The Vǫluspá tells us that there will come a day when Loki tears himself free. The Vǫluspá tells us that day will be the beginning of Ragnarǫk.

The Vǫluspá tells us that when Loki rises from the cave, he will go to the gathering place of the giants, and he will join the wolf his son and the serpent his son, and he will steer the great ship Naglfar, the nail ship, the ship made of the fingernails of dead men, across the sea to fight the gods at the end of all things.

That is what Loki's binding is. A waiting. A holding in place. A wife with a bowl. A husband on three stones. A snake with venom. A world that will, in time, break.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Wolf at the Edge of Time. The story we told you tonight is one of the longest stories in the surviving Norse sources.

It is the story the Lokasenna and the fiftieth chapter of Gylfaginning preserve together.

The story of how a god of the Æsir, a god who had sat at every council of the gods, a god who had walked beside Óðinn at the dawn of the worlds, became the prisoner at the bottom of the cosmos.

The story of how the table broke. The story of how the binding came. The story of how Sigyn became the one who holds the bowl.

It is also, and this is the part the modern reader of the Eddas sometimes misses, the story of the last evening before the world began to count down.

Because the binding of Loki is, in the old Norse cosmology, the beginning of the end. The Norse universe, you remember, has a shape.

The shape is a great tree, and at the foot of the tree there is a well, and beside the well there sit three sisters who weave the fates of every living thing.

The three sisters are Urðr, who is what has been; Verðandi, who is what is becoming; and Skuld, who is what shall be.

The three sisters have been weaving the cloth of the world since the first morning. And the cloth, like all woven things, has an end. The end of the cloth is Ragnarǫk.

We have been telling you, since the first night of this almanac, that the cloth was woven toward Ragnarǫk.

We have shown you the wolf Fenrir, in episode four, being lured onto an island and bound with a silken cord, and biting down on Týr's hand as the gods betrayed him.

We have shown you Skírnir, in another story, riding to Jǫtunheimr to bring back the giant bride for Freyr, and Freyr giving away the sword that he will need at the last battle.

We have shown you Óðinn, the all father, riding the eight legged Sleipnir down to the gate of Hel to interrogate a dead woman about a dream his son had had.

We have shown you Baldr, the most beautiful of the gods, dying on a courtyard in Asgard with a small mistletoe dart in his chest.

We have shown you Hermóðr, riding nine nights into Hel to bring him back, and failing, and returning empty handed.

We have shown you the gods burning Baldr's body on the great ship Hringhorni. And now, tonight, we have shown you the binding.

Each of these stories, the wolf, the sword, the dream, the death, the burning, the binding, is a single step the world has taken toward Ragnarǫk.

The Norse believed the world was not, in this slow late age, in equilibrium. The Norse believed the world was tilting.

The Norse believed that every wrong that was added now to the long sum of the cosmos brought the cosmos closer to the day when the sum would be settled.

The binding of Loki is the deepest of these steps. Because Loki, bound now in the cave with the venom dripping on his face, will not stay bound forever.

The Vǫluspá tells us, in its fifty first stanza, that the day will come when Loki rises.

The day will come when the cord made from his son's entrails will break, and the three stones beneath him will crack, and Loki will walk out of the cave.

The day will come when Loki goes to the eastern shore.

The day will come when Loki finds, waiting for him on the beach, the great ship Naglfar, the ship made from the nails of dead men, the ship the Norse believed was being built quietly through the centuries by the unkempt dead, the ship that would be ready when Ragnarǫk came.

The day will come when Loki, beside his old son the World Serpent and his old son the wolf Fenrir, will sail Naglfar across the sea to meet the gods on the field where the world will be decided.

That is the day Ragnarǫk begins. And the binding tonight, the binding in the cave, the binding to the three stones, is what is keeping that day from happening yet.

Sigyn's bowl is the world's bowl. Every drop of venom Sigyn catches is a day the world has not ended.

Every drop she empties is a moment when Loki thrashes, and the earth shakes, and the world remembers that the binding cannot hold forever.

This is what the old Norse meant by an earthquake. This is what the old Norse meant by the slow turning toward Ragnarǫk.

This is what the old Norse meant when they said the world was running out of time. You and I, dear listener, are living in that running out of time.

The Norse cosmos imagined every age as a slow countdown. The gods locked in their last late years. The world thinning. The long evening before the dark.

The almanac you are listening to tonight is the almanac of those last years. Each episode is a day on the slow calendar. Each story is one more drop in Sigyn's bowl.

We will keep telling you the stories. We will tell you, next time, of Þórr and his great fishing trip with the giant Hymir.

When Þórr and Hymir went out into the open sea and Þórr cast his hook and pulled up, on the end of his line, the World Serpent itself. The great Jǫrmungandr.

His old enemy. The one he is fated to fight at Ragnarǫk. We will tell you of the moment when Þórr raised his hammer to strike the Serpent dead.

And of the moment when Hymir, in fear, cut the line. We will tell you of the Serpent dropping back into the dark sea. We will tell you of the long failed shot.

We will tell you of the way that story, too, is a step closer to the end. That is the story you and I will tell together on Wednesday. But for now.

For now, the cave is dark, and the snake is dripping, and Sigyn is kneeling, and Loki is silent.

The gods have walked away, and the world has turned, and the wind in the cold north is moving over the cave mouth, and Sigyn, patient, faithful, with no other place to go, is holding the bowl.

Goodnight, dear listener. Wherever you are tonight. Whatever bed you are in. Whatever quiet room. Whatever soft pillow you have laid your head on.

Let the picture of Sigyn beside her husband be the last picture you carry into sleep. Not the cruelty of the cave. Not the venom. Not the binding. The bowl.

The hand of a wife above the face of her husband. The slow rhythm of love that has nowhere left to go but service. Let that be what you take with you down into the dark.

Let the wolf at the edge of time wait. Let the great ship Naglfar wait in the cold east. Let Ragnarǫk wait. Tonight there is only the cave, and Sigyn, and the bowl.

And tonight there is only your bed, and your breath, and the room around you growing dark. Sleep.

The Sleeping Almanac will be here on Wednesday with another story from the old north. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday at eight o'clock in the evening.

If the story carried you down into sleep, if Sigyn's bowl was the last picture in your mind before the dark came, leave a quiet small note in the comments.

We read every one. We tell each other, in the morning, who slept. Sleep deeply. Sleep without dreams. And wake into a quieter world. Goodnight, dear listener.

From the long old north. From the cave where the bowl is held. From the almanac that is keeping the slow count. Goodnight.

[Music to sleep by]

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.

Tonight we tell the story of the god who
went fishing for his oldest enemy and

almost killed him.

Of a small wooden boat on the cold sea at
the very edge of the world.

Of a hook baited with the head of an ox.

Of two figures rowing out into water no
boat had ever gone into before.

Of one of those figures, very large, very
tall, sitting in the back with his eyes

on the horizon, knowing what he was about
to do. Of the line that pulled.

Of the head that rose. Of the eye that
opened, and looked back at him.

And of the moment, between the rising of
the head and the falling of the hammer,

when the god in the boat and the great
serpent in the water looked at each other

across the open sea, and each of them
understood that they had been waiting for

this meeting since the world began.

We will tell this story tonight from the
Poetic Edda, where it lives most fully in

a poem called the Hymiskviða, the Lay of
Hymir, which gives us the long version:

the council of the gods, the journey east,
the giant's grandmother with her nine

hundred heads, the giant's mother with her
gold decked arms, the eight cauldrons

that fell from a single look, the meal of
three oxen, the cutting of the line, the

breaking of the goblet, the chase home.

We will draw also on the forty eighth
chapter of Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning,

which preserves the central scene more
compactly, and which gives us the moment we

will return to tonight as the heart of the
story, the moment when Þórr and the

Serpent looked at each other.

And we will draw on a much older skaldic
poem called the Húsdrápa, composed by the

poet Úlfr Uggason in the late tenth
century for the wedding hall of Óláfr the

Peacock in Iceland, which preserves an
independent and older confirmation that this

story was known to the old north long
before Snorri wrote it down.

Where the surviving sources are silent
about what was said or thought or felt in

any given moment, we will tell you we are
imagining, and we will tell you so

clearly. The story is more than old enough
to bear the imagining.

Tonight we go east. To a giant's hall at
the very edge of the world. To a boat.

To a hook.

To the moment the line pulled, and the god
in the boat braced, and the great

serpent rose out of the sea. Settle in.
Let your shoulders drop.

We begin in the hall of the sea giant
Ægir, where the gods are gathered, and where

the question that begins this whole story
is being asked.

Chapter One. The Cauldron That Was Not
There.

The hall of Ægir stood at the edge of the
world.

We have stood in this hall before, dear
listener.

We stood in it not long ago, in the story
of Loki's binding, when the gods had

gathered for a feast that turned cruel.
Tonight's story is older.

Tonight's story takes place before that
night.

Tonight's story is from the time when the
gods still came gladly to Ægir's hall,

when the ale was good and the company was
kind and the world had not yet begun its

long slow tilt toward the end.

Ægir was a jǫtunn, but not the kind of
jǫtunn the gods made war on.

He was a sea giant.

His wife was Rán, who held a net at the
bottom of the sea for the drowned.

His daughters were the waves themselves,
nine of them, each with her own name, each

with her own way of moving across the
water.

Ægir was, of all the giants of the old
north, the one closest to the gods.

He hosted them. He brewed for them.

He kept a hall at the edge of the world
where the gods came to drink and to be glad.

But on this night, the night where our
story begins, Ægir had a problem.

The Æsir had come to him in number. Not
just Óðinn and Þórr. Not just a few.

All of them.

Every god of Asgard had crossed the long
road from the high city and come down to

the sea cliff hall, and they had come
hungry, and they had come thirsty, and they

had come expecting ale.

And Ægir, looking at the size of his
company, and looking at the size of his

brewing cauldron, knew that he could not
brew enough.

He stood among them in his great hall,
with his white hair and his sea grey eyes,

and he said: my friends. I cannot brew for
you all. My cauldron is not large enough.

There is no cauldron in all of Asgard
large enough to brew ale for this company.

Find me a cauldron, and I will brew. Until
then, we drink what little I have.

The gods looked at one another.

Þórr, who had been silent, who was always
silent until the work needed doing,

Þórr said: I will find one. Óðinn looked
at his son.

Óðinn said: where will you find a cauldron
larger than any cauldron in Asgard?

And here a voice spoke up that had not
spoken yet. The voice of Týr.

The one handed god.

The one who had given his right hand to
the wolf Fenrir when no other god would put

a hand into the wolf's mouth, the one who
knew what it was to keep a promise even

when the promise cost you something you
could not get back.

Týr stood up at the long table and said: I
know where such a cauldron is.

The gods turned toward him. Týr said: my
father has one.

A small silence fell across the hall.

Because Týr's father, in this telling, was
not the All father Óðinn.

Týr's father, in this telling, was Hymir.
A giant.

A jǫtunn of the eastern marches, who lived
far across the cold lands where the gods

did not go.

The relation is given to us in the
Hymiskviða, the poem that preserves this story,

and it is a strange relation, Týr, the
one handed god of the gods' war oath,

somehow also being the son of a jǫtunn who
lived in the cold east.

The Eddas elsewhere call Týr a son of
Óðinn.

The Eddas are not always consistent on
these matters.

Tonight, in this poem, in this story,
Týr's father is Hymir.

And Hymir, says Týr, my father, has a
cauldron at the bottom of his hall that is

a full mile deep. He calls it his
brewing vat.

It is the largest cauldron in any of the
worlds.

If we can bring it back to Ægir, the
brewing problem is solved.

The gods looked at one another again. Þórr
looked at Týr. Þórr said: then we go.

And that was the beginning of the journey.

Two figures, the strongest god of Asgard
and the one handed god whose father was a

giant, leaving Ægir's hall at the edge of
the world and turning east.

East, into the cold lands where the jǫtnar
lived.

East, toward a hall on the very edge of
the world where the ice never melted and

the seas were full of things older than
the gods. The hall they were going to.

The hall of Hymir.

Chapter Two. The Journey East. Þórr and
Týr left at dawn.

They did not take Þórr's chariot of goats.
The Hymiskviða does not tell us why.

We can imagine, from what the poem hints,
that this was a journey that required

quiet and not noise, that the chariot of
Þórr, drawn by two great goats with

brass shod hooves, was a thing too loud
for the country they were entering.

Or perhaps Þórr simply wanted, this once,
to walk. The Eddas do not tell us.

We are told only that the two gods set out
on foot, that they crossed the long

plain east of Ægir's hall, and that they
began the slow climb up into the cold high

country where the jǫtnar lived. The land
changed as they walked.

The Æsir country was green.

There were oak and ash, there were rivers,
there were small farms scattered across

the rolling country with little
smoke trails rising from the hearths.

The gods passed these and the small
farmers, who looked up and bowed, and the gods

nodded back, and they kept walking. Then
the green began to thin.

The trees grew shorter. The rivers grew
narrower.

The grass turned silver and brittle. The
wind picked up.

The two gods, walking shoulder to
shoulder, leaned forward against it.

Þórr's red beard whipped behind him. Týr's
cloak filled like a sail.

Then the snow began. Not the gentle snow
of a winter night.

The hard sideways snow of the eastern
wilderness.

The snow that does not fall, that is
hurled across the country by a wind that has

been coming for a thousand years and is
not stopping. Þórr lowered his head.

Týr lowered his. They kept walking. The
land grew rocks. Then more rocks.

Then nothing but rocks. The grass was
gone. The trees were gone.

There were only the long grey ridges of
jǫtunn country, the dark cliffs of stone

that rose around them on every side, the
high passes where the wind came through

like a knife. They climbed for a long
time.

The Hymiskviða does not tell us how long.

The poem moves quickly through this part
of the story.

It tells us that the two gods crossed the
wide country, and that they climbed the

high passes, and that at last they came
down out of a high notch in the stones and

saw, far below them, a great hall standing
alone on a flat shelf of stone above a

cold sea. The hall. It was vast. Larger
than any hall in Asgard.

Larger than any hall the two gods had ever
stood in.

Its roof beams were great whole trees laid
across each other.

Its walls were stone, undressed boulders
fitted together by a hand large enough to

lift them like pebbles. Smoke rose from a
hole in its roof.

Around it, in a wide ring of trampled
snow, the cattle of the giant grazed,

enormous oxen, each one larger than any ox
in any farm in Midgard, their breath

rising in white clouds in the cold air.

And the sea below the hall, that was
Hymir's sea.

The cold edge of the world sea where no
boat from Asgard had ever rowed.

The sea that, somewhere out in its deep,
held the Serpent.

Þórr stood at the top of the notch and
looked down at the hall and the cattle and

the sea. Týr stood beside him. Týr said:
that is my father's hall.

Þórr said: are you ready? Týr said: yes.

And the two gods began their long climb
down toward Hymir's hall.

Chapter Three. The Grandmother and the
Mother.

They entered the hall through its great
open door.

The Hymiskviða gives us, here, one of the
strangest images in all the surviving

Norse poetry.

It tells us that the first person Þórr and
Týr saw inside Hymir's hall was not

Hymir. It was Hymir's mother. Týr's
grandmother.

And she was, the poem says, a thing of
nine hundred heads. Nine hundred.

The poem does not explain. The poem does
not elaborate.

The poem says only that there she was,
sitting at the back of the hall, an old

jǫtunn woman with nine hundred heads, each
of them awful, each of them ancient,

each of them turned toward the door as the
two gods walked in.

Some of the heads were sleeping. Some were
watching.

Some were looking past Þórr and Týr at
nothing at all.

The poem leaves her there as the bare
strange fact of her existence, a creature so

old and so monstrous that the human mind
cannot quite hold her, but who is, all the

same, Týr's own grandmother. Whom Týr has
known. Whom Týr has visited.

Þórr stopped at the threshold. Týr walked
in, and bowed.

The grandmother of nine hundred heads said
nothing.

And then, from another part of the hall, a
different woman stepped forward.

This was Týr's mother.

The Hymiskviða describes her in a single
line, and the line is the small jewel of

this part of the poem. She is, the poem
says, gold decked.

Her arms are bright with gold rings. Her
hair is bright. Her gown is fair.

Her eyes, the poem does not say, but the
poem does not need to say, are kind.

She looked at Týr. She had not seen him in
a long time. She crossed the hall to him.

She did not throw her arms around him. The
poem does not give us that.

The poem gives us only that she came to
him, and stood close to him, and looked at

him for a long moment without speaking,
and then said: my son.

Why have you come here. And Týr answered
her honestly.

He said: we have come to ask your husband
for the cauldron. We need it.

The gods need it. Ægir cannot brew without
it. His mother lowered her head.

She said: your father will not be pleased
to find Æsir in his hall.

Hide behind the great pillar at the back
of the room.

I will speak to him when he comes home.

If he is in a good mood, he will give it
to you.

If he is not, if he is not, I will do
what I can. The two gods understood.

Þórr, the strongest god in Asgard, the
god who had killed more jǫtnar than any

other being in the worlds, the god whose
hammer had cracked the world rocks and

whose anger had shaken the seas, Þórr
crouched down behind a stone pillar at the

back of his enemy's hall, on his enemy's
orders, on his enemy's wife's orders,

because the strangest thing about meeting
a giant in his own hall is that you do

not, even if you are Þórr, simply burst in
shouting. You wait.

You let the mother of the house speak
first. Týr crouched beside him. They waited.

The grandmother of nine hundred heads
watched them from the back of the hall.

She did not, the poem implies, give them
away.

Whether she would have, had Hymir asked
her, the poem does not say.

Chapter Four. The Return of Hymir. He came
home at twilight.

The Hymiskviða gives this scene one of the
most evocative descriptions in the

entire poem. We hear Hymir before we see
him.

We hear his footsteps on the long stone
path that comes down from the high country.

We hear the rattle of frozen branches
being dragged behind him.

We hear his breathing, the slow heavy
breathing of a giant who has walked all day

across the cold east and is now at last
coming home.

The door of the great hall darkened. He
filled the doorway entirely.

He had to bend to come through.

When he stood up inside the hall, his head
almost touched the roof beams, even

though the roof beams were laid across the
hall on poles thick as old oaks.

He was older than Þórr. He was older than
Týr.

He was older than any jǫtunn the gods had
met before. His hair was white.

His beard was white.

And from his beard, the poem says, and
this is the image that the old north loved

enough to repeat, from his beard the ice
fell in cracking pieces as he stepped

into the warmth of the hall. He had been
hunting in the high country.

His beard was so frozen that, as the
warmth of the fire began to touch it, the ice

cracked off in shards and fell to the
stone floor of the hall.

Hymir stood in the middle of the great
chamber and shook off the cold.

He did not, yet, see his guests. Týr's
mother went to him. She kissed him.

She said: husband. There are guests in the
hall. Hymir turned his head.

He looked toward the back of the hall,
toward the great pillar where Þórr and Týr

were crouched.

And then, the poem tells us, and then a
thing happened that the old north

considered, in its memory of giants, one
of the small great miracles of Hymir.

Hymir's gaze fell on the corner of the
room.

His eyes, old, cold, accustomed to the
high country, his eyes simply rested on

the back wall for a moment.

And from the rafters above the pillar
where Þórr and Týr were crouched, eight

cauldrons fell. Cauldrons that had been
hanging there for years.

Cauldrons used for brewing, for boiling,
for storing.

Each one had been fixed to its peg with
iron rings. The iron rings broke.

The cauldrons fell. One after another.
Eight of them.

They struck the stone floor and they
shattered.

The sound was like ice cracking in a deep
winter wood. Hymir had not even glared.

He had merely looked. And the cauldrons
had fallen.

Only one cauldron, the poem tells us,
remained on its peg. The largest one.

The one Týr had spoken of. The one a mile
deep. That cauldron did not fall.

That cauldron, the poem tells us, was made
of metal too good to break.

But the other eight broke. The hall heard
them.

Hymir's wife, Týr's mother, said:
husband. Be kind.

They are our son and his friend. They have
come a long way. Hymir said nothing.

He walked to the back of the hall. He
looked down at the two crouched figures.

He looked at Týr, his own son.

He looked at Þórr, the red bearded god of
Asgard whose hammer had killed more of

Hymir's kin than the giant could count. He
looked for a long moment.

Then he said: very well. He turned to his
wife. He said: slaughter three oxen.

And he went to sit at the head of his long
stone table, and to wait for his dinner.

The gods rose from behind the pillar.

The grandmother of nine hundred heads
watched them rise.

Chapter Five. The Three Oxen. Hymir's wife
brought out the meat.

It was a great deal of meat.

Three whole oxen, slaughtered that
afternoon by Hymir's herdsman, roasted slowly

through the long blue hours of the eastern
dusk on a spit so long it took three

poles to hold it. The smell filled the
hall.

The smell of roasting beef, of fat
dripping into the fire, of charred bones and

rendered tallow.

It is the smell every hall in the long
winter country of the old north must have

smelled like, on a good night, when the
hunt had been kind.

It is the smell of survival in cold
places.

The two gods, sitting at the long stone
table in their enemy's hall, would have

known this smell in their own halls of
Asgard, and would have known it in every

farmhouse and feast hall of Midgard, and
would have known what the smell meant,

that the night was going to be all right.

That whatever the day had cost, the night
would feed you.

That you would sleep on a full belly.
Hymir's wife, Týr's mother, carved.

The Hymiskviða tells us, without any
flourish, just as a small flat fact, that

Þórr ate two of the three oxen at this
meal. Two. Of the three.

The third ox, the one not eaten by Þórr,
was shared between Hymir, Týr, and Týr's

mother.

The fourth person at the table, Þórr, ate twice as much by himself as everyone

else combined. This is, in the old north,
one of the standard jokes about Þórr.

He was the largest of the gods. He needed
enormous amounts of food.

The Eddas tell us elsewhere that he could
empty a giant's mead horn in three

draughts, that he could eat an entire ox
and ask for another.

That his appetite was, in some way, part
of his identity.

Þórr was the god of the labouring people.

Þórr was the god of those who worked the
fields and rowed the boats and needed to

eat enough to keep going.

So the poet of the Hymiskviða, telling us
that Þórr ate two oxen at this meal, was

telling the old north something it already
knew: that Þórr in a strange hall was

Þórr being most himself, eating everything
in front of him with a clean conscience.

But Hymir, sitting at the head of his
long table, watching this happen, was not

amused. Hymir was a hunter. He had been
out all day. He had walked the long miles.

He had brought back the cold game. He had
earned his evening meal.

And now, in his own hall, this red bearded
son of Óðinn was eating two of his three

best oxen in a single sitting. When the
meal was done, Hymir stood up.

He said, slowly, looking at Þórr:
tomorrow, we will not eat what is in my pantry.

Tomorrow we will eat what the sea gives
us.

If we are hungry, we will fish for our
dinner.

If the sea gives us nothing, we will go
to bed hungry. Is this understood.

Þórr said: yes. Hymir said: good.

And he turned and went to his bed at the
back of the hall.

Týr and Þórr stayed at the table. Týr's
mother began to gather the bones.

She did not look at her son. She did not
look at Þórr.

She gathered the bones in silence, one by
one, and dropped them into a great

basket, and carried them away to the back
of the hall where the dogs of the giant

lived. The dogs ate the bones one by one.

Their teeth, the Hymiskviða notes,
without explaining, were as long as a child's

arm.

The cracking of the bones in their jaws
was, for a while, the only sound in the

hall. The fire crackled now and then. The
wind, outside, moved against the shutters.

The dogs ate. The bones broke. The marrow
came out. The dogs swallowed it.

The pile of bones, slowly, became a pile
of nothing.

The grandmother of nine hundred heads, at
the back of the hall, did not eat.

She did not move. She did not speak. Some
of her heads slept. Some of them watched.

The Hymiskviða does not tell us, in any of
its surviving versions, what the

grandmother ate, or whether she ate at
all.

The poem leaves her there as a presence
the listener accepts and does not question.

She was the oldest jǫtunn being in the
hall.

She had been there before Hymir was a
child.

She would, in some way the Eddas do not
explain, still be there long after he was

gone. Some beings, the old north knew, did
not require what other beings required.

The hall went quiet. The fire died down.
Þórr leaned back from the table.

Týr looked at his friend. Týr said: my
father said we are fishing tomorrow.

Þórr said: yes. Týr said: do you know what
he will be hoping to catch.

Þórr looked at him. Þórr said: I have a
guess. Týr said: and if he catches it.

Þórr said: he will not be the one to pull
it in.

The two gods sat in the quiet of Hymir's
hall.

Outside, the cold sea was breathing
against the rocks below the hall.

Somewhere out in that sea, in water so
deep that no light had ever touched its

bottom, the Serpent was sleeping.

The Serpent had been there since the first
day of the world, when Óðinn had thrown

it into the encircling sea. The Serpent
had grown with the world.

The Serpent had wrapped itself around all
the lands of Midgard, biting its own tail

at the eastern horizon, holding the world
together with its own body.

The Serpent was Þórr's old enemy.

The Serpent was the thing Þórr was fated,
at the end of all things, to fight and

kill and be killed by. The Serpent did not
know, that night, what was coming.

The Serpent slept. Þórr did not sleep.

Þórr sat at Hymir's table, in the dying
firelight, and looked out the open door at

the dark sea. And he listened to the sound
of the waves. And he waited for morning.

Chapter Six. The Bait. He went out at
dawn.

The Hymiskviða gives us, here, one of the
simple striking images of the poem.

Þórr, before Hymir had risen, before Týr
had risen, before even Týr's mother had

begun her morning work, Þórr was already
up and outside the hall, walking the long

ridge above the cold sea. He was thinking
about bait.

For the great fish of the deep, Þórr knew,
you do not bait your hook with a worm.

You do not bait it with a small fish.

You bait it with something that the great
fish of the deep will want, something

big enough, something rich enough in blood
and meat, that it will rise up out of

its deep place to take. Þórr looked around
at the country.

He saw the cattle of Hymir grazing in the
high pasture. The cattle were enormous.

Each one as big as a small house. Their
hides were dark and shaggy.

Their breath rose in white clouds in the
cold morning air.

They moved slowly across the snow, pulling
at the brittle grass underneath.

Þórr's eye fell on one of them. The
largest. The black ox at the head of the herd.

Its horns were nearly as tall as Þórr
himself. Its eyes were dark and patient.

The Hymiskviða gives this ox a name, Himinhrjóðr, the heaven tearer, the

heaven render.

The name had come, the old north said,
from some ancient story about the ox having

torn at the sky itself with its horns in
some quarrel of the giants.

The name had stayed with this particular
line of cattle since.

Þórr walked into the pasture. The other
cattle moved away from him.

The black ox Himinhrjóðr, perhaps because
of his name, perhaps because of his

nature, did not move.

He looked at the small red bearded figure
walking toward him across the snow.

He lowered his head, slightly. He did not
run. Þórr came to him.

He put one hand on the ox's neck.

And then, quietly, without ceremony, Þórr broke the ox's neck.

The Hymiskviða does not give us drama
here.

The poem says only that Þórr took the ox
down. The ox did not fight him.

The ox did not have time to. Þórr was
Þórr. The ox was an ox. The thing was done.

Then Þórr, with both hands, tore the ox's
head from its body.

He carried the head back toward the hall.
A whole ox head.

Black furred, enormous, the horns curving
up above Þórr's shoulders as he walked.

Blood ran down his arms.

His red beard, in the morning light, was
the same colour as the blood.

He carried the head as easily as a man
might carry a heavy basket. He did not hurry.

He walked steadily back across the long
snow field toward Hymir's hall.

Hymir was just stepping out the door as
Þórr arrived.

The giant stopped in his tracks. He looked
at Þórr.

He looked at the head of his finest ox,
dangling from Þórr's hand, the eyes still

slightly open, the tongue lolling. The
giant said nothing.

The poem records no words from him.

The poem says only that Hymir's face, old, cold, accustomed to giant country anger

Hymir's face went very still.

The way a man's face goes still when he
has seen, in a moment, more than he had

bargained for in the day ahead of him.
Þórr lifted the head a little.

Þórr said: bait. Hymir looked at him.
Hymir said, finally: get in the boat.

And the two of them walked down to the
cold sea, where Hymir's small fishing boat

was pulled up on the black rocks. Týr came
down behind them.

The poem does not tell us whether Týr came
on the boat or stayed on the shore.

Most of the surviving versions imply he
stayed. The boat, after all, was small.

Two passengers, a god and a giant, was
already a great deal of weight.

Three would have been more than the small
craft could bear.

Þórr put the ox head in the bottom of the
boat. He picked up the oars.

Hymir sat in the back, where the fishing
was done.

He had two long lines, two great iron
hooks.

He had, somewhere out in the deep beyond
the rocks, a place he liked to fish, a

shallow bank where the flat fish came up
at certain tides. He pointed to it.

Þórr pulled at the oars. The boat shot
away from the shore.

Týr stood on the black rocks and watched
them go.

The cold wind blew his cloak straight out
behind him.

The grey sea heaved under the small dark
shape of the boat. Þórr rowed.

Hymir sat in the back. The boat got
smaller. The wind got colder.

Týr stood there for a long time, watching
them, until the boat was a black speck on

the water, and then until even the speck
was gone, and then he stood for a while

longer just looking at the place where the
speck had been.

He did not know, none of them knew, that
morning, what they were going to find

out there.

None of them knew, as the boat pulled out
of sight, that this was the moment the

world began its slow tilt toward Ragnarǫk.

They knew only that a god and a giant had
gone out fishing, and that the cold sea

had taken them, and that the small boat
was now somewhere out in water no one in

this country knew. Týr turned, eventually,
and walked back up to Hymir's hall.

He sat at the long stone table, with his
grandmother of nine hundred heads watching

him from the back of the room, and his
mother working at the hearth, and the cold

wind rattling the door, and he waited for
his friend to come back.

Chapter Seven. The Rowing Out. Þórr rowed.

The Hymiskviða gives this part of the
story in the way the old north's poets did

their best work, quietly, with a small
accumulation of detail, letting the

listener feel the weight of what was
happening rather than telling them.

Hymir, in the back of the boat, was the
giant who had fished these waters since the

world was young. He knew every bank. He
knew every depth.

He knew where the flat fish came up at
certain tides, where the cod gathered in the

cool channels, where the herring ran in
their long silver schools.

He pointed past Þórr's shoulder, toward a
place perhaps a half mile from the shore,

where the cliffs of the giant country
formed a low ledge under the water.

He said: there. The flat fish come there.
We will fish there.

Þórr did not stop rowing. Þórr passed the
half mile mark. The cliffs slipped behind.

The water under the boat got darker.

The bottom, which a fisherman could
often, in shallower water, see as a green

shimmer below the keel, disappeared. The
bottom was now too far down to see.

Hymir said: we have gone far enough. Þórr
kept rowing.

The shore behind them grew smaller.

The cliffs of Hymir's country became a
thin grey line on the horizon.

The sea around the boat became a great
empty grey blue plate of water, with no land

visible in any direction except behind
them, and even behind them, the land was

thinning out. Hymir said: god of Asgard.
We have gone too far. Þórr did not answer.

Þórr rowed. The strokes of his oars were
not human strokes.

The poem does not pretend they were. Þórr
was the strongest of the gods.

When he pulled at the oars, the small boat
did not move the way a small boat

usually moves on a calm sea. The small
boat shot forward.

The water rolled away from the bow in two
long curls.

The wake stretched behind them in a
straight white line as long as a king's hall.

With every stroke of Þórr's oars the boat
leapt forward another length of itself,

and another, and another, and the shore
behind them disappeared into the haze, and

the great grey plate of the sea opened
around them.

The water under the boat changed.

Near the shore, when they had pushed off,
the water had been green grey, with the

green of the kelp beds visible far below.
Then it had darkened.

Then it had become the colour of slate.

Then, as they kept going, it had darkened
again, to the colour of wet iron, to the

colour of old armour, to the colour of
stone left out in winter rain.

And now, somewhere out under them, the
water was a colour the old north did not

have a name for. A blue so dark it was
almost black.

A blue that the eye could not look at for
very long without feeling that something

was being held below it, very still, and
very large.

The sea birds that had followed them out
from the shore, the gulls, the

kittiwakes, the small white birds of the
coast, had thinned out.

Then they had stopped.

The last gull turned back somewhere over
the half mile mark and beat its way back

toward the safe shallows. There were no
birds out here.

There were no birds, because there were no
small fish here for the birds to eat.

There were no small fish here, because no
small fish came this far out.

Only the great things of the deep came out
this far.

And the great things of the deep did not
need air.

They did not need to come to the surface.

They could stay down, far down, in the
long blue dark, and that is where they

stayed. Þórr rowed. Hymir watched the
water.

The Hymiskviða does not give us the
giant's thoughts here, but the poem implies

them by the way his hands moved.

Hymir, sitting in the stern, had his hands
clasped together in his lap.

He kept tightening his grip on one with
the other.

The old joint of his right thumb cracked.

The cracking was the only sound in the
boat besides the small clean noise of Þórr's

oars going in and out of the water and the
long slow breathing of the sea.

Hymir said: stop. Þórr stopped. He let the
oars rest on the gunwales.

The boat drifted in the long slow swell.

The two of them, the god in the bow, the
giant in the stern, the small dark wooden

shape of the boat between them, sat in
the middle of a sea no one in the worlds

had ever seen this far out. The water
around them was the colour of old iron.

The sky above them was the colour of a wet
stone. There was no horizon.

There was no land.

There was only the long grey breathing of
the cold sea, and the small wooden boat,

and the two figures in it, and the
silence.

Hymir said, very quietly: this is the
Serpent's water. Þórr said: I know.

Hymir said: turn the boat. Now. Þórr did
not turn the boat.

Þórr looked over the side, down into the
dark. He could not see the bottom.

The bottom was a hundred fathoms below
them, maybe a thousand, maybe more.

There was no measuring it. The light only
went down so far.

After the light stopped, there was only
the cold and the dark and whatever lived in

it. Þórr said: bait the hooks. Hymir,
after a long moment, did.

Chapter Eight. The Whales. The giant
fished first.

Hymir, in the stern, baited his two great
hooks with whatever giants use for bait,

the poem does not tell us exactly, but the
implication is something not unlike what

a giant would always carry on a fishing
trip: long strips of dried fish, perhaps,

or whole small fish kept in a salt barrel
for just this purpose.

He cast the lines over the side. The hooks
sank away into the dark.

For a long time, there was nothing. The
boat drifted. Hymir watched the lines.

The poem does not give us his thoughts.

The poem gives us only that he sat in the
stern, his old white beard catching the

salt mist, his eyes fixed on the two lines
as they hung down into the water, and

that he waited. Then a tug. Then another.
Hymir's hands tightened on the lines.

He began to pull.

The poem tells us, and this is one of the
small jewels of the Hymiskviða, one of

the moments the old north loved, that
Hymir pulled up, in quick succession, two

whales. Two of them. From a single trip
out to sea. From two casts of his line.

Whales.

Not the kind of whale the men of Midgard
could ever have caught from a small boat,

these were not the great singing
leviathans of the deep ocean, the kind the men of

Norway hunted in their long autumn hunts.

These were smaller whales, porpoises,
perhaps, or pilot whales, the kind that

sometimes came close to a fishing boat on
a calm sea. But two of them. Two.

From a single sitting.

Hymir hauled them, one after another, into
the bottom of the boat.

The bottom of the boat became a sliding
pile of grey blue flesh and dark eyes and

small fins. The whales' breath had
stopped.

Their bodies were warm against the cold
wooden boards.

Hymir looked at Þórr, finally, with
something like satisfaction in his old eyes.

He said: this is fishing. We can go home
now. Þórr looked at the two whales.

Þórr looked at the giant. Þórr said: no.

He picked up the ox head, Himinhrjóðr's
great black head, with the horns still

curving up, the eyes now sunk and grey, and he threaded it onto his own great iron

hook. The hook was thicker around than a
child's wrist.

The ox head, on the hook, looked very
small.

He took up the line, a line as thick as a
ship's rope, twisted from the hair of

many cows, and he stood up in the bow of
the small boat, with the boat rocking

under him, and he swung the baited ox head
once in the air, and twice in the air,

and then he let it go. The ox head sailed
out into the grey distance.

It struck the water with a sound like a
stone falling into a deep well.

The line ran out. It ran out for a long
time.

The line was almost a quarter of a mile
long.

The whole thing went out of the boat, over
the gunwale, down into the dark.

It paid out at speed. The wooden cleats it
ran past whistled with the friction.

The line went on running for so long that
even Hymir, in the stern, sat up and

watched it with attention. Then it
stopped. The hook had reached the deep.

The ox head was sitting on the dark
sea bed somewhere far, far below them, at a

depth no human made line had ever reached.
It was lying on whatever it was lying on.

The sand of the deep. The mud of the deep.

Or, perhaps, the back of the thing the
deep belonged to.

Þórr held the line in his right hand. He
sat down in the bow. He waited.

Chapter Nine. The Pull. Nothing happened.
For a long time. The boat rocked.

The grey sea breathed. The cold wind
pulled at Þórr's beard.

Hymir, in the stern, watched the god in
the bow.

The god in the bow watched the line.

The line led down out of the boat, into
the water, into the dark.

There was no movement on it. Þórr did not
move.

The Hymiskviða is quiet about how long
this took.

The poem gives us, here, a single pause.
The poem says only: he waited.

The skaldic art knew that waiting was a
thing you did not need to belabor.

The listener felt the wait without being
told to.

But we, dear listener, can imagine it.

We can imagine Þórr sitting very still in
the bow of the small boat, with the line

in his right hand and the oars resting on
the gunwales.

We can imagine the long swell of the sea
raising the boat and lowering the boat,

raising it and lowering it, slowly, in a
rhythm older than the world.

We can imagine the small sound of the
water against the planks, the soft slap,

slap, slap of the cold sea against the
small wooden craft.

We can imagine the cold air, moving slowly
past their faces, carrying the smell of

salt and of distance.

We can imagine Hymir, in the stern,
breathing through his nose, his hands still

clasped, his old eyes watching the line
where it disappeared into the dark.

And we can imagine that somewhere far
below the boat, somewhere a long, long way

down, in water cold enough to slow even
the blood of a thing as ancient as the

Serpent, there was, in that moment, a
stirring.

A small movement of an old enormous body
that had been still for a long time.

A turning of an ancient head.

A noticing of something on the dark floor
of the deep that had not been there

before. A small dark shape. Round. Black.
With a piece of iron through it.

The Serpent did not, the old north
imagined, recognize the bait at first.

The Serpent did not know what an ox head
was.

The Serpent did not understand the
difference between an offering and a trick.

The Serpent knew only that something had
appeared on the floor of its deep place,

something with the smell of meat and the
warmth of blood and bone in it, and that

it was small, and that it could be tasted.
The Serpent moved.

In the dark of the deep sea, the great
body of Jǫrmungandr began, slowly, to gather

itself. The vast coils that wrapped the
world began to shift.

The Serpent that bit its own tail at the
eastern horizon let go of its tail, for

one moment, for the first time in many
ages, and turned its head toward the small

dark shape that had appeared on the sand.
The Serpent opened its mouth.

And then, without warning, without
preamble, the line moved. Not a small tug.

Not the gentle pulse of a small fish
nosing a hook.

The line moved as if it had been seized.

As if some thing far below them had taken
the bait into its mouth and turned and

begun to swim. The line, in Þórr's right
hand, jumped. Then it ran.

The remaining slack jumped out of the boat
in a single instant, snapping taut over

the gunwale. The cleats whistled again.

The boat lurched forward, not a small
lurch, the lurch of a small craft being

pulled by a thing larger than it. Hymir,
in the stern, said: gods.

Þórr did not say anything.

Þórr braced his feet against the bottom of
the small boat.

He set his hand on the line. He began to
pull.

This is the moment the old north
remembered.

This is the moment the picture stones at
Altuna and at Ardre and on the Gosforth

Cross all preserved, in different ways,
with the same image, the god of the gods,

in a small boat, his feet braced, hauling
on a line, with the great head of the

Serpent rising in the dark water below
him. Þórr pulled. The line came up.

The thing on the other end of the line
resisted. It was not a small resistance.

It was the resistance of the entire weight
of the sea.

Þórr's arms, which had lifted hammers,
which had broken mountains, which had

thrown jǫtnar into the sky, Þórr's arms
strained against the line.

The cords of his neck stood out. His face
went dark with the effort.

He was not, the poem implies, struggling
because he was weak.

He was struggling because the thing on the
other end of the line was, for the

first time in his life, a thing that did
not want to come up.

A thing that was pulling back.

A thing that, if it had wanted to, could
have pulled Þórr straight out of the boat

and down into the sea. But Þórr was Þórr.
He braced harder.

And as he braced, the Hymiskviða tells us, and the Húsdrápa tells us, in its

older, more dignified way, and Snorri in
Gylfaginning ch. 48 tells us, in the same

language, Þórr's feet went through the
bottom of the boat. Through the planks.

Through the wooden floor of the small
craft.

The pressure of Þórr's bracing pushed his
feet down so hard that the cedar planks

of the bottom of the boat split, and
Þórr's feet went through, and his bare feet,

in their leather sandals, were now planted
not on the boat's bottom but on the very

sea bed below the boat. The cold sea was
rushing up around his ankles.

The small boat was, and the poem does not
bother to say it, because the listener

of the old north would have understood, the small boat was now held above the

water only by Þórr's own braced legs and
the careful balance of his weight.

He was, in effect, standing on the floor
of the sea.

He was, in effect, pulling on a line.

Hymir, in the stern, watched this with
eyes that the poet of the Hymiskviða

specifically described, using the old
Norse word for the fear of a man who has

seen something he should never have seen.
Þórr pulled the line. The line came up.

And then, in the great grey plate of the
sea around the boat, the water began to

lift. Not in a wave. In a slow upward
swell.

As if something enormous, far below, were
rising toward the surface, pushing the

whole weight of the sea upward as it rose.
The water lifted. And then it broke.

Chapter Ten. The Eye. This is the heart of
the story.

This is the moment the old north loved
most about Þórr, more than the killing of

any other jǫtunn, more than the recovery
of Mjǫllnir from the giant Þrymr, more

than any of his other adventures.

This is the moment the Húsdrápa preserved
as worthy of being carved into the wooden

panels of a wedding hall in Iceland in the
late tenth century, long before any of

these tales were written down.

This is the moment Snorri Sturluson, two
hundred years later, put at the centre of

his Prose Edda chapter on Þórr's labours.

This is the moment that exists, in its
long silence, in the picture stones of

Sweden and Gotland and the Isle of Man.

This is the moment the old north could not
let go of. The Serpent rose.

Out of the sea, in front of Þórr's small
boat, the great head of Jǫrmungandr lifted

itself above the water. It was vast.

The old north was very careful, in its
descriptions, about not giving us a number.

The Serpent's head was, bigger than the
boat. Bigger than Hymir's hall.

Bigger, perhaps, than any single thing the
gods had ever stood before.

Its scales were the colour of cold steel.

Its eyes were old, older than the world,
older than the gods.

They had been open since Óðinn had thrown
the Serpent into the sea on the first day

of creation, and they had been open every
day since.

The mouth of the Serpent had closed on
Þórr's hook.

The ox head of Himinhrjóðr was caught
inside the corner of that mouth, the iron

hook hooked through the inside of the
Serpent's lip. The Serpent was caught.

Þórr, standing in the boat with his feet
through the bottom and his legs braced

against the sea floor and his hands
holding the line, Þórr looked up at the great

head. The Serpent looked down at him.

We do not know, the old north said, what
the Serpent saw in that first moment.

The Serpent had never, before this, looked
at a god.

The Serpent had been at the bottom of the
deep since Óðinn had thrown it there.

It had grown there, slowly, generation by
generation.

It had wrapped itself around the lands of
Midgard, biting its own tail.

It had felt the world above it, the
stamping of horses, the building of halls, the

rising and falling of small wars. But it
had not seen these things.

The Serpent had not, until this moment,
opened its eye and looked at a god.

Now it did.

The eye was, the old north said, in many
different ways across many different

sources, green. Cold green.

The green of ice that has been under the
sea for a long time.

The green of the deep aurora that hangs
above the northern country in winter.

The green of certain old stones that have
been polished by the long working of

water. The pupil of the eye was vertical.
Like a snake's pupil.

Long and dark and very still.

And in that pupil, for the small moment
they were holding each other, Þórr saw,

perhaps, the long dark of every place the
Serpent had ever been.

The cold lightless trench at the bottom of
the encircling sea.

The great slow turnings of the Serpent's
body around the lands of men.

The long old waiting of an enormous mind
that had nothing to do but wait.

Þórr saw, perhaps, his own future.

The day at the end of the world when this
eye would be the last thing he would ever

see. And the Serpent saw, perhaps, what
Þórr was. A small red bearded god in a boat.

A hammer in his hand.

The thing that was, in the very far
distance, going to kill it.

The moment, in the actual time of the
world, did not last long. The eye opens.

The eye closes. The water rolls. The boat
rocks.

The line trembles in the god's hand.

By any honest measurement of time, the
looking lasted only as long as it takes a

person to draw one slow breath. Perhaps
two. Perhaps three.

The Hymiskviða does not measure it. The
Gylfaginning does not measure it.

The Húsdrápa does not measure it.

The picture stones at Altuna and Ardre and
the Gosforth Cross do not measure it

either, they freeze it, the way a piece
of carved stone is meant to freeze a thing.

But the moment, in the way the old north
measured the things that mattered, was

longer than that.

The moment, in the way the old north
measured these things, was long enough to

contain a kind of recognition that does
not happen in human time.

The Serpent had been alive since the first
morning.

The Serpent had been at the bottom of the
encircling sea for as long as there had

been a sea.

And in all of that time, in the long deep
dark of the bottom of the world, the

Serpent had never, until this moment,
looked into the face of the being who was

going to kill it. Now it had.

And Þórr, who had killed many giants, who
had broken many of the great old enemies

of the gods, who had taken Mjǫllnir in his
hand more times than even he could

remember, Þórr had never, until this
moment, looked into the face of the being who

was going to kill him. Now he had.

Each of them, for the small space of three
breaths, knew the face of the other.

The Serpent learned what Þórr looked like
at close range, the red beard, the

strong square jaw, the dark eyes set deep
under the heavy brow.

The shape of the man who would, at the end
of the world, swing the hammer that

would end the Serpent's life. The Serpent
looked at this man as if to memorize him.

As if the Serpent, sinking back into its
deep place after this was done, would

carry the image of Þórr down with it, and
would keep it for the long thousand years

between this looking and the next looking,
and would hold it ready for the day the

two of them would meet again. And Þórr
looked at the Serpent the same way.

He looked at the great cold green eye.

He looked at the scales the colour of old
armour.

He looked at the long terrible body that
he could see, in pieces, where the

Serpent's coils broke the surface of the
water in different places around the boat.

He looked at the thing that was, in the
very far distance of the cosmos, at the

end of all of time, going to spit its
venom across half the sky and kill him.

He looked at it without fear. The old
north was very careful to insist on this.

The old north did not give us a Þórr who
was afraid in this moment.

The Hymiskviða does not give us a Þórr who
flinched.

The Gylfaginning does not give us a Þórr
who hesitated.

The picture stones do not show a Þórr who
looks worried.

The old north gave us a Þórr who looked at
the Serpent the way a man looks at a

thing he has been waiting to meet for a
long time. With curiosity. With patience.

With the small steadiness of a being who
knew what was coming and was, in some

quiet way, glad to have seen it once
before the end.

The old north was very careful, here, with
what it said.

The poem does not tell us what the Serpent
was thinking.

The poem does not tell us what Þórr was
thinking.

The poem tells us only that the two of
them looked at each other.

For one long moment, in the middle of the
grey sea, at the edge of the world, the

great green eye of the Serpent and the
small dark eyes of the god rested on each

other. They had been waiting for this
meeting since the first day of the world.

They had known, both of them, that it was
coming.

They had known it in the way the very old
things know what is going to happen, not

as a thought, not as a plan, but as a
certainty in the bones.

They were, the two of them, fated to fight
each other at the end of all things.

They had been fated to it since they were
both made. The Vǫluspá knew this.

The skalds knew this. The picture stones
knew this.

But the end of all things was not yet.

The end of all things was, the old north
believed, still many slow generations away.

Naglfar, the ship made of the fingernails
of dead men, was still being built

quietly by the slow work of the unkempt
dead. The world was still turning.

The cloth of fate, woven by the three
sisters at the foot of Yggdrasil, was still

being woven. It was not yet time.

But it was, the Serpent and the god both
understood, looking at each other across

the cold grey water, it was, in some way,
time enough to know each other's faces.

To see, once, the shape of what was
coming.

To learn the eye that, at the end of all
things, would be the last eye each of them

would see. Þórr did not strike yet. The
Serpent did not pull yet.

The two of them, the god and the worm, held each other in their gaze for the

small space of time that, in the old
north's memory, was the only space of time in

all the long histories of the gods when
these two old enemies actually saw each

other clearly.

Then Þórr, slowly, carefully,
deliberately, reached for the hammer at his belt.

He drew Mjǫllnir. He raised it. He brought
it back.

He was about to bring it down on the head
of the Serpent and end, three thousand

years before it was supposed to end, the
slow countdown of the world toward

Ragnarǫk.

And in the stern of the boat, the part of
this story the old north loved most, the

part that gave Hymir his place in the long
memory of the north, in the stern of

the boat, Hymir the giant, who had brought
the god out here, who had watched all of

this happen, who had spent his whole long
life on the cold sea and knew what the

Serpent was, Hymir reached for the small
knife at his belt. And cut the line.

Chapter Eleven. The Cut. The line went
slack. Þórr's hammer was already coming down.

The Hymiskviða gives us this part of the
story in a strange, almost stuttering

rhythm, as if the poet himself, in the
long act of telling, could not quite decide

what to put first. The hammer falling. The
line going slack.

The Serpent falling away. The god's roar.

What the poem agrees on, in every
surviving version, is this: The line was cut.

The Serpent, freed from the hook, began to
fall away from the surface of the sea,

back into the deep. Slowly, at first. The
great head sinking. The neck following.

The vast body, somewhere far down,
beginning to gather itself for the descent.

Þórr's hammer reached the place where the
Serpent's head had been.

In Hymiskviða stanza twenty three, the
poet says: the hammer struck.

The hammer caught the Serpent on the side
of the head as it sank.

The blow was so strong that the rocks of
the eastern shore, far, far behind them,

miles back at the edge of Hymir's country, the rocks were said to have cracked.

In Gylfaginning chapter forty eight,
Snorri Sturluson is more careful.

Snorri says: many men say Þórr struck the
head off the Serpent there in the deep.

But it is more true to tell, Snorri says,
that the Serpent lives still, and lies in

the encircling sea.

The two versions do not, in the long view,
contradict each other.

The Hymiskviða tells us what Þórr's hammer
did to a thing that the Serpent could

put on as a face and then take off, the
way the old north imagined the great

immortal beings could do.

The Gylfaginning tells us what the Serpent
really was, underneath. Þórr struck.

Þórr struck hard enough to crack the rocks
of the coast.

But the Serpent, because the Serpent was
the Serpent, fell back into its deep

place and went on living, the way the
Serpent had lived since before the gods were

named. The hook was lost. The bait was
lost. The line was lost.

The Serpent was gone.

Þórr stood in the boat with his feet
through the bottom and his hammer in his hand

and the foam of the broken sea still
spraying around him, and he turned, slowly,

and looked at Hymir.

Hymir was sitting in the stern of the boat
with the small knife still in his hand.

The two of them looked at each other.

Þórr, the Hymiskviða tells us, very
quietly, Þórr did not say anything.

Þórr reached across the small boat with
his left hand, and he took Hymir by the

front of his frozen white beard, and he
lifted Hymir off the bench, and he held the

giant in the air for one moment over the
side of the boat, and then he opened his

hand. Hymir went into the cold sea. He
came up sputtering. He swam.

He swam for the shore, the long miles of
the shore, with his great white beard

streaming behind him in the cold water,
with his old eyes squinting against the

salt, with his ancient giant's body
labouring against the cold of the sea he had

fished all his life. Þórr, in the boat,
sat down. He took the oars again.

He looked once more at the place where the
Serpent had been.

The water there was still rolling, the
great swell of the Serpent's descent was

still settling itself.

The two whales Hymir had caught, slid into
the bottom of the boat, were rolling

among Þórr's feet.

The boat, despite the holes in its bottom,
was somehow staying afloat.

The poem does not explain why. The old
north did not always explain. Þórr rowed.

He rowed back to Hymir's country.

He overtook Hymir in the water, the giant
swimming, the god in the boat, and he

passed him without looking down. He pulled
the small boat up onto the black rocks.

He stepped out.

He picked up the two whales, each one as
long as Þórr was tall, and he carried

them, one under each arm, up the long path
toward Hymir's hall. Týr was at the door.

Týr looked at his friend. Týr said: what
happened. Þórr said: I had him.

Your father cut the line. Týr said: oh.
Týr said: did you kill him.

Þórr said: not all of him.

The two of them stood together at the door
of the giant's hall, with the two dead

whales at Þórr's feet, and the cold wind
blowing past them, and the small distant

shape of Hymir still swimming for shore
far out on the grey sea behind them.

The cauldron, the poem reminds us, almost
as an afterthought, almost embarrassed

at having to remember it, the cauldron
was still inside.

The thing they had come for. The thing
this whole journey had been about.

The mile deep brewing vat that Ægir needed
to make ale for the gods.

Þórr and Týr went inside the hall.

The grandmother of nine hundred heads was
still watching from the back.

Týr's mother was at the hearth. She looked
up at her son. She looked at Þórr.

She looked at the white salt drying in
Þórr's beard.

She had heard, the poem implies, what had
happened on the water.

She had heard the crack of the eastern
shore. She had felt the boat coming back.

She said, very quietly: he will be angry
when he gets home.

Þórr said: we will be gone by then.

He walked to the great pillar at the back
of the hall, where the largest cauldron

in the worlds had hung since before the
giant himself was a child. He lifted it.

He set it on his head, upside down, the
way men of the old north carried great

vessels, and the rim of it came down over
his shoulders and rested there, and the

depth of it went up into the air above him
like a great metal tower. He turned.

He walked to the door of the hall. Týr
walked beside him.

Týr's mother watched them go.

The grandmother of nine hundred heads, in
the back of the hall, watched them too.

None of her nine hundred faces moved.

The poem does not tell us whether she
might, at the end, have wished her grandson

well. The poem does not tell us much about
her at all.

It only tells us that she watched them go,
and that they did not look back, and

that the great hall of Hymir was the last
thing they saw of the eastern country

before the snow closed in behind them and
they were on the long road home.

Hymir, the Hymiskviða tells us, came home
to a hall with no cauldron and no Þórr

and no Týr.

He stood in his empty hall for a long
moment, the cold sea water still dripping

from his white beard, his old eyes moving
from the broken hook on the pillar to the

empty space where the largest cauldron in
the worlds had hung since before he was a

child, to the still warm hearth where his
wife had cooked the three oxen the night

before. He understood, slowly, what had
happened.

He understood what the eating of the two
oxen had been.

He understood what the rowing out had
been.

He understood that the red bearded god of
Asgard had not, in any of the moments of

this whole long visit, been there for
fishing. Hymir went to the door of his hall.

He called.

The Hymiskviða tells us he raised a small
army of his giant kin, the cousins and

brothers and grown sons of the eastern
country, the jǫtnar who lived in the high

cold valleys around Hymir's hall, and he
led them in pursuit.

They came down out of the mountains in a
long ragged line.

Each one carried whatever weapon he had to
hand. Some of them carried iron clubs.

Some of them carried axes.

Some of them carried only their own
enormous hands, which for a giant of the

eastern country are weapon enough.

Þórr, on the long road west with the
cauldron on his head and Týr at his side,

heard them coming. He set down the
cauldron. He turned. He took up Mjǫllnir.

The Hymiskviða does this part of the story
briefly, not, perhaps, because the

killings did not matter to the poet, but
because the poet knew the listener had

already had the central scene. The hammer
falling on the Serpent.

The eye looking up at the god. The line
being cut. Those were the moments.

The rest was the long walk home with a
borrowed cauldron and, after the walk had

been briefly interrupted, a hammer red
with new blood. The pursuit was a coda.

The killings were a postscript.

They happened, Þórr killed every one of
the giants who came against him on that

road, but they happened the way the
closing of a feast happens, when the wine has

been poured and the great speeches have
been given and what is left is simply the

small clearing of the table.

When it was over, Þórr lifted the cauldron
back onto his head and Týr walked beside

him and the two of them went on west. They
walked through the long grey afternoon.

They walked through the cold evening. They
walked through the night.

They came at last to Ægir's hall in the
dim before dawn, with the cauldron still on

Þórr's head, with the snow of the eastern
country still in their cloaks, with the

salt of the cold sea still drying in
Þórr's beard.

Þórr set the cauldron down at the door of
the hall. Ægir came out to meet them.

The sea giant, calm, old, white haired,
glad, looked at the great vessel his hall

would now be able to brew in, and he
looked at the two gods who had brought it to

him, and he understood, without their
having to tell him, that the journey had not

been only a journey for a cauldron. He
looked at Þórr.

He looked at the small distance that was
now in Þórr's eyes that had not been there

when Þórr had left.

He understood that Þórr had been somewhere
a god does not often go.

That Þórr had seen something that not many
beings in the worlds had seen.

Ægir said: come in. You will tell me what
you saw. And Ægir brewed.

And the gods drank.

And the story of the fishing trip, the
Hymiskviða tells us, became one of the

stories the gods of Asgard told each other
in their cups for a very long time

afterward. The great head rising. The eye
looking up at the god. The line being cut.

The small mercy of an old giant in the
back of a boat, who at the last moment lost

his nerve and saved the world from ending
three thousand years too early.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Wolf at
the Edge of Time.

The story we told you tonight is one of
the simplest in the old north.

A god went fishing. A giant went with him.
A serpent rose to the bait.

The line was cut. The serpent fell back
into the sea. That is all.

There is no death in the central scene.
There is no marriage. There is no betrayal.

There is no transformation.

There is only a boat, and a hook, and the
great head of an old enemy rising in

front of the god who would, at the end of
all things, be the one to kill him.

But the old north loved this story.

The old north loved it more than it loved
most of the other Þórr stories.

It carved it into wedding halls. It
painted it on picture stones.

It told it in long winter halls and short
summer nights, in Iceland and Norway and

Sweden and the Isle of Man.

The poet of the Hymiskviða gave it
thirty nine careful stanzas.

Snorri Sturluson gave it a full chapter.

The Húsdrápa, the older skaldic poem,
lingered over it.

The old north loved this story because of
what almost happened.

Because, for one moment, in the boat on
the grey sea, the god of the gods had the

Serpent on the line. Had Mjǫllnir in his
hand.

Had the bracing of his own feet against
the sea floor. Could have struck.

Could have ended, three thousand years
before it was supposed to end, the slow

countdown of the world toward Ragnarǫk.
And was prevented. By a giant.

By an old giant, sitting in the back of a
boat, who had brought the god out here in

the first place and watched the whole
thing happen and at the very last moment lost

his nerve. Hymir was not, in the end, a
great villain.

Hymir was a hunter at the edge of the
world, who had spent his life respecting the

Serpent's water and not going into it, and
who, when the red bearded god of Asgard

had finally pulled the Serpent up out of
its deep place, had done what any creature

near the bottom of the food chain of the
worlds will do when faced with a thing

that big, he had cut the line. The
Serpent went back into its deep place.

The Serpent is still there.

The Vǫluspá tells us, in its long Ragnarǫk
vision, what will happen the day the

Serpent comes out for the last time.

The Vǫluspá tells us that on the day
Ragnarǫk begins, on the day Loki tears

himself free of the cave and the great
ship Naglfar comes loose and the wolf

Fenrir's bonds break, on that day, the
Serpent will rise out of the encircling sea.

The Serpent will come on shore.

The Serpent will go to meet Þórr at the
field where the world will be decided.

The Serpent will spit its venom across
half the sky. Þórr will kill it.

Þórr will take nine steps. And then Þórr
will fall.

That is how the meeting between the two of
them ends. Not in the boat tonight.

In a field, at the end of the world, three
thousand years from where we are sitting.

Tonight is only the first meeting. Tonight
is only the introduction.

The looking into each other's eyes. The
learning of the face.

Tonight is the practice for the day that
will be the last day.

This is, in some quiet way, what the old
north was telling itself when it carved

this story into the picture stones at
Altuna and Ardre and the Gosforth Cross.

The old north was saying: the great
endings of the world do not arrive all at once.

They are practiced. They are rehearsed.

They are met halfway, in a small boat on a
grey sea, by the same two beings who

will meet for real at the end. The world
ends slowly.

The world has many small almost endings
before the real one.

The Serpent has risen before. The hammer
has been raised before.

The line has been cut before, by an old
giant in the back of a boat who lost his

nerve at the last moment. The carvers of
the picture stones knew this.

The picture stone at Altuna, in Sweden,
shows Þórr in a small boat with his feet

through the bottom and his hammer raised,
the great Serpent rising out of the water

below him. The carver placed Þórr and the
Serpent at the centre of the stone.

Everything else on the stone, the small
surrounding decorations, the runes, the

borders, radiates out from this central
image.

The carver knew, in the eleventh century
when he made the stone, that this was the

moment to put at the centre. Not the
killing. Not the binding. Not the death.

The almost. The looking. The recognition.

The picture stones at Ardre, on the
Swedish island of Gotland, do the same.

So does the Gosforth Cross, in northern
England, carved by Norse settlers in the

tenth century.

So does a stone fragment at Hørdum, in
Denmark, that shows Þórr's foot going

through the boat's planking with a kind of
awkward energy that only an artist who

knew the story could have managed.

Across thousands of miles, across two
centuries, the old Norse carvers and the old

Norse listeners kept returning to this
single image. The boat. The line. The eye.

The hammer raised but not yet falling. It
was the image of the moment before.

And we, the listeners of the old north, and we, dear listener, tonight, sit

between the almost endings and the real
one.

We do not know how many more times the
Serpent will rise before the last time.

We know only that, every time it has risen
so far, something has happened to send

it back. A line cut. A giant's hand on a
knife.

A small mercy in the middle of a great
fated story. That is what tonight's story is.

A small mercy. A line cut. A few thousand
more years of the world.

We will tell you, next time, of the great
hammer Mjǫllnir, and of the day it was

stolen from Þórr by a king of the giants
named Þrymr, and of the strange thing the

gods of Asgard had to do to get it back.
Of a wedding. Of a veil.

Of a god who had to put on a bride's gown
and ride east in a borrowed wagon to a

hall where his hammer was waiting on a
pillow.

We will tell you that story on Wednesday.
But for now.

For now, the boat is back on the black
rocks. The cauldron is on its way to Ægir.

The Serpent is in its deep place, asleep
again, with the old bait still in the

corner of its mouth and the cold water
closing back over its head.

Hymir is wringing out his beard on the
shore. Týr is at his father's door.

Þórr is walking the long road west with
the cauldron on his head and a small

private smile under his red beard. The
world has another few thousand years.

The wolf at the edge of time waits. The
great ship Naglfar is still being built.

Ragnarǫk is still far away.

Tonight there is only the cold sea, and
the small boat, and the moment two old

enemies looked at each other across the
open water and recognized, for the first

time, the face of the one they were
waiting for. Goodnight, dear listener.

Wherever you are tonight. Whatever bed you
are in. Whatever quiet room.

Whatever soft pillow you have laid your
head on.

Let the picture of the god and the serpent
be the last picture you carry into sleep.

Not the violence of the hammer. Not the
cutting of the line. The looking.

The seeing. The recognition.

The small space of stillness, in the
middle of a grey sea at the edge of the world,

when two beings who had been waiting for
each other since the first morning finally

met.

And both of them, perhaps, were a little
glad to have seen each other once before

the end. Let the wolf at the edge of time
wait.

Let the great ship Naglfar wait in the
cold east. Let Ragnarǫk wait.

Tonight there is only the boat, and the
line, and the sea, and the goodnight.

And tonight there is only your bed, and
your breath, and the room around you

growing dark. Sleep.

The Sleeping Almanac will be here on
Wednesday with another story from the old

north. New episodes every Wednesday and
Sunday at eight o'clock in the evening.

If the story carried you down into sleep,
if the picture of the god and the serpent

was the last thing you saw before the dark
came, leave a quiet small note in the

comments. We read every one. We tell each
other, in the morning, who slept.

Sleep deeply. Sleep without dreams. And
wake into a quieter world.

Goodnight, dear listener. From the long
old north. From the boat on the cold sea.

From the almanac that is keeping the slow
count. Goodnight.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.

Tonight, the strangest thing the gods of
Asgard ever did.

The day they dressed Thor, the strongest god in the worlds, the storm god, the wielder of the great hammer Mjölnir

they dressed him as a bride.

They put a veil on his face, a gown on his shoulders, the bride's keys at his belt, and the great gold necklace of Freyja

the goddess of love, at his throat, and they rode him east in his own goat chariot to a giant's wedding feast in the cold country across the world where the hammer that had been stolen from him eight nights before was waiting on a pillow.

We will tell the story tonight from the Thrymskvida, the Lay of Thrymr, the last and strangest of the great Thor poems preserved in the Codex Regius.

There is a verse in the Havamal, the wisdom poem of the Old North, that says, "Praise the day at evening.

Praise the woman after she is buried.

Praise the weapon when it has been tried."

Tonight, by the time the story is done,
Mjölnir will be tried.

Settle in.

Let your shoulders drop.

We begin on the morning the hammer
disappeared.

Chapter one.

The empty pillow.

Thor woke at dawn.

The Thrymskvidha does not tell us exactly what dawn it was or what season of the year.

We can imagine from the small details the poem gives us that it was an early summer dawn

that the long gray light of the eastern sky was already pale, that the goats in the yard outside Thor's hall were already stirring

that the small birds of Asgard were beginning their first careful calls in the trees of Idavoll.

We can imagine that Thor's wife, Sif, the one with hair of gold, was still asleep beside him.

We can imagine the slow, steady rhythm of
her breathing in the early light.

We can imagine that the hall around them
was very still.

Thor opened his eyes.

He reached the way he always reached on waking to his right side, to the place on the floor beside his bed where he kept Mjolnir

the hammer that the dwarves Eitri and Brokkr had forged for him in the great forging contest of long ago

the hammer that had cracked the heads of giants, the hammer that had broken the rocks of the world rim

the hammer that had been at his side every night since the day it had been given to him.

His hand closed on nothing.

The floor was empty.

There was no haft.

There was no head.

There was no leather thong.

There was no oil cloth wrapped around the
great iron weight.

There was only the dust of the floor and
the cold morning air against his palm.

Thor sat up.

He sat up very slowly.

The Thrymskvidha gives us this moment with
its rare gift for the quiet detail.

The poem tells us that Thor, who had killed more giants than any other being in the worlds

Thor the strongest of the gods, Thor who had pulled the world serpent up out of the deep

Thor in this moment did not roar, did not
curse, did not strike out.

The poem says only that he sat up and that he looked at the floor and that his beard shook.

His beard shook.

That is the line the Thrymskvidha gives
us.

In the old language, the line is, "Skegg nam að hrista, skör nam að dæja." His beard began to shake.

His hair began to tremble.

Not because he was afraid.

Thor did not get afraid.

The trembling the old North understood was the small physical sign of the anger that was beginning very slowly in the center of Thor's chest

like a small fire being lit somewhere deep
that would burn slowly outward and that

if it was not contained, would burn the
whole world.

Thor's beard shook.

He stood up.

He did not wake Sif.

He moved very quietly, the poem tells us,
around the bed, looking on every side.

He looked under the bed.

He looked behind the wall hangings.

He looked in the corners of the room.

He looked in the small chests of his
clothes.

He looked in the high rafters above the
bed.

He looked everywhere a hammer might have been mislaid by a tired man at the end of a long day.

He did this very thoroughly, very slowly, very carefully, even though he knew, and the poem implies that he knew

that Mjollnir was not in the room.

Mjollnir, the poem implies, was not in the
hall at all.

Mjollnir, the poem implies, was not in
Asgard.

Mjollnir was somewhere else.

Thor finished his search.

He stood for a long moment in the center of his own bedroom in the dim gray early morning light with the chest still open behind him and the wall hanging still pulled aside

and he looked at the place beside the bed
where his hammer had always been.

The dust on the floor was undisturbed.

That was the strange thing.

That was the thing the Thrymskvidha does
not say but implies.

The dust on the floor was undisturbed.

There was no scuff mark of a thief's foot.

There was no print of a hand.

There was no track of a sliding object.

The hammer had not been pulled away.

The hammer had not been dragged.

The hammer had not been picked up by hands
that had crossed the room from any door.

The hammer had simply, sometime in the
night, ceased to be where it had been.

That was a kind of theft, Thor understood, that very few beings in the worlds could perform.

That was the theft of a being who could reach into a god's bedroom from somewhere else and take a hammer out of its place and leave the dust undisturbed.

Thor knew, in that moment, that he had a
problem.

He went to find Loki.

He did not wake Sif.

He did not call for his servants.

He did not yet, the poem implies, tell
anyone in his own hall what had happened.

He walked out the door of his bedroom, down the long hall of his house, across the small dawn courtyard outside his hall

where the goats were beginning to bleat for their morning feed, and across the long open road that led between the gods' halls in Asgard

and he went directly to the door of the only being in the worlds who would know what to do

Loki.

Loki, who had been there at the forging of
the hammer.

Loki, who had been there at every clever
thing the gods had ever done.

Loki, who, when a thing was lost, was the only being in Asgard who would think to ask the right questions about who might have taken it.

Loki, who in his own way, even though Loki was the one who would eventually be the cause of the ending of all things

Loki was also, in the long old North, the one being who could be relied on to find a thing that had gone missing.

Thor arrived at Loki's door.

He did not knock.

He pushed the door open and walked into
Loki's hall.

Loki was already awake.

Loki, the poem implies with the small smile of a poet who knows his characters, Loki was already awake because Loki was always already awake.

Loki slept lightly.

Loki kept odd hours.

Loki, in the dawn, was usually already sitting somewhere with a cup of something warm in his hands

watching the morning come on.

He had eyes the color of cold water.

He had a thin face.

He had a small smile that did not quite
reach his eyes.

Loki looked up when Thor came in.

He saw Thor's beard still shaking.

He set down his cup very carefully, and he
stood up.

He said, "What has happened?" Thor said, "My hammer is gone." The Thrymskvidha gives us

in this moment, one of its small jewels.

Loki, who could be many things and who was many things and who would in the end be the betrayer of all things

Loki, in this single moment, was Thor's
friend.

The poem records no laughter, no quick
remark, no quip.

The poem records only that Loki, hearing what Thor had to say, understood immediately.

Loki said, "Come with me." And the two of them, the god of thunder with his beard still trembling and the trickster of Asgard with his cold eyes very calm and very focused

the two of them walked out of Loki's hall together and across the dawn road and toward the hall of Freyja.

Because Loki, the poem implies, had already begun to work the problem, and Loki, the poem implies

knew exactly what the first move had to
be.

Chapter two, The Borrowed Wings.

Freyja was awake.

The poem does not tell us how she knew the
two gods were coming.

We can imagine, in the way the old North imagined these things, that Freyja, who was the goddess of love and of fertility and of war and of magic

who was a Vanir goddess older than the Aesir, who saw a great many things that other gods did not see

that Freyja had simply, on some morning instinct, felt that two of her colleagues were on their way to her door.

She was at the threshold of her hall when
they arrived.

The Thrymskvidha describes her in a single image, and the image is the small precious detail of this part of the poem.

She is, the poem says, wearing the great necklace, Brisingamen, the necklace of fire, a necklace whose origin the Thrymskvidha does not tell us

though later tellings in other later poems would give the necklace a long strange story of its own.

The Thrymskvidha tells us only that the necklace was Freyja's, that she wore it every day

that it was the most beautiful object in
any of the worlds.

Around her throat, the four small dwarf stones of it catching the dawn light, her hair fell loose.

Her gown was the color of wheat grain just
before harvest.

She looked at Thor.

She looked at Loki.

She said, What is wrong?

Loki spoke.

Thor, the poem implies, was not yet
capable of words.

Thor was still in the small slow burning
rage of a god who had lost his hammer.

Loki spoke for him.

Loki said, Freyja, lend us your feather
cloak.

The poem moves quickly here, and we will move with it, but let us first explain the cloak

because the cloak is the thing this whole
chapter turns on.

Freyja owned a great feather cloak.

The poem calls it a fjedurhamar, a feather skin, but the meaning is more specific than that.

The cloak was a falcon skin, a magical garment that, when a being wrapped it around themselves

allowed that being to take the form of a
falcon and to fly.

Freyja used it for her own purposes.

She lent it occasionally to other gods.

It was one of the great treasures of
Asgard.

It was not a thing she gave lightly.

Freyja looked at Loki.

She said, "Why?" Loki said, "Thor's hammer
is gone." Freyja's face changed.

The poem does not describe the change in
detail.

The poem says only in a single fine line
that the old Norse poets loved.

Freyja, hearing what Loki had said,
understood at once.

She understood what it meant for Mjollnir
to be gone.

She understood that some giant somewhere had reached into Asgard in the night and pulled the hammer out of the place where it lived.

She understood that without Mjollnir, the
gods were vulnerable.

She understood that without Mjollnir, the
giants might come.

She said, "Take it." She turned.

She went into her hall.

She came back out a moment later with a
cloak folded over her arms.

The cloak was the color of a wild falcon's back, brown and white and gray, with the long banded feathers of the wing folded carefully one over the other.

She held it out to Loki.

She said, "Bring my cloak back to me and bring Thor's hammer back to him." Loki took the cloak.

Loki bowed to Freyja, very quickly and very formally, in the way the Old North's tricksters bowed when they wanted to acknowledge that someone had done them a service.

Loki turned to Thor.

Loki said, "Wait here." The Thrymskvidha gives this moment one of its precious small touches.

Loki, the poem implies, did not waste any
further words.

Loki, the poem implies, knew that every moment was a moment in which Mjolnir was somewhere it should not have been.

Loki turned and walked out of Freyja's hall and went to the open space of Idavollr

the great plain at the center of Asgard.

And he stood there in the morning light with the feather cloak in his hands, and he looked east.

He looked east because east was where the
Jotnar lived.

He looked east because if Mjolnir had been taken, the being who had taken it would have hidden it in the country of the Jotnar.

He looked east because he was about to fly
there.

Loki, the poem tells us, swung the feather
cloak around his shoulders.

The cloak, the way the cloak worked, the way the Old North imagined these things, closed itself around him.

The feathers settled against his
shoulders.

The hood came up and over his head.

And then, in a way the poem does not bother to describe because the listener would have known

Loki was no longer Loki.

Loki was a falcon, a small gray and brown falcon with cold eyes and a sharp beak, standing on the long grass of Idavollr in the early morning light

looking east.

The falcon opened its wings.

The falcon launched into the sky.

The Thrymskvidha describes this, and this is one of the small lovely lines of the poem.

In three quick brush strokes, whir of wings, wind through feathers, the shape of a falcon rising over the high walls of Asgard and turning east

the morning light catching on the back of the wings as he climbed, the small distant shape of him crossing the rainbow bridge of Bifrost and then crossing beyond it into the long country between Asgard and Jotunheimr.

Thor, on the ground in front of Freyja's
hall, watched him go.

Thor said nothing.

Freyja stood beside him.

She said quietly, "He will find it." Thor said, "I hope so." And the two of them stood in the dawn in the long shadow of Freyja's hall with the great necklace of Brisingamen catching the morning light

and they waited for Loki to come back.

Chapter three: The Hall of Thrymmer.

Loki flew east.

The Thrymskvidda does not tell us how long
the flight took.

We can imagine from the way the poem hints at distance that it took most of a morning.

The world between Asgard and Jotunheimr is
a long world.

The lands roll under a falcon's wings for
hour after hour.

The forests of the middle country pass
below.

The rivers cross the falcon's path like
long silver threads.

The small farms of Midgard, the country of men, pass below in their slow patchwork of green and brown.

The high mountains of the eastern border
rise.

The falcon climbs over the mountains.

The falcon crosses the great cold passes
of the high country.

And then somewhere on the far side, the falcon comes down out of the high air into the country of the Jotnar

Jotunheimr.

The country was, the poem implies in the way the old North always implied, vast, cold, stony

vast pine forest stretching in every direction, high cliffs of dark stone, cold rivers running between cold rocks

halls of the Jotnar standing alone in clearings with thin lines of smoke rising from the smoke holes of their roofs

cattle of the Jotnar grazing in the long meadows, herds larger than any herd in Midgard.

The country went on for as far as the
falcon's eyes could see.

Loki, in falcon shape, began to look.

He looked for a hall that was bigger than
the others.

He looked for a hall that had recently
been visited by something important.

He looked for a hall where the wood smoke smelled different, where the cooking fire smelled of feasting

where the hangings outside were the bright hangings of a hall preparing for a celebration.

He looked in the way the old North's tricksters looked for the small signs of a being who had just done something that he was very proud of

and he found it.

The Thrymskvida does not give us a detailed description of Thrymmer's hall, but the poem implies

in a few small details, that the hall was large, that it was new, that it stood on a flat shelf of rock above a wide pasture in which a great many cattle grazed.

The roof was thatched with new straw.

The doors were thrown open.

The hall was already preparing for some event, some celebration, some announcement, something the giant who lived there was very pleased about.

Loki, in falcon shape, came down through the cold air of the eastern country and landed on the long stone wall in front of Thrymmer's hall.

He sat on the wall in falcon shape.

He turned his head, the way a falcon does, with the quick, small movement that takes in the whole landscape in three turns of the neck.

He looked at the hall.

He looked at the pasture.

He looked at the cattle.

And then, looking back at the hall, he saw
the figure he had come to find.

Thrymmer was sitting on a high stone seat
outside his hall.

The Thrymskvida gives us, here, one of the
small precious images of the poem.

Thrymmer, the king of the Jotnar of the eastern country, the lord of the Thirsas, the one whom the poem calls Thirsa Draughten.

Thrymmer was sitting on his stone seat in the morning sun, calm, satisfied, the way a man sits when he has just done a thing that he believes is going to bring him a very great prize.

He was weaving collars for his hunting
dogs.

The poem records this in a single quick
line.

He was weaving gold collars for his dogs.

He was trimming the manes of his horses.

The horses, the poem says, were large and dark, with black coats that gleamed in the morning sun.

Thrymmer was sitting on his stone seat in the bright morning, with the collars across his lap

and the great hunting dogs of his hall lying at his feet, and the horses of his hall grazing in the pasture

and he was waiting.

He was waiting, the poem implies, with the patience of a being who knew what he was waiting for.

Loki, in falcon shape, watched him.

Thrymmer, after a moment, looked up.

He saw the small falcon on the wall.

He recognized it.

The Thrymskvida gives us, here, the small detail that Thrymmer, even though he was a giant of the eastern country

even though he had probably never met Loki face to face, Thrymmer immediately recognized the falcon as one of the messengers of Asgard.

He had heard of Freyja's cloak.

He had heard of the gods who borrowed it.

He understood, the way creatures of the old North understood these things, that the falcon on his wall was not a wild falcon.

Thrymmer said, in the open air, without standing up, "Well, Loki of the Aesir, what brings you to my hall?" The Thrymskvidha gives this line to Thrymmer exactly.

He addresses Loki by name.

He calls him Loki of the Aesir.

He speaks calmly, as if he has been
expecting the visit for some time.

Loki, on the wall, took the feather cloak
off.

He became Loki again, standing on the top of the long stone wall in the morning light of Jotunheimr

thin, pale, cold eyed, wearing his traveling cloak underneath the falcon skin, which he now folded over his arm.

Loki said, "Thrymmer, lord of the thursas, I have come for a thing that we believe is in your possession." Thrymmer did not

the poem records, look surprised.

Thrymmer did not pretend ignorance.

Thrymmer did not, in the long Norse way,
even try to bluff.

Thrymmer simply, with the calm of a man who has been waiting for this question, raised his head a little.

Thrymmer said, "What thing?" Loki said,
"Thor's hammer." A small silence.

Thrymmer smiled.

It was not a friendly smile.

It was the smile of a being who has been waiting for a long time to be asked exactly this question and who has been preparing his answer for as long as he has been waiting.

Thrymmer did not stand up.

Thrymmer did not call for any of his
giants.

Thrymmer did not, the poem implies, even
raise his voice.

Thrymmer said, "I have hidden Mjollnir
eight leagues underground.

No being will ever find it.

No being will ever lift it.

No being will ever take it from where I have put it." Loki said, "What do you want for it?"

The Thrymskvidha records the exchange in three short stanzas, and the exchange is the heart of this chapter.

Loki, in the old way, did not argue.

Loki, in the old way, did not threaten.

Loki simply asked the only question a
being like Thrymmer would understand.

What is your price?

Thrymmer leaned forward a little on his
stone seat.

His smile grew wider.

He said, Bring me Freya as my bride in
eight nights' time.

And on the morning of the wedding, when she comes to my hall, when she takes the marriage vows with me

when she is mine, on that morning, and not a moment before, I will give back Thor's hammer.

Chapter four, The Demand.

Loki did not, the poem records, respond
immediately.

Loki, on the stone wall, with the feather cloak folded over his arm, looked at Thrymmer for a long moment without speaking.

The poem does not tell us what Loki was thinking in that long moment, but we can imagine.

We can imagine that Loki, the trickster who lived by the small, careful calculation of how impossible things could be made possible

Loki was already turning the demand over
in his mind.

Freyja as bride in eight nights, the wedding to be performed in Thrymr's hall, the hammer to be returned only after the marriage was complete.

It was, Loki understood, an impossible
demand.

Freyja would not, Loki knew with great certainty, agree to it, and even if Freyja agreed

even if somehow the gods of Asgard pressured her into the agreement, once the wedding was performed

once she was Thrymr's bride, the gods would have given the giants a much greater prize than just the hammer.

They would have given them Freyja herself.

Freyja, the goddess of love.

Freyja, the goddess of fertility.

Freyja, the older Vanir goddess whose
magic was older than the Aesir.

The giants, having Freyja as their queen, would be able to bring such terrible weather

such terrible failures of crops, such terrible barrenness of beasts on the lands of the gods that Asgard might fall within a generation.

It was, Loki understood, a demand designed
to be impossible.

Thrymr was not, Loki understood, asking for Freyja because he thought he could have her.

Thrymr was asking for Freyja because he knew the gods could not give her, and the gods could not get their hammer back

and Thrymr would have what he had always wanted, which was Mjollnir hidden eight leagues underground in his own land

and the gods of Asgard without their greatest weapon, and the long, slow tilting of the worlds toward a future in which the giants might at last be greater than the gods.

Loki understood all of this.

Loki, in his cold eyed way, did not show
that he understood any of it.

Loki said, " I will bring your demand to the gods." Thrymr said, "Do." Loki bowed in the small way the old Norse tricksters bowed when they wanted to acknowledge a transaction that was not yet complete.

He put the falcon cloak back around his
shoulders.

He became, again, the falcon.

He launched into the cold morning air of Jotunheimr, and he turned and he flew back west toward Asgard with the demand of Thrym

the lord of the Thirsas, the king of the eastern country, wrapped in his mind like a small dark stone.

He flew fast.

The flight back to Asgard was, the poem
implies, faster than the flight out.

Loki had something to tell, and Loki, the poem implies, had already begun to think, even in the air

even with the wind in his feathers, about how the impossible demand of Thrym might be turned in some small impossible way into a possible demand A demand that might

with the right cleverness, be answered without giving Thrymmer the prize he was really asking for.

Loki, the poem implies, was already in
flight, beginning to work the problem.

By the time he came down out of the western sky onto the long grass of Idavollr in the late afternoon light

Loki had, though the poem does not say so
out loud, Loki had a plan.

It was a very strange plan.

It was a plan that required the cooperation of the strongest god in Asgard.

It was a plan that required Thor to do a thing that Thor would not, in his ordinary life, ever have considered doing.

Loki landed.

He pulled the falcon cloak off.

He became Loki again.

Thor was still standing in front of Freyja's hall, exactly where Loki had left him.

Freyja was beside him, with the great necklace, Brisingamen, still around her neck, with the dawn long since passed and the late afternoon light now slanting across the open space of Idavollr.

Thor turned.

Thor said, "What did you find?" Loki said, "I found Thrymmer, the king of the Thursas.

He has Mjollnir." Thor said, "Where?" Loki said, "Eight leagues underground, in his own land.

He will not give it back unless we pay him for it." Thor said, "What does he want?" Loki

the poem records, paused for a moment.

The poem does not tell us why he paused.

We can imagine that Loki, with his cold eyed practical mind, wanted to deliver the news in such a way that the news did not immediately cause Thor to take a sword and start swinging it.

We can imagine that Loki was choosing his
words.

Loki said, "He wants Freyja as his bride." The poem records Freyja's reaction in one of its most famous lines.

The poem says simply that Freyja snorted.

Chapter five, The Refusal.

She snorted.

That is the line the Thrymskvidha gives us, and the line is one of the small great moments of the poem.

Freyja, hearing what Loki had just said, did not, the poem implies, speak first, did not curse

did not raise her voice, did not, in any human sense, react in the way that the old North would have expected a furious goddess to react.

Freya simply, in the moment of hearing the demand, drew in a long, deep breath and pushed it out through her nostrils: a snort.

It is the kind of sound a horse makes when a thing it cannot accept has just been put in front of it.

It is the kind of sound that does not contain any words because the words have not yet been arranged

because the anger is still in the body and
has not yet reached the throat.

It is the small first physical sign of a goddess realizing what has just been said to her.

The Thrymskvidha gives this snort in the original Old Norse in a single word: fnasaði.

She fnasaði.

She snorted with anger.

And the snort, the poem records, was so violent, was so full of the deep, cold, ancient anger of an old Vanir goddess who had just been told what her colleagues at the door wanted to bargain her away for

that the great hall of Freya shook on its
foundations.

The great walls of the hall trembled.

The Brísingamen, the great necklace of fire that lived around her throat, the necklace forged by four dwarves in a cave under a mountain in some ancient time before the gods were named

the Brísingamen broke.

Or rather, the poem says, "The Brísingamen burst from her neck, the clasp of it sprang open

the chain of it leapt up from her throat, the four small dwarf stones of it scattered for one quick moment into the air of her hall

" stukk af halsi men.

The necklace leapt from her neck.

The Brísingamen fell.

It fell onto the long wooden floor of Freyja's hall, where it lay in a small, bright pile of light

like a small fallen star.

Freyja did not pick it up.

Freyja, the poem records, was looking at
Loki.

The Thrymskvida gives us this look in a
single careful line.

Freyja looked at Loki, and Loki, Loki who had stared down jotnar, Loki who had walked across the long roads of the worlds with the most dangerous of beings as his companions

Loki who would in the end be the cause of the ending of all things, Loki, in this moment

took a small step back.

The poem does not record what Loki said in
that moment.

The poem records only Freyja's response.

Freyja said, "Do you think I am a goddess so full of love for men that I would marry a jotun to get a hammer back?" The poem renders this in two short stanzas.

The first contains Freyja's question.

The second contains a single line that the old North loved, that the old North repeated

that the old North preserved for hundreds
of years in this single poem.

Mik veist verða vergarnasta ef ek ek með
þeri jotunheima?

You would have me be the most husband mad of all the women in the worlds if I went with you to Jotunheimr.

It is one of the great lines of the Old
North.

The line is a refusal.

The line is also, in the small, dry old
way of the Eddic poems, a joke.

Freyja was not, the poem implies, going to
marry Thrymmer.

Freyja was not, the poem implies, going to
even consider marrying Thrymmer.

The idea was so monstrous that Freyja had no other response except to point out, very dryly

that the gods would have to think very
poorly of her to imagine that she would.

The gods, the poem implies, took the
point.

Thor, in the doorway of Freyja's hall, did
not speak.

Loki, who had taken a small step back, did
not speak either.

The Brisingamen lay on the floor.

Freyja, after a long moment, knelt down
very slowly and picked up the necklace.

She held it in her hands for a moment, looking at the small dwarf stones of it in the long fading afternoon light.

The clasp of the necklace had not broken.

The necklace had simply leapt off her
throat in the moment of her anger.

She fastened it back around her own neck, very carefully, very deliberately, with the small

careful movements of a woman who is restoring order to a thing that has been disordered.

She stood up.

She looked at Thor.

She looked at Loki.

She said, Find another way.

And she turned, and she went back into her
hall, and she closed the door behind her.

The Thrymskvida gives us this gesture, the closing of the door, without any further explanation.

The door closed.

Freyja was inside her hall.

The two gods were outside.

The question of how to recover Mjolnir
was, now, entirely the gods' problem.

Freyja had refused.

The refusal was final.

The gods would have to find another way.

Thor, in the late afternoon light, looked
at Loki.

Thor said, We should call a council.

Loki, the poem implies, agreed.

Loki nodded.

Loki, who already, the poem implies, had a plan, but who was not yet ready to share that plan with anyone

least of all with Thor.

Loki nodded, and the two of them turned, and they walked together across the long open space of Idavollr toward the great hall of council that stood at the center of Asgard

where the gods met when the gods had a
problem they could not solve alone.

They called the council.

Chapter six: The Council of the Gods.

The gods came.

The Thrymskvidda does not give us a long list of who was at the council, but we can imagine from the way the poem implies the gathering that everyone came.

Odin, the Allfather.

Frigg, his wife, with her quiet eyes.

Tyr, the one handed god.

Heimdallr, the watcher of the rainbow
bridge, with his great horn at his side.

Freyr, brother of Freyja, the lord of
fertility.

Idun, keeper of the apples of youth, with
her hair the color of wheat.

Sif, Thor's wife, with her golden hair.

Baldr.

Yes, the Thrymskvidda takes place before the death of Baldr, and so Baldr was at this council

the bright son of Odin, whose loss would one day begin the great tilting of the world toward Ragnarok.

Baldr was there, the poem implies, sitting
at the long table with the others.

The gods sat in a circle.

Thor stood at the center.

He told them, in the small, careful way that even Thor knew how to use when the situation called for it

what had happened.

The hammer.

The empty floor by the bed.

The visit to Freyja.

The borrowing of the cloak.

Loki's flight east.

Thrymmer's demand.

Then he said, "Freyja will not go." The gods, the poem records, all turned to look at Freyja

who was at the council.

Freyja, with the Brísingamen back around
her neck, looked at the gods.

Freyja, the poem implies, did not need to
say anything.

The gods knew.

The gods understood.

The gods, the poem implies, would not have asked her to go, even if Thor had not already said she would not.

There was a long silence.

The gods of Asgard, the Thrymskvidda
implies, did not have a ready answer.

The problem was, on its face, impossible.

The hammer was gone.

The giants would not return it without
Freyja.

Freyja would not be given.

The hammer would not, by any path any of
them could see, be coming back.

And then, in the small, clear voice of the watcher of the rainbow bridge, Heimdallr spoke.

The Thrymskvidha gives us Heimdallr's speech with all the dignity the old North could give to a difficult suggestion.

The Havamal, the old wisdom poem of the North, the long sequence of plain quiet sayings that Odin himself was said to have spoken

preserved in the Codex Regius alongside the Thrymskvidha itself, has a line for moments like this one.

It is better, the Havamal says, to give a
friend a wise word than to give him bread.

The bread will be gone by morning.

The word may save his life.

Heimdallr was the kind of friend who gave
the word.

Heimdallr, the white god, the foreseeing one, the one whose hearing was so sharp that he could hear the grass growing on the ground and the wool growing on a sheep's back

the one whose eyes could see a hundred leagues in any direction, the one whose horn would one day announce the beginning of Ragnarok Heimdallr stood up at the council.

He looked at the gods.

He looked, finally, at Thor.

Heimdallr said, "There is a way." The gods
turned to him.

Heimdallr said, "We dress Thor as the
bride." A small silence.

The poem records this silence with one of
its few overt notes of comedy.

The gods did not, the poem implies,
immediately respond.

The gods, the poem implies, were taking in
what Heimdallr had said.

They were turning it over.

They were looking at Thor, at the great red bearded god, at the broad shoulders, at the strong arms

at the everything about him that was not,
in any conceivable way, a bride.

They were trying to imagine what Heimdallr
had just suggested.

Heimdallr, sensing the silence, continued.

He said, "We put the bride's gown on him.

We put the bride's veil on him.

We put the Brisingamen around his neck.

He travels east in the goat chariot to
Thrymmer's hall.

He goes through the wedding feast.

At the moment when the hammer is brought out, at the moment when, by the customs of the jotnar

Mjollnir is laid on the bride's knees as the blessing of the marriage, at that moment

Thor seizes his hammer back and ends the
wedding."

The gods, the poem implies, began, slowly,
to understand.

It was a plan.

It was a strange plan.

It was a plan that turned on a single piece of the old Norse marriage customs that the gods all knew.

When a giant married, the great hammer of the giant, the symbol of his power and his protection

was brought out at the wedding feast and
laid on the bride's knees.

It was the blessing of the marriage.

It was the moment that consecrated the
union.

It was the moment that, by the old laws of
the jotnar, made the wedding final.

If Mjollnir was brought out to bless this wedding, and the wedding was for Thor's hammer

and Thrymmer had no other hammer of his own that could match it, then Mjollnir would be brought out to bless the wedding

and Mjollnir, brought to be laid on the bride's knees, would be brought directly into reach of the bride who was not a bride.

The gods, the poem implies, began to nod.

Loki, sitting beside the council, smiled
his small cold smile.

Loki said, "Yes." Thor, the poem records,
did not smile.

The Thrymskvidha gives us Thor's response
in one of its small great lines.

Thor said, "They will call me unmanly." The poem records this objection with all the seriousness the old North could give to a question of honor.

Thor, for whom honor was not an abstract concept, for whom honor was the small everyday thing of being a god who was known and feared and respected

Thor could not, the poem implies, imagine
himself putting on a bride's gown.

The gown would not, in the old North,
simply be a costume.

The gown would be a public act of becoming
the thing the gown represented.

The gods of Asgard would see him in it.

The giants of Jotunheimr would see him in
it.

The skalds of the long winters afterward
would tell stories about him in it.

The men of Midgard, in their long cold halls, would, for many generations to come, laugh in their cups about the time the strongest god of Asgard had put on a bride's gown.

Thor could not, in that moment, accept it.

The poem records this objection in a
single famous line.

Thor said, "Argr." Argr is one of the
great words of the old North.

It means, and the meaning is not translatable in any single English word, it means unmanly

but it means more than that.

It means a man who has given up his
manhood.

It means a man who has accepted the role
of the woman.

It means, in the old Norse warrior honor culture, the single most insulting word that could be said of a man.

To be argur was to be unworthy of the
company of men.

To be argur was to be exiled from the
warrior's hall.

To be argur was, in some old laws, to be
killable without consequence.

Thor was saying that he could not, by going through with this plan, do that to himself.

The gods, the poem records, looked at one
another.

Loki, and this is one of the small moments where the poem lets us see Loki's intelligence at its sharpest.

Loki stood up.

Loki said, "Shut up, Thor." The Thrymskvida records this with exactly that bluntness.

"Thegi thu Thor," the poem says.

Shut up, Thor.

Loki was the only being in Asgard who could say a thing like that to Thor and survive.

He said it.

The gods, the poem implies, did not
flinch.

They knew Loki was speaking for all of
them.

Loki said, "Think." Loki said, "If you do not go to Thrymmer's hall, if you do not do this thing

the Jotnar will rule Asgard within the
year.

They will come here.

They will sit on our seats.

They will take our halls.

They will be the masters of this place where you and I and all of these other gods have lived for as long as any of us can remember.

They will end us.

Mjolnir is the thing that has kept the
Jotnar out of Asgard.

Without Mjolnir, the Jotnar come in.

You know this.

You have always known this.

The choice is not between wearing a bride's gown and not wearing a bride's gown.

The choice is between wearing a bride's gown for one day and watching everything we have ever cared about being ground under the feet of the Jotnar for the rest of time." Thor

the poem records, looked at Loki for a
long moment.

Then he looked at Freya.

Then he looked at Sif, his wife, who was sitting at the council with her hair the color of gold falling down her back.

Sif, the poem implies, did not say
anything.

She did not need to.

The two of them, Thor and Sif, had been married long enough to know each other in the small

quiet way that long married beings know
each other.

Thor was asking her with one look across the council whether she could bear what was about to happen

whether she could sit in her hall in Asgard for the next eight nights knowing that her husband was on his way east in a bride's gown to be married to another being

whether she could bear the long, quiet humiliation of knowing that her husband had agreed to put on the veil of another woman

and not just any other woman, but the most beautiful goddess in Asgard, the goddess of love herself

whose necklace would for the long ride east be lying against her husband's collarbones.

Sif, the poem implies, considered all of this for one long quiet moment, and then she gave him the only answer that mattered.

She nodded once slowly. with the small, calm steadiness of a woman who had known, since the morning her husband had walked into her hall to tell her his hammer was gone

that some price would have to be paid, and who had decided, long before the council had even been called

that whatever the price was, she would, in
her own way, help him pay it.

Sif, the old North remembered, had reason to be cautious about the cleverness of Loki.

It had been Loki, in some older story, who had once crept into her bedroom in the night and cut off her hair while she slept.

Sif knew what the cleverness of Loki could
cost.

She knew that the plans of Loki, even when they worked, were not the kind of plans that came without consequence.

She knew that the gown she was now allowing her husband to wear was, in some small way, going to cost her too.

She nodded anyway.

That was, the poem implies, what marriage
in the old North could be at its best.

Two beings who had been together long enough to know what the other was asking and who could

when the cost was high and the moment came, give each other the small, calm answer that made the next hard thing possible.

It was permission, the wife's permission, the permission of the gods of Asgard in the form of one calm look from his own wife to do the thing he was being asked to do.

Thor, the poem records, said one word.

He said, "Very well." And the gods, the poem implies with one of its rare moments of collective relief

the gods exhaled.

The plan had been accepted.

Thor would go.

The wedding would be performed.

The hammer would be brought out.

Mjolnir would, by the old laws of the Jotnar, be laid on the bride's knees for the blessing of the marriage.

And after that, after that, the poem implies, the old laws of the Jotnar would no longer matter.

After that, the old laws of any of the
worlds would no longer matter.

After that, there would be only Thor and
Mjolnir and a hall full of giants.

Chapter seven, The Bridal Veil.

The gods went to work.

The Thrymskvidha gives this chapter in a few quick stanzas, and the chapter is the small precious comedy of the poem.

The gods of Asgard, with their council ended, went together with Thor into the great hall of Freyja where the dresses of Asgard's women were kept

and they began to dress Thor as a bride.

It did not go quickly.

The gown was, the poem implies, the first
problem.

The bride's gown of a goddess like Freyja was a fine close fitted thing, long falling to the floor with embroidered patterns at the hem and the sleeves.

It was not made for the shoulders of Thor.

The shoulders of Thor were the shoulders
of the strongest god in Asgard.

The gown, when they tried to fasten it
across his chest, would not close.

The scalds in the long winter halls would tell for centuries afterward the story of how the gods of Asgard had to let out the seams of Freyja's wedding gown to fit it around Thor's shoulders and how the women of Freyja's household stood around with needles and thread very calmly

very seriously doing the work that needed
to be done.

The gown was finally fastened.

Then the necklace.

Freyja, the poem implies, took the Brisingamen off her own neck and placed it around Thor's.

The four small dwarf stones of the necklace in the late afternoon light of Freyja's hall lay against Thor's collarbones.

Freyja did this.

The poem implies without any expression the gods were gonna use her necklace to deceive a giant.

Her necklace would, by the end of the day,
be in the hall of Thrymmer.

Her necklace would be the one piece of her that would, in some small way, be present at the wedding she was not attending.

She fastened the clasp.

She stepped back.

Then the keys.

The bride of a Norse household carried
around her belt a set of keys.

The keys were the symbol of the bride's coming authority over the household, the keys to the food store

the keys to the chest, the keys to the great storehouse where the household kept the things that mattered.

Thor, as the bride, would need to wear
these keys.

The gods, the poem implies, found a set of bride's keys somewhere in Freyja's hall, and they fastened them to Thor's belt.

The keys hung against his hip.

The keys clinked very softly every time he
moved.

Then the rings.

The bride of a Norse household wore rings, gold rings on her fingers, a great brooch at her shoulder.

The gods of Asgard found these things and
put them on Thor.

Then the veil.

The veil was the last and the most
important of all the bride's garments.

The veil was the white linen cloth that
covered the bride's head and face.

The veil hid the bride from the eyes of the wedding guest until the moment at the end of the wedding feast when the husband raised the veil and saw for the first time the face of the woman he had married.

The veil was the great symbol of the
bride.

The veil was the thing that, by the customs of the Old North, made the wedding a wedding.

Freyja, the poem implies, brought out a
veil of fine white linen.

She held it for a moment in her hands.

Thor, and we can imagine this even though the poem does not say it, Thor stood very still.

He had been standing very still for some
time now.

He had been standing very still while the seamstresses had let out the seams of the gown.

He had been standing very still while the Brisingamen had been fastened around his throat.

He had been standing very still while the keys had been hung at his belt and the rings had been placed on his fingers.

He had not, in any of those small
unmakings of himself, said anything.

He had simply stood.

He had let the gods of Asgard do to him
what they needed to do.

He had, the poem implies, with all the dignity the Old North could find for him, he had held his breath somewhere deep in his chest

and he had let the bride be made out of
him.

The veil was the last piece.

Once the veil came down, the unmaking
would be complete.

Once the veil came down, the gods of Asgard would look at him and see not Thor, but Freyja.

Once the veil came down, the long ride east would begin, and the long humiliation and the long careful pretending in the giant's hall.

Freyja set the veil on Thor's head.

She pulled it down over his face.

Thor, behind the veil, did not move.

He could see, the poem implies, and this small detail is one the old North would have understood.

Thor could see the gods of Asgard through
the veil.

The veil was a thin linen.

Light came through it.

The shapes of the gods who had dressed him were visible on the other side of the white cloth

but the gods of Asgard could no longer
easily see his face.

The veil hid him.

The veil was, for the first time since he had taken Mjollnir off his belt the previous evening

a barrier between Thor and the world.

The poem records this moment in its small
dignified way in a single line.

Thor was now dressed.

He was, by every outward sign, the bride.

Freyja's gown, Freyja's necklace, the bride's keys, the bride's rings, the bride's veil.

He was, in every visible way, ready to be married to the king of the Jotnar of the eastern country.

Loki watching smiled his small cold smile.

Loki said, 'She will need a handmaiden.' The Thrymskvida gives this moment to Loki in one of its small lovely lines.

Loki, who had been the architect of the whole impossible plan, Loki was not content to send Thor east alone.

Thor, in a bride's veil, would, at the very first awkward word, give the whole thing away.

Thor did not have the gift of words.

Thor did not have the gift of social
grace.

Thor was the god of thunder, not the god of polite conversation at a wedding feast in a giant's hall.

Thor would need a bridesmaid, a handmaiden who could speak for him, who could explain his strangenesses

who could deflect questions, who could, when the giant's eyes lingered too long on the bride

give the kind of clever, quick answer that
would turn the questioning aside.

Loki, the poem implies, knew exactly who
that handmaiden should be.

Loki said, "I will be the handmaiden." The
gods, the poem records, did not object.

The gods understood.

The plan would not work without Loki.

Loki, in a handmaiden's gown, with his cold eyes and his quick tongue and his small smile

was exactly the being who could keep Thor from being recognized at the wedding feast of Thrymmer.

The gods dressed Loki.

The poem records this in a single quick
image.

They put a handmaiden's gown on him, a simple linen dress more modest than the bride's

a cap on his head, a small bundle of belongings, the way a handmaiden traveling with her bride would have carried

slung over his shoulder.

Loki, in handmaiden's clothes, looked, the poem implies, convincingly like a handmaiden.

Loki had always been able to take any
shape he chose.

The handmaiden's gown was not, for Loki, a
hard costume.

Thor, behind the veil, said one word.

He said, "Loki." Loki said yes.

Thor said, "Do not let me kill you on the road east." Loki, the poem implies, did not promise anything.

Loki only smiled his small, cold smile.

The gods, the poem records, walked the two of them, the bride and the bridesmaid, out into the open air of Idavollr

where Thor's chariot of goats was waiting and where the long road east lay open under the late afternoon sky.

Chapter eight, The Road East.

They climbed into the chariot.

Thor's chariot, the Thrymskvidha gives us in a single quick image, was drawn by two great goats.

The poem does not name them in this stanza, but the old North would have known their names.

They were Tanngrisnir, the gap toothed,
and Tanngnjóstr, the tooth gnasher.

Two great goats with horns curving above their heads, with shaggy coats the color of late autumn grass

with hooves shod in brass.

They drew the chariot of Thor across the
worlds when he traveled.

They drew it now.

Thor, in his bride's veil, sat down in the
chariot.

Loki, in his handmaiden's gown, sat down
beside him.

The gods of Asgard, standing on the long
grass of Idavollr, watched them go.

Sif was there.

Freyja was there.

Odin was there.

Heimdallr, with his great horn, was there.

None of them, the poem implies, spoke.

There was nothing to say.

The bride and the bridesmaid were on their
way.

The gods could only watch and hope and wait for the chariot to come back with a hammer in it.

Thor took up the reins of the goat
chariot.

He shouted, the poem implies, in his great voice, the voice that was the same whether he wore a bride's veil or not.

he shouted at the goats.

The goats started forward.

The chariot lurched.

The wheels began to turn.

The chariot picked up speed.

And here the Thrymskvidha gives us one of
its small great lines.

The poem says in two careful stanzas that the chariot went east at such speed and Thor drove the goats with such fury at having to make this journey at all that the road behind them caught fire.

The rock split.

The mountain shook.

The earth burned with flame.

Bjorg brustu, brann jord loga.

It is one of the famous lines of the Old
Norse corpus.

The mountain shattered.

The earth burned with flame.

The poem is, in this single line, giving us a window into the cosmic temper of Thor in this moment.

Thor was not happy Thor was driving his chariot east at the speed of his own fury at the situation he had been placed in.

The road behind him, in the wake of the chariot's wheels, was a long line of cracked rock and burning grass.

The mountains on either side of his path
were trembling.

Loki, in his handmaiden's gown, hung onto
the side of the chariot.

The Thrymskvidha does not record what Loki
said in that moment.

We can imagine that Loki, with his cold eyed pragmatism, was thinking that they needed to slow down

that arriving at Thrymmer's hall with the visible signs of cosmic disturbance trailing behind them would not

perhaps, help with the disguise.

We can imagine Loki turning his head and the wind catching at a small handmaiden's cap and Loki saying something quiet and sharp to Thor through the noise of the wheels.

We can imagine Thor behind his veil, breathing in, breathing out, pulling the reins a little, slowing the goats.

The fire behind them died down.

The chariot, by the time it crossed the long border into Jotunheimr, was no longer trailing cosmic disturbance behind it.

It was just a chariot, a bride and her handmaiden, two great goats pulling them across the cold country.

The journey was, by then, a quieter
journey.

The country grew rougher.

The forest grew darker.

The cattle of the Jotnar grazed in the
high pastures on either side of the road.

The smoke of the Jotnar's halls rose in long, thin lines from the small clearings between the trees.

They drove east.

They drove east through the late afternoon and into the long blue evening of Jotunheimr.

The Havamal opens with a verse for the
kind of crossing the chariot was making.

At every doorway, the old poem says,
"Before you go in, look around carefully.

You never know what enemy is already sitting on the bench within." The bench within Thrymmer's hall that evening was lined with enemies.

And as the evening grew, the great hall of
Thrymmer came into sight on the horizon.

The new straw of its roof, the doors thrown open, the cooking fires already burning.

The hall, the poem implies, was already at
full preparation for the wedding.

Thrymmer, the king of the Jotnar, was
waiting.

The Thrymskvidha gives us the next moment
in one of its small great touches.

Thrymmer When he saw the chariot coming up the long road from the west, Thrym stood up from his stone seat outside the hall.

Thrym called to his giants.

Thrym's voice carried across the pasture
and through the open doors of the hall.

Thrym said, "Stand up, Jotnar.

She is coming.

Freyja, the daughter of the Vanir, is coming to my hall to be my bride, to bring me the great prize my hammer theft has won." The Thrymskvida records his speech with all the small awful pride of a giant who is about to be very badly fooled.

Thrym says in the next stanza that he has many gold horned cattle, many black oxen, many things in his hall

many treasures, many fine gems and rings, and that all of these things would mean nothing to him until tonight when at last he would have Freyja.

The poem records this with a small dry
irony.

The poem knows that Thrym has just said the last thing he will ever say with any of his old confidence.

The chariot rolled to a stop in front of
the hall.

The bride climbed down.

The handmaiden climbed down.

The goat stood breathing hard in the cold
blue evening light.

The bride, with her veil down over her
face, was led by Thrym's hand.

Thrym, the poem implies, took her hand at the door of the hall, and the bride's hand was even through the gown

even through the long sleeve, even through the embroidered cuff, a hand of strange and unusual size and weight.

Thrym led her in.

The wedding feast began.

Chapter nine.

The wedding feast.

The hall was full.

The Thrymskvida gives us the wedding feast in three stanzas, and the three stanzas are the comic heart of the poem.

The hall of Thrymr was filled with giants, cousins, brothers, sons, lords of the eastern country

lesser jotnar of the surrounding
mountains.

The long tables of the hall were laid with
food.

The great hearth at the center of the hall
was burning.

The cooking fires in the side passages were sending up smoke through the open vents in the roof.

The hall was loud with the voices of the giants, with the slow, heavy laughter of giants pleased about a wedding that was a triumph

with the small, bright clinking of bronze
cups being filled with mead.

The hall was warm.

It was the warmth of a great cold country hall on a winter evening, the warmth of stone walls that had soaked up the heat of the cooking fires for hours

the warmth of bodies and the bodies of
jotnar.

The old North knew were large bodies, hot bodies, bodies that gave off heat the way smaller bodies could not.

The warmth of the rough wool clothes that the wedding guests were wearing, the long fur cloaks over the shoulders of the men

the heavy gowns of the women, the small steam that rose from the cups of hot spiced wine that were now being passed down the long tables.

The hall was warm in a way that the poem implies the bride was feeling under her veil.

The hall smelled, the poem implies, of
many things at once.

It smelled of roasting beef.

It smelled of charred fat.

It smelled of the long, sweet smoke of pine wood burning in the great hearth, of the small

sharp smoke of resinous branches being tossed in for fragrance, of the warm, yeasty smell of bread baking in the side ovens.

It smelled of mead, which is to say it smelled of honey, of fermented honey, of the warm

spiced honey wine that the jotnar of the eastern country were famous for and that they were now bringing out in great oak barrels and pouring into the bronze cups of every guest in the hall.

The hall sounded like a feast, the slow, heavy laughter of giants, the clinking of cups

the scrape of long knives on the wooden cutting boards as the carving women cut the roasted meats into portions.

The small quick footsteps of the serving children, who were the half grown jotnar of Thrymmer's household

weaving in and out among the tables with
platters held high.

The voices in the rafters of the great hall, rising and falling, gathering into the long low roar that any large feast in any large hall makes when the company has settled in and the mead has begun to do its work.

And underneath all of it, very quietly, very steadily, the slow careful breathing of the bride.

Thrymmer sat at the high seat at the head
of the hall.

Thor, the bride, with the veil down over his face, with Freyja's necklace at his throat

with the keys clinking at his belt, sat at
Thrymmer's right hand.

Loki, the handmaiden, sat at Thor's right
hand, ready to speak for him.

The food came.

The Thrymskvida gives us the menu of the
wedding feast in a single careful stanza.

Roasted ox, eight salmon, all the delicate small dishes that were customarily made for the women of the feast.

Small breads, small honey cakes, small soft fruits, small cheeses, the kind of fine careful foods that a bride was expected to eat slowly

in small portions, behind her veil.

The bride, the poem records, did not eat
slowly.

The bride ate the whole ox.

The bride ate all eight of the salmon.

The bride ate every one of the small delicate dishes that had been prepared for the women.

And then, the poem records, the bride
called for mead.

Three barrels of mead.

The bride drank.

The Thrymskvida says, three barrels of
mead in a single sitting.

Thrymr, sitting in his high seat at the
head of the hall, watched all of this.

Thrymr's face, the poem implies, slowly
changed.

The poem gives us, in one of its famous
lines, Thrymr's reaction.

Thrymr leaned over to where Loki was
sitting at the bride's right hand.

Thrymr spoke very softly.

Thrymr said, I never saw a bride bite more
sharply.

I never saw a maiden eat more food.

I never saw a young woman drink more mead.

It is one of the small comic gems of the
Old North.

Thrymr, the king of the Jotnar, the lord of the Thirsas, the giant who has hidden Mjolnir eight leagues underground

Thrymr is now leaning across the high table and quietly asking the handmaiden whether his bride is

perhaps, unusual.

Loki, the poem records, was ready.

Loki had, the poem implies, been preparing for exactly this question on the long ride east.

Loki turned to Thrymr.

Loki, in his handmaiden's voice, which the poem implies was a soft, careful voice, the kind of voice a respectful handmaiden of an old high rank goddess would use to address the giant who was about to become her mistress's husband.

Loki gave Thrymr the answer.

Loki said, Freya has not eaten in eight
nights.

So eager was she to come to your hall, lord of the Thirsas, so impatient was she to be your bride

that she has not slept and has not eaten for the eight nights since the demand was sent.

Now, finally, in your hall, she is eating
and drinking, because at last she is here.

The poem gives us Thrymr's response in the
smallest possible touch.

Thrymr smiled.

It was a smile of vanity.

It was a smile of a being who, on hearing the explanation, found that he was very willing to believe the explanation

because the explanation flattered him.

Freya had been so eager for him, so hungry for the wedding, that she had not slept or eaten for eight nights.

Of course.

Of course she had.

He, Thrymr, was the giant she had been
waiting for.

He, Thrymr, was the king worthy of such
hunger.

Thrymr was satisfied.

The feast continued.

The bride, behind her veil, kept eating.

Chapter ten.

The eye beneath the veil.

The feast went on for some time.

The Thrymskvidda does not give us the length, but the poem implies that the meal stretched on through the long evening of Jotunheimr

with the cooking fires burning down, with the small fine wedding foods being brought out by the women of Thrymmer's household

with the mead going around in the great bronze cups, with the slow heavy laughter of the giants growing slower and more affectionate as the wedding feast did the thing wedding feasts always do

which is bring the company into the warmth
of a long shared meal.

And at some point in the evening, the poem implies, Thrymmer leaned over toward the bride.

Thrymmer wanted to kiss her.

The Thrymskvidda gives us the moment with
all the small comic dread it can muster.

Thrymmer, the king of the Jotnar, the bridegroom, the man who had won the prize he had been waiting for

Thrymmer leaned across the high table toward the bride who sat beside him with her veil still down over her face.

He wanted, the poem implies, to lift the
veil and see the face of his bride.

He reached out.

He lifted the veil just a little, just enough to see in the warm hall light the eyes of the woman he was about to be married to.

Thor, the poem implies, could not move.

The poem does not tell us this, but we can
imagine it.

Thor, sitting at the high seat at the head of the hall with the great square iron head of Mjolnir still nowhere in his hands

with his hand still trapped under the embroidered sleeve of a bride's gown, with the giant's face four inches from his own face and the giant's mouth coming closer with the slow

heavy intention of a kiss.

Thor could not move, could not strike, could not stand up, could not in any of the small old ways the god of thunder had ever solved a problem

solve this problem.

Mjolnir was somewhere in the hall on a cloth in the hands of giants being brought out in slow procession.

Mjolnir was not yet in his lap.

Mjolnir was not yet in his hand.

Thor was, for one second of the long evening, the most vulnerable he had ever been in his life.

Thor was a bride.

Thor was unarmed.

Thor was being kissed at by a giant.

He held the eye contact.

He had to.

Looking away would have been the giveaway.

Closing his eyes would have been the
giveaway.

Any flinch, any small involuntary turn of the head, any small reflexive setting of the jaw would have been the giveaway.

Thor held the eye contact with the man he had ridden east to kill, with the man whose face was now closer to his own face than any face had ever been outside his own bed

and he held it, and he held his breath, and he held the small, slow burning fury of a god who had been brought to this point by the strangest series of small impossible decisions any god had ever been brought to.

And the burning, the poem implies, was
visible.

The fury came up through Thor's eyes the way it had come up through his beard on the morning he had found his hammer gone.

He could not contain it.

He had been containing it all day.

He had been containing it through the
dressing.

He had been containing it through the ride
east.

He had been containing it through the
feast.

The fury had been gathering in his chest, in his shoulders, in the muscles of his arms under the long embroidered sleeves.

And now, in the small space between his face and Thrymmer's, with no way to release it

the fury did the only thing it could do.

It came out through his eyes.

His eyes burned.

His eyes burned the way coals at the bottom of a forge fire burn when the bellows have been working them for a long time.

His eyes burned the way the iron of Mjolnir had burned in the great forging contest of the dwarves Eitri and Brokkr long ago

when the small pale flame at the bottom of the forge had been worked, breath after breath

into the bright white fury that the hammer
head had been pulled out of.

His eyes burned.

Thrymmer saw them.

He recoiled.

The Thrymskvida gives this recoil in one
of its great lines.

Thrymmer leapt back.

Thrymmer almost overturned his own high
seat.

Thrymmer, the king of the Thyrses, was, for the first time in this whole poem, afraid.

The poem records, in Thrymmer's own voice,
what he had seen.

Thrymmer said, Why are Freya's eyes so
terrible?

Why do they burn like fire?

Why are they not the eyes of a maiden?

The poem records this in one of its small,
dignified stanzas.

Thrymmer's eyes had met in the small space under the lifted edge of the veil, the eyes of Thor.

And Thor's eyes behind the veil were not
the eyes of Freya.

They were the eyes of the God who had spent the entire journey east burning with the fury of having to wear a bride's gown.

They were the eyes of a being who had just eaten an entire ox and drunk three barrels of mead and was

in the way only Thor could be, very awake.

They were the eyes that in the corners of the warm hall light glowed like the small coals at the bottom of a forge fire.

Thrymmer saw them, and Thrymmer, the giant who had been ready to laugh off any eccentricity of his bride.

Thrymmer, in this moment, almost saw
through the disguise.

Loki, the poem records, was ready again.

The poem does not tell us what Loki was feeling in that second, but we can imagine.

We can imagine that Loki, who had been the architect of the whole plan, who had ridden east with Thor

knowing that this exact moment would come, who had been rehearsing his lines for the long ride out

Loki, in this second, was feeling for the first time the full cold weight of what the plan had been asking him to carry.

If the next sentence out of his mouth did not work, both of them would die in this hall.

There were a hundred giants in this room.

There were weapons on every wall.

Mjollnir was not in Thor's hand.

The plan, the careful, impossible plan, was in this small space between Thrymmer's leaning in face and the bride's burning eyes

and it lived or died on whether Loki could say one true sounding sentence in the voice of a soft

careful handmaiden.

Loki's heart, the poem implies, came up
into his throat.

Loki's voice, the poem implies, stayed
very even.

Loki, in his handmaiden's voice, and the poem implies that this is the moment when all of Loki's clever

cold thinking on the long road east was being repaid in a single critical exchange.

Loki leaned in toward Thrymmer.

Loki said, Lord of the Thursas, do not be
afraid.

Freyja's eyes burn because for the same reason that she has eaten and drunk so much tonight

she has not slept for eight nights.

The eight nights between the demand and the wedding, she has lain awake in her hall, so eager was she for you.

Her eyes burn because they have not been
closed.

They will be calm again, Lord of the
Thursas, after she has rested in your bed.

The Thrymskvida records Thrymmer's reaction to the second explanation with the same small comic touch.

Thrymmer who had almost seen through the
disguise.

Thrymmer, on hearing Loki's explanation,
again chose to believe it.

He chose to believe it because the
explanation, again, flattered him.

Freyja's eyes burned with the hunger of
love.

Freyja's eyes had not slept because she
could not stop thinking of him.

Thrymmer, in this moment, settled back
onto his high seat.

He smiled again.

It was the small, dangerous smile of a
giant who has chosen vanity over caution.

It was the smile of a giant who was, the poem implies, about to die, but Thrymmer did not yet know that.

Thrymmer, restored to his confidence by the explanation, Thrymmer now decided that it was time.

The feast had gone on long enough.

The mead had been drunk.

The food had been eaten.

The hour had come for the moment that, by the old laws of the Jotnar, would make the wedding final.

Thrymmer stood up at the high seat.

Thrymmer raised his voice across the hall.

The Thrymskvida gives us his speech in one of the great anticipated moments of the entire poem.

Thrymmer said, "Bring out the hammer."
Chapter Eleven: The Hammer on the Knee.

A small silence fell across the hall.

The Thrymskvida gives us the silence in a
single quick line.

The giants of Thrymmer's hall, hearing the king's command, stopped their conversations.

The clinking of cups stopped.

The laughter stopped.

The hall was, for one moment, completely still because the giants knew what was about to happen.

The bringing out of the hammer at a giant wedding was the great consecrating moment of the marriage.

The hammer of the bridegroom, the symbol of his power and of the protection he would now extend over his bride

was carried out by the bridegroom's men.

It was laid on the bride's knees.

The bride, by accepting the hammer on her knees, accepted the protection of her husband.

The husband, by laying the hammer on her
knees, gave that protection.

It was the moment that, by the old laws of the Jotnar, the laws older than any of the laws of the gods

made the wedding final.

Thrymmer's giants brought out the hammer.

The Thrymskvidda does not give us the details of the procession, but the poem implies that the hammer was carried by several giants.

Mjollnir was a heavy weapon, and even in the hall of Thrymmer, the bringing out of it was a procession.

They carried it on a cloth.

They carried it slowly, with the great
care that the moment required.

The hammer, the poem implies, was the great hammer, Mjollnir of Thor, with its short, heavy haft and its great square iron head

with the small marks on the head where the dwarves Eitri and Brokkr had finished it in the deep places of the worlds.

It was, after eight long nights, no longer
eight leagues underground.

It was, after eight long nights, finally
back in the same room as Thor.

The giants approached the high table.

They carried the hammer to where the bride
was sitting beside Thrymmer.

They, by the old custom of the Jotnar,
laid Mjollnir on the bride's knees.

The Thrymskvidda gives us, here, the line that the Old North preserved more carefully than almost any other line in the entire poem.

The line is, Hlo hlórida hugr í brjósti.

It means, the heart of Thor laughed in his
breast.

Thor, who had been silent through the whole feast, who had eaten an ox and ate salmon and drunk three barrels of mead

who had stared out at Thrymmer through the
veil with eyes that almost gave him away

who had been carried east in a bride's
gown against every instinct of his honor.

Thor, in this single quiet moment, when the haft of his own hammer touched the cloth of the gown across his own knees

when his hand, hidden under the embroidered sleeve of the bride's gown, closed around the haft that he had not held in eight nights.

Thor's heart laughed in his breast.

It is one of the small great lines of the
entire Old Norse corpus.

The heart of Thor laughed, not aloud, not so that any of the giants in the hall heard it.

The poem is careful about this.

The laughter was internal.

The laughter was the small recognition, deep in Thor's chest, that the long humiliating journey

the gown, the keys, the necklace, the veil, the eight salmon, the three barrels of mead, the careful explanations of Loki

all of it, all of it had brought him here to this moment with his hand around the haft of Mjollnir in the hall of Thrymmer with the giants of the eastern country gathered around him in their long wedding feast clothes

weapons at their sides, but not in their
hands.

The slow, heavy laughter of a feast still
echoing in the rafters of the hall.

The laughter was also, the poem implies,
something else.

The laughter was the moment in which a being who had spent the whole day being someone he was not

being a bride, being a quiet woman, being a thing the gown had made him, felt himself in one small private second become himself again.

The hand under the embroidered sleeve was
his own hand.

The hand was the hand that had held this
hammer ten thousand times.

The hand knew the haft.

The haft knew the hand.

The wood of the haft had over the long
years taken the shape of his grip.

The grip now slid back into the place the
haft had been waiting for it to slide.

The hammer remembered him.

He remembered the hammer under the veil, behind the gown, with the Brisingamen at his throat and the bride's keys at his belt and the small bright rings of the bride still on his fingers.

Thor, for one small space of one held breath with his hand on his own hammer for the first time in eight nights

Thor was again Thor.

The bride was not the bride.

The bride was the god of thunder, and the god of thunder, the poem implies, was about to be the god of thunder again.

Thor was Thor again.

Mjollnir was Mjollnir again.

The plan, the careful impossible plan of
Loki, had worked.

There is a verse in the Havamal that says,
"Praise the day at evening.

Praise the woman after she is buried.

Praise the weapon when it has been tried." Mjolnir, that night, was about to be tried.

The Thrymskvidha gives us the next moment
in three quick stanzas.

Thor seized the hammer from his own lap.

He stood up at the high table.

The veil fell back.

The bride's gown fell open.

The keys jangled at his belt.

The Brisingamen swung at his throat.

Freyja's gold and Thor's beard and the great square iron head of Mjolnir all caught the firelight at the same moment

and Thrymr, beside him at the high seat,
finally, too late, saw who his bride was.

Thrymr stood up.

Thrymr opened his mouth to call to his
giants.

Thor brought Mjolnir down.

The Thrymskvidha records the moment with the brief dignity of a poem that knows it does not need to elaborate.

The hammer fell.

Thrymr, the king of the thursas, fell.

The hall, for a single moment, was full of the small sound of the king of the jotnar of the eastern country striking the floor of his own hall.

Then the giants began to rise, and Thor, the great red bearded god, with the gown still half on

with the necklace still around his neck, with his hammer in his hand, Thor moved through the hall of Thrymmer the way Thor always moved through halls of giants.

The poem does not give us the details.

The poem says only that Thor, in this hall, killed every giant who stood up to come against him.

The hall, by the time it was over, was
silent.

The wedding feast, by the time it was
over, was no longer a wedding feast.

Thrymmer's hall was a hall of fallen
giants and a god with a hammer.

The Thrymskvidha gives us one final small detail, and the detail is one of the strangest in the poem.

At the end of the slaughter, when the hall was silent, an old jotun woman came forward.

She had been Thrymmer's sister.

She had, the poem implies, been at the wedding for the giving of the bride gift, which in the old North was the gift of rings from the bridegroom's family to the bride.

She had been about to give Freyja, as she imagined Freyja, the rings that were her right by custom.

Now, with her brother dead and the hall full of fallen giants and the bride who was not a bride standing in the middle of it all with her hammer in her hand

she asked anyway.

She asked for the rings.

The Thrymskvidha records with a small dry note that Thor gave her instead what he had given her brother.

The hall went quiet.

Thor lowered the hammer.

He looked around the hall at the long fallen tables, at the small fire still burning in the wall sconces

at the great half eaten ox at the center of the high table, at the empty mead barrels on the floor

and he understood that the wedding was
over.

The mission was done.

Mjolnir was in his hand.

Loki, in his handmaiden's gown, stood very
still in the corner of the hall.

Loki, who had been the architect of the whole plan, who had been at Thor's side through the whole long impossible day

who had spoken for Thor at the feast and saved him from Thrymmer's eyes and explained away the burning eyes and the great appetite

Loki in this moment did the one thing he was always good at, which was knowing when not to draw attention to himself.

Loki said, "Are we going home?" Thor said, "Yes." And the two of them, the god of thunder with his hammer in his hand and his gown still half on

and the trickster of Asgard with his handmaiden's cap askew on his head and his small cold smile playing at the corner of his mouth

the two of them walked out of the hall of Thrymmer in the deep blue light of the Jotunheimer night

and they climbed back into the chariot of goats, and they turned the chariot west, and they went home.

The Thrymskvidha gives us one final stanza
for the ride back.

The chariot, with Thor no longer in the cosmic rage of the outward journey, with Mjolnir back in his hand and the matter resolved

drove west across the long country between Jotunheimer and Asgard at the ordinary speed of a chariot.

The road behind them did not catch fire.

The mountains did not split.

The earth did not burn.

The two great goats pulled the chariot steadily across the cold country through the night and into the first gray light of the dawn over Asgard.

Thor came home.

Thor, still in the gown, the poem implies because the poem does not record any pause to change clothes.

Thor came home to the gods of Asgard with Mjolnir at his side in the first light of morning.

The gods of Asgard, who had waited the
night, came out to meet him.

The Thrymskvidha ends the story here with
one last small line.

The gods received Thor.

The hammer was back.

The matter was closed.

Freyja's necklace was returned to her.

Freyja's gown was returned to her
household.

The bride's veil was folded carefully
away.

Loki's handmaiden's gown was folded away
too.

The chariot of goats was put back in its
stable.

The poem ends, as Eddic poems often end, with a small, simple note that the story is now over.

Tonight, dear listener, the story will end
in a slightly different way.

Tonight, we will sit for a moment in the closing of the story before we let you go to sleep.

Chapter Twelve: Goodnight and the Wolf at
the Edge of Time.

The story we told you tonight is one of
the strangest in the Old North.

A god lost a hammer.

The hammer was hidden eight leagues
underground by a king of the giants.

The king of the giants demanded, as the price of the hammer's return, the goddess of love as his bride.

The goddess refused.

The gods of Asgard, having no other path, dressed the god of thunder in a bride's gown and a bride's veil and sent him east to the giant's hall.

The giant, in the small, awful pride of a being who has been waiting too long for his prize

failed to recognize that the bride was not
the bride he had asked for.

The hammer was brought out.

The hammer was laid on the bride's knees.

The bride, in that small moment, became
again the god whose hammer it was.

And the wedding ended in the way the
wedding could only have ended.

That is all.

There is no great tragedy in this story.

There is no death of a son of the gods.

There is no binding of a great old enemy.

There is no first meeting of two beings fated to kill each other at the end of all things.

There is only the small precious comedy of a god in a bride's gown and the small precious moment in which his heart laughed inside his breast when his hand finally closed around the haft of his own hammer.

But the Old North loved this story.

The Old North loved this story the way the Old North loved any story in which the gods of Asgard

by some clever, impossible turn, recovered
what they had lost.

The Thrymskvidha was one of the most
beloved poems in the entire Eddic corpus.

It survived in the Codex Regius.

It was probably composed, the scholars believe, in the late tenth century or the early eleventh

when the old religion of Iceland was just
beginning to give way to the new religion.

It was a poem from the late days of the
Old North's understanding of itself.

And it was, in some quiet way, exactly the kind of poem the Old North's listeners needed.

The hammer had been lost.

The hammer had been recovered.

The world had, by a strange, impossible
path, been put right again.

Thor was Thor again.

Mjolnir was Mjolnir again.

And the giants, the Old North believed, would not, for one more generation at least, be the masters of Asgard.

But the giants were still there.

The Thrymskvida does not say so in its closing stanza, but the Old North's listeners would have understood.

Thrymr was one giant.

Thrymr had hidden the hammer eight leagues
underground.

Thrymr had been answered, but the giants of the eastern country were still there in their long

cold halls, waiting.

The giants would, in the next generation,
try again.

The giants would try again and again and again through all the long stretching ages of the Old North's cosmos until at last

at the end of all things, they would try one final time, and that final time would be the time when the gods of Asgard would not

by any clever, impossible plan, be able to
send them home.

That final time would be Ragnarok.

The giants would come across the long road
from the east.

They would cross the rainbow bridge.

They would walk into Asgard.

The hammer would still be in Thor's hand.

The hammer would, on that day, no longer
be enough to send them back.

The serpent we met two nights ago in the deep, cold sea would rise from the encircling water.

Loki, who tonight, in the small dignified comedy of the wedding feast, was Thor's clever

loyal companion.

Loki would by then have become the great
betrayer.

Loki would lead the giants.

Loki would ride at the head of the army.

But Ragnarok is not yet.

Ragnarok is, the old North believed, still
many generations away.

Tonight the giants are at home in the cold
east.

The hammer is back at Thor's side.

Freyja is back in her hall with her
necklace at her throat.

Loki is back in his small cold cunning, smiling his small smile with no sign yet that the smile would in some far future turn into something terrible.

Tonight is the small precious time before
the ending.

This is, in some quiet way, what the Thrymskvidha was telling itself in the long winter halls of the late tenth century.

The hammer is gone.

The hammer is recovered.

The world goes on.

The giants are out there.

The giants will try again.

But for tonight, the giants are at home.

For tonight, the hammer is here.

For tonight, the gods of Asgard sit in Idavollr in the morning light, and Thor is taking off the bride's gown at last

and Loki is taking off the handmaiden's cap, and Freyja is fastening the Brisingamen back around her own throat

and the long quiet day after the strange
impossible night is beginning.

That is what tonight's story is, a small, precious recovery, a hammer back in its place

a few thousand more years of the world.

We will tell you next time of a god who went into the country of the giants for a different reason

not to recover something stolen, but to seek something he wanted, of a hall of riddles

of a contest of strength, of a great horn that no being could drain, of a cat that no being could lift

of an old crone called Elli, whose name in the old language meant simply old age, and against whom even Thor could not stand.

We will tell you of the visit to
Utgardaloki on Wednesday.

But for now, for now, the bride is no
longer the bride.

The hammer is back in its place beside
Thor's bed.

The chariot of goats is stabled.

The Brisingamen catches the morning light
at Freyja's throat.

Loki is sitting again at his own table with his warm cup in his hands, watching the dawn come on

the small cold smile playing at the corner
of his mouth.

Sif is in the kitchen of her hall with her
gold hair shining in the morning light

making breakfast for her husband who has come home Thor is sitting on the edge of his bed

taking off the last of the bride's gown and reaching down to the place beside the bed where Mjolnir now is again.

The world has another few thousand years.

The wolf at the edge of time waits.

The great ship Naglfar is still being
built.

Ragnarok is still far away.

Tonight there is only the cold morning of Asgard and a hammer back in its place and a god in his own bed and a small smile somewhere across town that has not yet turned into the smile that ends everything.

Good night, dear listener.

Wherever you are tonight, whatever bed you are in, whatever quiet room, whatever soft pillow you have laid your head on

let the picture of the god and the hammer
be the last picture you carry into sleep.

Not the slaughter at the end of the
wedding feast.

Not the falling of Thrimur.

The hand.

The hand of the god, hidden under the embroidered sleeve of the bride's gown, closing around the haft of his own hammer for the first time in eight long nights.

The small private laughter of his heart
inside his breast.

The recognition.

The recovery.

Let the wolf at the edge of time wait.

Let Ragnarok wait.

Tonight there is only the morning and the
hammer and the good night.

And tonight there is only your bed and your breath and the room around you growing dark.

Sleep.

The Sleeping Almanac will be here on Wednesday with another story from the Old North.

New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday at
eight o'clock in the evening.

If the story carried you down into sleep, if the picture of the god and the hammer was the last thing you saw before the dark came

leave a quiet small note in the comments.

We read every one.

We tell each other in the morning who
slept.

Sleep deeply.

Sleep without dreams.

And wake into a quieter world.

Good night, dear listener.

From the long Old North.

From the bride who was not a bride.

From the hammer back in its place.

From the almanac that is keeping the slow
count.

Good night.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.

Tonight: the night Óðinn, the all father, the king of Asgard, the wisdom seeker,

became a snake and slid through a crack in a mountain to steal the poetry of the worlds.

A drill in the stone.

A snake on its belly.

A giant's daughter on a golden throne.

Three sips of a precious mead.

And a god flying home, in the shape of a great eagle, with all of poetry held inside his throat.

We will tell the story tonight from the Hávamál, the wisdom poem of the old north,

and from Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál, the second part of the Prose Edda.

The Hávamál preserves the heist in Óðinn's own voice.

Six brief stanzas.

The only moment in the entire Norse corpus where the All Father speaks first person about something he stole.

The Hávamál says: I sought the old giant.

Now I am back.

Talking got me very little there.

With many words I won my wishes in the hall of Suttungr.

Rati's mouth made me an opening, gnawed through the stone.

The paths of the giants ran over and under.

I risked my head on it.

Gunnlǫð gave me, from her golden throne, a drink of the precious mead.

Tonight, by the time the story is done, we will be in the hall of Suttungr.

Settle in.

Let your shoulders drop.

We begin on the day a god of wisdom was born from a jar of spit.

Chapter One.

The Spit in the Jar.

There was, in the old north, a war.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us when, exactly.

The Vǫluspá tells us only that it was the first war in the worlds,

the war that came before the world we know.

We can imagine, from the small details the poem gives us, that it was very long ago,

in the days when the gods were still figuring out what kind of beings they were going to be.

There were, the old north remembered, two tribes of gods.

The Æsir, the gods of the sky and the storm and the spear and the gallows, lived in Asgard.

Their father was Óðinn.

Their lord of thunder was Þórr.

Their watcher at the rainbow bridge was Heimdallr.

The Æsir were the gods we have been telling stories about all season.

The Vanir, the gods of the field and the sea and the long slow growing of things, lived in Vanaheimr.

Their father was Njǫrðr.

Their lord of harvest was Freyr.

Their lady of love was Freyja.

The Vanir were the older gods, the quieter gods, the gods who remembered the world before the world.

The two tribes, in the long old days, did not get along.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us, in detail, why the war began.

The poem implies, and the Vǫluspá implies, that it had something to do with a woman.

A Vanir witch named Gullveig.

The Æsir tried to burn her.

She would not burn.

They burned her three times, the poem says, and three times she rose from the fire whole.

After the third burning, the Æsir gave up on burning her, and the Vanir came to her defence,

and the war began.

It was, the old north remembered, a long war.

It went on for years.

Maybe for ages.

The Æsir threw their spears across the field.

The Vanir threw down the walls of Asgard.

Both sides used every weapon they had.

Both sides tried every trick.

And by the end of it, neither side could win.

So the war ended the way the old north's worst wars always ended.

It ended with talk.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the two tribes came together in the centre of the worlds,

in a place where they could meet without either side having the advantage, and they sat down across from each other,

and they made peace.

But the peace, the old north understood, had to be sealed.

In the old laws of the north, when two parties made peace after a long war,

they had to mark the moment in some way that could not be taken back.

They had to do a thing that no one in either tribe could later undo.

They had to bind themselves to the truce.

And the way they did it, in this case, the Skáldskaparmál tells us with the small dry tone of a man writing down something very strange, was this.

They spat.

All of the gods, the Skáldskaparmál says, came forward, one by one, Óðinn first,

then Freyr, then Njǫrðr, then Freyja, then Heimdallr, then every one of the Æsir and every one of the Vanir,

all the gods who had been at the war and were now at the peace,

and each of them, in turn, leaned forward over a great jar that had been set on a stone in the centre of the council,

and each of them spat into it.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us this with the smallest possible explanation.

Snorri Sturluson, writing in Iceland two hundred years after the old poems were first preserved,

does not pause to tell us why.

He simply says: they spat into a jar, and that is how the peace was sealed.

We can imagine, from what the old north understood about marks of binding, that the spit of every god in the worlds,

mixed together in one vessel, was a thing that no one in either tribe could ever later separate.

The peace, by the time the last god had spat into the jar, was inside the jar.

The peace, in some old north sense, had become a physical thing.

A thing that the gods, between them, had made together.

The jar was full.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the gods looked at the jar after the spitting was done,

and they understood that what was inside it was too important to be poured out.

The spit of all the gods in the worlds, mixed together, the marker of the first peace,

was a substance, the gods understood, that had to be kept.

But they did not, the poem implies, quite know what to do with it.

And then, the Skáldskaparmál says, with the small tone of a poet preparing us for a wonder,

one of the gods had an idea.

We do not know which one.

The poem does not name the god.

We can imagine, the way the old north often imagined Óðinn at the moment of any clever idea,

that it was Óðinn.

We can imagine the All Father looking at the jar of mixed spit, and tilting his one good eye,

and saying, with the slow careful voice of a god who has just thought of something he has never thought of before: we could make it into a being.

A being made of the wisdom of all the gods.

A being who could carry, inside his body, the peace itself.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that this is what the gods did.

They took the spit from the jar.

They shaped it, the way a potter shapes clay.

They breathed life into it.

And the being who stood up, when the spit had become flesh and the flesh had taken its first breath, was a man.

His name was Kvasir.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us his name with a small reverence.

Kvasir, the wisest being in the worlds.

Kvasir, born of the spit of every god in every tribe.

Kvasir, the living embodiment of the peace between the Æsir and the Vanir.

Kvasir, the poem implies, was so wise that no question, asked of him by any being in any of the worlds,

could ever stump him.

He stood up.

He looked at the gods around him.

He understood, the poem implies, in the first moment of his existence, what he was,

and why he had been made, and what he was for.

And he opened his mouth, and he spoke for the first time, and the first thing he ever said,

the poem implies, was a thing of such wisdom that the gods themselves,

even Óðinn, even the All Father, were quiet for a long moment afterward.

Kvasir, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, then asked permission to leave.

He did not, the poem implies, want to live in Asgard.

He did not want to live in Vanaheimr.

He wanted, instead, to walk through the worlds, through the lands of men and the lands of dwarves and the lands of giants and the lands of small beings the old north did not have names for, and to teach.

To answer questions.

To bring the wisdom of the gods to the beings who had never had a god to ask.

The gods, the poem implies, agreed.

And Kvasir walked out of the council of the gods, and he walked away from Asgard,

and he walked into the world.

Chapter Two.

The Wisest Being in the Worlds.

Kvasir walked.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us how long.

The poem moves quickly through this part of the story, the way poems do when they are setting up something terrible by establishing first something good.

Kvasir walked through the worlds.

He stopped wherever beings stopped him.

He answered any question that any being asked.

He never, the poem tells us, did not have an answer.

We can imagine, and the old north, telling this story around their winter fires,

would have imagined, what it was like to meet Kvasir on the road.

You would have been, perhaps, a farmer.

Or a fisherman.

Or a small craftsman in a village in the long northern country.

You would have been going about your work in the way you always did,

and you would have looked up from your field or your nets or your bench,

and you would have seen a quiet stranger walking down the road.

He would not have looked, the old north imagined, like anything special.

Kvasir, the poem implies, did not glow.

He did not radiate.

He did not announce himself.

He was simply a quiet man in a traveller's cloak, walking with the slow steady pace of a being who had nowhere in particular to be by any particular time,

and who was happy, while he walked, to stop and talk.

You might have called out to him.

You might have asked him, the way the old north's farmers asked travelling strangers,

whether the weather to the east was good.

Or whether there were giants on the road north.

Or whether he had seen any news of the king's army.

And Kvasir, the Skáldskaparmál implies, would have answered.

And his answer would have been, you would have understood, with a small slow chill of recognition,

the truest answer to that question that anyone had ever given you.

Not just true.

True in a way you had not known was possible.

As if the question itself had been, before he spoke, much smaller than you had realised,

and his answer had revealed how large it really was.

You might, then, have asked him a second question.

You might have asked him, the old north imagined, the kind of question you had been carrying around in the back of your chest for years.

The question about whether your wife still loved you.

Or whether your son was lost.

Or whether the small dark feeling you had been having, in the mornings, was a sickness or an omen.

And Kvasir, the poem implies, would have answered that question too.

And his answer to that one would have changed your life.

Because that, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was what Kvasir did.

He walked through the worlds, and he stopped wherever beings stopped him, and he answered.

He answered the small questions and he answered the large questions and he answered the questions no one had quite known how to ask.

And when he had answered, he walked on.

He did not stay.

He did not collect a following.

He did not build a hall and gather students around him.

He simply walked, and answered, and walked on.

He was, the old north remembered, the wisest being who had ever lived.

And the wisest being who had ever lived, the old north also remembered, with the small dry note of a tradition that knew exactly how the world worked,

did not survive very long.

Because, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small heaviness of a poet who knows what is coming,

Kvasir's walking eventually took him to a particular hall, on a particular evening, in a particular country at the edge of the worlds.

And the beings who opened the door of that hall, when Kvasir knocked, were not beings who were going to ask him questions.

They were beings who were going to kill him.

Chapter Three.

The Dwarves at the Door.

Their names were Fjalar and Galar.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us their names without ceremony.

Two dwarves.

Brothers.

The kind of dwarves the old north remembered with the small uneasy tone of a tradition that knew dwarves were not,

despite their small size, safe.

Dwarves, in the old north, were craftsmen.

They forged the great hammer of Þórr.

They forged the spear of Óðinn.

They forged the ring of Andvari that would bring down kingdoms.

But dwarves, the old north also remembered, kept their own counsel.

Dwarves had reasons no one else understood.

Dwarves, when they wanted something, would do things to get it that no other being in the worlds would have done.

Fjalar and Galar, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, lived in a small dark hall in a dark country far from the gods.

They had heard, the poem implies, of the wisest being in the worlds.

They had heard, perhaps, the stories of farmers and fishermen and small craftsmen who had been changed by a meeting with the quiet stranger on the road.

They had heard, perhaps, that the stranger never refused a guest.

They had heard, perhaps, that the stranger would come to any hall to which he was invited,

and that he would stay for one evening, and that he would answer any question put to him,

and that he would then walk on.

And they decided, the Skáldskaparmál implies with the small dry tone of a poet who knows exactly what kind of beings these were, to invite him.

They sent a message.

We can imagine, from how such things were done in the old north, that they sent a small runner,

or a passing trader, or a bird trained for such errands.

The message went out into the world.

It said: Fjalar and Galar, the dwarf brothers of the deep country, invite the wise Kvasir to their hall.

They have heard of his answers.

They would like, very much, to hear one for themselves.

Will he come?

Kvasir, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, came.

He did not, the poem implies, suspect anything.

Kvasir had been invited to many halls.

Kings had invited him.

Witches had invited him.

Hermits in mountain caves had invited him.

Kvasir had gone to all of them, and he had answered their questions, and he had walked on.

He had no reason, when the message from Fjalar and Galar reached him, to think this invitation was different.

He walked, the poem implies, for many days.

The country where Fjalar and Galar lived was a long way from the road where the message had reached him.

The journey took Kvasir through forests that grew thicker as he walked east.

The trees, the old north imagined, grew older.

The light, between the trees, grew dimmer.

The roads, the old north imagined, grew less travelled.

And by the time Kvasir arrived at the hall of Fjalar and Galar, he had been walking,

alone, through deep country for a very long time, and he was, for the first time in his existence as a wise being in the world, tired.

He knocked on the door.

The door, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, was opened by Fjalar.

We can imagine, from how the old north imagined dwarves, what Fjalar looked like.

Short.

Bearded.

Eyes the colour of cold metal.

A small smile that did not, quite, reach the rest of his face.

He stood in the doorway, and he looked up at the tall wise stranger,

and he said the words the old north remembered the dwarves saying: welcome, friend.

Come in.

We have been waiting.

Kvasir came in.

The hall, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was warm.

There was a fire in the hearth.

There was food on the table.

There was, near the fire, a second dwarf, Galar, the brother, already seated at one of the benches,

with a cup in his hand.

Galar looked up when Kvasir came in.

Galar smiled the same small smile his brother had smiled at the door.

Galar gestured, with the cup, to a seat at the table.

Kvasir sat.

And the Skáldskaparmál tells us what happened then with the smallest possible number of words.

The two dwarves, the poem says, killed him.

That is the line the poem gives us.

They killed him.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us how.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us what was said.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us what Kvasir, in his last moments, understood about what was happening to him.

The poem moves through this moment with the dry brevity of a tradition that knew there was no way to make the killing of the wisest being in the worlds bearable to tell at any length,

and so chose to tell it as quickly as possible.

They killed him.

And then, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, they did something stranger.

They drained his blood.

They took, the poem implies, two great vessels, vessels they had prepared, in advance, for exactly this purpose.

They drained Kvasir's blood into the vessels.

They drained, the poem implies, every drop.

The wisdom of all the gods, in the form of the blood of the being the gods had made of their spit,

ran out of Kvasir and into the dwarves' vessels, and Fjalar and Galar collected it carefully,

and they set the vessels aside.

Then, the Skáldskaparmál says, they brought out a third vessel.

A vessel of honey.

They mixed Kvasir's blood with the honey.

They stirred the mixture, the way a brewer stirs the first stages of mead.

They poured the mixture, when it had settled, into three smaller vessels, one large vessel called Óðrœrir,

and two smaller vessels called Boðn and Són.

And what they had made, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, was the most precious substance that had ever existed in any of the worlds.

It was a mead.

A mead, the poem says, of such a kind that any being who drank even a single sip of it would,

from that moment forward, be a poet and a scholar.

The wisdom of Kvasir, the wisdom of every god in every tribe, distilled through Kvasir's body,

mixed now with honey and stored in three small vessels in a dwarf's hall in the deep country, could be drunk.

It could be carried in a cup.

It could be tasted on a tongue.

And anyone who tasted it would never, after that, be the same.

The dwarves, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, drank none of it themselves.

They were dwarves.

The mead, the old north understood, was not made for dwarves.

The mead, the dwarves understood, was a thing to be kept.

A thing to be hidden.

A thing, perhaps, to be sold, one day, at the highest possible price to the highest possible buyer.

They set the three vessels on a high shelf in the back of their hall.

And the Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small dry note of a poet who knows exactly what kind of beings these dwarves were,

that they began, almost immediately, to look for the next being they could kill.

Chapter Four.

The Drowning of Gilling.

Some time later, the Skáldskaparmál does not tell us how long, a giant came to the dwarves' hall.

His name was Gilling.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us his name without much ceremony.

Gilling, a giant of the eastern country, a being of the jǫtnar tribe,

the kind of being who, in the long old north, lived in the cold mountains and the deep forests where the gods rarely went.

Gilling had a wife.

The Skáldskaparmál does not give us her name.

Gilling and his wife, the poem implies, had come to the dwarves' country on some business of their own.

Perhaps trade.

Perhaps a journey.

The poem does not tell us.

The poem tells us only that they came to the dwarves' hall, and that they accepted the dwarves' hospitality,

and that they sat down at the dwarves' table to eat.

Fjalar and Galar, the Skáldskaparmál implies, did not like having giants in their hall.

We can imagine, from how the old north remembered dwarves, that they were uneasy.

Giants were larger than dwarves.

Giants were stronger than dwarves.

A giant in a small dwarf hall was, in the long view, a being who could break the hall if he wanted to.

The dwarves, the poem implies, watched their guest carefully.

They smiled the small smiles they were good at.

They served the food.

They poured the drink.

And they thought, the poem implies, about what they were going to do about Gilling before he could do anything about them.

After the meal, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, Fjalar invited Gilling to go out in a small boat.

The country around the dwarves' hall, the poem implies, was a country of lakes.

There were small boats at the shore.

Fjalar suggested, with the small careful courtesy of a host showing his guest the local sights,

that they could row out on the lake and see the country from the water.

Gilling, who did not know what kind of host he had, agreed.

They took a small boat out onto the lake.

Gilling, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, was at the prow.

Fjalar was at the oars.

They rowed out, the poem implies, into the deeper water in the middle of the lake.

And then Fjalar, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, with no particular ceremony, drove the boat against a hidden rock.

The boat, the poem tells us, capsized.

Gilling, who was a giant of the mountains and not of the sea, could not swim.

He drowned.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us this with the dry brevity it has used for everything else in this story.

Gilling drowned.

Fjalar swam to shore.

Fjalar walked back to the hall, where his brother Galar was waiting, and where Gilling's wife,

who did not yet know what had happened, was also waiting.

When Gilling's wife saw Fjalar come back alone, she understood, the Skáldskaparmál implies, immediately what had happened.

She began to wail.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that she wailed, in the door of the dwarves' hall,

in a voice so loud and so full of grief that the dwarves could not bear to hear it.

The dwarves, the poem tells us, conferred.

The dwarves, the poem tells us, agreed that something would have to be done about the wailing.

Galar went to the door.

He called Gilling's wife outside.

He said, the poem implies, with the small false soothing voice of a being lying to ease another being's grief,

that he could take her to see the place on the lake where Gilling had drowned.

He would help her, he said, find her husband's body.

She came outside.

Galar, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, was waiting for her with a heavy millstone in his hands.

As she stepped through the door, Galar dropped the millstone from above.

It struck her on the head.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the brevity it has used for every killing in this story,

that she fell to the ground, and that she was dead.

And the two dwarves, the poem implies, dragged her body away from their hall,

and they went back inside, and they returned to the slow careful work of guarding the three vessels of mead.

They had killed, by this point, three beings.

Kvasir.

Gilling.

Gilling's wife.

And they thought, the Skáldskaparmál implies, that the killings were over.

They were wrong.

Because Gilling, it turned out, had a son.

His name was Suttungr.

Chapter Five.

The Brother's Revenge.

Some time later, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, Suttungr came looking for his parents.

We can imagine, from how the old north's giants kept track of each other across the great cold country,

that he did not find them quickly.

Giants travelled slowly.

Giants kept long counsel.

Suttungr would have waited, perhaps for a long time, for word of his father and mother to come back from their journey.

He would have waited at his own hall, the Skáldskaparmál implies, in the deep eastern mountains,

and he would have grown, with each passing month, more and more uneasy.

When the word finally came, the old north imagined, it came from a passing trader.

The trader, perhaps, had stopped at the dwarves' hall on his way through the lake country.

The dwarves had been hospitable.

The dwarves had fed him.

The dwarves, in the small careless way of beings who had committed a murder and were now quite confident they had got away with it,

had said something, a wrong word, perhaps, or a small slip, about the strange visitors they had recently entertained.

The trader, the old north imagined, had been clever enough to notice.

The trader had said nothing in the hall.

The trader had ridden on.

And when the trader, in his next country, met one of Suttungr's kin, he told them what he had heard.

Suttungr came at once.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us his arrival at the dwarves' hall with the small heavy economy it has used for everything in this story.

Suttungr came.

He stood in the door of the dwarves' hall.

He was, the poem implies, a giant of great size, taller than the door of the hall,

taller perhaps than the hall itself, and the dwarves, the moment they saw him in their doorway,

understood that everything they had thought they had got away with was, in this single moment,

no longer something they had got away with.

Suttungr asked them where his father was.

The Skáldskaparmál does not give us the dwarves' answer in detail.

The poem implies that they tried, at first, to lie.

They tried, perhaps, to say that Gilling had come, and that Gilling had left,

and that they did not know where Gilling had gone.

We can imagine, from how dwarves lied in the old north, that they were good at it.

They had small smiles.

They had careful voices.

They had practised, in their long lives of dealings with beings stronger than they were,

the art of saying nothing while seeming to say everything.

Suttungr, the Skáldskaparmál implies, did not believe them.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, then, what Suttungr did.

He took both dwarves by the shoulders.

He carried them, one in each great hand, out of their hall and away from their country,

and he carried them, the poem implies, for some distance, across forests and across rivers and out to the western edge of the cold country where the cold sea met the cold rocks.

And he set them down, the poem says, on a single small rock that stood out from the shore.

A rock that was, when the tide was low, dry.

A rock that was, when the tide came in, completely underwater.

He set them on the rock.

He stepped back, the Skáldskaparmál implies, to the dry shore.

And the dwarves, standing on their small rock with the tide coming in around their ankles,

understood, very quickly, what the giant intended to do to them.

Suttungr was going to wait.

Suttungr was going to stand on the shore, and watch, while the tide came in around the rock,

and the rock disappeared under the water, and the dwarves drowned the way Gilling had drowned,

on a small piece of stone in cold water, with no one to help them.

The dwarves, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, began to bargain.

We can imagine, from how dwarves bargained in the old north when their lives were on the line,

what it was like.

They were quick.

They were inventive.

They were, even with the cold sea water rising around their feet, calm in the small careful way of beings who had spent their whole lives weighing offers and counter offers.

They called out to Suttungr.

They told him they had something.

They told him they had something the giant would want.

They told him, the poem implies, with the quick desperate brightness of beings who had only one card to play, about the mead.

The mead, they said, was theirs to give.

The mead, they said, was the most precious substance that had ever existed in any of the worlds.

The mead had been made, they did not, perhaps, explain how, from the blood of the wisest being that had ever lived.

The mead, they said, could turn any drinker, in a single sip, into a poet and a scholar.

The mead, they said, was on a high shelf in their hall.

The mead was in three vessels.

The mead, they said, would be Suttungr's, in compensation for his father's death, if he would let them off the rock.

Suttungr, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, considered.

He was a giant.

He was, the old north remembered, calculating in the slow heavy way of giants.

He looked down at the two small beings on the small rock with the cold water rising.

He listened to their offer.

He understood that they had killed his father.

He understood that they would deserve, by every old north measure of justice, to drown.

And he understood, with the slow practical sense of a being who had thought a great deal about what was and was not worth doing,

that the mead they were describing might, in fact, be a thing more valuable than the small revenge of watching two murderers drown.

He agreed.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small dry note of a poet who has watched many such bargains,

that Suttungr waded out to the rock, and he picked up both dwarves, and he carried them back to the dry shore.

He set them down.

He looked at them.

He said, the poem implies, that if they did not now produce the mead they had promised,

he would carry them back to the rock and stand on the shore and watch until they were dead.

The dwarves, the poem implies, understood.

The dwarves agreed.

The dwarves led Suttungr back across the forests and across the rivers and back to their hall.

The mead, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, was on the high shelf where they had left it.

Suttungr took down the three vessels.

He took them, the poem implies, very carefully.

The vessels were not large.

He could carry all three of them, one cradled in the crook of his arm and the others held between his fingers.

He looked at the dwarves.

He told them, the Skáldskaparmál implies, that if he ever saw either of them again,

he would remember what they owed him.

And then he turned, the poem says, and he carried the three vessels out of the dwarves' hall,

and he walked east, with the mead.

Chapter Six.

The Mead in the Mountain.

Suttungr's hall, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, was in a mountain.

The mountain was called Hnitbjǫrg.

The name, in the old language, meant the clashing rocks, or the heavy rocks, depending on which scholar you ask.

Hnitbjǫrg was a great peak in the deep eastern country of the jǫtnar,

a mountain so large that whole communities of giants lived inside it, in halls cut into the rock,

in chambers carved out of the deep stone, in corridors that ran for miles inside the mountain's body.

Suttungr's hall, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was the largest of these chambers.

It was at the heart of the mountain.

It was the place Suttungr, when he was not travelling, considered his home.

He brought the mead there.

The journey home, the Skáldskaparmál implies, took some time.

Suttungr walked east.

He walked through the long countries between the lake country of the dwarves and the deep mountains of his own people.

He walked carefully, the poem implies, with the slow steady pace of a being who was carrying something he did not want to drop.

The three small vessels, in his great hands, were the most precious substance in any of the worlds.

He did not, the poem implies, set them down.

He did not even, when he stopped to sleep on his journey, let them out of his sight.

When he reached Hnitbjǫrg, he carried the mead deep inside.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that he chose, for the hiding place, a chamber far from the main hall.

We can imagine, from how the old north imagined the inside of mountains, what the chamber was like.

Cold.

Dark.

A small space cut from the rock, far enough from the surface that the warmth of the giants' cooking fires did not reach it.

A space with one entrance, and the entrance closed by a heavy stone door.

A space, the old north imagined, that no being in the worlds could find unless they had been told exactly where to look.

Suttungr set the three vessels on a stone shelf in the chamber.

He stepped back.

He looked at them.

He understood, the Skáldskaparmál implies, what he now had.

He had the wisdom of all the gods, distilled through Kvasir's body, brewed by the dwarves into a drinkable form,

and stored in three small vessels on a shelf in a chamber in the deep heart of his mountain.

He had, the old north would have said, the most valuable thing any being in the worlds had ever owned.

And he understood, the Skáldskaparmál implies, that he could not, by himself, guard it forever.

He had to sleep.

He had to leave, sometimes, on the business of giants.

He had to be, at certain hours, somewhere other than the chamber where the mead was.

And in those hours, the poem implies, the mead would be unguarded.

He needed a guardian.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, then, the small detail of this story that makes the whole story possible.

Suttungr, the poem says, had a daughter.

Her name was Gunnlǫð.

She was, the poem does not give us many details, and we will be careful not to invent too many,

a young giantess, the only child of Suttungr, and she lived with her father inside Hnitbjǫrg.

Suttungr called her.

We can imagine the moment.

Suttungr standing in the small dark chamber with the three vessels of mead on the shelf behind him.

Gunnlǫð arriving at the door, the poem implies, with the small quiet care of a young being summoned by her large dangerous father.

She would have looked at him.

She would have waited to be told what he wanted.

Suttungr told her.

He told her, the Skáldskaparmál implies, what was in the chamber.

He told her, perhaps in some detail, perhaps not, what the mead was,

and how it had come to him, and what it could do for any being who drank it.

He told her, the poem implies, what he wanted her to do.

He wanted her, he said, to sit in the chamber.

To live in the chamber.

To keep watch in the chamber, day and night, for as long as the mead was there.

To let no being into the chamber except him, and to let no drop of the mead leave the chamber until he,

Suttungr, came back and asked for it.

She was, the Skáldskaparmál implies, his only daughter, and he was, the poem implies,

her only living parent, and she had nowhere else, in the long old north, to be.

She agreed.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Suttungr installed her in the chamber.

He brought, the poem implies, the few things she would need, a bed,

a chest of clothes, a small lamp, perhaps a few books or a small loom for the long quiet hours of the watch.

He sat her on a low stone seat near the shelf where the vessels stood,

and the seat, the poem tells us, was covered in gold cloth, so that she would have,

in the long cold hours of guarding the mead, at least one small piece of brightness near her.

The seat, the Skáldskaparmál implies, became her throne.

And Gunnlǫð, the daughter of Suttungr, took up her watch.

She would sit on the gold covered seat in the small dark chamber in the deep heart of Hnitbjǫrg,

the Skáldskaparmál implies, for what was, by the time the story arrives at her,

a very long time.

She would watch the three vessels on the shelf.

She would tend the small lamp.

She would, perhaps, sing to herself, or weave at a small loom, or read by the lamp's light.

She would wait.

She would not, the poem implies, see any being other than her father for what we can imagine was months at a stretch, perhaps years.

She would be, by the time another being finally came through the chamber's door,

the loneliest young being in any of the worlds.

That, the Skáldskaparmál implies, is what was waiting in the deep heart of Hnitbjǫrg.

A young giantess on a gold covered seat.

A small lamp.

Three vessels of the most precious mead in any of the worlds.

And, somewhere far away, in Asgard, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, a god who had heard,

by now, what Suttungr had done.

A god who was, by the time we leave Hnitbjǫrg and turn west, already preparing to come for it.

Chapter Seven.

Bǫlverkr at the Farm.

Óðinn, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, decided to steal the mead.

The poem does not tell us, in detail, why.

We can imagine the reasons.

The mead was the wisdom of the gods, distilled through Kvasir.

The mead, the poem implies, was a thing that belonged, in some old north sense, to the gods themselves.

Óðinn was the god of wisdom.

Óðinn had, years before this story, given his right eye to drink from the well of Mímir.

Óðinn had, years before, hung himself on the world tree for nine nights to win the runes.

Óðinn, of every being in the worlds, was the being who understood, most clearly,

what the mead was, and what it could do, and what it would mean if it stayed forever in a giant's mountain in the eastern country,

where no being who could properly use it would ever drink it.

He decided to go and get it.

He did not, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, go as Óðinn.

We have told this story before, in earlier episodes of The Sleeping Almanac.

Óðinn, when he travelled in the worlds outside Asgard, did not travel as the king of the gods.

He travelled, the Hávamál tells us, in disguise.

He wore the long grey cloak of a wanderer.

He pulled the wide brimmed hat down low over his face.

He hid the eye patch that would have given him away.

He gave himself a different name, often, in the lands he passed through.

He became, for the journey, somebody else.

For this journey, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, he became Bǫlverkr.

The name, in the old language, meant the evil doer.

Or, more precisely: the doer of bad work.

We can imagine, from how the old north chose its names, what Óðinn was telling himself with this choice.

He was going to a giant's farm.

He was going to play a part.

He was going to do, in the playing of that part, things that no good being would do.

He gave himself, before he went, the name that owned the thing he was about to be.

He walked east.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us how long.

The poem moves quickly.

Bǫlverkr walked east, away from Asgard, into the long cold country between the gods' country and the giants'.

He walked for what we can imagine was many days.

And eventually, the poem implies, he came to a farm on the edge of the giants' country,

in a long valley with fields of summer hay.

The farm, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, belonged to a giant called Baugi.

And Baugi, the poem tells us, was the brother of Suttungr.

Bǫlverkr arrived at the edge of the hayfield.

It was, the Skáldskaparmál implies, late in the summer.

The hay was tall.

The hay needed cutting.

In Baugi's hayfield, the poem tells us, nine slaves were at work.

They moved across the field in a long slow line, the poem implies, each with a scythe in his hands,

swinging in the slow steady rhythm of beings who had been at the same work all summer and would be at it for several more days.

The scythes flashed in the sunlight.

The hay fell in long rows behind them.

The slaves, the poem implies, did not look up when Bǫlverkr came to the edge of the field.

Bǫlverkr watched them for a moment.

He saw, the Skáldskaparmál implies, with the quick wise eye of the All Father in disguise, what he was looking at.

He saw that the slaves were tired.

He saw that the scythes were dull.

He saw that the work, in the long heat of the late summer, was going slowly,

and that the slaves had become careless, and that the field would not be finished before the weather turned.

He saw, the poem implies, what he could do with this.

He walked into the field.

He greeted the slaves, the Skáldskaparmál implies, in the calm courteous way of a stranger introducing himself to working men.

He told them he was a traveller.

He told them he had been watching their work.

He told them, the poem implies, that he was sorry to interrupt, but that he had noticed something he could perhaps help with.

He showed them his whetstone.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Bǫlverkr carried, in a small pouch at his belt, a whetstone of unusual quality.

We can imagine, the poem does not specify, but we can imagine, from how the old north thought about such objects,

that the whetstone was something Óðinn had made, or won, or been given long ago,

and that it was a whetstone that could put an edge on any blade more sharply than any whetstone ever made.

Bǫlverkr offered, in the calm courteous voice of a stranger doing a kindness, to sharpen the slaves' scythes.

The slaves agreed.

They came forward, one at a time, the Skáldskaparmál implies, with their dulled scythes in their hands.

Bǫlverkr took each scythe.

He drew the whetstone, with slow careful strokes, along the curved iron blade.

And the blade, when he was done with it, was, the poem implies, sharper than it had ever been in its life.

The slaves, when they took their scythes back, looked at the new edges with the small slow wonder of working men suddenly given a tool they had not known was possible.

They went back to the work.

And the work, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, suddenly went very quickly.

The new edges cut the hay in clean fast strokes.

The slaves moved through the field with a new lightness, the poem implies, the way working men move when their tools are finally right.

The long rows of hay fell behind them.

The field, which had been many days from finished, became, in a single afternoon's work, almost done.

The slaves stopped, at the end of the afternoon, to rest.

They sat in the shade at the edge of the field.

They looked at the whetstone in Bǫlverkr's hand.

They began, the Skáldskaparmál implies, to talk.

They asked Bǫlverkr, perhaps politely at first, where he had got the whetstone.

They asked, perhaps less politely as the afternoon went on, whether the whetstone was for sale.

They asked, the poem implies, whether the whetstone could be borrowed.

They asked, the poem implies, whether each of them, in turn, might have the use of the whetstone,

just for a few moments, just for the small private purpose of sharpening his own tools at home in the evenings.

Bǫlverkr, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, smiled.

He said, in the calm courteous voice he had been using all afternoon, that the whetstone was not for sale.

He said that the whetstone was not for loan.

He said, the poem implies, with the small slow note of a god who was setting a trap,

that he would tell them what he was willing to do.

He would, he said, throw the whetstone up in the air.

Whichever of the nine of them caught it, the poem implies he said, could have it.

As a gift.

The slaves, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, jumped up.

We can imagine the moment with the dry quiet exactness of the old north.

Nine men in a hayfield at the end of a long afternoon.

Tired.

Hopeful.

Each one wanting, very much, the whetstone that would make his work easy for the rest of his life.

Each one looking at the other eight and understanding, in the same small slow second,

that only one of them was going to catch it.

Bǫlverkr threw the whetstone up in the air.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us what happened then with the dry brevity it has used for everything in this story.

The slaves, the poem says, reached up.

They reached at the same moment.

They reached with their scythes still in their hands.

And in the small space of a single moment, with nine men reaching up at the same moment with nine very sharp blades in their hands,

all nine of them, the poem says, cut each other's throats.

They fell, the Skáldskaparmál implies, where they stood.

The whetstone, the poem does not bother to tell us, was caught by nobody.

It fell to the ground somewhere among them.

Bǫlverkr, the poem implies, did not even bother to pick it up.

He stood, in the shade at the edge of the field, and he looked at the nine bodies of the slaves of Baugi the giant,

and he did not say anything.

Then he went, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, to the door of Baugi's hall.

Chapter Eight.

The Summer of Nine Men's Work.

Baugi was at home.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that he opened the door himself, in the small quiet way of a giant who had not been expecting visitors.

He looked down at the stranger on his step.

He asked the stranger, perhaps with some impatience, what he wanted.

Bǫlverkr told him, the poem implies, that he had bad news.

He told Baugi, in the calm careful voice of a stranger being honest, that he had been passing the giant's hayfield earlier in the afternoon.

He told Baugi that he had seen, with great regret, an accident.

He told Baugi, the poem implies, that the nine slaves who had been mowing Baugi's hay had got into a small disagreement over a tool,

and that they had, in the heat of the disagreement, cut each other's throats with their own scythes,

and that all nine of them were now lying in the field, dead.

Baugi, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was furious.

He was a giant.

He had, the poem implies, owned those nine slaves for many years.

They had been, in his calculation, valuable.

And they were now, the poem implies, lying in his hayfield with their work half finished,

and the harvest was coming, and he had no other slaves, and the whole of his summer's labour was,

by the end of this single afternoon, on the edge of being lost.

He told Bǫlverkr, the poem implies, exactly what he thought.

Bǫlverkr listened, the Skáldskaparmál implies, with the small patient courtesy of a stranger who had nowhere in particular to be.

He let the giant finish.

And then, when the giant had run out of words, Bǫlverkr told him, in the calm voice he had been using all day,

that he had a proposal.

He told Baugi, the Skáldskaparmál implies, that he was a strong worker.

He told Baugi that he was, in fact, as strong as nine ordinary men.

He told Baugi that he was willing, if Baugi wanted him to, to do the work of all nine slaves for the rest of the summer.

He would mow the hay.

He would bring in the harvest.

He would, by the end of the season, leave Baugi's farm in better shape than it had been in before the accident.

And in exchange, Bǫlverkr said, with the small slow voice of a being naming his price,

he wanted only one thing.

He wanted, he said, a single sip of his brother Suttungr's mead.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Baugi was startled.

He had not, the poem implies, expected this stranger to know about the mead.

Few beings in the worlds, by this point in the story, knew about the mead.

Suttungr had been careful.

The mead was deep in Hnitbjǫrg.

The mead was guarded by Gunnlǫð.

The mead, in the long view of the giants, was supposed to be a thing that nobody outside Suttungr's hall even knew existed.

Baugi looked at the stranger.

He saw, the Skáldskaparmál implies, what we have been told all along he saw.

He saw a tall man in a long grey traveller's cloak.

He saw a wide brimmed hat pulled low.

He saw the small careful smile of a being who had said exactly what he meant to say.

He did not, the poem implies, see Óðinn.

He saw only Bǫlverkr.

Baugi, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, agreed.

He agreed with a reservation.

He said, in the slow careful voice of a giant being honest about what he could and could not promise,

that he could not, by himself, give Bǫlverkr a sip of the mead.

The mead, he said, belonged to his brother.

The mead was in his brother's mountain.

The mead was guarded by his brother's daughter.

He, Baugi, had no control over the mead.

But if Bǫlverkr did the work, Baugi said, Baugi would go with him to Suttungr at the end of the summer,

and Baugi would speak on Bǫlverkr's behalf, and Baugi would do everything he could to persuade his brother to grant Bǫlverkr the sip.

Bǫlverkr, the poem implies, agreed.

He moved, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, into Baugi's farm.

He worked, the poem tells us, all summer.

We can imagine the work, the way the old north imagined the long hot work of a Norse summer.

The hay.

The cutting.

The hauling.

The stacking.

The repair of fences.

The cleaning of tools.

The feeding of cattle.

The herding of sheep.

The thousand small tasks that a giant's farm required, on every day of every week of the long northern summer,

and that had been done, until this summer, by nine men.

Now they were done by one.

Bǫlverkr, the Skáldskaparmál implies, did the work of nine men.

He did it well.

He did it quickly.

He did it, the poem implies, with the small steady patience of a god who knew he was paying a very long down payment on a single sip of a mead worth more than every hayfield in the worlds.

Baugi, the Skáldskaparmál implies, watched him.

Baugi began, as the summer went on, to understand that he had got a very strange bargain.

The stranger he had taken on for the cost of one sip of his brother's mead was,

by the end of the season, going to leave Baugi's farm richer than Baugi could remember it ever being.

Baugi, the poem implies, began to feel, with the small uneasy sense of a being who had paid less than the true price for a thing,

that he owed Bǫlverkr something more than he had bargained for.

By the end of the summer, the work was done.

The harvest was in.

The fields were cleared.

The fences were repaired.

The tools were stored.

The animals were settled.

Baugi's farm, the Skáldskaparmál implies, had not been in this kind of shape in many years.

Bǫlverkr came to Baugi at the end of the season.

He reminded him, the Skáldskaparmál implies, of their bargain.

He said, in the calm voice he had been using all summer, that the time had come to go and ask Suttungr for the sip of mead.

Baugi, the poem tells us, agreed.

The two of them, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, walked east.

They walked, the poem implies, for several days.

They came to the foot of Hnitbjǫrg.

They climbed the long slow road that ran up the side of the mountain.

They came to the entrance of Suttungr's hall.

They were greeted, the poem implies, by Suttungr's servants, and they were brought into the hall,

and they were given seats at the long table, and they were given food and drink and the small careful hospitality that even a giant's hall offered to a guest who had been brought in by the master's brother.

Suttungr, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, came to meet them.

He sat down at the head of the table.

He listened, the poem implies, while his brother Baugi explained why they had come.

Baugi told the story, the poem implies, carefully.

He told Suttungr about the accident in the hayfield.

He told Suttungr about the stranger who had arrived just after.

He told Suttungr about the bargain.

He told Suttungr about the summer's work.

He told Suttungr that the stranger had earned, by every measure of the old north's justice of work and pay,

a single sip of the mead.

Suttungr, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, refused.

He refused, the poem implies, immediately.

He refused without much explanation.

He said that the mead was his.

He said that the mead had been bought at the price of his father's life.

He said that he had no intention, no matter what bargain his brother had made on a farm at the edge of the country,

of giving any drop of it to any being who was not himself.

He said, the poem implies, that the conversation was over.

Bǫlverkr, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, looked at Baugi.

Baugi, the poem implies, looked away.

And the two of them, the poem says, left Suttungr's hall, and they walked back down the long slow road that ran down the side of Hnitbjǫrg,

and they came to the foot of the mountain in the long blue evening of the late summer, and they stopped.

Bǫlverkr, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, turned to Baugi.

He said, in the calm voice he had been using all season, that there was another way.

Chapter Nine.

The Drill in the Stone.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, then, the strangest small moment in this story.

Bǫlverkr proposed, in the long blue evening at the foot of Hnitbjǫrg, that they drill into the mountain.

He proposed it, the poem implies, with the calm matter of fact voice of a being suggesting a small technical solution to a small technical problem.

He said that he knew of a drill, a drill called Rati,

that could bore through any rock, however hard, however thick.

He said, the poem implies, that he had brought the drill with him, in case it was needed.

He said that the way into Suttungr's chamber, if the front door was closed to them,

was through the rock itself.

Baugi, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was reluctant.

We can imagine, from how the poem moves through this moment, that he understood what he was being asked.

He was being asked to help a stranger break into his brother's mountain.

He was being asked to take part, however small the part, in a theft of his brother's most precious property.

Baugi was a giant.

Giants did not, in the long old north, betray each other lightly.

But Baugi, the Skáldskaparmál implies, had made a bargain.

He had taken from Bǫlverkr a summer's work.

He had eaten the bread his brother had refused to share.

He felt, the poem implies, that he owed something.

And the something he owed, he understood, was at least the small help of holding the drill while Bǫlverkr did the work.

He agreed.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Bǫlverkr produced the drill.

He drew it, the poem implies, from somewhere inside his long grey cloak.

The drill was called Rati.

The name, in the old language, meant the borer, or the gnawer.

The drill was small, and it was sharp, and it was, the poem implies,

of a kind no being in the worlds had seen before or has seen since.

It was a drill that could go through stone the way a tooth goes through soft wood.

Baugi took the drill.

The two of them, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, climbed the lower slope of Hnitbjǫrg to a place where the rock face was clean and steady.

Bǫlverkr placed his hand against the rock.

He listened.

He felt, the poem implies, for the direction of the hollow chamber inside.

And he showed Baugi, with a small careful gesture, where to start.

Baugi began to drill.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the drill went into the stone the way a knife goes into hard cheese.

Slowly, but steadily.

The rock dust fell from the hole in a small fine stream.

The hole, the poem implies, grew deeper.

Baugi worked, the poem tells us, for some time.

The evening grew dark around them.

The lower slope of Hnitbjǫrg cooled.

The hole grew deeper still.

After some time, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, Baugi stopped.

He turned to Bǫlverkr.

He said, in the small careful voice of a being making a report, that the drill had gone through.

He said that the rock, at the bottom of the hole, was now open into the chamber on the other side.

He said that the way was clear.

Bǫlverkr looked at him.

He took, the Skáldskaparmál implies, the small slow measure of the giant in the dark beside him.

And then he did, the poem says, what the Hávamál preserves in stanza one hundred and six.

He put his mouth to the hole.

He blew, the poem says, into it.

A small stream of rock chips, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, blew back out of the hole into Bǫlverkr's face.

The drill, Bǫlverkr understood, had not gone through.

The drill had gone almost through.

The drill had stopped, perhaps an inch or two before the breakthrough, in the small careful way of a tool held by a being who did not,

in his heart, quite want to finish the job.

The rock chips, when Bǫlverkr blew into the hole, were chips that should have fallen into the chamber on the other side and been gone forever.

They had come back out the way they came in.

Bǫlverkr, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, said nothing about this.

He simply, the poem implies, told Baugi to keep drilling.

Baugi, the Skáldskaparmál implies, understood that he had been caught.

He took the drill back up.

He set it to the hole.

He turned, the poem says, for some more time.

And eventually, when the breakthrough finally came, Bǫlverkr blew into the hole a second time,

and this time, the poem says, no chips came back.

The hole, this time, was clear.

The chamber on the other side, Bǫlverkr knew, was now open to him.

Chapter Ten.

The Snake in the Mountain.

What happened next, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, took a single quick moment.

Bǫlverkr stepped back from the hole.

He said nothing, the poem implies, to Baugi.

He simply, the Skáldskaparmál says, transformed.

We have been telling this story all season, and we have, by now, heard about the transformations of Loki,

the falcon cloak, the salmon, the horse who became the mother of Sleipnir.

Óðinn, the Hávamál implies, could do the same.

Óðinn, the wisdom seeker, the rune winner, the wanderer of the worlds, Óðinn, in this single moment,

on the dark slope of Hnitbjǫrg at the end of the summer, with a small hole in the rock at his side and a giant standing uneasily beside him in the dark, became a snake.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the transformation was quick.

Bǫlverkr's tall form, the poem implies, shrank.

His long grey cloak fell to the ground.

His wide brimmed hat fell with it.

And on the rock at Baugi's feet, the poem says, there was now a long thin grey snake.

The snake, the Skáldskaparmál implies, slid forward.

Baugi, the poem says, understood, in the same small slow second, what was happening.

Baugi understood that Bǫlverkr, in the form of the snake, was about to slide into the hole and disappear into the chamber on the other side and steal his brother's mead.

Baugi understood, the poem implies, that this was the moment when, if he wanted to be loyal to his brother,

he could end the theft before it began.

Baugi raised the drill.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small quick economy it has used for everything in this story, what happened then.

Baugi drove the drill down at the snake, the poem says, with the intent of pinning it to the rock.

The drill came down.

The snake, by the time the drill struck the rock, was already in the hole.

The drill came down on empty stone.

The snake's tail, the poem implies, was just disappearing into the hole at the moment the drill struck.

Baugi missed by a hand's breadth.

The snake was gone.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Baugi stood, for a long moment, on the dark slope of Hnitbjǫrg,

with the drill in his hand and an empty hole in front of him and nothing more he could do.

The poem does not tell us what Baugi did next.

The poem implies that he turned, in the dark, and walked away.

Inside the mountain, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, the snake came out the other end of the hole.

It came out, the poem implies, in a small dark passage.

The passage led, in the deep heart of Hnitbjǫrg, toward the chamber where Suttungr had hidden the mead.

The snake, the poem implies, slid along the passage with the slow careful certainty of a being who knew exactly where it was going.

It moved, the poem implies, for some distance.

And eventually, when it came to the heavy stone door at the end of the passage,

it slid underneath the door and into the chamber.

In the chamber, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, the snake stopped.

It looked, the poem implies, at the small dark space.

It saw the three vessels on the shelf.

It saw the low stone seat covered in gold cloth.

It saw, on the seat, the young giantess who had been watching the mead for what we can imagine was,

by this point, a very long time.

It saw Gunnlǫð.

And the snake, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, transformed.

Bǫlverkr stood up, in the small dark chamber, in the same long grey traveller's cloak he had been wearing all summer at Baugi's farm.

He looked, the poem implies, at the young giantess on the gold covered seat.

He took off his wide brimmed hat.

And he greeted her, the poem implies, in the calm careful voice he had been using all season,

the voice of a stranger who had come a long way and had no particular hurry,

and who was, very much, looking forward to having a conversation.

Chapter Eleven.

The Three Nights.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Bǫlverkr stayed with Gunnlǫð for three nights.

The poem does not give us, in detail, what was said in those three nights.

The poem implies, and the Hávamál, in the small first person stanzas Óðinn preserved of this story,

also implies, that he spoke to her.

He spoke, the poem implies, in the careful voice of a being who had come a long way for one purpose,

and who knew exactly what he had to do to accomplish it, and who was doing it with the slow steady patience of a god who had practised,

in his long life of wandering and disguise, the art of being whatever a being in front of him needed him to be.

He told her, the Hávamál implies, that he was in love with her.

He told her, perhaps, that he had heard of her in the world outside the mountain.

He told her, perhaps, that he had come to find her.

He told her that he understood, with the small slow tone of a being who saw what no one else had seen,

what it had been like for her, in the deep dark chamber, alone, for what we can imagine was years on end,

with no being for company but her dangerous father, and no work to do but to watch three vessels on a shelf.

He told her, perhaps, that he wanted to take her away from the mountain.

That he wanted, perhaps, to make her his wife.

That he wanted, the Hávamál's first person admission preserves, things he was not, in his heart, ever going to give her.

She believed him.

The Skáldskaparmál implies, and the Hávamál, in stanza one hundred and ten, comes back to admit,

that Gunnlǫð gave Bǫlverkr what he asked for with her whole heart.

The Hávamál's own line, in the wisdom poem the All Father himself was said to have spoken, calls her wholehearted.

The Hávamál says: she gave me, on her golden throne, a drink of the precious mead.

A poor reward I gave her back, for her true heart, for her wholehearted love.

That is the line the Hávamál preserves.

That is the small honest moment, in the entire Norse corpus, where Óðinn admits what he did.

On the third night, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, Gunnlǫð got up from her gold covered seat.

She went to the shelf where the three vessels stood.

She brought them down, one at a time.

She set them on a small table beside the seat.

And she told Bǫlverkr, the poem implies, that he could have one drink from each.

Bǫlverkr drank from the first vessel.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small dry economy it has used for everything in this story,

that the first sip emptied the vessel.

The whole vessel, the poem says, went down in one swallow.

Bǫlverkr set the vessel down.

He took up the second.

He drank from it.

The second vessel, the poem says, also went down in one swallow.

He took up the third.

He drank from it.

The third vessel, the poem says, was likewise drained, in a single sip, to the bottom.

Three sips.

Three vessels.

All of the mead.

Gunnlǫð, the Skáldskaparmál implies, did not, at first, understand what had happened.

She had agreed to give him a drink from each vessel.

She had not understood that a drink, to a god of his thirst, meant the whole thing.

Bǫlverkr stood up.

He looked at her, the Skáldskaparmál implies, for one long moment.

The poem does not tell us what he said.

The Hávamál's later admission implies that he said, perhaps, less than he should have.

He said goodbye, perhaps.

He said, perhaps, nothing at all.

He simply stood up, with the three vessels' worth of the mead of poetry held now in his mouth and his throat and his chest,

and he walked, the poem implies, toward the door of the chamber.

And then, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, he transformed.

The grey cloak fell.

The wide brimmed hat fell.

The tall form of the traveller, the poem implies, contracted and shifted and changed shape.

And what stood in the chamber, in the small dark space where Bǫlverkr had been standing a moment before,

was not a man.

It was a great eagle.

The eagle, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was large.

Its wings, the poem implies, almost touched the walls of the chamber.

Its eyes were the colour of the cold winter sky.

Its beak was open, and inside the open beak, the poem implies, the mead of poetry was held,

all of it, in three swallows, in the throat of the eagle.

The eagle, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, beat its wings once.

It went, the poem says, up.

It rose through the small passage that the snake had come down.

It came out of the hole at the side of Hnitbjǫrg in the long dark hour just before dawn.

It rose into the cold sky over the eastern country.

It turned west.

And it flew, the poem says, for Asgard.

In the chamber, Gunnlǫð, the Skáldskaparmál implies, sat alone on her gold covered seat with three empty vessels on the table beside her and the long slow understanding,

the poem implies, of what had just happened beginning to come over her.

And in another part of the mountain, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, Suttungr heard.

He heard, the poem implies, his daughter's voice.

He came to the chamber.

He saw the three empty vessels.

He saw his daughter's face.

He understood, the poem implies, in the same single second that Gunnlǫð did, what had been done to her,

and to him, and to the mead.

Suttungr ran.

He ran, the Skáldskaparmál implies, out of the mountain.

He came to the open air.

And he, like Bǫlverkr a moment before him, transformed.

Suttungr, the giant who had killed two dwarves on a sea rock for his father's revenge,

the giant who had carried the mead deep into the mountain, the giant who had set his daughter to guard it,

Suttungr, the poem says, became an eagle.

A second eagle, of a different colour, of perhaps a greater size, of a fury the first eagle did not have.

He went, the poem says, up.

He turned west.

And the chase, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, began.

The two eagles, the poem implies, were not far apart.

Bǫlverkr had a small head start.

But Suttungr was, the poem implies, faster.

Suttungr was on his own ground.

Suttungr knew the wind.

Suttungr was furious.

The distance between them, as they flew west, began, the poem implies, to close.

In Asgard, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, the gods saw them coming.

They had been waiting, the poem implies, for this.

Óðinn had told them, before he left, what he was going to try to do,

and what they should watch for, and what they should do when he came back.

The gods saw the first eagle.

They saw the second.

They understood, the poem implies, immediately what was happening.

They set out, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, the great vessels in the centre of Iðavǫllr.

They set out three great vats, the poem implies, large enough to hold all the mead Óðinn had drunk into himself.

They stood, the gods, in a long careful line around the vats.

They waited.

The first eagle, the Skáldskaparmál says, came over the walls of Asgard.

It came, the poem implies, just ahead of the second.

It came at full speed.

It came, the poem implies, with the mead still in its throat and the breath of the second eagle,

by this point, close on its tail feathers.

It crossed the wall.

It crossed the long open ground of Iðavǫllr.

And as it came down toward the vats, the Skáldskaparmál says, it opened its beak.

The mead, the poem says, came out.

It came out in three long careful streams.

The first stream went into the first vat.

The second stream went into the second vat.

The third stream went into the third vat.

The vats, the poem implies, filled.

The mead, all the mead, all of Kvasir's blood, all of the wisdom of every god in every tribe,

the substance the dwarves had brewed and Suttungr had hidden, was, in that single moment,

back in the hands of the gods.

But, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small dry tone of the poet who knows the world is not perfect,

not all of the mead went into the vats.

A small portion, a small careless flick of the mead, fell, the poem implies,

behind the eagle as it landed.

The Skáldskaparmál tells this part briefly, in a single sentence with the small dry note of comedy the old north loved.

Some of the mead, the poem says, fell where it was not supposed to fall.

Some of the mead fell behind the god.

That small portion, the Skáldskaparmál says, became the share of the bad poets.

The old north had a name for it.

The skáldfífla hlutr.

The bad poets' portion.

It was the explanation, the old north told itself, with the small dry humour the old north was good at,

for why most of the poetry made by most of the poets in most of the worlds was,

well, not very good.

Some poets, the old north said, drank from the vats.

Most poets, the old north said with a small wink, drank only from the small careless puddle the god had let fall behind himself.

The second eagle, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, came over the wall of Asgard a moment too late.

Suttungr, the poem implies, was met by the gods.

The Skáldskaparmál does not give us the killing in detail.

The poem says only that when the second eagle came down at the wall of Asgard,

the gods met him there, and that Suttungr did not, when the morning came, fly back east.

Suttungr was dead.

The mead was in Asgard.

And Óðinn, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small slow note of a poet ending a story he has been telling for a long time,

took the mead, and he gave it to the gods.

He gave it to those who needed it most.

He gave it, the old north said, to skalds.

He gave it to poets.

He gave it, in small careful portions over the long years of the worlds,

to any being who asked for it the right way.

And the mead, the poem implies, became the wisdom of poetry itself, the small inexplicable thing that allowed certain beings,

when they put words together, to put them together in a way that made other beings stop and listen,

and remember, and understand things they had not understood before.

That, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, is the story of where poetry comes from.

But the Hávamál, the wisdom poem of the old north, preserves one more line that the Skáldskaparmál does not.

The Hávamál preserves a line about Gunnlǫð.

The Hávamál, in stanza one hundred and ten, says, in Óðinn's own voice,

that the oath ring that Óðinn had taken at the door of Suttungr's hall,

the oath ring he had sworn upon when he had told Gunnlǫð he loved her, was broken.

The Hávamál says: how can his truth be trusted?

He left Suttungr cheated of his draught, and he left Gunnlǫð weeping.

That is the line, the small honest line, the wisdom poem itself preserves.

The mead of poetry, the old north understood, was not won cleanly.

It was won by a god who took a name that meant the evil doer,

who killed nine men with a thrown whetstone, who lied to a young giantess in a dark chamber,

who broke his oath, and who left, behind him in the mountain, a being whose true heart he had used and discarded.

The wisdom of the worlds, the Hávamál implies, comes to us through a story we do not,

when we look at it carefully, very much like.

The poetry we are using, even now, in this story we are telling, is poetry that has Gunnlǫð weeping somewhere behind it.

That, the old north remembered, was the price.

That, the old north remembered, was what wisdom cost, even for the All Father.

Chapter Twelve.

Goodnight.

And the Wolf at the Edge of Time.

The story we told you tonight, dear listener, is one of the strangest in the old north.

It is a heist story.

It is a love story, of a particular dark kind.

It is a creation story for the thing called poetry, which is the thing we have been using,

all season, to tell you these stories at all.

And it is, the old north understood, a story with a small heavy moral weight at its centre.

The wisdom of the gods, the story tells us, did not come to the worlds by clean means.

It came by theft.

It came by lies.

It came by the broken oath of the wisest god, made to a young giantess who had spent her life alone in a mountain,

and who had, on the third night, finally let someone in.

The Hávamál, the wisdom poem the All Father himself was said to have spoken, does not, in its later stanzas, pretend otherwise.

The Hávamál admits, in the small honest voice the old north loved, that the All Father had done a thing that even the All Father,

looking back, was not proud of.

The Hávamál preserves Gunnlǫð weeping.

The Hávamál preserves the broken oath ring.

The Hávamál preserves the small line about a poor reward for a true heart,

and it does not, in any of the long stanzas around that line, try to make the line into something better than it is.

That is, perhaps, what makes the Hávamál the wisdom poem.

A wisdom poem, the old north understood, is not a poem that tells you the world is good.

A wisdom poem is a poem that tells you the world is what it is,

and that the beings who have wisdom in it are the beings who have looked clearly at what it is,

and who have not, even when they could have, looked away.

Óðinn, the old north understood, was the god who had looked clearly.

He had looked at the well of Mímir, and he had given his eye to drink from it.

He had looked at the world tree, and he had hung himself on it for nine nights to win the runes.

He had looked at the mountain of Suttungr, and he had become a snake and a lover and a thief and an eagle to bring the mead back to the gods.

And he had looked, in the long quiet years afterward, at what he had done to a young giantess in a dark chamber,

and he had not, when he composed the Hávamál, looked away from that either.

That is, perhaps, why poetry exists.

The old north understood, in the small careful way it understood things, that poetry is the thing that makes it possible to say the hard truths about what a being has done,

and what a being has been, and what the cost of any good thing in any world has always been.

Poetry is the form, the old north understood, that the wisdom of looking clearly takes when it has to be spoken aloud.

Poetry is what allows even a god, even the All Father, even the king of the gods,

to say the line about Gunnlǫð weeping and to keep it in the wisdom poem for the next thousand years.

That is the story we have been telling you tonight.

The mead of poetry is in Asgard.

The vats are full.

The skalds, in the long years of the old north, came one by one to Óðinn,

and they asked for the mead the right way, and they were given it,

and they went out into the worlds and made the small inexplicable thing that allowed other beings to stop and listen.

The bad poets' portion, the small careless flick of mead that fell behind the eagle in Iðavǫllr,

is still, the old north said with a small dry smile, available to anyone who wants it.

The old north pointed out, in the long evenings around the winter fires, that most of the poetry in most of the worlds tasted a little bit of the puddle.

That is, the old north said, why most of the poetry is not very good.

But the mead in the vats, the old north said, was something else.

The mead in the vats, the old north said, was what made it possible for any of us to tell a story about what was done to Gunnlǫð in a dark chamber,

and to say it clearly, and to mean it.

Goodnight, dear listener, wherever you are tonight.

Whatever bed you are in.

Whatever quiet room.

Whatever soft pillow you have laid your head against to hear this story.

Let the snake slide back into its hole.

Let the eagle land in the vats.

Let Suttungr fall by the wall of Asgard.

Let Gunnlǫð, in the chamber of Hnitbjǫrg, finally lay down her head on the gold covered seat and sleep the long sleep that the gods,

in the end, did not deny her either.

Let the wolf at the edge of time wait.

Let the great ship Naglfar wait in the cold east.

Let Ragnarǫk wait.

Tonight there is only the long calm of the worlds at peace, and the mead of poetry in the vats of Asgard,

and the small quiet truth that even the wisest god in any of the worlds had to do a thing he was not proud of,

in order to bring the wisdom home.

Goodnight.

And the Wolf at the Edge of Time.

The Sleeping Almanac will be here on Sunday with another story from the old north.

New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday at eight in the evening, Eastern time.

If the story tonight carried you down into sleep, dear listener, a like is a small kindness to a small channel.

I read every comment in the morning.

Goodnight.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.

Tonight: the story of a marriage that was paid for in blood and laughter, and ended in eighteen nights of trying to sleep in the wrong house.

A young giantess in winter snow. A row of feet behind a curtain. A pair of clean white feet that she thought belonged to one god and that turned out to belong to another. And then, after the wedding, the slow careful months of trying to make a life with a husband whose country was the salt sea and whose ears could not, in any version of the nights they tried, hear the cold mountain wolves the way that hers could.

We will tell the story tonight from Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál, the second part of the Prose Edda, and from the Poetic Edda's Lokasenna, the flyting at Ægir's hall where Skaði comes back, years later, to speak of her father's death and to do, in the deep cave under the earth, the small careful steady thing the gods needed her to do.

The Hávamál, the wisdom poem of the old north, has a verse for this kind of story. It says: it is better to have a home, even if it is small. In your own house you can be your own master. It hurts the heart to have to ask for every meal at others' tables.

Tonight, by the time the story is done, Skaði will be back in her own house.

Settle in. Let your shoulders drop. We begin in the cold hall of a dead father, in the high mountain country, on the morning a daughter learned that her father was not coming home.

Chapter One. The Hall of Þjazi.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Þjazi had a daughter.

We have told the story of Þjazi himself in an earlier episode of The Sleeping Almanac. He was the giant who, with Loki's help, stole the goddess Iðunn and her apples of youth out of Asgard. The gods came to take her back. Þjazi flew after them in the shape of a great eagle. The gods of Asgard built a wall of fire on the inner side of their gate, and Þjazi flew into the fire, and his wings caught, and he fell. That is, for the long story tonight, the only thing about him that matters.

He had, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, a daughter.

Her name was Skaði. She lived with her father in his great hall at a place called Þrymheimr, the Thunderhome, in the deep eastern country of the jǫtnar. Þrymheimr, the old north remembered, was built into the side of a great peak, with the wind always coming down off the high slopes above and the small cold cries of mountain birds always echoing in its rafters. It was one of the coldest halls in any of the worlds. And Skaði loved it.

She was, the Skáldskaparmál implies, a hunter. Her father had raised her with a bow in her hands. She knew, by the time she was a young woman, every track and every trail of the high cold country. She knew the small careful ways of the mountain hare and the slow steady walks of the high reindeer. She had learned to ski, the old north imagined, before she had learned to walk.

She would, in later days, be called by many names. The bow goddess. The ski goer. The lady of Þrymheimr. But on the morning this story begins, she was a young woman in a cold mountain hall, waiting for her father to come home, and she had not yet learned that he was not going to.

The news came by a small careful messenger.

A small dark figure on a small dark horse, the old north imagined, coming up the long winding road that led to Þrymheimr. A knock at the door of the cold hall. A servant going to the door. A few quick low words exchanged. The servant turning with a face that already had the news written on it, and coming through the cold corridors of Þrymheimr to find his lady.

Skaði was at her bow.

She was, perhaps, in the small armoury at the back of her father's hall. She was tending to a string. She was checking the flights on her arrows. She was doing the small careful work that a hunter does in the early hours of any winter day.

The servant came to her.

The Skáldskaparmál does not tell us what was said. The poem moves through this moment with the dry brevity it uses for the worst moments in any of these stories. We can imagine the servant standing in the doorway, with his head bowed, and the small careful words coming out of him in the broken pieces of a being who did not, in any version of his life, want to be the one to say what he was about to say. Your father, my lady. The gods of Asgard. The eagle. The wall of fire.

Skaði did not, at first, say anything.

She stood in the small armoury, with the bow she had been working on still in her hands, and she looked at the servant in the doorway, and she said nothing. She did not cry. She did not sit down. She listened. She listened to the small details, the names of the gods who had been there, the description of the wall of fire, the place on the inner side of Asgard's wall where her father's body had finally come to rest. She listened with the small careful attention of a being who had already, in the first moment of hearing the news, begun to think about what she was going to do about it.

When the servant was finished, she put the bow down on the bench.

She walked out of the armoury. She walked through the cold corridors of Þrymheimr. She walked to her own room. She sat down on the edge of her own bed. And she sat there, the poem implies, for what we can imagine was a long quiet hour, with the small careful clarity of a being who had just lost the only living being she loved, and who was now slowly, in the cold of her father's hall, beginning to understand what she was going to have to do next.

She would go to Asgard.

She would go armed.

She would go, in the old north's careful language of justice, to demand the compensation that the killing of a father required, by the long laws of the cold country, the killers to pay.

She got up from the bed.

She walked back to the armoury, and she began to prepare.

Chapter Two. The Winter March.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Skaði took up her arms.

She took up her great bow, the long curved bow of horn and yew that her father had given her on her tenth winter, and that she had drawn ten thousand times in the long quiet hours of her hunting on the high slopes. She took up her quiver, filled with the long careful arrows she had fletched herself in the small dark evenings of the late autumn. She took up the long spear of ash wood that hung on the wall of her father's hall. She took up the sword at her father's belt, which now, with her father gone, was hers.

She put on her winter armour.

Long leggings of grey wool over felt boots. A long tunic of heavy wool dyed the colour of cold winter sky. A heavy cloak of dark fur over her shoulders, the fur of a great northern bear. A small belt of carved bone around her waist with the small everyday tools of a winter hunter. A wide felt cap pulled down over her dark hair. Mittens of soft sealskin on her hands.

She took her skis.

The skis were long. They were of pine. They had been oiled and waxed and cared for through the long years of her hunting on the high slopes, and they were, in the practical careful way of the cold country, the most important thing she would carry. The skis were how, in the long winter march that lay ahead of her, she was going to cross the cold country at the speed of a goddess of winter rather than at the slow ordinary pace of a being who had to walk.

She left at first light the next morning.

She did not, the Skáldskaparmál implies, say goodbye to anyone in particular. The servants of Þrymheimr were her father's servants. They had been good to her all her life. She nodded to them as she went. She did not stop. She did not look back at the hall. The hall had been her father's. Without her father, it was a quiet stone building full of his absence, and she did not, on the morning of her march, want to look at it.

She skied west.

We can imagine the long days of her travel. The high cold mountain passes. The deep blue valleys. The small careful fires she built in the deep snow at evening, the small careful meals of dried meat and dried apple she ate beside them. The long quiet nights wrapped in her bear fur cloak in shelters of pine boughs she made herself. The cold breath on her own face in the dark. The two stars that, weeks later, would belong to her father, but that on the night of her march had not yet been lifted up into the sky.

She crossed the long brown lands of Mithgarthr in seven days.

She came to the gates of Asgard on the eighth.

The watchman saw her coming.

Chapter Three. The Goddess at the Gate.

The watchman, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was Heimdallr.

He stood, as he always stood, on the high wall of the gate of Asgard, and he watched the long road that came up from the south. He had keen sight. He could see, the old stories said, the small grass growing on the long fields of the south country. He could see the small dust kicked up by the small foot of a small bird walking on a far hill. And on the morning Skaði came up the road, he saw her from a long way off, a small dark figure on long pine skis, moving steadily across the snowfields, alone, armed, dressed for the long winter and the long march.

He sent word ahead.

The gods of Asgard, the Skáldskaparmál implies, came out to the gate to meet her. They came in some number, Óðinn, in his long grey cloak, his one good eye watching the road. Frigg, in her long blue dress, standing slightly behind him. Bragi, the god of speech, who would do most of the careful talking. And, at the back, the others, Týr, Heimdallr, Freyr, Njǫrðr. They stood in the bright morning sun on the inner side of the gate, and they watched the tall woman in the bear fur cloak come up the road.

Skaði stopped at a respectful distance.

She did not bow. She did not speak first. She slid her skis off. She set them, carefully, in the snow at her feet. She set her bow down. She set her quiver down. She set the spear of ash wood down. She did not take off the sword at her belt. She stood, with her hands open, in the small steady stillness of a being who had come a long way and had no intention of leaving without what she had come for.

Óðinn spoke first.

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, the Skáldskaparmál implies, did not laugh at her. They took her seriously. She was a giantess. She was the daughter of a great giant. The threat of an army of frost giants and mountain trolls was the kind of threat that the Æsir, in their long history, had learned not to dismiss.

They considered.

Óðinn, the Skáldskaparmál implies, asked her to speak her terms.

Chapter Four. The Three Demands.

Skaði, the Skáldskaparmál tells us, had thought about it on the long road south.

She had eight nights in the high mountain passes to think. She had eight nights of small careful fires and small careful meals and the long quiet wrapped in her bear fur cloak. She had thought, in those eight nights, about what she actually wanted from the gods who had killed her father.

Vengeance, she knew, the Æsir would not grant. They would not put one of their own to death over the death of a giant. That was not, by the long careful laws of the worlds, going to happen.

Gold, she did not want.

She had gold of her own. Her father had been a great giant. His hall at Þrymheimr was full of the small heavy treasures of a long old life. She did not need, in the quiet hours of her hunting, any gold from the Æsir.

What she wanted, she had thought, on the eight long nights of her march, was something more difficult. She wanted, in the deep practical careful way of a being who had lost a father, something that would change her life and give her something instead of him. She wanted, the Skáldskaparmál implies, three things.

She told the gods.

The first thing, she said, was a husband. Not in the form of a gift. In the form of a fair choice. She would pick a husband from among the Æsir, but she would pick him only by the sight of his feet. The gods would stand in a row behind a long cloth curtain, with only their feet visible. She would walk along the row. She would choose. Whoever she chose, she would marry, and that god would come with her, into the high cold country, and live as her husband.

The gods, the Skáldskaparmál implies, looked at one another.

It was not, in the strict legal sense, a punishment. It was a marriage. The Æsir were not, by the long laws of the cold country, in a position to refuse it. They considered. They thought, the surviving sources imply, that she would look for the most beautiful feet, and that she would choose Baldr, the most beautiful of all the Æsir, who was young and unmarried, and who could endure, for a time, the cold of the mountains.

They agreed.

The second thing, she said, was harder.

She said: One of you must make me laugh. I have not laughed since my father died. I have not, in the long days of the march and the long days of the preparation, even smiled. I do not believe, in the deepest part of myself, that I will laugh again. But the killing of a father deserves more than gold, and more than a husband. The killing of a father deserves, the laws of the old north imply, a small careful undoing of the cold the killing put into the daughter's chest. If one of you can make me laugh, here, in front of the council of Asgard, I will count that as the third weregild paid.

The gods looked at one another.

None of them, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was famous for making giantesses laugh.

The third thing, she said, was the smallest of the three, and the one that the Æsir, the poem implies, did not see coming. She said: My father's eyes were taken when he died. They are, I have been told by the messenger, kept somewhere in Asgard. I do not want them back. I want them lifted.

She said: Lift them up. Put them where they cannot be taken away again. Put them where I, and every being who lives under the cold sky of the worlds, can see them.

The gods, the Skáldskaparmál implies, were quiet for a long moment.

Then Óðinn nodded.

He said: All three things will be done. We will stand for the choosing. We will try to make you laugh. And the eyes of your father will be lifted.

He turned, and he called for the long curtains to be brought.

Chapter Five. The Row of Feet.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the curtains were set up in the courtyard of Asgard.

We can imagine the scene, the way the old north imagined the council scenes of the gods. The long flat courtyard. The high stone walls. The clear cold winter sky above. The gods of Asgard standing in a row, the way they had agreed to, behind a long heavy cloth curtain that hung from a wooden frame. The curtain hung down to a foot above the ground. Only the feet of each god were visible. The rest of each god was hidden.

The Æsir, the Skáldskaparmál implies, were thinking of Baldr.

Baldr was the most beautiful god in the worlds. His feet, like the rest of him, were beautiful, clean, well made, fair skinned. The Æsir were sure, the surviving sources imply, that Skaði would look at the row of feet, would pick out the most beautiful pair, and would point to Baldr.

Skaði walked along the row.

She walked slowly. She looked at each pair of feet with the small careful attention of a being who had hunted on long mountain slopes and who knew how to read the small careful signs of a body she could not see. She was, in some quiet way, the Skáldskaparmál implies, doing the same thing she would have done in her own country if she had been tracking a stag, looking for the small careful clues that would tell her which body she was looking at without seeing the whole.

She stopped at one pair of feet.

They were smoother than the others. They were whiter. They looked as if they had been washed every evening of a long careful life in cold clear water. They looked, the Skáldskaparmál implies, like the feet of a being who lived close to water, who walked every day on wet sand, whose toes had been worn smooth by years of small careful tides. She thought, certainly, these are the feet of the most beautiful god.

She pointed.

She said: This one. I take this one.

The curtains, the Skáldskaparmál implies, were drawn back.

The feet did not belong to Baldr.

The feet belonged to Njǫrðr, the father of Freyr and Freyja, the god of the calm sea and the harbours, who had spent his whole long life walking on wet sand and standing in salt water, and whose feet were, accordingly, the smoothest and whitest of any feet in Asgard. He was not, in the way Baldr was beautiful, the most beautiful of the gods. He was older. He was quieter. He was a god of small waves and of ships and of fishing nets and of the small steady weather of the long coast.

Skaði stood, the Skáldskaparmál implies, for a long moment, and looked at him.

She had been tricked, in a sense. She had done what she said she would do. The gods had done what they said they would do. But she had not gotten the husband she had hoped for. She had gotten this older quieter god of the sea, who was now her husband by her own oath, and who would have to come with her into the mountains.

She did not break her word.

She nodded.

But she said, with the small careful firmness of a being who had not lost the thread of what she had come for: Now. The second thing.

Chapter Six. Loki and the Sky.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the gods of Asgard looked at one another.

The second debt was harder than the first. The first had been arrangeable. A wedding could be planned. A husband could be brought. But laughter, the Skáldskaparmál implies, was not, in the strict legal sense, something that could be commanded. It would have to be earned. And none of the gods of Asgard, in the small careful silence that followed Skaði's demand, looked particularly confident that they could earn it.

Then Loki stepped forward.

Loki, of course. Loki, who had brought all of this on in the first place. Loki, who was responsible, in the truest and deepest sense, for the death of Skaði's father, because it had been Loki who had handed Iðunn over to Þjazi to begin with, and Loki who had then gone to take her back, and Loki who had led Þjazi, in his great eagle shape, into the wall of fire above Asgard.

Loki had not been forgiven for any of it.

He stepped forward into the council circle. He looked, the Skáldskaparmál implies, at Skaði with the small clever inviting expression he used when he was about to do something absurd. He said: I will make her laugh.

What Loki did next, the Skáldskaparmál tells us in some detail, and we will tell lightly. Loki got hold of a goat, a billy goat, with horns, the kind that lived in the high places. He tied one end of a rope to the goat and the other end of the rope to himself, in a place that, if the goat pulled, would be very painful for Loki. The goat pulled. Loki pulled. The goat did not understand and bleated. Loki cried out and grimaced. The two of them did an absurd tugging dance, the goat at one end, Loki at the other, both of them shouting, until at last the rope gave way and Loki fell forward into Skaði's lap.

He landed there, at her feet. He looked up at her, helpless and grinning.

Skaði, the Skáldskaparmál implies, watched the whole absurd performance, watched the great Loki, the foster brother of Óðinn, who had stood at the high councils, who had taken treasures from dwarves, who had bound great wolves, reduced to a man tied to a goat by his most private parts, Skaði laughed.

She laughed out loud.

She could not stop herself. It was the first time she had laughed since her father's death. The laugh filled the courtyard of Asgard. It was, in some sense, the strangest sound the gods had 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 stopped laughing, she nodded.

She said: That counts.

The second debt was paid.

But the third, the Skáldskaparmál implies, still remained.

Óðinn, in his long grey cloak, walked to a small heavy chest that had been brought, at his quiet earlier order, into the courtyard. He opened it. He lifted out, the Skáldskaparmál implies, the two great pale yellow eyes of Þjazi, eyes that had been the eyes of the eagle, eyes that were larger than any eyes in any of the gods of Asgard, eyes that had been kept, since the killing, in the small careful dark of Óðinn's own storeroom.

He carried them out into the centre of the courtyard.

He lifted them, one in each hand, up to the cold winter sky.

He said, to Skaði: Daughter of Þjazi. Look up.

She looked up.

He threw them.

The eyes rose. They rose higher than the towers of Asgard. They rose past the walls. They rose into the air, faster and faster, and they did not stop. They went up into the sky and they kept going up, and they passed through the lower clouds, and then the higher clouds, and then up into the deep cold air above the clouds. They became smaller, and brighter, and at last they became two small steady points of light that hung above the world, and they did 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 the goddess of apples away 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.

Skaði, the Skáldskaparmál implies, did not say anything.

She looked up at the two new stars for a long quiet moment. She looked at her father, lifted at last into the sky.

Then she lowered her head, and she looked at the gods of Asgard, and she said: Now we are done. Now the marriage.

Chapter Seven. The Nine Nights at Þrymheimr.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the marriage was held the next morning.

We can imagine, from how the old north imagined weddings between gods, what the ceremony was like. The gods of Asgard, all in their dignified council dress. The bride, in the same winter blue tunic she had come south in, with a small wreath of mountain heather in her dark hair. The groom, the sea god Njǫrðr, in the long dark blue cloak of his coastal country, with the small careful expression of a being marrying a giantess he had met the night before. The wedding feast in the great hall. The cups of mead. The small careful speeches. The small careful old north tradition of every important moment.

After the feast, the question came up.

The question was: where would they live?

Njǫrðr had his hall on the coast, at Nóatún, the Ship yard, where the long beaches met the long sea and the small careful sounds of his country were the sound of the wind on the water and the calling of gulls.

Skaði had her hall in the mountains, at Þrymheimr, the Thunderhome, where the high slopes met the high sky and the small careful sounds of her country were the sound of the wind on the cold rocks and the calling of wolves.

Neither of them wanted to give up their country.

We can imagine the small careful discussion that followed in the council hall of Asgard, where the gods were still gathered, where Óðinn and Frigg and Bragi and the others were watching this new marriage take its first careful difficult steps. Neither was willing to live, for the rest of their life together, in the other's hall. But neither was willing, either, to call off the marriage that had only just begun.

So they reached, with the small careful compromising habit of beings who were trying to do their best with a difficult situation, an agreement.

They would alternate. Nine nights together in Þrymheimr. Nine nights together in Nóatún. And so on, for the rest of their marriage.

They left Asgard, the Skáldskaparmál implies, the morning after the wedding.

They went, by Skaði's choice, to Þrymheimr first.

Skaði was glad. She put on her skis, and she came down through the long winter passes with the small steady gladness of a being going back to the country she belonged to. Njǫrðr walked behind her. He had no skis. He walked, the Skáldskaparmál implies, in heavy winter boots through deep snow, the way a sea god of the coastal country who had spent his whole life on soft sand walked through deep mountain snow, slowly, awkwardly, with the small uneasy attention of a being who was already, on the first morning of his new marriage, a long way from home.

They arrived at Þrymheimr in the deep blue evening of the day after the wedding.

We can imagine the hall, the way the old north imagined the cold mountain halls of the eastern country. A great stone hall built into the side of the peak. Heavy timber doors. Cold stone floors. Deep fur rugs over the floors. A great hearth fire in the centre, burning all night to keep the cold out. Carved beams. The small careful old details of a hall that had been kept, for many generations, by the same family of mountain giants.

The wind, the old north imagined, always outside the hall. The wind always calling. The wind always reminding the beings inside that they were a long way from anywhere warm.

Skaði slept well that first night.

She slept the way she had slept her whole life. In a small heavy fur lined bed in the small heavy stone chamber of her father's hall. With the wind outside and the small steady distant calling of the wolves in the deep high valleys around the hall. With the small careful certainty, in the deepest part of herself, that she was home, that the country around her was the country she belonged to, that the sounds in the dark were the sounds she had grown up with, that the walls around her were the walls of a place that had been hers since she had been a small child in her father's arms.

She slept the deep clean sleep of a being entirely at peace.

Njǫrðr did not.

He lay, the Skáldskaparmál implies, in the same fur lined bed beside his new wife, and he listened, all night, to the wind on the cold rocks and to the small steady distant calling of the wolves. He lay with the small uneasy attention of a being who had spent his whole life going to sleep to the sound of the sea, and who could not, in the cold high country, find the sound he needed to sleep at all.

The wind, to Njǫrðr, did not sound like wind on water. The wind, in the high mountains, sounded like a being. It sounded like a great cold being moving past the hall, looking for the small careful warm things inside. It sounded, to a god of the sea who had never heard the wind move that way before, like a thing that wanted in.

The wolves, to Njǫrðr, did not sound like wolves either. The wolves, in the deep high valleys, sounded like the long careful voices of beings who were calling to each other in a language Njǫrðr did not know, in the small steady careful way of beings who were not, in any version of the world Njǫrðr understood, going to be his friends.

He lay there, all night, listening.

He thought, the Skáldskaparmál implies, of the sea. He thought of the small steady careful rolling in of the waves on the long beach at Nóatún. He thought of the small careful calling of the gulls in the morning. He thought of the sound of the wind moving across the long open water, which was, he understood with the small slow certainty of a god who knew his own country, not the same wind at all as the wind he was listening to now. The wind on the water was a wind that moved. The wind in the mountains was a wind that came at you. He could not, in the small uneasy attention of his first night at Þrymheimr, sleep beside the second one.

He lay there the second night. He did not sleep. The third night. He did not sleep. The fourth.

By the seventh night, he had begun to count the nights.

He told no one. He did not, the Skáldskaparmál implies, want to be the kind of husband who complained, in the first week of his marriage, about his wife's country. He understood that this was, in the small careful balance of the agreement they had reached, fair. He had agreed to nine nights at Þrymheimr. He would honour the nine nights. But he counted them, in the small slow way of a being who was waiting for a difficult thing to end.

Skaði, the Skáldskaparmál implies, watched him.

She had not, the poem implies, expected him to like Þrymheimr. She had hoped, the small honest expectation of a young wife in a new marriage, that he might, with time, grow used to it. She watched him through the first nine days. She watched his face in the morning. She watched his hands at the small hall table when they ate together. She watched the way he held himself, the small careful way of a being who was holding a great quiet fear at the edge of himself and not letting it come fully in.

By the ninth night, she understood.

He had not slept properly even once. She had seen, in the long careful nights of their first nine days together, that he was not, in any version of the next nine nights they would spend at Þrymheimr many months hence, going to learn to sleep here.

On the morning of the tenth day, the Skáldskaparmál implies, Njǫrðr sat up in the small heavy bed in the small heavy chamber of Þrymheimr, with the wind still outside and the wolves still calling, and he looked at the small dawn light just beginning to come in through the high window.

He understood that the nine nights at Þrymheimr were over.

He understood that the nine nights at Nóatún were about to begin.

He understood, with the small slow certainty of a being who had been counting the nights for a week, that he was, in this strange and difficult marriage, going home.

He told Skaði, the Skáldskaparmál implies, that he was looking forward to seeing his own coast again.

Chapter Eight. The Nine Nights at Nóatún.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, with the small dry note of a poet who has watched too many marriages, that the second nine nights were, in their own way, just as difficult.

They went, the poem implies, west.

Njǫrðr was leading, this time. He walked with the small steady ease of a being going back to country he knew. He had, by the second day of the walk, begun to look like himself again, the slow careful shoulders unbent, the small slow smile beginning to come back to the corners of his eyes, the small steady humour of a god of the sea returning to him with each step away from the cold mountains.

Skaði walked behind him.

She watched him grow easier with the small careful attention of a wife who saw, more clearly with each mile, that her husband had not, in any deep way, been at ease in her own country. She did not, the poem implies, hold this against him. She had not, in any version of the eight nights of her march south, expected him to. She had only hoped, in the small honest way of a young wife, that the country she loved might be loveable, in time, by him also.

They came to Nóatún in the long blue evening of the day after they had left Þrymheimr.

We can imagine the hall, the way the old north imagined the coastal halls of the western country. A great long timbered hall built on a low sandy rise above a long curved beach. Long open windows looking out over the sea. A roof of weathered driftwood. The smell, the old north imagined, of salt and seaweed and the slow steady smoke of cooking fires fed by driftwood. The walls were lined with the small careful pale shells of the long coastal seasons. The floor was clean dry sand pressed down hard with the small careful tread of a hundred coastal years.

The sound, always, was the sea.

The long slow rolling in of the waves on the beach. The small careful calling of the gulls. The small steady wind that came in off the long open water and moved through the long open windows of the hall and carried with it the small soft salt smell of a being's whole life.

Njǫrðr slept beautifully at Nóatún.

He slept the way he had slept his whole life, to the sound of the sea coming in. He slept the small careful sleep of a being who was home, who was in the country he belonged to, who was at peace. His face, in the long blue evenings of the hall, was the easy face of a husband who had been quietly miserable for nine nights and was now, on his own coast, quietly happy again.

Skaði did not.

She lay, the poem implies, in the long bed in the long open chamber of Nóatún, and she listened, all night, to the small careful calling of the gulls and to the long slow rolling in of the waves on the beach.

The gulls, to Skaði, did not sound like wolves. They sounded like beings of no consequence, small light beings who had nothing important to say and who said it constantly. She lay in the dark and she listened to the small careful calling and she did not know how, in the deep practical part of herself, to find rest in it.

The sea, to Skaði, did not sound like wind in cold stone. The sea sounded like a great slow breathing thing that never stopped. The sea did not call. The sea did not pause. The sea simply came in, came in, came in, in the long slow steady rolling of a being who had been coming in since the first morning of the worlds and would, in the small careful steady understanding of any sea god, keep coming in until the worlds were over.

She lay there the first night. She did not sleep. The second night. The third. The fourth.

The smell of the hall did not help.

The salt smell, to Skaði, was the smell of a wet country. She had grown up in a country where the small careful smell of cold pine and cold stone and small careful winter fires was the smell of every safe place she had ever been. The salt smell of Nóatún, in the small careful first nights of her marriage, did not feel safe. It felt, the poem implies, like a smell that belonged to someone else's life.

The bed, too, was different.

The bed at Nóatún was a long low bed, raised slightly off the sand floor on a frame of pale driftwood, with linen sheets that had been bleached white by long coastal summers. The bed at Þrymheimr had been a small heavy bed in a small heavy stone chamber, with thick fur rugs and a wooden frame carved with the small careful patterns of her mother's family. She lay in the long low bed at Nóatún, in the long open chamber, and she could not, the poem implies, find in any of the small careful details of her husband's hall the small careful familiarity she needed in order to close her eyes.

She lay there the fifth night.

She watched, in the small careful dawn that came through the long open window, the small steady arrival of another day she had not slept through. She heard, the poem implies, the small careful calling of the gulls beginning to start up again. She heard the long slow rolling in of the waves. She heard, the poem implies, the small steady careful breathing of her husband in the bed beside her, the long peaceful sleep of a being entirely at home.

She lay there the sixth night.

She lay there the seventh.

Somewhere in the seventh night, the Hávamál verse arrived in her, the way old true verses sometimes arrive in beings who are slowly understanding a thing.

The verse, the Hávamál implies the old north knew, says: only the heart knows what lies close to itself. A wise being can bear many things. But to crave what they cannot have, the verse says, is the worst sickness a wise being can carry.

Skaði, the poem implies, was a wise being.

She lay in the long bed in the long open chamber of Nóatún, and she listened to the gulls she could not learn to sleep beside, and she understood, in the small slow clear way of a being who had been understanding it for several nights already, what the verse meant.

She had been wise enough, on the morning her father died, to put down her bow and walk south.

She had been wise enough, in the council hall of Asgard, to lay down her arms and bargain instead of demanding blood.

She had been wise enough, when the curtain had been drawn back and the wrong god had been revealed, to honour her own word and accept the marriage that her own word had bound her to.

She had been wise enough, in the long quiet days that followed the wedding, to give the marriage a fair chance, to come down out of the mountains, to try the agreed alternation, to lie in her husband's bed in her husband's country and try, with the small careful honesty of a being who wanted to be fair to her own oath, to sleep there.

She had also become, the poem implies, in the slow steady weeks since the wedding, wise enough to understand that the marriage was not, in any version of the days she could imagine ahead of her, going to be a marriage either of them could live in.

She lay back down in the bed.

She lay there, the Skáldskaparmál implies, beside Njǫrðr, who was still sleeping peacefully, with the small careful steady breathing of a being entirely at home. She looked at the dawn light coming in through the long open window. She made, the poem implies, the decision.

She would go home.

She would not refuse to honour the bargain. The bargain had been kept. The compensation had been paid. The marriage had been performed. But the marriage, the poem implies, had been tested. The marriage had been answered.

It was not a marriage that either of them was going to be able to keep.

Chapter Nine. The Slow Parting.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that Skaði did not, the next morning, simply leave.

She lay in the bed for the rest of the seventh night.

She lay in the bed through the eighth night.

She lay in the bed through the ninth.

She wanted, the poem implies, to be sure. She had been a wise being all her life. She had not made the decisions she had made, to come south alone, to choose by feet, to honour the choosing, by acting quickly. She had made them by sitting with the question, in the small careful steady way of a hunter who could wait, patient as a stone, for the small certain moment when the question answered itself.

So she sat with this question.

She sat with it through the ninth long sleepless night at Nóatún. She listened to the gulls. She listened to the sea. She listened, in the small careful dark of the long open chamber, to her husband's deep peaceful breathing. She thought, the poem implies, about the alternative.

The alternative was to stay.

She could, the small honest part of her admitted, learn to sleep here in time. She could, with enough months and enough seasons, train her ears to the small careful calling of the gulls. She could learn, perhaps, to find some small careful version of rest in the long slow rolling in of the waves. She could spend, in this country, the long slow careful years of a wife. She could become, with time, a being of the coast.

She could.

But she would not, the poem implies, become herself, in doing it.

She would become, in the slow careful arrival at sleep on her husband's bed at Nóatún, a smaller version of the being she had been at Þrymheimr. The bow would not, in the soft sandy country of the coast, be needed. The skis would not, on the long wet beaches, be useful. The small careful long quiet stride of a hunter walking the high slopes at dawn would not, in any version of the days she could imagine ahead of her, be hers any longer in the way it had been.

She would be Njǫrðr's wife.

She would not, the small honest careful part of her said in the deep dark of the ninth night, be Skaði any longer.

That was the question. That was what she sat with, in the long careful dark, with the gulls calling and the sea coming in. That was what she answered, in the small slow clear way of a being who had been answering hard questions all her life.

She would not, the poem implies, become smaller.

When the dawn came on the tenth morning, she got out of the bed.

She put on her winter cloak. She walked quietly to the long open window of the chamber, and she looked out at the small careful pale beach and at the long open water beyond it. She looked at her husband's country, the country she had not been able to sleep in, the country she did not, in any deep version of the days she could imagine, want to live in.

She turned back to the bed.

She woke him.

She did it gently, the poem implies. She had not, in any of the eighteen nights of their marriage, been unkind to him. He was, in his own way, a good being. He was an older god of the calm sea, who had not asked to be married to a giantess of the cold mountains, who had agreed to come north with her because his oath had required it, and who had tried, in the small careful careful way of a being doing his honest best, to make the marriage work. She did not, the poem implies, blame him for any of it.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

She told him.

The Skáldskaparmál does not give us the words. The poem moves through this moment with the dry careful brevity it uses for the moments in any of these stories that are too tender for the long telling. But we can imagine the small careful steady honest words. Husband. I have tried. You have tried. We have done, between us, what the oath required. But the country I belong to is the country of cold stone and the high wolves. The country you belong to is the country of warm sand and the slow gulls. Neither of us, in the slow careful steady test of the eighteen nights, has been able to sleep in the other's country. And I would rather, in the small careful long honest practice of a being who knew herself, sleep in my own.

He listened.

He did not, the Skáldskaparmál implies, argue. He had, in his own way, in the long sleepless nights at Þrymheimr, come to the same understanding. He had been waiting, perhaps, for her to be the one to say it, because she had been the one who came south to begin with, because she had been the one whose father had been killed, because the marriage had been hers to demand and hers, in the slow careful steady way of these things, to release.

He nodded.

He said, the poem implies, that he had thought, also, that the marriage was not going to work.

They sat for a long moment.

The Skáldskaparmál implies, in the small careful brevity of its description, that they did not, in the small careful moment of the parting, hate each other. They had, in the long quiet eighteen nights, tried something difficult and discovered it could not be done. The discovery was not, in the small old slow careful way of the old north, anyone's fault. It was simply the small slow clear answer that the eighteen nights had given them.

They would remain married, by name.

The bargain had been kept. The oath had been sworn. There was no need, by the long laws of the cold country, to undo the oath. They would live, the Skáldskaparmál implies, separately, each in the country that they belonged to, each in the hall they could sleep in, and they would, in the long slow steady weeks and months and years that followed, see each other rarely.

That was the agreement.

That was what the long quiet conversation at the dawn of the tenth morning at Nóatún came to.

She stood up from the bed.

She gathered her small careful belongings, her bow, her quiver, her small belt of carved bone, the long winter cloak of dark bear fur. She did not take much. She had come south with little. She would go north with the same.

He walked her, the Skáldskaparmál implies, to the door of the hall.

He stood there with her, the small careful steady older god of the calm sea, in the small careful clear morning light, and he said the small careful steady goodbye of a being who had tried to do an honest thing and who knew that the honest thing had not, in the end, worked.

She said, the Skáldskaparmál implies, the small careful steady goodbye in return.

She put on her skis.

She turned away from the long open hall and from the long curved beach and from the long open water and from the husband she had chosen by his feet alone, and she began, with the small steady stride of a being going home, the long winter walk back north.

Chapter Ten. The Long Walk Back.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us that the walk back to Þrymheimr was slower than the walk south.

She was, the poem implies, not in any particular hurry. The work that had brought her south had been done. The compensation had been paid. The stars of her father had been lifted. The marriage had been tested and answered. There was nothing waiting for her, in the long high cold country, except her own house. And her own house was, by the small careful long laws of the Hávamál, the kind of place that did not need to be hurried back to. It would be there. It had always been there. It would still be there in a week, or in two weeks, or in any of the small careful quiet days she chose to take in the long slow walk home.

She took her time.

She crossed the long brown coastal country in three days. She crossed the long flat lands beyond the coast in another three. She came, on the seventh day, to the small first hills of the deep eastern country, where the long brown plains began to lift up into the small careful low rises of the mountains.

She slept, the Skáldskaparmál implies, well on the long walk.

She slept the way she had slept on the way south. In the small careful pine bough shelters she built for herself in the deep snow at evening, with her small careful fire of pine and birch crackling at the door of the shelter, with the small careful smell of cold pine and cold stone and the small careful absence of any gull in any direction. She slept the small careful long quiet sleep of a being who was, with every mile, walking back into the country her body knew.

The small careful old wisdom of the Hávamál, the poem implies, kept her company on the long walk.

The verse the welcome of this story remembered, the verse about a small home being better than a great hall at another being's table, kept turning in her, in the small slow clear way of an old true verse turning in a wise being who was, in the small careful steady weeks of her long return, understanding the verse more deeply than she had ever understood it before.

She thought, the Skáldskaparmál implies, on the long walk, about her father.

She thought about him on the eighth night of the walk, in a small pine bough shelter on the rim of the first deep high valley of the eastern country, when she looked up at the cold winter sky above her camp and she saw, for the first time on the walk north, the two new stars.

The two stars, the poem implies, were just visible above the high rim of the valley.

They were small. They were pale. They were steady. They did not flicker. They were the eyes, she remembered, that Óðinn had thrown up into the cold sky on the bright cold morning in the courtyard of Asgard, in the small careful steady gift that the killer of her father had owed her father's daughter. They had been there now for many nights. They would be there, the poem implies, for many more.

She looked at them for a long time.

She did not, the Skáldskaparmál implies, say anything. There was nothing to say. Her father was dead. Her father was also, in the small careful slow way of the long memory of the old north, lifted. The two things were both, in the long quiet practical understanding of a hunter who knew what kind of world she lived in, true.

She watched the two stars for a long quiet hour.

She got up, the poem implies, when the small careful first cold of the dawn began to come into the high valley. She rolled up her sleeping fur. She put on her bear fur cloak. She put on her skis. She began the long quiet stride of the next day's walk.

She came, the Skáldskaparmál implies, to Þrymheimr on the fourteenth day after she had left Nóatún.

The hall was, in the small careful steady way of all halls that had been waiting a long time for their lady to come back, exactly as she had left it. The hearth fires were low. The fur rugs were clean. The small careful steady servants, her father's old servants, who were now hers, came out to meet her at the door of the cold stone hall, and they bowed, the small careful steady bow of old retainers welcoming a young lady home from a long careful difficult journey.

She did not, the Skáldskaparmál implies, say much.

She nodded to them. She handed her bow to the servant who had always taken her bow. She handed her cloak to the servant who had always taken her cloak. She walked, in the small steady stride of a being going back to the small careful daily life of her own house, through the cold corridors of Þrymheimr to her own chamber.

She sat down on the edge of her own bed.

She sat there, the small careful long steady moment of a being who had been gone a long time, who had been south to Asgard and west to Nóatún and back through long winter country, and who was, at last, in the small careful clear way of an old true Hávamál verse, home.

She lay down.

She slept, the Skáldskaparmál implies, deeply.

She slept the long clean deep sleep of a being who had been a long time away from the sound her ears knew, the smell her nose knew, the feel of the small heavy fur lined bed her body knew. She slept through the long quiet rest of the day, and through the long quiet night, and into the long quiet careful early morning of the day after.

When she woke, she was, in the deepest small careful steady way of the verse the Hávamál had given her, herself again.

Chapter Eleven. The Goddess in the Mountains.

The Skáldskaparmál tells us, briefly, the small careful long years that followed.

It tells us that Skaði went back to her bow. It tells us that she went back to her skis. It tells us that she went back to the long high slopes of the eastern country, to the small careful tracks of the mountain hare and to the slow steady walks of the high reindeer. It tells us that she became, in the long memory of the old north, the goddess of winter.

The lady of Þrymheimr.

The bow goddess.

The ski goer.

The hunter of the high cold country.

She was, the old north remembered, alone in her hall.

But alone, the Hávamál preserved this understanding in the small careful verse the welcome of this story remembered, was not, in every case, a worse thing than not alone.

The verse said: it is better to have a home, even if it is small. In your own house you can be your own master. It hurts the heart, the verse said, to have to ask for every meal at others' tables.

Skaði, the old north imagined, was her own master at Þrymheimr.

She did not, the poem implies, ask any other being in any of the worlds, in the long careful steady years that followed, for permission to do any of the small things she did. She did not ask for permission to ski the long high passes of her country. She did not ask for permission to hunt the high reindeer. She did not ask for permission to sit, in the long winter evenings, by the great hearth fire of her father's hall, with her father's spear leaning against the wall beside her seat, and to look up, through the small high window of the hall, at the two new stars that her father's eyes had become.

She was alone.

She was also, in the slow careful steady deep way of the verse, free.

The long careful steady seasons passed.

She watched, the old north imagined, many long winters at Þrymheimr. She watched the small careful steady arrival of the first snow each autumn, the long slow careful deepening of the drifts through the cold deep months, the small careful first soft melt of the late spring. She skied, the old north imagined, every long high pass of her country. She hunted, the old north imagined, every long high slope. She knew, by the long careful steady end of her first solitary winter, every small careful track of every small careful living thing in the high cold country, the way her father had known them before her, the way her father had taught her to know them.

She became, the old north imagined, the small steady careful steady presence at the high edge of the worlds.

The skalds, the small careful steady poets of the long winter halls, sang of her.

They sang of her in their kennings. They called the snow on the high passes Skaði's pale road. They called the wind on the high slopes Skaði's breath. They called the small careful sharp arrows that came down out of the long cold sky in deep midwinter Skaði's gift. They sang of her, in the small careful long quiet way of the small careful skalds, with the small careful steady respect of beings who knew exactly what kind of being she was.

She was, the small careful steady old north remembered, a being who had not, in any of the careful steady years that followed her marriage, ever once asked for her marriage back.

She had been wise enough, the old north remembered, to let the marriage end. She had been wise enough to come home. She had been wise enough, the small careful steady old north imagined, to be exactly what she was.

The Lokasenna, the Skáldskaparmál implies, gives us one small later glimpse of her.

The Lokasenna is the great flyting at the feast of Ægir, the night, much later in the long story of the gods, when Loki came uninvited to the hall by the sea and accused, one by one, every god in Asgard of every small private thing they had done wrong. We have told that story in an earlier episode of The Sleeping Almanac.

In that story, Skaði was at the feast.

She did not, the poem implies, say much. She had not, in the small careful long years between the eighteen nights and the night of the flyting, become a god of long speeches. She sat in her seat at the long table, with the small careful steady listening attention of a being who had spent a long time alone and who knew exactly when to listen.

But when Loki, near the end of the long evening of accusations, turned to her, the Lokasenna gives us one of the small fierce careful steady lines that Skaði ever spoke in the surviving sources.

She told him, the Lokasenna says, that he would not, in the end, escape the long cold consequences of his cleverness. She told him, in the small careful steady voice of a being who had not, since the night of the goat in the council hall, forgotten who he was or what he had done, that he would be bound. She told him that there would be, in the long story of the gods, a cave. She told him that there would be stones. She told him that there would be a serpent.

The Lokasenna tells us, then, that when the gods of Asgard finally caught Loki and bound him in the cave with the three stones, it was Skaði who placed the venomous serpent above his face. She placed it, the Lokasenna implies, with the small careful steady hands of a being who had been waiting, for a very long time, to do exactly this. She fastened it carefully. She walked away.

That, the old north remembered, was Skaði.

That was the goddess of winter who had lost a father, and who had walked south alone to demand his compensation, and who had chosen a husband by his feet alone and discovered she had chosen wrong, and who had laughed at a goat and a god in spite of herself, and who had tried for eighteen nights to live in a marriage that could not be lived in, and who had walked, finally, back up into her own country and let the marriage end.

That was the goddess who, when she had had the chance, had placed the serpent.

That was the goddess, the old north imagined with the small careful respect of a tradition that knew exactly what kind of being she was, who lived alone in the high cold country and was, in the long evenings, her own master.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Wolf at the Edge of Time.

That is the story for tonight.

The story of a young giantess who lost her father, and who walked south to demand what was owed, and who walked back north with the marriage in name and her own life in hand. The story of a being who had been wise enough to know when a thing was working and when a thing was not, and who had been wise enough, when the thing was not, to let it end.

The Hávamál, the small careful steady wisdom poem of the old north, has one more verse for this kind of story.

The verse says: a small house of your own, where you can be your own master, is better than a great hall where you must ask for every meal. A small fire of your own is warmer than a great fire that someone else has built. The verse means, the small careful steady old north understood, that the country you belong to is the country you should live in, and the bed you can sleep in is the bed you should sleep in, and the small careful steady life you can be your own master in is the life worth keeping.

Skaði, the old north remembered, kept that life.

She kept it, in the small careful long steady years that followed her marriage, with the small careful steady patience of a being who had learned, in the eighteen nights of trying to live in another being's country, what kind of country she actually belonged to.

She kept it through the long careful steady seasons. Through the long high cold winters of her own country. Through the long quiet hours of her hunting on the high slopes. Through the long evenings at the great hearth fire of her father's hall, looking up through the small high window at the two new stars that her father's eyes had become.

She kept it, the small careful steady old north imagined, until the appointed twilight came.

The wolf in the east, the wolf that we have spoken of in earlier episodes of The Sleeping Almanac, the great wolf Fenrir who waits in the small careful steady patience of the old north's longest story for the moment when the cord that holds him will at last give way, that wolf was waiting, the old north remembered, all through Skaði's long quiet careful years in the mountains. He was waiting, the old north remembered, on the small careful long island of Lyngvi where he had been bound. He was waiting, the small careful steady old north remembered, through every long winter of Skaði's life, with the small careful steady patience of a great cold thing that knows its moment will come.

That moment, the old north remembered, has not come yet.

For tonight, that is for another evening, for the last episode of our season, when we will tell the appointed twilight and what comes after.

For tonight, the story closes in the small careful long quiet of Skaði's hall.

She is at the great hearth fire in the centre of the cold stone room. Her father's spear is leaning against the wall beside her seat. Her bow is on the carved wooden rack above the fire. Her skis are at the door, ready for the long quiet careful early morning when she will put them on and go out into the small careful steady cold of the high passes. The hall is quiet. The wind is, as always, outside the hall. The wolves are, as always, calling in the deep high valleys. The two new stars, the small careful steady old north imagined, are just visible through the small high window of the hall, hanging in the deep cold sky above the eastern country.

She looks up at them for a small careful moment.

Then she lowers her head.

She watches the small careful steady old fire in the hearth.