Updates, behind the scenes, and thoughts from Jennifer
Before the stories were mine to retell, they belonged to everyone. This series visits the old Norse tellings as the Eddas actually give them — no embellishment, just the old words and why they still hold. New tellings arrive weekly.
Browse the Index — every telling at a glanceMost of the Edda's poems about the fall of the Gjukungs are told from the margins: a sister, a widow, a woman with a harp in her ear. The Lay of Atli does something harder. It walks into the hall with the two brothers and refuses to look away. It is short, it is hard, and it contains one of the coldest jokes in all of Old Norse poetry.
Read the TellingThere is a poem in the Edda that begins as a house call. A woman's labor will not come, a friend rides out on a black horse, and for twenty stanzas the story is about a difficult birth. Then, in the middle of the room, the midwife starts talking about herself, and the poem becomes the saddest thing in the Guthrun cycle that is not about Guthrun.
Read the TellingThere is one poem in the Guthrun cycle where she is believed, and it is probably the least loved poem in the cycle. Scholars have been polite about it for a century and a half. I think it deserves a fairer hearing, because it does something the other Guthrun poems never allow: it lets her win.
Read the TellingThere is a poem in the Edda that opens with the most ordinary sentence in the world, I was a girl, and ends mid-breath, with a man lying awake in the dark who remembers, and then the manuscript just stops. In between, a woman tells the story of how her life was taken apart. She does it in the order she can bear to say it.
Read the TellingThere is a post earlier in this series that took you up the mountain, through the wall of fire, and into the shield-tower where a woman lay asleep in armor that had grown to her. You met her waking, her blessing of the day and the night, her punishment, and the stanzas where she says the end will be bad and he says he will not run. If you haven't read it, it stands on its own, and you should.
Read the TellingIf you've read the earlier telling of Sigurd and Fafnir, you've heard the part everyone knows: the trench, the sword, the dying dragon's honest warning, the burned thumb. That was number twenty, and I'm not going to walk the same road twice.
Read the TellingHere is a poem that begins with a stolen life and a bargain nobody keeps, and ends with a man in a storm telling a boy to wash his face and eat breakfast.
Read the TellingMost poems in the Edda are about someone who didn't know. This one is about someone who asked.
Read the TellingHere is the shortest death in the Edda, and it may be the cruelest thing the shelf holds. There is no battle in it, no curse, no ring, no prophecy. There is a funeral feast, a woman with a grudge, and a drink.
Read the TellingLast week a rider nobody named gave a name to a silent boy, and a scribe, centuries later, gave the rider one in return: Svava, king's daughter, valkyrie — a title the verse itself never once confirmed. Tonight the shelf gives us the other Helgi, the one Bellows calls, without a great deal of fondness for the fact, "unquestionably one of the latest of the Eddic poems," composed "probably not earlier than the second quarter of the eleventh century." It is also, he says, something the Helgi poems otherwise never are: a story.
Read the TellingLast week ended on a promise, and it took us back to the Edda's shelf. After two posts in the history books, with a king's poet choosing Valhalla for a king who had left the choice to others, we return to Henry Adams Bellows and The Poetic Edda, and to a poem this series has walked past twice. In №36 we borrowed its giantess, Hrimgerth, the one who talked until sunrise and turned to stone in a harbor. In №43 we skipped over it to reach Sigrun at the burial mound. Tonight we go in through the front door.
Read the TellingLast week's telling ended with a pair of names and a promise. The names were Gondul and Skogul, and long-memoried readers have met them before: back in №7 they rode past in the Voluspo's roll-call of the choosers, two beats in a drumline of war-words, Skogul "rode next," Gondul after. They had names and no lines. Tonight they get lines. The promise was that one king after the handbook cut a valkyrie out of Harald Fairhair's poem, the same handbook would print a whole poem in which the valkyries do the talking — and it does, at the very end of a saga, at length, with the choosers left in.
Read the TellingLast week's telling ended on a promise with no quotation marks in it: a raven-song from the age of Harald Fairhair, built as a conversation overheard at dawn — a valkyrie questioning a raven about the king he feeds behind. That was deliberate, and the accounting at tonight's door explains why. The poem the promise named is real, and old, and it survives — but it survives torn, and the pieces sit in different books. The book that kept the conversation whole is one this series has never opened. The book that kept the most and best of the answers is one it has been circling for a year.
Read the TellingLast week's stanza ended with a door: the monsters, said the Hyndluljóth, went among men. For fifty tellings this series has stayed inside the two Eddas — the poems and the handbook, Iceland's memory of the gods — and the monsters it met there stayed where those books keep them: at the world's edge, in the Ironwood, under the roots, off the ledger. But the stanza says they went among men. So tonight, for the first time, the series follows them out — out of the Eddas entirely, into a book written by a man who did not believe in them.
Read the TellingLast week ended on a promise this series has owed for twelve tellings. When №38 climbed the Hyndluljóth — the poem of hall-lists, where a giantess calls a hero a fool nine times for not knowing his own kin — it passed four lines at a walk, quoted them, said what Bellows says (that nothing more is known), and moved on, because eighteen stanzas of genealogy were waiting. The teaser promised the series would go back for them, and that this time it stays.
Read the TellingLast week the mill-song did something quietly enormous on its way to the salt. Asked why they alone could turn the stone, Fenja and Menja answered with a family tree — "Brothers of Hill-Giants, / Of them were we born" — and the whole tragedy pivoted on Fródi never asking the question the North asks about everybody: whose are you? The teaser promised that this week we would walk east, into the wood where that kind of kindred keeps its mothers, and ask the question Fródi skipped — of the one figure in the old books who is defined by it never being answered.
Read the TellingLast week ended under Ægir's gold-lit roof, with the handbook's shelf of gold-names half spent and half gleaming, and the teaser promised the fire we had not touched — the one with a mill behind it. The accounting first, because this series pays at the door, and this week the ledger is short: the teaser cashes clean.
Read the TellingLast week ended in the treasury — the chapter of the poets' handbook that keeps Freyja's tears — and the teaser promised the first name on that same golden shelf: Ægir's Fire, and the feast behind it. The accounting first, because this series pays at the door, and this week the door work is unusually honest.
Read the TellingLast week the ruled road ended in summer, and the teaser made one more promise anyway — the sister. The family walk was always going to finish here: the father who parted honestly (№44), the brother whose whole estate is gifts (№45), and now the goddess this series met on a battlefield in its second week and has been circling ever since. Before the door opens, the accounting, because this series pays at the door — and for once the teaser comes home nearly clean.
Read the TellingLast week's telling ended in a hole in the record — the mother nobody names — and promised the son who came out of it: Freyr, the god the light-turn has been circling since it began. Before the door opens, the teaser owes its corrections, because this series pays at the door.
Read the TellingLast week's telling closed at Sevafjoll, and Bellows' gloss on that mountain — "Wet Mountain"; sea and rock held in one name, to my ear — pointed the road here: to the one marriage in the mythology that tried to hold sea and rock in one household. But the teaser owes two corrections before the house is even entered, and this series pays its debts at the door.
Read the TellingLast week's telling ended with three swan-maidens who "flew away to find battles, and came back no more," and a promise: the next poems on Bellows' shelf are the ones where a Valkyrie who flew to battles does come back. Two corrections before anything else, because that is this series' habit when a teaser has overreached, and this one did it twice. First, the small one: I said the poem we wanted was "the one after next." Count the doors honestly and it is the one after the one after next — from the smith's poem, Bellows' shelf runs Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, then the first Helgakvitha Hundingsbana, then this.
Read the TellingLast week's telling ended with a name said aloud and a house bursting open, and with a warning at the tail: the next poem on Bellows' shelf is about a smith, and it would be the light-turn's hardest test. I said I would tell it if the road led there. The road led there. So here is the honest thing to say at the top: this is the darkest poem this series has opened since the pyre in №24, and it is not even in the dark half of the book.
Read the TellingLast week's telling ended in a giant's hall with a god asking who lives? five times and getting five names back, and with Bellows' note on the two survivors sending the reader somewhere this series had never been: a poem where the world-tree is called Mimameith, and "fire nor iron shall fell it." I followed the note. It leads to a young man standing at the doors of the dead, calling for his mother.
Read the TellingBellows says the Grimnismol and the poem that precedes it in both manuscripts "together, in deed, constitute a fairly complete dictionary of Norse mythology." The other poem is the Vafthruthnismol — Odin, under the name Gagnrath, in the hall of "the Mighty in Riddles," with his head wagered against a giant's (№36 quoted the stakes; №12 the unanswerable last question; №3 the wife who tried to keep him home). What this series has never told is the middle: twelve numbered questions about how the world began, and then five about what comes after it ends — and the giant answers every one. Who lives when "The mighty winter" comes: two people hidden in a wood, eating "The morning dews | for meat." What happens to the sun when the wolf takes it: "A daughter bright | Alfrothul bears," to walk her mother's road. Who rules when Surt's fires sink: two sons of Odin and two sons of Thor, "Mothi and Magni | shall Mjollnir have." And, in Odin's own first answer, a river between the gods and the giants that "For all time ever | open it flows, / No ice on the river there is." The Vafthruthnismol: the wisdom-contest that ends with a head, and, on the way to it, the oldest list in the North of what survives.
Read the Tellingthis series has stood in King Geirröth's hall once already, in №35, and watched a god sit between two fires for eight nights until his mantle burned. What it did not tell is what he said there — because what Odin says, from between the fires, is the map. The Grimnismol is, Bellows says, "largely encyclopedic": the last forty-seven stanzas hold two hundred and twenty-five proper names, and among them are the homes of the gods, told hall by hall and numbered as he goes — Alfheim, given to Freyr "As a tooth-gift in ancient times"; Thrymheim, where Skathi (№17) "abides" in her father's mountain home, with Bellows' note telling the nine-nights-and-three compromise with Njorth that failed; Folkvang, where Freyja (№2) chooses "The half of the dead"; Himinbjorg, where the second vague passage about Heimdall sits in "bad shape"; and Valhall itself, with "Five hundred doors | and forty," eight hundred fighters to a door, a goat by the hall whose mead never fails, and a hart from whose horns every river runs. Then the names of the Valkyries (№7), the horses of the sun, the harts and serpents in Yggdrasil (№13), and, at the end, name after name of Odin, stanza after stanza of them, the last beginning "Now am I Othin" — and a king falling on his own sword. The Grimnismol: the poem that is a map of heaven, and a god reading it aloud while he burns.
Read the Tellingthe third witness for the annotator was a line in "the short Voluspo" — a poem that survives, Bellows says, only as a fragment of fifty-one lines "inserted bodily" into another poem, in a manuscript from around 1400, the two "clumsily put together" by "some blundering copyist." The poem it was stuffed into is the Hyndluljoth, and it begins with Freyja (№2) waking a giantess in her cave at nightfall and asking her to ride with her to Valhalla. Freyja is riding a boar. The boar is her lover, in disguise, and the giantess sees through it at once. What Freyja wants is a family tree — her favorite has bet his whole inheritance on having nobler blood than another man, and only a giantess can recite the line back far enough — and what she gets is eighteen stanzas of names with a refrain: "And all are thy kinsmen, | Ottar, thou fool!" Somewhere in the middle, the copyist's other poem breaks in, and there, for the first time in these tellings where the naming can be checked, the nine mothers of Heimdall (№15) are given their names. It ends with a drink of memory, a threat of fire, and a giantess's opinion of Freyja's morals. The Hyndluljoth: the poem that is two poems, and the goddess who rode her lover to a wager.
Read the TellingBellows reports that one scholar was "pretty sure" this week's poet had picked up a Celtic accent, and points, for the argument, at another poem — one found in neither of the great Eddic codices, only on the last, incomplete sheet of a copy of Snorri. In it a god walks "by ways so green" along a seashore and comes to three houses, one after another: a hovel with a husk-loaf on the table, a farm with a chest in the corner, a hall whose doors face south. In each he sits between the couple at supper, and sleeps between them for three nights, and walks on; nine months later there is a son — Thræll, then Karl, then Jarl — and from the three sons, the poem says, come the three kinds of people there are. The old annotator says the god was Heimdall (№15); Bellows thinks it was Odin, and says why. Then the youngest of the youngest learns runes, a crow starts to speak — and the parchment runs out in the middle of its sentence. The Rigsthula: the poem that ends because the page did.
Read the Tellingthe skald who sang this week's poem called Thor, once, "the grim Sire of Thrúdr" — and Thrúdr is his daughter, the only one whose name survives. Next week a dwarf comes to collect her. He is called Alvis, "All-Knowing," and the gods promised her to him while her father was away; Thor, home now, claims a father's right to break it — and then, instead of breaking it, asks the dwarf a question. Then another. Thirteen questions, every answer perfect, all night long, while the bride's father keeps him talking toward sunrise. It is the one contest in these tellings Thor wins with his mouth, and its closing words are his: "The day has caught thee, dwarf!" (Bellows' note says the sun turned him to stone; the poem itself says only that. We will tell you exactly which is which.) The Alvissmol: the god who stalled.
Read the Tellingwhen Ægir asks whether Thor did yet more valorous deeds among the trolls, Bragi's very next tale is the strangest errand of them all — Thor summoned to a giant's dwelling with no hammer, no girdle of might, no iron gloves, because Loki, caught in borrowed feathers and starved three months in a chest, swore an oath to deliver him unarmed. What saves him: a giantess's borrowed belt and staff, a river swollen by the giant's daughter standing astride it, a chair that rises to crush him against the rafters, and a bar of glowing iron caught out of the air and thrown back — through the pillar, through the giant, through the wall. Thor at Geirrödr's: the hospitality of enemies.
Read the Tellingafter a castle of loaded dice, the old books owe Thor a contest with honest rules — and there is exactly one formal duel in all the mythology, told whole by Snorri. A giant with a stone head and a stone heart, who rode into Valhalla drunk on a golden horse and wagered everything on the race; a second built of clay, nine miles high, with the heart of a mare; a whetstone thrown against a hammer in mid-air; and a shard of it lodged in Thor's skull that no craft ever loosened — because of a spell interrupted at exactly the wrong moment, by good news. The duel at the stone-fence: Thor and Hrungnir.
Read the Tellingtwice now a flyting has thrown the same glove at Thor — and twice this series has promised, in a translator's note, "the famous episode, related in full by Snorri." It is time to pay that debt. The journey in the East, told whole: the snoring that was a giant, the shelter that was his glove, and the stronghold of Utgartha-Loki, where Thor drinks from a horn he cannot empty, wrestles an old woman he cannot throw, and lifts a gray cat he cannot lift — and where the morning after brings the most courteous, most devastating confession of trickery in the old books, delivered outside gates that will never be found again.
Read the Tellingthe compiler of the Lokasenna said Thor was away "on a journey in the East" — and the Edda keeps a poem that meets him coming home from one. At a sound stands a ferryman who will not bring the boat over; what follows is a flyting across the water, where the god with the hammer discovers the one arena in which the hammer counts for nothing, against a sharp-tongued graybeard who knows far too much about everyone — and whose name is not really Harbarth. The Harbarthsljoth: the other great insult-match of the Edda, in which Thor, fresh from silencing Loki with a threat, meets an opponent who cannot be reached by anything but words — and loses.
Read the Tellingthe kettle came home so the gods could drink at Ægir's — and the old books preserve what happened at that table. A guest arrives whom nobody invited, claims a seat by an oath too old to refuse, and works down the benches saying, to every god and goddess in turn, the one true thing each of them least wants said. It is the most dangerous dinner party in mythology, and only one argument ends it — the same argument that ends most of them. The Lokasenna: the flyting at Ægir's feast, where the ale we just watched them win is poured, and honesty is the weapon everyone pretends not to recognize.
Read the TellingThor's appetite was a running joke — the notes to this poem keep pointing at another poem to explain it, and that poem is where the gods' ale comes from. The Hymiskvitha: a giant's cauldron a mile deep, a guest who eats two oxen at a sitting, and a fishing trip with an ox-head for bait — the day Thor rowed farther out than the giant dared and hooked the serpent that circles the world. The old sources cannot agree on what happened when the line went taut, and one of them admits it. We will read them both.
Read the Tellingthe hammer is barely cool before it goes missing. A giant has buried Mjollnir eight miles deep, and his price for returning it is Freyja for a bride — and what happens next is the funniest poem in the Poetic Edda: the god of thunder in a bridal veil and a necklace of keys, eating an ox and eight salmon at his own wedding feast while the flower-girl does the talking, and a giant leans in, lifts the veil, and wonders aloud why the bride's eyes burn. The North knew how to laugh at its own strongest god — and knew exactly when to stop laughing.
Read the TellingLoki cuts off a sleeping goddess's hair for a joke, and to save his own skin he has to go underground and talk the dwarfs into making it grow back. What he comes home with is a spear that never misses, a ship that folds into a pocket, a boar that runs on air, a hammer with a handle too short — and a gold ring called Draupnir, which drops eight of its own weight every ninth night, and which you have just watched change hands in a giant's hall with no explanation whatsoever. Then Loki bets his head on it, and finds out what a wager is worth to a dwarf.
Read the TellingA god sits in Odin's high seat, looks where he should not, sees a girl in a giant's yard, and falls sick with love. His servant is sent down the long dark road to do the asking — with eleven golden apples, a ring that breeds, a sword, and, when none of that works, a threat so strange and so ugly that scholars have been arguing about it for a century. Skírnismál: the shining one goes wooing.
Read the TellingA baby girl, a dead mother, a foster-father with a hollow harp — and a queen who came out of that harp to out-riddle the most famous viking in the world. The Völsungs are not finished after all. Aslaug, the girl in the harp.
Read the TellingAn orchard, a woman with a box, and the only thing standing between the gods of Asgard and old age. Then a kidnapping, a bad bargain, and a god of mischief in a falcon-skin flying for his life with a nut in his claws. The dark is told; now the light — Iðunn and the apples.
Read the TellingThe sword goes in while he is sleeping, and the hall hears a woman laugh — once, with all her heart. Then a pyre built wide enough for two, and a queen who rides down the road to Hel and argues with a giantess the whole way, because she is not finished being right.
Read the TellingTwo queens go down to the river to wash their hair, and one of them says the wrong true thing. What follows is a ring produced as evidence, a woman who stops speaking for days, and three brothers finding a loophole in an oath they cannot break — so they go looking for a fourth.
Read the TellingHe swore. Then he rode down into the land of the Gjukungs, and there was a cup waiting for him — a drink that takes a memory out of a man as cleanly as a thief takes a purse. What the ale of forgetting cost two women and three brothers comes next.
Read the TellingHe rides to Hindarfjoll and cuts a sleeping warrior out of her mail with a sword — and she wakes speaking a hymn to the day. She is called a victory-bringer, and a translator's honest mistake turned that word into a name. The Valkyrie in the fire-ring, and the runes she teaches, come next.
Read the TellingThe smith whets the boy, and the boy rides to Gnitaheith. But the strangest thing about the most famous dragon-slaying in the North is not the killing — it is the conversation. A dying dragon who gives honest counsel, a roasted heart, a burned thumb, and birds whose speech suddenly makes terrible sense. Sigurd meets Fafnir next.
Read the TellingThe runes were the old North's letters — and the greatest story those letters ever carried is a family curse in five generations. A sword driven into a living tree, a dragon lying on stolen gold, and a Valkyrie asleep inside a ring of fire, waiting for the one man who does not know how to be afraid. The Völsungs are coming.
Read the TellingA god hung himself on the world-tree, wounded by his own spear, nine nights without bread or horn — an offering of himself, to himself, for a fistful of marks that could catch the wind in wood. The runes, and the price of writing.
Read the TellingOne day a giantess walked into Asgard armed to the teeth, demanding payment for a dead father — and the gods, who owed her, let her choose a husband from among them. By his feet. Skaði, the bride of the shining ankles.
Read the TellingHalf the slain went to Freyja, and we have seen where the heroes feast. But most of the dead were never slain in battle at all — and someone keeps their country too. Hel, the keeper of the quiet lands.
Read the TellingHe needs less sleep than a bird, hears the grass grow, and spends the whole age of the world not blowing his horn — and the seeress calls all of humankind his sons. The watch resumes with Heimdall.
Read the TellingThe strangest thing about the Norse end of the world is that everyone already knew. The fetter breaks, the ship comes loose, every god meets a named partner — and the poem keeps going, to the green land after.
Read the TellingThe tree holding up all nine worlds is chewed from above, rotting through the middle, and gnawed from below — and the gods know it, and hold their court beneath it anyway, watered daily, one more day.
Read the TellingA mother argued with fate oath by oath, all the way around the world — fire swore, iron swore, stones and serpents swore. The hinge of the whole story is one small green thing she thought too young to ask.
Read the TellingNumbered among the gods and the first father of falsehoods — in the same breath. The trouble at the table got them the hammer, the wall, and the eight-legged horse, and the door was sworn open.
Read the TellingIn the old North, poetry is a substance — brewed from a murdered wise man's blood, paid over as a ransom, hoarded in a mountain, and stolen by a liar. The first thing the poets did with it was confess.
Read the TellingYou have been saying their names your whole life. Every seven days you read a fossil out loud — a hunted sun, a deposed sky-father, and one day for washing.
Read the TellingThe first war in the world was not gods against giants — it was family. It ended in a draw nobody recorded, a swap of hostages, and, by accident, poetry.
Read the TellingWinged helmets and opera sopranos need not apply. The originals are stranger, harder, and better — and their very name is a job description.
Read the TellingHe fed the wolf no one else dared approach, and paid for the gods' lie with his hand. Cut his rune twice, said the Valkyrie, and go to war believing.
Read the TellingIron failed twice. What bound the unbindable was a silk ribbon made of six impossible things — and a pledge everyone at the table knew was false.
Read the TellingThe beings who allot every life in the cosmos spend their mornings doing chores. Destiny, in the North, is not a decree from a throne. It is a bucket carried daily.
Read the TellingThe Norse made a goddess who knows every fate of every living thing — and then gave her the one trait no other seer in any pantheon possesses. She keeps it to herself.
Read the TellingFreyja is a goddess of the battlefield, and when the slain are gathered, half of them are hers. Not Odin’s leftovers. Half. And by the oldest poem we have, she chooses first.
Read the TellingThe Norse did not give their god of wisdom perfect sight. They gave him impaired sight — permanently, visibly, by his own choice. Wisdom is not something added to you. It is something traded for.
Read the Telling