August 23, 2026
Last time we left a woman on the Hel-road, and before that a hall full of people who heard a queen laugh and could not read it. This telling opens with a laugh too, and this one is easy to read, because the god doing it already knows the story comes out all right.
In Snorri's Gylfaginning, a visitor called Gangleri is being walked through the roster of the gods. Bragi is described — the eloquent one, the poet — and then, in a single sentence, so is his wife, and so is the arrangement on which the entire pantheon rests:
His wife is Idunn: she guards in her chest of ash those apples which the gods must taste whensoever they grow old; and then they all become young, and so it shall be even unto the Weird of the Gods. — Gylfaginning, Brodeur translation (1916)
Read that again with the emphasis where the North put it. Whensoever they grow old. The gods of the North are not immortal. They age like anything else that breathes. What they have instead of immortality is a maintenance contract — a fruit, a chest, and a woman who remembers to open it. Everything Asgard is, everything it can still do at Ragnarök, runs through one person's steadiness at one small daily task.
Gangleri notices. His reaction is the reaction any sensible listener has, and Snorri gives it to him:
Then said Gangleri: "A very great thing, methinks, the gods entrust to the watchfulness and good faith of Idunn." Then said Hárr, laughing loudly: "'T was near being desperate once; I may be able to tell thee of it…" — Gylfaginning, Brodeur translation (1916)
Laughing loudly. Out of a thousand years of grim material, here is a god who thinks a story is funny — and he thinks so because it ended well. The joke only works from the far side. That is what a story with a rescue in it sounds like when it is being told by someone who was there.
Before the story, one honest thing about the storyteller's sources.
Henry Adams Bellows, annotating the Poetic Edda, notes that Iðunn "is not mentioned by name in any other of the Eddic poems" — that is, in the whole surviving body of the old verse she is named exactly once, in the Lokasenna, and everything else we have of her comes from Snorri's prose two centuries later, or from the skalds, who did not use her name at all. They used her the way skalds used everyone: as a riddle to be solved.
"How should Idunn be periphrased? Thus: by calling her Wife of Bragi, and Keeper of the Apples; and the apples should be called Age-Elixir of the Æsir. Idunn is also called Spoil of the Giant Thjazi…" — Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
Wife of. Keeper of. Spoil of. Three kennings, and every one of them defines her by her relation to somebody else — her husband, her fruit, and the man who stole her. Age-Elixir of the Æsir is a beautiful phrase and it is not about her either; it is about what she supplies to other people.
So we are working with a figure the sources kept almost entirely off-stage. Which makes it worth noticing how much the machinery of the world turns out to depend on her, and how loudly Hárr laughs at the memory of nearly losing her.
It starts, as these things do, with three gods being hungry.
Odin, Loki and Hœnir are crossing wastes with nothing to eat. They find a herd, take an ox, build a fire. The ox will not cook. They scatter the fire and rebuild it. The ox still will not cook. And then somebody speaks from the oak above them.
Then they heard a voice speaking in the oak up above them, declaring that he who sat there confessed he had caused the lack of virtue in the fire. They looked thither, and there sat an eagle; and it was no small one. — Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
And it was no small one. That is a storyteller who knows exactly how much to say.
The eagle offers terms: let him eat his fill and the meat will cook. They agree; he takes both hams and both shoulders at the first grab; Loki, enraged, drives a pole into him — and the pole sticks to the eagle and Loki's hands stick to the pole, and the eagle takes off low and fast with a god dragging along the ground behind it.
The eagle flew at such a height that Loki's feet down below knocked against stones and rock-heaps and trees, and he thought his arms would be torn from his shoulders. He cried aloud, entreating the eagle urgently for peace; but the eagle declared that Loki should never be loosed, unless he would give him his oath to induce Idunn to come out of Ásgard with her apples. — Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
The eagle is Þjazi, a giant in eagle's plumage, and note what he asks for. Not gold. Not a killing. He wants the woman who keeps the fruit, and he wants her brought out voluntarily, by a friend. He has thought about this. Whatever else giants are in these books, this one understood the single point of failure in Asgard's design better than Asgard did.
Loki swears, and is dropped, and goes home, and says nothing.
But at the appointed time Loki lured Idunn out of Ásgard into a certain wood, saying that he had found such apples as would seem to her of great virtue, and prayed that she would have her apples with her and compare them with these. Then Thjazi the giant came there in his eagle's plumage and took Idunn and flew away with her, off into Thrymheimr to his abode. — Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
The bait is perfect and it is worth being precise about why. He does not offer her jewels or flattery. He tells her there is better fruit, and asks her to come and compare. It is a lure aimed exactly at the thing she is good at. She goes out carrying her own box, because she is being invited to do her job well.
And then the most human sentence in the whole affair:
But the Æsir became straitened at the disappearance of Idunn, and speedily they became hoary and old. — Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
No thunderclap. No prophecy. The gods simply start aging, all at once, all together, and have to hold a council about it while it is happening to them. The oldest surviving version of this story — older than Snorri by three hundred years — puts the scene on the page with a cruelty Snorri softens:
At that the steep slope-dwellers No sorrow felt; then Idunn Was from the south, by giants New-stolen, come among them. All Ingvi-Freyr's high kindred, Hoary and old, to council Hasted; grewsome of fashion And ugly all the gods were. — Haustlöng, by Þjóðólfr of Hvin, as quoted in Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
Grewsome of fashion and ugly all the gods were. The beautiful ones, hurrying to a meeting, appalled at each other's faces.
They do what such meetings do: they establish who was last seen with the missing person. It was Loki. He is seized, brought to the Thing, and threatened with death or torture, and — this is the detail that keeps him interesting — it works instantly. He offers to fetch her back the moment he is frightened enough.
A word about that poem, because it belongs in a post about the light.
Haustlöng — "Autumn-long" — was composed around the year 900 by Þjóðólfr of Hvin, and it is not, in the first place, a poem about Iðunn at all. It is a poem about a shield. A man named Þorleifr gave Þjóðólfr a painted shield, and Þjóðólfr paid him back in verse by describing the pictures on it. The poem opens by asking how he can possibly settle the debt, and it closes by pointing at the object in his hands:
'Tis pictured on the giant's Sole-bridge, the shield which, painted With stories, Thórleifr gave me. — Haustlöng, by Þjóðólfr of Hvin, as quoted in Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
So the earliest account we possess of Iðunn's theft and rescue is a description of a painting on a shield that no longer exists, made by a poet paying a courtesy to a friend. The shield rotted. The paint is a thousand years gone. The pictures survive because somebody looked at them closely enough to put them into words, and somebody else thought the words were worth copying out.
That is not a small thing to notice on the day the series turns toward the light. Most of what we have of the North came down the dark way — burned halls, blood-feuds, a manuscript with eight leaves torn out of the middle of it. This one came down because a man liked a gift.
Loki's plan requires borrowing, and what he borrows is the detail that gives the rescue its shape: he asks Freyja for her hawk's plumage. The goddess who takes half the slain also owns a flying-skin, and she lends it out.
And when he got the hawk's plumage, he flew north into Jötunheim, and came on a certain day to the home of Thjazi the giant. Thjazi had rowed out to sea, but Idunn was at home alone: Loki turned her into the shape of a nut and grasped her in his claws and flew his utmost. — Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
Turned her into the shape of a nut. The keeper of the fruit is carried home as a seed.
Then the chase, and then the best piece of staging in the Prose Edda — because the gods do not meet the eagle in battle. They meet it with carpentry.
But when the Æsir saw how the hawk flew with the nut, and where the eagle was flying, they went out below Ásgard and bore burdens of plane-shavings thither. As soon as the hawk flew into the citadel, he swooped down close by the castle-wall; then the Æsir struck fire to the plane-shavings. But the eagle could not stop himself when he missed the hawk: the feathers of the eagle caught fire, and straightway his flight ceased. Then the Æsir were near at hand and slew Thjazi the giant within the Gate of the Æsir, and that slaying is exceeding famous. — Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
Wood-shavings. Swept up from somebody's workshop, piled at the foot of the wall, and lit at the right second. The mightiest of the Æsir hurry out with armfuls of curls of pine, and that is what brings down the eagle — not Thor's hammer, not Odin's spear, but a bonfire of scrap and a giant's inability to brake.
The whole rescue is like that. Nobody wins a duel. A goddess lends a coat, a thief flies well, and a group of frightened old people build a fire in the right place. It is a story about getting her back, and every element in it is bent toward that single outcome.
Now for the part where the old books cheerfully contradict each other, which they do most often about the things everybody agreed were famous.
Snorri says "the Æsir" killed him at the gate, and gives the sequel — Odin's atonement to the dead giant's daughter — to Odin. The skald Bragi, whom Snorri quotes, agrees:
He who threw the dead eyes Of Thjazi, Skadi's father, Into the Winds' Wide Basin O'er the abodes of men-folk many. — Bragi, as quoted in Skáldskaparmál, Brodeur translation (1916)
But in the Harbarthsljoth, Thor is standing on a shore trading insults with a ferryman, and when he is asked what great deeds he has to his name, this is the first one out of his mouth:
"Thjazi I felled, | the giant fierce, And I hurled the eyes | of Alvaldi's son To the heavens hot above; Of my deeds the mightiest | marks are these, That all men since can see." — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 19, Bellows translation (1923)
Bellows notes drily that "Snorri's prose version does not attribute this feat particularly to Thor." And there is a third claimant: in the Lokasenna, when Skaði promises Loki the punishment that is coming to him, Loki's answer is a boast that he was "first and last at the deadly fight there where Thjazi we caught." Three tellings, three men taking credit, and the boasting is being done in every case by somebody trying to win an argument.
One more honest gap, and it is the one I like best. Two stars were set in the sky out of that killing, and they were still being pointed at when these poems were made — marks that all men since can see. We have lost which ones. Bellows: "It is not known which stars were called 'Thjazi's Eyes.'" They are up there tonight. Nobody alive can tell you their names.
As for what the dead giant's daughter did about all this — she put on a war-helm and walked up to the gates of Asgard alone to collect, and that story we have already told — it is No. 17 in this series — and it is one of the few times in the old books that somebody presents a bill to the gods and gets paid.
Iðunn comes home and the apples go back in the chest and the gods stop being old, and the sources very nearly drop her again. She gets one scene, in the Lokasenna, at a feast where Loki has come in to insult everyone in the hall by name.
Her husband Bragi has just been called a coward, and is threatening violence he cannot deliver from where he sits. And Iðunn — who has better cause than anyone present to hate this particular guest — puts her hand on her husband's arm:
"Well, prithee, Bragi, | his kinship weigh, Since chosen as wish-son he was; And speak not to Loki | such words of spite Here within Ægir's hall." — Lokasenna, stanza 16, Bellows translation (1923)
Weigh his kinship. She is reminding the room that Loki was taken in as a son by Odin himself, which is both true and, at that moment, the least popular fact available. Loki repays her with an obscenity about a brother of hers whose slayer she is said to have embraced — Bellows, admirably, admits in his note that "we do not even know who Ithun's brother was, much less who slew him," so the insult survives with its meaning entirely lost, which is the correct fate for it. And she answers:
"To Loki I speak not | with spiteful words Here within Ægir's hall; And Bragi I calm, | who is hot with beer, For I wish not that fierce they should fight." — Lokasenna, stanza 18, Bellows translation (1923)
Every other goddess in that poem takes up the challenge and is destroyed by it — Bellows observes that they "all find themselves confronted with undeniable facts in their own careers." Frigg, Freyja, Skaði, Sif: each one swings, and each one is answered with something true and unbearable, because that is the game and Loki is better at it than they are.
Iðunn declines to play. I wish not that fierce they should fight. It is not a victory; the poem does not treat it as one, and I will not pretend the poet meant it as one. But it is the only exchange in the Lokasenna that ends without anybody being ruined, and it is spoken by the person the whole hall would be dead without.
A last small thing, told straight.
The apples do not appear in the old poems as Iðunn's. Bellows is careful about this: the identification is Snorri's, and Snorri is the one who built the tidy system. In the verse, apples turn up as what apples always were in the North — Bellows glosses them plainly as "the symbol of fruitfulness, and also of eternal youth" — and the most famous appearance is in the Skirnismol, where a servant offers them to a giant's daughter as the opening bid in a courtship:
"Eleven apples, | all of gold, Here will I give thee, Gerth, To buy thy troth | that Freyr shall be Deemed to be dearest to you." — Skirnismol, stanza 19, Bellows translation (1923)
She turns them down flat, which is its own good scene for another day. Eleven golden apples, offered as the price of a woman's consent, and refused. The North knew what the fruit meant.
But it took Snorri, writing in Christian Iceland with the old faith already a memory, to say out loud whose hands the fruit was in, and what it cost the world the one time those hands were empty.
That is the whole shape of it, and after six tellings of a family destroying itself, the shape is worth saying plainly. Nobody is avenged in this story. Nobody is cursed. Nothing is ruined that stays ruined. A woman is taken by a trick aimed at her own diligence; the gods get old and ugly and frightened; a coward is threatened into courage; a goddess lends her wings; and the rescue is completed by a pile of wood-shavings and a lit match at the foot of a wall.
And a thousand years later, a god in a story is still laughing about it, because it came out right.
'T was near being desperate once. It was. It wasn't.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and the next one has been waiting since the pyre went out.
Sources: Lokasenna, Harbarthsljoth and Skirnismol, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923), with reference to Benjamin Thorpe (1866); Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál, in The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), including the verses of Þjóðólfr of Hvin's Haustlöng and of the skald Bragi as Snorri quotes them. Notes on Iðunn's single appearance in the Eddic poems, her unnamed brother, the disputed slaying of Thjazi, the lost identity of "Thjazi's Eyes," and the apple as a symbol of fruitfulness and eternal youth as given in Bellows' commentary. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: a 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.