August 23, 2026
Two tellings ago this series went to the orchard, and one telling ago it went round the far side of a pyre to find a girl who lived. This one goes back among the gods — and it is a love story, and it contains the single most beautiful image in the North, and it also contains the ugliest speech anyone makes in the Poetic Edda.
All three of those things are true at once. That is rather the point of it.
The Skirnismol — "The Ballad of Skirnir," in the Codex Regius titled For Scirnis, "Skirnir's journey" — opens with a line of prose so offhand you can miss what it is telling you.
Freyr, the son of Njorth, had sat one day in Hlithskjolf, and looked over all the worlds. He looked into Jotunheim, and saw there a fair maiden, as she went from her father's house to her bower. Forthwith he felt a mighty love-sickness. — introductory prose to the Skirnismol, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923)
Hlithskjolf is not Freyr's chair. Bellows glosses it in a footnote of three words: "Hlithskjolf: Othin's watch-tower." It is the high seat from which the chief of the gods looks out over every world at once, and Freyr — noblest of the gods, ruler of rain and sunshine and the fruitfulness of the earth — has climbed into it while nobody was looking.
Snorri Sturluson, retelling the same scene in prose two hundred years later, is blunt about the arithmetic:
It chanced one day that Freyr had gone to Hlidskjálf, and gazed over all the world; but when he looked over into the northern region, he saw on an estate a house great and fair. And toward this house went a woman; when she raised her hands and opened the door before her, brightness gleamed from her hands, both over sky and sea, and all the worlds were illumined of her. Thus his overweening pride, in having presumed to sit in that holy seat, was avenged upon him, that he went away full of sorrow. — Gylfaginning, XXXVII, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916)
Read that last sentence again, because it is one of the strangest theological moves in the corpus. The most luminous thing anybody sees anywhere in Norse myth — a woman opening a door, and the light off her hands filling the sky and the sea and all the worlds — is delivered to Freyr as a punishment. The trespass and the vision are the same event. He sat in the god's chair to see everything, and the thing he saw was one woman's hands, and it ruined him.
Snorri says what that ruin looks like in one flat line: "he spake not, he slept not, he drank not; no man dared speak to him."
The verse gives us the same moment from inside Freyr's mouth, and the difference between the two versions is worth a minute.
Skirnir, his servant, comes to him and asks the obvious question:
"Speak prithee, Freyr, | foremost of the gods, For now I fain would know; Why sittest thou here | in the wide halls, Days long, my prince, alone?" — Skirnismol, stanza 3
And Freyr answers with a line that has no business being as good as it is:
"How shall I tell thee, | thou hero young, Of all my grief so great? Though every day | the elfbeam dawns, It lights my longing never." — Skirnismol, stanza 4
Elfbeam is the sun. Bellows notes the reason for the name: its rays were fatal to elves and dwarfs. So the god of sunshine, in his one moment of despair, calls the sun by the name that means the thing that kills, and says it rises every day and does nothing for him.
Then the image itself:
"From Gymir's house | I beheld go forth A maiden dear to me; Her arms glittered, | and from their gleam Shone all the sea and sky. — Skirnismol, stanza 6
Snorri has the door and the raised hands; the poem has only the arms and the gleam. Between them they make the whole picture, and neither one alone would. This is what it looks like when a story survives twice.
Her name is Gerth. Her father is Gymir, a mountain-giant; her mother, in Snorri, is Aurboda, of the stock of the Hill-Giants; and Snorri's verdict on their daughter runs to four words — she is the one "fairest of all women."
Here is a seam in the text I would rather show you than paper over.
In both manuscripts, the person who sends Skirnir on the errand is not Njorth. Both manuscripts read "Then Skathi said," and Skathi is Njorth's wife — the giant's daughter who chose her husband by his feet, whose story this series told in No. 17. Bellows prints Njorth instead, following an emendation of Sophus Bugge's that is based on Snorri's version, and explains why: with Skathi speaking, the pronouns go wrong ("our son," "your son" in the plural) and the metre breaks.
Bugge is very likely right. But it means that in the oldest copies we have, the person who notices that Freyr has stopped eating, and does something about it, is his giant stepmother — who would know better than anyone in Asgard what it is to be brought into that family from the other side of a mountain. Bellows' emendation is the sounder reading. The manuscript reading is the better story. Both facts belong to you, and I am not going to pick one and pretend the other isn't there.
Skirnir agrees to go. Then he names his fee.
"Then give me the horse | that goes through the dark And magic flickering flames; And the sword as well | that fights of itself Against the giants grim." — Skirnismol, stanza 8
Freyr hands both over without a word of argument — though notice that he does not repeat Skirnir's terms back to him:
"The horse will I give thee | that goes through the dark And magic flickering flames, And the sword as well | that will fight of itself If a worthy hero wields it." — Skirnismol, stanza 9
Hold that. We will come back to it, because it is the most expensive sentence in Norse mythology, and the poem drops it in the ninth stanza like a man tossing his keys to a friend.
There is a gap here, too. Snorri's paraphrase includes a piece of Freyr's instructions that the verse does not: "And now thou shalt go and woo her on my behalf and have her hither, whether her father will or no." Because Snorri's version is otherwise so close to the poem, editors have concluded since Finn Magnusen noticed it in 1821 that a stanza has fallen out between 7 and 8. Bellows offers a reconstruction, and I quote it here as exactly what it is — a scholar's guess at a lost stanza, not a line of the Edda:
"Hither to me shalt thou bring the maid, / And home shalt thou lead her here, / If her father wills it or wills it not, / And good reward shalt thou get." — Bellows' tentative reconstruction of the missing stanza, note to Skirnismol, stanza 7
Whether or not those were the words, the sense is in Snorri and cannot be argued away. The errand is coercive from the moment it is given. The god does not send his servant to ask. He sends him to bring her, and the father's consent is explicitly optional.
Skirnir speaks to the horse before he rides, and gets the best four lines in the poem:
"Dark is it without, | and I deem it time To fare through the wild fells, (To fare through the giants' fastness;) We shall both come back, | or us both together The terrible giant will take." — Skirnismol, stanza 10
At Gymir's gate there are fierce dogs bound before the fence, and a herdsman sitting on a hill, and the herdsman greets him the way the North greets anybody who arrives somewhere he shouldn't be:
"Art thou doomed to die | or already dead, Thou horseman that ridest hither? Barred from speech | shalt thou ever be With Gymir's daughter good." — Skirnismol, stanza 12
And Skirnir answers:
"Boldness is better | than plaints can be For him whose feet must fare; To a destined day has mine age been doomed, And my life's span thereto laid." — Skirnismol, stanza 13
Bellows' note on that stanza is a small, deflating pleasure: "This stanza is almost exactly like many in the first part of the Hovamol, and may well have been a separate proverb." So the bravest thing said out loud in the poem is probably not the poet's at all. It is a piece of common wisdom that everybody in Norway already knew, dropped into the mouth of a servant at the exact moment he needs it — the way people actually do use proverbs, when they are frightened and standing in front of a gate.
Inside the house, Gerth hears something and does not know what it is:
"What noise is that which now so loud I hear within our house? The ground shakes, and the home of Gymir Around me trembles too." — Skirnismol, stanza 14
A serving-maid tells her a man has got off his horse outside. And Gerth — before she knows who he is, before a word has passed between them — says this:
"Bid the man come in, and drink good mead Here within our hall; Though this I fear, that there without My brother's slayer stands. — Skirnismol, stanza 16
She thinks there is a decent chance the man at her door killed her brother. She invites him in for a drink anyway, because he is a traveller and this is her father's hall and that is what one does.
Remember that she does this. Nothing that happens for the next twenty stanzas is her fault.
Skirnir opens with gold.
"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
This series has been carrying those apples for two posts. No. 25 mentioned them in passing — the symbol of fruitfulness and eternal youth, the fruit-of-youth of the old verse, offered here as a bride-price — and said the scene deserved its own day. Here is the day, and here is what Gerth does with the most valuable object anybody in the Edda is ever offered:
"I will not take | at any man's wish These eleven apples ever; Nor shall Freyr and I | one dwelling find So long as we two live." — Skirnismol, stanza 20
So he raises the offer, and the second gift is astonishing:
"Then do I bring thee | the ring that was burned Of old with Othin's son; From it do eight | of like weight fall On every ninth night." — Skirnismol, stanza 21
That is Draupnir — "Dropper" — the arm-ring the dwarfs made for Odin, which breeds eight rings of its own weight every ninth night. It is the ring Odin laid on Baldr's pyre when his son's body burned, and which Baldr sent back to him out of Hel. The most sentimental object in the mythology, freighted with the worst grief a god ever had, is being used here as a chip in a marriage negotiation.
And here Bellows' note lands the small perfect hole in the story: "How Freyr obtained it is nowhere stated." Nobody knows. It simply turns up in Skirnir's saddlebag, four worlds from the fire it was last seen in, and no source ever explains it.
Gerth's answer to that is my favourite thing she says:
"The ring I wish not, | though burned it was Of old with Othin's son; In Gymir's home | is no lack of gold In the wealth my father wields." — Skirnismol, stanza 22
We have gold. She is not poor, she is not impressed, and she has understood exactly what the transaction is. Twice offered a price, twice she declines to be a thing with a price.
Now the poem goes somewhere I am not going to dress up.
Skirnir draws the sword — Freyr's own sword, the one that fights of itself — and threatens to take her head off. She refuses again, and points out, reasonably, that her father is in the house and will be glad to fight him. He threatens her father. She holds.
So he stops threatening her body and starts on her mind.
"I strike thee, maid, | with my magic staff, To tame thee to work my will; There shalt thou go | where never again The sons of men shall see thee. — Skirnismol, stanza 26
What follows is eleven stanzas of curse, and it is the longest and most detailed piece of malice in the Poetic Edda. He curses her to sit on the eagle's hill at the edge of heaven and stare down at the gates of Hel, with her food more loathsome to her than the snake is to men. He curses her to be gaped at as a monster. He curses her to a marriage with a frost-giant, or to no marriage at all:
"Rage and longing, | fetters and wrath, Tears and torment are thine; Where thou sittest down | my doom is on thee Of heavy heart And double dole. — Skirnismol, stanza 29
"With three-headed giants | thou shalt dwell ever, Or never know a husband; (Let longing grip thee, | let wasting waste thee,--) Be like to the thistle | that in the loft Was cast and there was crushed. — Skirnismol, stanza 31
"Hrimgrimnir is he, | the giant who shall have thee In the depth by the doors of Hel; To the frost-giants' halls | each day shalt thou fare, Crawling and craving in vain, (Crawling and having no hope.) — Skirnismol, stanza 35 (Bellows brackets the fifth line as probably a later addition)
And then the mechanism, which is the reason this is not merely an ugly speech but a piece of magic:
"I write thee a charm | and three runes therewith, Longing and madness and lust; But what I have writ | I may yet unwrite If I find a need therefor." — Skirnismol, stanza 37
He writes it. Bellows' note says the charm is "literally, the rune Thurs," and adds that "the runic letters all had magic attributes" — a character cut, as No. 18 in this series described, into wood, where the old North kept the things it believed had power. This is not persuasion and it is not seduction. It is a man carving three runes meaning longing, madness and lust into a stick in order to reach inside a woman's head and rearrange what she wants, and telling her he can undo it if she gives him the answer he came for.
Two honest notes, because the creed of this series is the old words as they actually are and that has to include the words nobody enjoys.
The first: the manuscripts themselves come apart here. One of our two copies simply stops — the Arnamagnæan Codex, Bellows notes, "breaks off with the fourth line" of the eagle's-hill stanza and has nothing further to say. In Regius the stanzas of the curse are tangled enough that editors have been rearranging them ever since: Bellows follows Niedner, Sijmons and Gering against the manuscript order in one place, notes Hildebrand's and Jonsson's competing fixes in another, flags line after line as probably spurious or interpolated, and says of one crucial word that it is "another case of guesswork." Of the poem as a whole he says something very different — that it "has been preserved in exceptionally good condition, and seems to be practically devoid of interpolations or lacunæ." Both things are his. The poem is in its worst textual state precisely where it is on its worst behaviour.
The second: nobody has ever agreed about what this scene is for. Read one way it is exactly what it looks like — a coercion, and the poem is not embarrassed about it. Read another way it is a ritual: the curse is built of frost from end to end (the frost-giant Hrimnir gaping at her, Hrimgrimnir — "The Frost-Shrouded," in Bellows' gloss — waiting by the doors of Hel, the frost-giants' halls, the thistle killed by the cold in the loft), and it is spoken to the daughter of a mountain by the servant of the god of sunshine and rain and the fruitfulness of the earth. I will flag that as a reading rather than smuggle it past you as the poet's intent. But the wedding is coming, and where it happens is not an accident.
Because when it turns, it turns in one stanza, and she is the one who turns it.
"Find welcome rather, | and with it take The frost-cup filled with mead; Though I did not believe | that I should so love Ever one of the Wanes." — Skirnismol, stanza 38
The poem does not tell us whether the runes did that or whether she did. It gives no stage direction, no sign of a spell taking hold, no line of Skirnir unwriting anything. It gives us a woman who has just been threatened with a sword, with her father's death, with monstrous marriage and lifelong wasting — offering the man a cup of mead, which is what she offered him when he arrived, and saying that she is surprised to find she loves a Wane.
A thousand years of readers have argued about that stanza and they will keep arguing. I am not going to settle it in a blog post. What I will say is that the poet had every chance to make it simple and declined: the last word in the exchange is hers, it is hospitality, and it is a confession of feeling nobody asked her for.
Then she names the place:
Barri there is, | which we both know well, A forest fair and still; And nine nights hence | to the son of Njorth Will Gerth there grant delight." — Skirnismol, stanza 40
Bellows' note on it is three words long. "Barri: 'The Leafy.'"
Eleven stanzas of frost, and the meeting is set in a wood named for its leaves.
Skirnir rides home. Freyr is standing outside — he has clearly been standing outside for some time — and cannot wait for the man to dismount before asking. Skirnir repeats Gerth's stanza back to him word for word. And the Skirnismol ends on the only stanza of itself that Snorri Sturluson thought worth quoting in verse, thirteen hundred years of theology and cosmology notwithstanding:
"Long is one night, | longer are two; How then shall I bear three? Often to me | has a month seemed less Than now half a night of desire." — Skirnismol, stanza 43
Out of forty-three stanzas — a magic staff, a ring from a pyre, a curse that scholars still fight over — the piece a thirteenth-century Icelandic Christian scholar kept in the original metre, and set down in his own book in his own slightly different words ("Long is one night, long is the second"), is a god complaining that three nights is a long time to wait.
One last thing, and it is the bill for the whole story.
Freyr gave his sword away in stanza 9, to a servant, to fund an errand. He does not appear to think about it again. But the Edda thinks about it, in three separate places, across two centuries and two authors, and every one of them brings it up.
Loki brings it up first, in the middle of insulting every god in Ægir's hall:
"The daughter of Gymir | with gold didst thou buy, And sold thy sword to boot; But when Muspell's sons | through Myrkwood ride, Thou shalt weaponless wait, poor wretch." — Lokasenna, stanza 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
Snorri brings it up next, and — this is the tell — he has his own listener raise the objection, so that it can be answered:
Then said Gangleri: "'T is much to be wondered at, that such a great chief as Freyr is would give away his sword, not having another equally good. It was a great privation to him, when he fought with him called Beli; by my faith, he must have rued that gift." Then answered Hárr: "There was small matter in that, when he and Beli met; Freyr could have killed him with his hand. It shall come to pass that Freyr will think a worse thing has come upon him, when he misses his sword on that day that the Sons of Múspell go a-harrying." — Gylfaginning, XXXVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
And the Voluspo brings it up last, in the account of the end of the world, in a single line that does not stop to explain itself because it does not have to:
"Now comes to Hlin | yet another hurt, When Othin fares | to fight with the wolf, And Beli's fair slayer | seeks out Surt, For there must fall | the joy of Frigg." — Voluspo, stanza 53, trans. Bellows (1923)
Beli's fair slayer is Freyr. He goes out to meet the lord of the fire-world on the last day with nothing in his hands, because of nine nights in a leafy wood a very long time ago.
Snorri, who is not a sentimental writer, hands Hárr the last word and lets him wave the whole objection off — small matter, he could have killed Beli with his hand. The sources never once record Freyr regretting the trade. The gods' own storytellers keep raising it, and the story keeps declining to call it a mistake.
That is not nothing, after the run of tellings this series has just come through. Six posts of people ruined by things they were not told, and then two posts of light, and now this: a god who saw a woman open a door, and paid for the sight with the weapon he would want at the end of the world, and is on record complaining about nothing except how slowly the three nights went.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and the next one goes down to the forge.
Sources: the Skirnismol, Lokasenna and Voluspo, with Henry Adams Bellows' notes and commentary, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923); and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning XXXVII, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: Loki 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.