September 8, 2026
The last telling ended in a giant’s hall, with a gold ring on the table that nobody could explain — Draupnir, offered as a bride-price, four worlds from where it was last seen, and the scholar’s note attached to it saying flatly that how Freyr came to have it “is nowhere stated.” This telling goes down to the forge where that ring was born.
It also pays an old debt. Back in No. 11, when this series tried to get its arms around Loki, it spent exactly one sentence on the most consequential prank in mythology: Thor’s hammer exists because Loki cut off Sif’s hair. One sentence, for the story of how nearly everything the gods carry came to exist. Here is the whole of it.
Last week’s teaser said Loki cut off the hair of a sleeping goddess. I have to take part of that back.
Everyone tells it that way — she was asleep, he crept in, the shears flashed — and the detail is so natural that this series reached for it too, without checking. But it is not in the source. Snorri Sturluson, who preserved this story and without whom we would not have it at all, spends no words on the scene of the crime. Here is everything he gives us:
Why is gold called Sif’s Hair? Loki Laufeyarson, for mischief’s sake, cut off all Sif’s hair. But when Thor learned of this, he seized Loki, and would have broken every bone in him, had he not sworn to get the Black Elves to make Sif hair of gold, such that it would grow like other hair. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916)
For mischief’s sake. Three words of motive, no scene, no shears, no sleep. Whether she was sleeping is our embellishment — reasonable, probably right, and not in the text. The creed of this series is the old words as they actually are, and that has to apply to its own advertisements.
Notice, too, what the story is doing in Snorri’s book at all. The Skáldskaparmál is a poet’s handbook — a catalogue of the approved ways to say things fancily — and this whole tale exists to answer a working question: why is gold called Sif’s Hair? One of the great stories of the North survives because a thirteenth-century Icelander wanted apprentice poets to get their metaphors right.
And the prank followed Loki into the reference books. Elsewhere in the same handbook, Snorri lists the approved ways to periphrase Loki himself, and there among his formal titles — Father of the Monster of Ván, Contriver of Baldr’s Death, the Bound God — sits this one: Harmer of Sif’s Hair. He goes down the centuries with the haircut in his name.
So Loki, with every bone in his body suddenly negotiable, goes underground.
After that, Loki went to those dwarves who are called Ívaldi’s Sons; and they made the hair, and Skídbladnir also, and the spear which became Odin’s possession, and was called Gungnir. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
He owed one item: hair. He comes back with three. The text does not say why the dwarfs threw in a warship and the spear of the war-father as a bonus, and I would love to know what Loki said down there.
A word on the spellings, before we go further: Brodeur writes Skídbladnir and Ívaldi; Bellows, whom we’ll meet in a moment, writes Skithblathnir and Ivaldi. Quotations here keep each translator’s own forms; my prose uses plain ones.
About Ivaldi himself the record holds almost nothing, and Bellows’ note on him is quietly devastating in the way this series has come to love: Ivaldi means “The Mighty,” and “he is known only as the father of the craftsmen-dwarfs” — the man exists in the entire surviving literature of the North solely as the father of the ones who made the things. The one time the old verse itself mentions the family is a stanza of the Grimnismol:
In days of old | did Ivaldi’s sons Skithblathnir fashion fair, The best of ships | for the bright god Freyr, The noble son of Njorth. — Grimnismol, stanza 43, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923)
And honesty compels the footnote: Bellows says this stanza and the next are “certainly interpolated, for they have nothing to do with the context” — they sit in the middle of a torture scene, apropos of nothing, because some copyist loved the ship too much to leave it out. I sympathize with the copyist. The next stanza is the famous catalogue — “The best of trees | must Yggdrasil be, / Skithblathnir best of boats” — the North formally ranking its own treasures.
Best of boats, notice. Not biggest. Snorri, asked the obvious question, answers it with a straight face:
Skídbladnir is best of ships and made with most skill of craftsmanship; but Naglfar is the largest ship; Múspell has it. — Gylfaginning, XLIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The finest ship ever made belongs to the gods, and it folds up like a napkin. The biggest ship is made of dead men’s fingernails and sails at the end of the world — this series told that story in No. 14, and why the old North kept its nails trimmed. The gods get craftsmanship. Scale belongs to the other side.
Now Loki has the hair, the debt is paid, the story could end. Instead:
Then Loki wagered his head with the dwarf called Brokkr that Brokkr’s brother Sindri could not make three other precious things equal in virtue to these. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
No one asked him to do this. He is standing in the underground with his errand complete and his bones intact, and he bets his head — not money, his actual head — that a smith he has presumably just met cannot match the work. It is the purest piece of Loki in the corpus: the inability to walk away from a table while he is ahead.
Sindri takes the bet, and the smithing contest that follows is told with the loving procedural detail the North reserved for craft. Three firings. Sindri lays the work in the hearth, gives his brother Brokkr one instruction — blow, and do not stop — and leaves the smithy. And each time, a fly comes.
Now when they came to the smithy, Sindri laid a pigskin in the hearth and bade Brokkr blow, and did not cease work until he took out of the hearth that which he had laid therein. But when he went out of the smithy, while the other dwarf was blowing, straightway a fly settled upon his hand and stung: yet he blew on as before, until the smith took the work out of the hearth; and it was a boar, with mane and bristles of gold. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Second firing: gold in the hearth, and the fly “settled on Brokkr’s neck, and bit now half again as hard as before; yet he blew even until the smith took from the hearth that gold ring which is called Draupnir.” Third firing — iron, this time, and Sindri’s warning that this one would be spoiled if the blast failed:
Straightway the fly settled between Brokkr’s eyes and stung his eyelid, but when the blood fell into his eyes so that he could not see, then he clutched at it with his hand as swiftly as he could,–while the bellows grew flat,–and he swept the fly from him. Then the smith came thither and said that it had come near to spoiling all that was in the hearth. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Who sent the fly? In this chapter, Snorri never says. The suspicion is ancient and it writes itself — one person in this story stands to lose his head if the work succeeds, and that person is a shapeshifter. But hold the text to what it actually does: it escalates the fly’s malice with a craftsman’s precision — hand, neck, eyelid; sting, harder sting, blood in the eyes — and declines to name it. A dwarf blowing a bellows with blood running into his eyes, keeping the rhythm because his brother told him to: the story gives the courage a name and the malice none.
The moment the bellows go flat is the only moment the fly wins. Remember which item was in the fire.
Brokkr and Loki carry the six works to Asgard, where the gods convene what may be the least impartial court in literature: “that verdict was to prevail which Odin, Thor, and Freyr should render” — the three judges being precisely the three gods about to receive the goods. The North’s idea of a fair hearing: let the beneficiaries decide, in the open, with everyone watching.
Loki presents first — the spear to Odin, the hair to Thor for Sif, the ship to Freyr —
and told the virtues of all these things: that the spear would never stop in its thrust; the hair would grow to the flesh as soon as it came upon Sif’s head; and Skídbladnir would have a favoring breeze as soon as the sail was raised, in whatsoever direction it might go, but could be folded together like a napkin and be kept in Freyr’s pouch if he so desired. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Last week’s teaser called Gungnir “a spear that never misses,” and the text’s actual clause is better: it never stops in its thrust. Not accuracy — inevitability.
Then Brokkr, matching him god for god. To Odin, the ring: “eight rings of the same weight would drop from it every ninth night.” That is Draupnir, born in the second firing, and pause a moment on its biography, because this series has now met it at every station: forged here and handed to Odin; laid by Odin on his son’s pyre in the worst hour the gods ever had (No. 12 told it); sent back to him out of Hel in Baldr’s own gesture of impossible courtesy; and then — somehow — turning up in Skirnir’s saddlebag in a giant’s yard, pledged to a mountain-giant’s daughter, with Bellows’ note shrugging that how Freyr got it “is nowhere stated.” The forge explains the ring’s birth. Nothing anywhere explains its travels. This post closes half the hole from No. 27 and leaves the other half open, because that is what the record does.
To Freyr, the boar, which “could run through air and water better than any horse” — and, in the clause I’ll carry in my own words because of a wrinkle in the transcription, no night could ever be so dark that there was not light enough where it went, such was the glow off its mane and bristles. A boar that is its own lantern. Elsewhere Snorri gives it its names — Freyr “is the possessor of Skídbladnir and of that boar which is called Gold-Bristle,” adding, “The boar is also called Fearful-Tusk” — and quotes the poet Úlfr Uggason on the one ride the old verse actually shows us:
The battle-bold Freyr rideth First on the golden-bristled Barrow-boar to the bale-fire Of Baldr, and leads the people. — Úlfr Uggason, quoted in Skáldskaparmál, VII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The shining boar’s one recorded errand is to lead the funeral procession. Even the light-half’s treasures do their gravest work at that pyre; this series stood at it in No. 12 and will not re-tell it here.
And to Thor, the hammer — Mjollnir, the iron from the third firing, the one the fly got to. Thor “might smite as hard as he desired, whatsoever might be before him, and the hammer would not fail; and if he threw it at anything, it would never miss, and never fly so far as not to return to his hand”; it was small enough to carry inside his shirt. And then Snorri, with the honesty of a craftsman filing a report:
but indeed it was a flaw in the hammer that the fore-haft was somewhat short. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The verdict follows, and it is unanimous and unsentimental:
This was their decision: that the hammer was best of all the precious works, and in it there was the greatest defence against the Rime-Giants; and they gave sentence, that the dwarf should have his wager. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Sit with that for a second. The gods look at six wonders — a spear that cannot be stopped, a ship that folds into a pocket, hair of living gold — and rank the flawed one first. The hammer with the short handle, the piece the interference reached, is judged the best thing ever made, because the judges are not grading craftsmanship. They are grading survival. The hammer is what will stand between them and the Rime-Giants, and a defence that exists beats a perfection that doesn’t. The flaw is in it forever — the fly’s signature, forged into the one object the gods trust most — and it does not matter, and the gods say so with their verdict.
If the fly was who we think it was, there is a fine irony available here at no extra charge: the sabotage is the reason the hammer has its flaw, and the flawed hammer is the reason its saboteur loses his head.
Except, of course, he doesn’t.
Loki, sentenced, first offers to buy his head back; Brokkr refuses — there is “no chance of this.” Then:
‘Take me, then,’ quoth Loki; but when Brokkr would have laid hands on him, he was a long way off. Loki had with him those shoes with which he ran through air and over water. Then the dwarf prayed Thor to catch him, and Thor did so. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Thor — the man whose wife’s hair started all this, the man now holding the best of all the precious works — catches Loki and delivers him to the dwarf. And with the blade presumably already moving, Loki produces the finest piece of contract law in the mythology:
Then the dwarf would have hewn off his head; but Loki said that he might have the head, but not the neck. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The wager was the head. Nobody staked the neck. And here is the thing the story does not say but shows: the argument works. Brokkr does not laugh it off, does not appeal, does not take the head anyway. In the North, a bond means exactly what it names, all the way to the scaffold — a people who took their own law so seriously that a word-trick at the block is not a trick at all, but a valid reading, and everyone in the story accepts it as one. The dwarf is owed the head; he cannot touch the neck; therefore the head stays on. Case closed.
So Brokkr takes what the letter of the bond actually leaves him. The head is his; very well —
Then Brokkr said that it would be better if his brother’s awl were there: and even as he named it, the awl was there, and pierced the lips. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
(Note the small marvel thrown off in passing: a tool from that forge arrives when named. Sindri’s awl answers to its own mention. The text finds this barely worth a clause.)
And Brokkr sews Loki’s mouth shut. Loki rips the thong out of the edges — of course he does — and the chapter ends the way it began, as a poet’s reference entry, with one last name for the catalogue:
That thong, with which Loki’s mouth was sewn together, is called Vartari. — Skáldskaparmál, XXXV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The North named the thong. It has a name because the poets needed to be able to refer to it, and they needed to refer to it because everyone knew this story: the day the mouth that talked the age’s treasures into existence got sewn shut with a dwarf’s thong — and talked its way out of that too, eventually, at the cost of the exit wound.
Count the takings, one prank later. Odin: the spear that never stops, and the ring that makes eight more of itself every ninth night. Freyr: the best of ships, and a boar that outruns horses and lights its own road. Thor: his wife’s hair made good in living gold, and the hammer that is the greatest defence the gods have — the single object on which the survival of Asgard most depends.
The entire arsenal of the light half of this mythology exists because of a joke about hair. That is not a moral I am imposing on the story; it is the story’s own arithmetic. And in a series that has just come through six tellings of the Völsung fall — where every cup, ring and oath left a body behind it — it is worth saying out loud what this telling’s body count is: nobody. A stung eyelid. A sewn lip, ripped free. The dark half of the North pays its debts in lives; the light half, this once, pays in treasures, and the worst thing that happens to anyone is that the cleverest mouth in the world spends a while stitched shut. It was near being a beheading once. It was. It wasn’t.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and the next one begins with a theft.
Sources: the Skáldskaparmál (VII, XVI, XXXV) and the Gylfaginning (XLIII) of Snorri Sturluson, in The Prose Edda, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916); and the Grimnismol, with Henry Adams Bellows’ notes and commentary, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the 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.