September 8, 2026
The last telling ended with a wedding party and a bookkeeping line, and left one question sitting at the table: what kind of appetite was that? An ox, eight salmon, everything set for the women, three tuns of mead — and a poet so unbothered by it that he spent his alarm on the eyes, not the plate. The two poems know each other: when Bellows annotates this week’s great supper, his note reaches straight across to last week’s wedding feast — “Thor’s appetite,” it says, “figures elsewhere.”
And in this poem, the appetite is the plot.
Because the gods have a supply problem. The Hymiskvitha opens with the gods at feast and short of drink, shaking twigs and trying blood to find more — Vigfusson reads it as the old rite of dipping divining-twigs in sacrificial blood, though Bellows allows the two may have been separate operations — and the answer the magic gives them is the hall of Ægir, the giant who is also the god of the sea. Ægir, cornered into hosting, strikes back with etiquette, the way Norse stories love to: fine, he will brew ale for all the gods — if someone brings him a kettle big enough to do it in. The far-famed ones search everywhere and find nothing. Then Tyr — the god of No. 6, the one who held still in the wolf’s mouth — speaks up, “in truthful wise,” with the worst good news in the poem:
“There dwells to the east | of Elivagar Hymir the wise | at the end of heaven; A kettle my father | fierce doth own, A mighty vessel | a mile in depth.” — Hymiskvitha, stanza 5, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923)
A kettle a mile deep, at the end of heaven, owned by a fierce giant. (Last week’s teaser called it a cauldron; Bellows’ word is kettle, and his word wins.) The notes add a marvel of their own: Ægir’s kettle, the note guesses, “is possibly the sea itself.” And there is a knot in the stanza that no scholar has untied: Tyr calls Hymir his father, when everywhere else Tyr is Odin’s son. Finnur Jonsson, Bellows reports, tried to fix it by simply changing “father” to “grandfather” — “but this does not help greatly.” The old poems keep their contradictions the way old houses keep their crooked doorframes. You do not straighten them; you learn where to duck.
Before we go to Hymir’s hall, I owe you the strangest mirror this series has yet held up. Last week’s poem survived by a single thread — one manuscript, Snorri silent, and the critics calling it “the finest ballad in the world.” This week’s poem is the exact inverse on every count. The Hymiskvitha is found complete in both great manuscripts. Snorri, who skipped the hammer-theft entirely, “does not quote it, although he tells the main story involved” — the story is so good he told it himself. And the critics? Bellows opens with a bucket of cold sea-water: “a distinctly inferior piece of work, obviously based on various narrative fragments, awkwardly pieced together,” the product of “a period of literary decadence.” His best clause of scorn deserves quoting for its precision: “the great days of Eddic poetry would never have permitted the nine hundred headed person found in Hymir’s home”.
We will meet her in a moment, heads and all.
What dates the poem, he explains, is its diction — it has been infected by skaldic verse, the professional court poetry with its riddling “kennings,” where (his examples, from a single stanza of one poem in the Egilssaga) a sword is “the halo of the helm,” “the wound-hoe,” “the blood-snake” (possibly; no one is sure what the compound word means) and “the ice of the girdle,” men are “Othin’s ash-trees,” battle is “the iron game” — and one of the eight lines, he reports, “has defied translation completely.” The Hymiskvitha talks like that. Keep your ear out: before this telling is done, an ox’s head will be a fortress, a boat will be a goat, and giants will be whales. And then Bellows grants the poem its reprieve, and it is the reprieve that matters: “Only the vigor of the two main stories–Thor’s expedition after Hymir’s kettle and the fishing trip in which he caught Mithgarthsorm–saves it from complete mediocrity.”
Good. Vigor and two stories is a fortune. Here they are.
Thor and Tyr travel east and come to Hymir’s hall, and the poem’s family scene is like nothing else in the Edda. First Tyr’s grandmother comes out — the one the critics cannot forgive:
The youth found his grandam, | that greatly he loathed, And full nine hundred | heads she had; But the other fair | with gold came forth, And the bright-browed one | brought beer to her son. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 8, trans. Bellows (1923)
Nine hundred heads, and in the next breath a gold-bright mother carrying beer to her boy. Bellows’ note guesses the mother “belonged rather to the race of the gods than to that of the giants,” and nothing more is known of either woman — but it is the mother who knows the house. She sets the two gods beneath the kettle — mark where they are hiding — because her dear-loved mate “To guests is wrathful | and grim of mind.” Then the master comes home from the hunt:
Late to his home | the misshapen Hymir, The giant harsh, | from his hunting came; The icicles rattled | as in he came, For the fellow’s chin-forest | frozen was. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 10, trans. Bellows (1923)
There is your first kenning, and it is a good one: the chin-forest, hung with rattling ice. The wife breaks the news gently — your son is here, and with him a friend of mankind — and points to where they sit hidden. And then the poem does the thing that tells you everything about this household:
The beam at the glance | of the giant broke, And the mighty pillar | in pieces fell. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 12 (ll. 3–4), trans. Bellows (1923)
Eight fell from the ledge, | and one alone, The hard-hammered kettle, | of all was whole; Forth came they then, | and his foes he sought, The giant old, | and held with his eyes. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 13, trans. Bellows (1923)
Hymir does not shout. He looks, and the architecture gives way — the beam breaks at his glance, the pillar shatters, and eight kettles fall off the ledge. Readers of last week will feel the number arrive like an old friend: eight miles, eight salmon, eight nights, and now eight broken kettles — the north’s favorite count, and only the hard-hammered one survives the fall: the very kettle, Bellows’ note confirms, that the two gods were hiding under. Watch the eyes in this poem. They are not done.
Hymir’s wrath, the notes observe, “does not permit him to ignore the duties of a host” — the law of the guest holds even here, even furious. Three steers are brought in and boiled, and now the teaser’s second claim comes due:
The husband of Sif, | ere to sleep he went, Alone two oxen | of Hymir’s ate. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 15 (ll. 3–4), trans. Bellows (1923)
Two of the three, alone, at one sitting. The alarm this time is not a giant blurting about brides — it is a host doing arithmetic:
To the comrade hoary | of Hrungnir then Did Hlorrithi’s meal | full mighty seem; — Hymiskvitha, stanza 16 (ll. 1–2), trans. Bellows (1923)
— and declaring, in lines I give you in prose because the transcription stumbles there, that next evening the three of them will have to eat whatever they can hunt. The strongest god in the world has eaten a giant into rationing. That is the joke №29’s poet trusted his hearers to know already; here is the poem that taught it to them.
So they must fish, and the bait negotiation is two stanzas of pure character. Thor — called Veur here, one of his obscurer names — is fain to row if the giant will supply bait. Hymir, magnificently unhelpful:
“Go to the herd, | if thou hast it in mind, Thou slayer of giants, | thy bait to seek; For there thou soon | mayst find, methinks, Bait from the oxen | easy to get.” — Hymiskvitha, stanza 18, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note translates the insult: the word for “bait” literally means “chaff” — small bits — and what Hymir means is that Thor should go collect dung. Thor goes to the herd, yes. And takes a different reading of the assignment:
Swift to the wood | the hero went, Till before him an ox | all black he found; From the beast the slayer | of giants broke The fortress high | of his double horns. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 19, trans. Bellows (1923)
The fortress high of his double horns — the ox’s head, in full skaldic dress. Snorri tells it plainer and better: the ox has a name, Himinbrjotr — “Heaven-bellowing?”, Brodeur’s own guess at it — and it is the largest in Hymir’s herd. In Snorri’s telling the whole visit is sharper-edged: Thor arrives “in the guise of a young lad,” and Hymir declines his company on the grounds that he is too small and too young to be worth taking —
“And thou wilt freeze, if I stay so long and so far out as I am wont.” — Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning XLVIII, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916)
Hold that taunt in your mind for the rest of the story: the giant is worried the boy will get cold.
They row. In Snorri’s telling, Hymir announces they have reached the banks where he is wont to “angle for flat-fish.” Thor keeps rowing.
The lord of the goats | bade the ape-begotten Farther to steer | the steed of the rollers; But the giant said | that his will, forsooth, Longer to row | was little enough. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 21, trans. Bellows (1923)
Every kenning in that stanza is a small cruelty: Thor is the lord of the goats, the boat is the steed of the rollers, and Hymir — Bellows notes the word “api” is fairly common in the meaning of fool — is the ape-begotten. The poem then gives Hymir his professional due — two whales hauled up on a single cast, workmanlike even in dread — while the passenger in the stern quietly prepares a cast of his own. And in Snorri, Hymir names his fear outright: they have come so far that it is perilous to sit out here because of the Midgard Serpent. Thor rows on. The giant who fishes farther out than anyone, the one who was worried his guest would freeze, is now “sore afraid” — and the boy in the stern is baiting a hook.
The warder of men, | the worm’s destroyer, Fixed on his hook | the head of the ox; There gaped at the bait | the foe of the gods, The girdler of all | the earth beneath. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 23, trans. Bellows (1923)
The girdler of all the earth beneath. This is Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, whom Odin long ago cast into the deep sea, where he grew until he circles every land and bites his own tail. And he gaped at the bait — the largest mouth in creation, opening under the smallest boat, for the head of an ox.
Here is where I promised you the sources disagree, and here is where the disagreement lives. First, the poem’s version, whole:
The venomous serpent | swiftly up To the boat did Thor, | the bold one, pull; With his hammer the loathly | hill of the hair Of the brother of Fenrir | he smote from above. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 24, trans. Bellows (1923)
The hill of the hair — the head, in the poem’s most extravagant kenning, and Bellows calls it “a thoroughly characteristic skaldic phrase.” (The brother of Fenrir is his rendering too, and he shows his work: the actual word in the text “has been guessed as meaning almost anything from ‘comrade’ to ‘enemy.’” The serpent and the wolf are siblings in Snorri; the poem’s own word wobbles.) So: Thor hauls the serpent to the gunwale and hits it on the head with Mjollnir. And then:
The monsters roared, | and the rocks resounded, And all the earth | so old was shaken; . . . . . . . . . . Then sank the fish | in the sea forthwith. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 25, trans. Bellows (1923)
Look at the third line. That row of dots is not my elision — it is the state of the text. Bellows: “No gap is indicated in the manuscripts, but that a line or more has been lost is highly probable.” The monsters roar, the old earth shakes, something happens, and the fish sinks. The one thing the whole poem exists to tell us — how the greatest catch in mythology got away — falls into a hole in the record.
Snorri has no hole. Snorri has a knife. In his telling, Thor pulls so hard that he “took upon him his divine strength, braced his feet so strongly that he plunged through the ship with both feet, and dashed his feet against the bottom” — standing on the sea-floor, hauling — and drags the serpent up to the gunwale, where god and monster look at each other. It is the eye-scene this poem was saving: Thor flashed “fiery glances” down at the serpent, and the serpent stared up from below and “blew venom,” and Hymir — the deep-sea man, the freeze-prophet — “grew pale, became yellow.” Last week a hall of giants looked into burning eyes and talked itself out of the evidence. Nobody in this boat has that option. And then:
In the very moment when Thor clutched his hammer and raised it on high, then the giant fumbled for his fish-knife and hacked off Thor’s line at the gunwale, and the Serpent sank down into the sea. Thor hurled his hammer after it; and men say that he struck off its head against the bottom; but I think it were true to tell thee that the Midgard Serpent yet lives and lies in the encompassing sea. — Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning XLVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Read that twice, because the teller does something extraordinary in it. Men say the hammer-throw killed the serpent — and the narrator, mid-story, overrules the sources on his own authority: but I think it were true to tell thee the serpent lives. Snorri’s storyteller admits, out loud, that the tellings disagree about what happened at the line’s tautness — and picks. The poem leaves the escape in a lost line; the prose gives it to a frightened giant’s knife and then argues with its own tradition about whether the blow landed. The oldest fish story in the North behaves exactly like every fish story since: the record breaks precisely at the fish.
And Snorri knew why the serpent had to live. So did the poem — its own note on “the worm’s destroyer” points forward to the appointment: at the last battle, Thor slays, and is slain by, Mithgarthsorm. The feud that begins with an ox-head on a hook ends at the world’s ending. No wonder the sources flinch at the gunwale. Whatever happened there, it was only a postponement.
The two versions cannot even agree on the rowing home. In the poem, Hymir survives the trip with his dignity in pieces — joyless, “speechless did Hymir | sit at the oars” — and the two whales get carried up the gorge. In Snorri, Thor “swung his fist” at the giant’s ear so that “he plunged overboard, and Thor saw the soles of his feet. And Thor waded to land.” Take your pick. One of them, remember, was worried the boy would freeze.
The poem is not done with Hymir, because the kettle is still unwon, and the giant has one test left: none is truly strong, he declares, “save one | who could break the cup” — his goblet, which no blow can shatter. Thor hurls it at the stone pillars; the posts shatter; the glass comes back whole. (Snorri, Bellows notes, “says nothing of this episode” — the disagreements run to the end.) It is the gold-bright wife — the second woman in two weeks to quietly steer a poem’s whole plot — who leans in with a counsel true: smite it, she says, on the skull of Hymir, “For harder it is | than ever was glass.”
The goats’ mighty ruler | then rose on his knee, And with all the strength | of a god he struck; Whole was the fellow’s | helmet-stem, But shattered the wine-cup | rounded was. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 32, trans. Bellows (1923)
The helmet-stem — the head again; this poem cannot say “head” to save its life — is unharmed, and the unbreakable cup breaks on it. Bellows’ note tells us the hard giant skull became a fixture of the later folk-tales, down to a giant actually named Hard-Skull. And Hymir’s lament for his cup is, for one stanza, almost unbearably human:
“Fair is the treasure | that from me is gone, Since now the cup | on my knees lies shattered;” So spake the giant: | "No more can I say In days to be, | ‘Thou art brewed, mine ale.’ — Hymiskvitha, stanza 33, trans. Bellows (1923)
Thrym got his one stanza of pity last week; here is Hymir’s. A giant mourning his cup, because he will never again speak the little blessing he spoke over his own ale. (The last line is uncertain — Bugge read it as “No more can I speak / Ever again | as I spoke of old” — and either way it is grief for a ritual.) Then he surrenders on his own terms: keep the kettle, if you can carry it out. Tyr tries twice, and twice it “stood fast.” Thor takes the rim:
The father of Mothi | the rim seized firm, And before it stood | on the floor below; Up on his head | Sif’s husband raised it, And about his heels | the handles clattered. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 35, trans. Bellows (1923)
A mile-deep kettle worn as a hat, handles ringing at his heels — carried out of the hall the way the hammer once came into one, by main strength dressed as ceremony. The pursuit comes on from the east, Hymir with “the throng | of the many-headed” — and Thor sets the kettle down, takes up Mjollnir (whose forging №28 told), and slays what the poem calls the whales of the waste. Giants as whales, on land: the kennings have come home from the fishing trip with him.
One goat goes lame on the road home — the poem blames “the evil | Loki” with no explanation whatever, while Snorri tells the same lame-goat story at another journey’s start and blames a farm-boy’s cracked bone, never Loki at all; the fragments, as Bellows warned, are awkwardly pieced. And then the poet does something Bellows’ note calls “exceedingly rare in the older poetry” — he turns to the audience:
But ye all have heard,– | for of them who have The tales of the gods, | who better can tell? — Hymiskvitha, stanza 39 (ll. 1–2), trans. Bellows (1923)
You have all heard this one. The decadent, awkward, critic-scorned poem looks up from the page, grinning, sure of its room. And it earns its ending:
The mighty one came | to the council of gods, And the kettle he had | that Hymir’s was; So gladly their ale | the gods could drink In Ægir’s hall | at the autumn-time. — Hymiskvitha, stanza 40, trans. Bellows (1923)
Even here the text keeps its manners about certainty: Bellows admits the last two lines are “mostly guess work.” But the shape holds. The errand is done. The sea-giant has his mile-deep kettle, the ale is brewed, and the gods gather at Ægir’s hall to drink it.
Remember that hall. Remember that ale. The old books do — and they remember who came to the feast.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and the next one says every quiet thing out loud.
Sources: the Hymiskvitha, with the translator’s notes and commentary, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923); the Gylfaginning, in The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the 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.