September 8, 2026
Last week’s teaser made five promises about this poem, and the page keeps every one of them: the ferryman at the sound, the passage refused, the flyting across the water, the hammer that counts for nothing over open water, and the graybeard who is not really Harbarth — Bellows settles that last one in his very first note, before the poem is three lines old: Harbarth (“Gray-Beard”): Othin. The reader is told in the apparatus, on page one. Hold on to that, because there is someone in this poem who is never told at all.
The teaser called Thor “fresh from silencing Loki with a threat,” and in reading order — yours and mine — he is. But the great manuscript shelves these poems the other way around. In the Codex Regius the Harbarthsljoth comes two doors earlier: it follows the Skirnismol — №27’s carved curse — with the kettle-errand and the feast still ahead of it. What licenses our order is a gesture of the compiler’s — though honesty requires the asterisk on it. His stage direction in the Lokasenna explained the empty seat at Ægir’s table: “Thor came not, as he was on a journey in the East.” And this poem’s opening prose meets exactly that man: “Thor was on his way back from a journey in the East, and came to a sound.” Whether the two journeys are truly one, Bellows doubts — №31 already caught that compiler “apparently a trifle confused as to Thor’s movements,” probably meaning “no more than that Thor was off killing giants.” But this poem’s own first note names its journey without hedging: “presumably the famous episode, related in full by Snorri,” the one with the giant Skrymir and the house of Utgartha-Loki, where Thor “lifted the cat which turned out to be Mithgarthsorm.” And then one more clause, tying the weeks together: “The Hymiskvitha relates a further incident of this journey.” The kettle-errand of №30 and this ferry-crossing hang off the same eastern road — and the feast of №31 is at least shelved, by a confused but well-meaning hand, at the end of it.
The manuscript facts, as the series’ habit is — and this week they are strange ones. The poem survives complete in Regius, and a second, fragmentary copy begins in the middle of stanza 19’s fourth line in the Arnamagnæan Codex, “of which it occupies the first page and a half” — our first two-manuscript poem since №30, and the two copies will disagree before we are done, in places that matter. As for what the thing is, Bellows opens with his hands raised: “It is, indeed, the most nearly formless of all the Eddic poems.” The normal metre is one called Malahattr, and its name is the poem’s confession — it means “in the manner of conversation.” Even that loose net does not hold everything: “A few of the speeches of which the poem is composed cannot be twisted into any known Old Norse metre, and appear to be simply prose.” Two men are shouting across a stretch of water, and the verse itself keeps forgetting to be verse.
The scholars have tried to tidy it. Finnur Jonsson — whose emendation of the Tyr-knot in №30 “does not help greatly,” you may remember — here “has attempted a wholesale purification of the poem,” and Bellows dismisses the attempt flat: the condemnations are “quite unjustified by any positive evidence.” Others have tried to make it respectable by making it symbolic, a class allegory of warrior against peasant, and Bellows waves that off too: “it seems a pity to take such a vigorous piece of broad farce too seriously.” The judgment he does accept is Mogk’s, and it is the key to everything that follows — the author was “a first-rate psychologist, but a poor poet.” Keep that sentence. The poem is dated late, eleventh century in its present form, and every taunt in it is aimed by a man who understood exactly how the thunder-god’s mind works.
Thor was on his way back from a journey in the East, and came to a sound; on the other side of the sound was a ferryman with a boat. Thor called out: — Harbarthsljoth, introductory prose, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923)
“Who is the fellow yonder, | on the farther shore of the sound?” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
The answer sets the temperature for the whole poem:
“What kind of a peasant is yon, | that calls o’er the bay?” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
Peasant. First word across the water, and it is already an insult with a theory behind it. Thor answers like an honest man at a market — ferry me over and I’ll feed you in the morning, there’s a basket on my back with herrings and porridge in it, “so plenty I had” — and the ferryman looks at the most feared god in the nine worlds, standing there advertising his packed lunch, and goes straight for the heart:
“Of thy morning feats art thou proud, | but the future thou knowest not wholly; Doleful thine home-coming is: | thy mother, me thinks, is dead.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
It is a lie — we will get the proof from the ferryman’s own mouth before the poem ends — and watch what Thor does with it. He does not rage. He believes it, instantly and completely:
“Now hast thou said | what to each must seem The mightiest grief, | that my mother is dead.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
There is the first-rate psychologist at work, in both senses. The poet knows that Thor takes every word at face value — and the ferryman knows it too, and files it away, and keeps going: you haven’t three good dwellings to your name, “Barefoot thou standest, | and wearest a beggar’s dress; / Not even hose dost thou have.” Bellows’ note catches how surgical the poverty-taunt is — the “three good dwellings” may be nothing grander than a farm’s house, barn and storehouse; the jab is not you are no god but you are not even a respectable peasant.
Thor asks whose boat this is, and the ferryman invents a master for himself — one Hildolf, “A hero wise,” who bade him carry no robbers nor horse-thieves, “But worthy men, | and those whom well do I know. / Say now thy name, | if over the sound thou wilt fare.” Bellows’ note dryly reports that neither Hildolf (“slaughtering wolf”) nor his home at Rathsey’s sound is ever mentioned anywhere else in the Edda. The ferryman has fabricated a respectable employer on the spot, as a device for demanding the one thing he wants: the name. And Thor — in enemy country, where a name is a weapon you hand your foes — gives everything:
“My name indeed shall I tell, | though in danger I am, And all my race; | I am Othin’s son, Meili’s brother, | and Magni’s father, The strong one of the gods; | with Thor now speech canst thou get. And now would I know | what name thou hast.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 9, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note explains the real cost of that candor: Thor is “sekr,” outside the protection of any law while he stands in the territory of his enemies. Announcing his full genealogy here is either courage or an incapacity for anything else, and the poem has already told us which. And the answer he gets back, from the god wearing a false name like a false beard:
“Harbarth am I, | and seldom I hide my name.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 10, trans. Bellows (1923)
For my money that is the funniest single line in the Edda, and the poem lets it lie there without a wink. Odin — the god of more assumed names than any figure in any mythology, presently operating under one — says seldom I hide my name to his own son. The series has watched a disguised god at a table he shouldn’t be at before, and watched a hall decide not to see the truth in front of it. This is crueler: nobody unmasks anyone here. The reader knows from the first note. Thor never learns at all — not in this poem, not on this shore. He will walk home having lost an afternoon to a stranger with a gray beard, and the audience that first heard this farce knew the stranger’s name the whole time, and that gap between what the room knows and what Thor knows is the engine the whole performance runs on.
The middle of the poem settles into a rhythm that any pair of quarreling brothers would recognize: competitive autobiography. Each god volleys a boast and demands the other match it — What didst thou the while? — and the two résumés could not be less alike. Thor’s entries are all public works. He felled Hrungnir, “The haughty giant, | whose head of stone was made.” (Bellows’ note on that duel is a saga in miniature: the giant “rashly wagered his head” that his horse Gullfaxi could outrun Othin’s Sleipnir, the drunken intrusion, the dummy giant nine miles high built as a second, Hrungnir standing on his own shield because he’d been told Thor would attack from underground, the grindstone, and Thor pinned beneath the dead giant’s foot until his son Magni — three days old — lifted it off and remarked, in the way of three-day-olds in this family, “There would have been little trouble, father, had I but come sooner; I think I should have sent this giant to hell with my fist if I had met him first.”) He guarded the river against the stone-hurling sons of Svarang. He felled Thjazi — №25’s eagle, №17’s father — and flung “the eyes | of Alvaldi’s son / To the heavens hot above,” where they burn still, “Of my deeds the mightiest | marks are these, / That all men since can see.” Even here the apparatus keeps its ledger honest: Snorri’s version of Thjazi’s death does not credit Thor in particular, Bellows notes, and as for the stars themselves, “It is not known which stars were called ‘Thjazi’s Eyes.’” The mightiest marks, the ones all men can see — and the record cannot find them.
Harbarth’s entries are of another kind entirely. Five winters on an island with someone called Fjolvar, fighting and wooing — “Much could we seek, | and maids could master” — and seven sisters whose resistance, the note explains, was as hopeless as winding ropes of sand. Love-craft “with them who ride by night” — witches, stolen “by stealth from their husbands.” And then the entry that stops pretending to be anything but what it is:
“In Valland I was, | and wars I raised, Princes I angered, | and peace brought never; The noble who fall | in the fight hath Othin, And Thor hath the race of the thralls.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 24, trans. Bellows (1923)
I raised wars and never brought peace — as a boast. Then the class-sneer to cap it: the noble dead to Odin, the thralls to Thor. This is the stanza the allegory-hunters built their warrior-versus-peasant readings on, and Bellows’ note quietly pulls its foundation: “Nowhere else is it indicated that Thor has an asylum for dead peasants.” It is not doctrine. It is one more taunt, engineered for the target — because what has the ferryman been calling him since stanza 2? A peasant. Barefoot. No hose. The poor poet repeats himself; the first-rate psychologist is building a theme.
Thor’s counter-boasts, meanwhile, develop a citation problem of their own. Eastward I fared, he says, and felled the giants’ “ill-working women” on the mountain — and Bellows’ note fact-checks the thunder-god as flatly as №31’s notes fact-checked Loki’s prophecies: “Thor killed no women of the giants’ race on the ‘journey to the East’ so fully described by Snorri” — his great giant-killing adventure, the note adds, is not on that road at all but in the hammer-quest of №29. At this ferry crossing, even the true god’s boasts don’t match the record.
Then Harbarth reaches for the sharpest stone on the beach:
“Thor has might enough, | but never a heart; For cowardly fear | in a glove wast thou fain to crawl, And there forgot thou wast Thor; Afraid there thou wast, | thy fear was such, To fart or sneeze | lest Fjalar should hear.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 26, trans. Bellows (1923)
The glove is the journey in the East itself — the night Thor and his companions, shaken by earthquakes and a roaring in the dark, took shelter in what morning revealed to be the giant Skrymir’s glove, the “smaller room” they hid in being the thumb. And here the two flytings of the Edda reach out and touch each other, in the apparatus, where nobody can miss it: “Loki taunts Thor with this adventure in Lokasenna, 60 and 62,” Bellows notes — the very taunts Thor answered with the hammer-refrain four times in №31 — and the third line of this stanza is “perhaps interpolated from Lokasenna, 60, 4.” The two insult-poems share ammunition; scribes carried the best line from one armory to the other. Loki throws the glove at Thor in Ægir’s hall and eats four hammer-threats for it. Harbarth throws the same glove across the sound — and now watch the teaser’s whole thesis arrive in two stanzas:
“Thou womanish Harbarth, | to hell would I smite thee straight, Could mine arm reach over the sound.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 27, trans. Bellows (1923)
“Wherefore reach over the sound, | since strife we have none? What, Thor, didst thou do then?” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 28, trans. Bellows (1923)
Could mine arm reach. It cannot. In №31 the hammer ended the argument because the hammer was in the room; the one god Loki yields to is the one who doesn’t argue. The Harbarthsljoth is the experiment the Lokasenna implies: take the same god, the same threat, the same style of enemy — and put thirty yards of water in between. “Wherefore reach over the sound, | since strife we have none?” is the ferryman actually saying it out loud: your whole argument requires proximity, and I have the boat. Later Thor tries the threat again at full length — wade the water, and “Louder, I ween, | than a wolf thou cryest, / If a blow of my hammer thou hast” — and it changes nothing at all, because a threat that must announce the wading is not a threat, it is a weather report. The god with the hammer has discovered the one arena in which the hammer counts for nothing. The other god chose the arena before the poem began. That is the joke, and it is also the whole strategy: of course the ferryman is Odin. Who else picks the battlefield first and the weapon second?
One more stone, and it is the one that lands nearest home. Between insults, Harbarth offers this:
“Sif has a lover at home, | and him shouldst thou meet; More fitting it were | on him to put forth thy strength.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 48, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note names the suspect — “the lover being presumably Loki” — and sends the reader, once again, to the Lokasenna: specifically to stanza 54, which №31 quoted in full — Loki’s answer to Sif’s crystal cup, where he makes exactly this claim to her face. The two flytings are quoting each other across the corpus: the same slander, told once at the wife’s table and once to the husband across open water, by two different mouths — if the graybeard’s mouth is different. Thor’s answer is almost touching: “Thou witless man! Thou liest, I ween.” I ween — even his denials are honest enough to carry a hedge.
The end, when it comes, is not a thunderclap; it is a man realizing the afternoon is gone. Harbarth twists the knife of the schedule — “slow on thy way thou art; / Far hadst thou gone | if now in the boat thou hadst fared” — and then delivers the line that should be carved over the whole poem: “I thought not ever | that Asathor would be hindered / By a ferryman thus from faring.” Asathor — Thor of the Gods, the note glosses — held at a ferry crossing by one old man with a boat. Thor tries, one last time, plain courtesy: row hither, no more scoffing, “set Magni’s father across.” And gets:
“From the sound go hence; | the passage thou hast not.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 54, trans. Bellows (1923)
So Thor asks for walking directions. And the ferryman gives them — in a stanza that has stopped being verse altogether, one of those speeches that “appear to be simply prose,” as if even the metre has given up and gone home:
“To refuse it is little, to fare it is long; A while to the stock, and a while to the stone; Then the road to thy left, till Verland thou reachest; And there shall Fjorgyn her son Thor find, And the road of her children she shows him to Othin’s realm.” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 56, trans. Bellows (1923)
Read that middle line with stanza 4 still in your ears. Fjorgyn — Bellows’ note confirms it — is Jorth, the Earth, Thor’s mother. The one the ferryman pronounced dead in his second breath. Fifty stanzas later, the same mouth gives Thor his route home, and the landmark on it is his mother, alive, waiting to show her son the road to Othin’s realm — the road being, per the note, Bifrost itself. The lie of stanza 4 is quietly confessed inside the directions of stanza 56, and Thor — who grieved on the spot, instantly, wholly — does not appear to notice this either. He asks only, with the day dying: “May I come so far in a day?” With toil and trouble, perhaps, comes the answer, “While the sun still shines, or so I think” — and even here the two manuscripts part ways, Bellows notes: Regius says while the sun shines; the other copy says “ere sunrise.” The tradition cannot agree how long the walk home is. Thor leaves an IOU hanging in the air behind him — “The passage thou gavest me not I shall pay thee if ever we meet” — and the poem’s last line is a shout at his back:
“Get hence where every evil thing shall have thee!” — Harbarthsljoth, stanza 60, trans. Bellows (1923)
And now the finest manuscript fact of the run. Whose line is that? Bellows’ final note: “The Arnamagnæan Codex clearly indicates Harbarth as the speaker of this line, but Regius has no superscription, and begins the line with a small letter not preceded by a period, thereby assigning it to Thor.” The poem is so purely a quarrel that the manuscripts themselves quarrel over who got the last word. Two vellums, one insult, both hands raised. There is no better ending this poem could have, and no chance it was on purpose, and after thirty-two of these tellings I have stopped being sure those are different things.
The teaser said Thor loses, and honesty requires the hedge: the poem never says so. No judge appears; no verdict is entered; the superscriptions, Bellows warns, are “badly confused in the manuscripts” even where they survive. What the page gives us is this: Thor asked for passage and did not get it; Thor believed the lie about his mother and never caught it; Thor was held at a crossing all afternoon by his own father in a false beard and never knew; and Thor walked. Bellows’ first note supplies the kindest available framing, and it is the one I’d carve on the poem’s lintel: “Like the Robin Hood of the British ballads, Thor was often temporarily worsted, but always managed to come out ahead in the end.” Temporarily worsted, then. By sixty stanzas of words, the one weapon that does not care how strong you are — wielded by a first-rate psychologist against the most honest target in the mythology, from the far side of exactly enough water. The Lokasenna proved the gods cannot out-argue the truth. The Harbarthsljoth proves something gentler and funnier: the strongest of them cannot out-argue a boat.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and the next one finally takes the road east itself.
Sources: the Harbarthsljoth, with the translator’s notes and commentary, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: twice 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.