September 8, 2026
Twice now this series has watched somebody throw a glove at Thor. Loki did it at Ægir’s feast — twice, and ate four hammer-threats for it. The graybeard ferryman did it across the sound, where the hammer couldn’t answer. And both times, Bellows’ notes made the same promise: this taunt points at “the famous episode, related in full by Snorri.” The Eddic poets sneer at this story constantly; not one of them ever tells it. Only Snorri does. So the debt comes due, the sources line changes hands, and for the first time in thirty-three tellings, Brodeur stands in it alone — the mirror of №29, if you’re keeping the ledger. There, the funniest poem in the Edda survived by one thread because Snorri stayed strangely silent. Here, the most famous adventure in the mythology survives only because Snorri talked.
Where it sits in the Prose Edda matters, because getting it told at all takes a small war. Gangleri — the traveling questioner the whole Gylfaginning is built around — has just heard about Skídbladnir, the ship that folds up like a napkin, which №28 readers will remember from the forge-verdict. And his follow-up question is a knife slipped under the door: fine, that’s magic — has Thor ever met magic he couldn’t beat? Watch what the answer does:
Few men, I ween, are able to tell of this; yet many a thing has seemed to him hard to overcome. Though there may have been something so powerful or strong that Thor might not have succeeded in winning the victory, yet it is not necessary to speak of it; because there are many examples to prove, and because all are bound to believe, that Thor is mightiest. — Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning XLIV, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916)
Read that twice. It is not necessary to speak of it… all are bound to believe. This is the mythology’s own narrator declining to tell a story on the grounds that faith in Thor is mandatory. Gangleri refuses to let it go — and puts stakes on the table, in the very idiom of the tale he’s about to receive:
Here will I stand and listen, if any answer is forthcoming to this word; but otherwise I pronounce you overcome, if ye cannot tell that which I ask you. — Gylfaginning XLIV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
I pronounce you overcome — tell me the story of the contest, or lose this one. It is Hárr who refuses; it takes all three of the enthroned voices to get past the refusal, and the third of them, Thridi, finally takes it up — conceding that the guest “is resolved to know this matter, though it seem not to us a pleasant thing to tell” — and out it comes: the one whole story in the old books where Thor loses every single game he plays.
And here is the joke under the joke, which I will hang on the wall now and come back to at the end. The Gylfaginning’s own title, on its own first page, is “The Beguiling of Gylfi.” Gangleri is King Gylfi in disguise, traveling under a false name — and his hosts saw him coming:
But the Æsir were wiser in this matter, having second sight; and they saw his journeying before ever he came, and prepared against him deceptions of the eye. — Gylfaginning II, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Hold that phrase. Deceptions of the eye. The story you are about to read — of a stronghold built on exactly that trick — is being told inside one.
The tale opens on the road, with the homeliest domestic miracle in the mythology. “Öku-Thor drove forth with his he-goats and chariot, and with him that Ás called Loki”; they lodge overnight with a farmer, and Thor slaughters his own goats for supper — laying the hides aside and instructing the household to throw the bones onto them. In the morning he hallows the hides with Mjöllnir and the goats stand up alive. One of them limps. The farmer’s boy, Thjálfi, had “split it with his knife and broke it for the marrow” — a thigh-bone, cracked at dinner — and Thor’s brows come down over his eyes until the terrified household offers him everything it owns. What he takes “in atonement” is the children: Thjálfi and Röskva, “who then became his bond-servants; and they follow him ever since.” That is where Thor’s man Thjálfi comes from — a farm kid who couldn’t resist marrow — and remember his legs, because they are about to matter. Then Thor leaves the goats behind and strikes out east toward Jötunheim, over the deep sea, with Loki and the two children — walking, into the one country where his reputation is a liability.
Nightfall, a great forest, nothing to eat, and shelter that seems too good to be true: a hall, “very great,” with a door at the end as wide as the hall itself. They move in. About midnight there comes “a great earthquake” — the earth rocking, the house trembling — and they grope their way to a side-chamber, where Thor guards the doorway all night against a humming and crashing in the dark. At dawn he finds the source: a sleeping man of such size that — and the text says this plainly, without flinching —
He girded himself with his belt of strength, and his divine power waxed; and on the instant the man awoke and rose up swiftly; and then, it is said, the first time Thor’s heart failed him, to strike him with the hammer. — Gylfaginning XLV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The first time Thor’s heart failed him. The flytings weaponized this — Loki’s fart-and-sneeze taunt in №31, the ferryman’s glove-crawl in №32 — and honesty obliges the record to say the poets weren’t inventing it; they were quoting it. But keep reading, because the same record will balance this scale before it’s done. The giant names himself Skrýmir, remarks that he doesn’t need to ask Thor’s name, and then asks for his glove back:
Then Skrýmir stretched out his hand and took up the glove; and at once Thor saw that it was that which he had taken for a hall during the night; and as for the side-chamber, it was the thumb of the glove. — Gylfaginning XLV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
There it is — the glove, the actual glove, the one two poems threw at him. The mighty hall was a mitten. The refuge Thor guarded all night, hammer gripped, was a thumb.
Skrýmir proposes they travel together and pool their provisions — then binds all the food in his own bag, carries it all day, hands it over at night, and lies down to sleep. And Thor cannot open the bag:
Thor took the provision-bag and set about to unloose it; but such things must be told as will seem incredible: he got no knot loosened and no thong-end stirred, so as to be looser than before. — Gylfaginning XLV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Such things must be told as will seem incredible — the narrator apologizing in advance for what the story requires. The strongest of the gods, beaten by a knot, on an empty stomach. What follows is the most patient escalation in the old books. Thor takes Mjöllnir in both hands and smites the sleeping giant in the head; Skrýmir wakes and asks “whether a leaf had fallen upon his head.” At midnight, with the giant’s snoring thundering through the woods, he tries again:
At midnight Thor heard how Skrýmir snored and slept fast, so that it thundered in the woods; then he stood up and went to him, shook his hammer eagerly and hard, and smote down upon the middle of his crown: he saw that the face of the hammer sank deep into his head. — Gylfaginning XLV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The hammer-face sinks into his head — and Skrýmir wakes asking, “What is it now? Did some acorn fall on my head? Or what is the news with thee, Thor?” A leaf, then an acorn. Before dawn Thor delivers the third blow with everything he has, to the upturned temple, and:
But Skrýmir sat up and stroked his cheek, and said: ’Some birds must be sitting in the tree above me; I imagined, when I awoke, that some dirt from the twigs fell upon my head. Art thou awake, Thor? — Gylfaginning XLV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Leaf, acorn, bird-droppings. Three full-strength blows from the weapon that kills giants in one, downgraded in the giant’s mouth to forest weather. And then Skrýmir — courteous to the end, and courtesy is this story’s sharpest instrument — gives directions to the castle called Útgardr, some free advice (“do not conduct yourselves boastfully,” the henchmen there won’t endure big words from “such swaddling-babes”), a sincere recommendation to turn back, and takes his leave. The narrator’s send-off is the driest line in Snorri:
Skrýmir took the provision-bag and cast it on his back, and turned from them across the forest; and it is not recorded that the Æsir bade him god-speed. — Gylfaginning XLV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
A word on the name before the gate: Bellows spelled him Utgartha-Loki, and №32 followed him; Brodeur, holding the sources line alone this week, prints Útgarda-Loki — Loki of the Outyards, no relation and every relation to the Loki walking in Thor’s company. Two translators, two spellings, one landlord. His castle announces its scale from a distance:
Then they saw a castle standing in a certain plain, and set their necks down on their backs before they could see up over it. — Gylfaginning XLVI, trans. Brodeur (1916)
They can’t open the gate — Thor, who has burst giant skulls like weather, cannot open a gate — and squeeze between the bars like children. Inside, benches of big men, and a king in no hurry:
Thereupon they came before the king Útgarda-Loki and saluted him; but he looked at them in his own good time, and smiled scornfully over his teeth, and said: ’It is late to ask tidings of a long journey; or is it otherwise than I think: that this toddler is Öku-Thor? — Gylfaginning XLVI, trans. Brodeur (1916)
This toddler. The house rule follows: “No one shall be here with us who knows not some kind of craft or cunning surpassing most men.” And so begin the games — five of them before the night is out, and the series asks you to keep the honest score alongside the apparent one.
Loki goes first, and picks the one arena he’s confident in: eating. A trough of meat, Loki at one end, one Logi at the other, they meet in the middle — but Logi has eaten the meat, the bones, and the trough, “and now it seemed to all as if Loki had lost the game.” Thjálfi — the marrow-boy, now “swiftest-footed of all men” — runs three heats against a lad named Hugi and loses all three, though his host allows that “never have any men come hither who seemed to me fleeter of foot than this.”
Then Thor. He asks to drink. They bring the sconce-horn — “It is held that this horn is well drained if it is drunk off in one drink, but some drink it off in two; but no one is so poor a man at drinking that it fails to drain off in three” — and it looks unremarkable to him, “and yet it was somewhat long.” Three enormous draughts, the last in real anger, and the level has barely moved. Next, an insult dressed as a parlor game: lift the cat that young lads here play with. A gray cat, “and a very big one”:
But the cat bent into an arch just as Thor stretched up his hands; and when Thor reached up as high as he could at the very utmost, then the cat lifted up one foot, and Thor got this game no further advanced. — Gylfaginning XLVI, trans. Brodeur (1916)
One paw off the floor. That is the whole result. And Thor — who has now been starved by a knot, ignored by a skull, and defeated by a housecat — says the most human line in the story: “Little as ye call me, let any one come up now and wrestle with me; now I am angry.” The teaser last week said he wrestles an old woman he cannot throw, and the text is exact about the cannot:
There is no need to make a long matter of it: that struggle went in such wise that the harder Thor strove in gripping, the faster she stood; then the old woman essayed a hold, and then Thor became totty on his feet, and their tuggings were very hard. Yet it was not long before Thor fell to his knee, on one foot. — Gylfaginning XLVI, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Elli, “an old woman, stricken in years,” his host’s own nurse — and the harder he grips, the faster she stands. One correction to last week’s teaser, made here in the open, because the difference will turn out to be the whole point: she does not wrestle him down. She wrestles him to one knee — and Útgarda-Loki stops the match there, quickly, before anything further can be proven. Then, because this castle’s cruelty is impeccably mannered, everyone is shown to seats and spends the night “in good cheer.”
The morning after is the reason this story has outlived a thousand better-behaved ones. There’s breakfast — “no lack of good cheer, meat and drink” — and the king himself walks his guests out. He asks Thor how he thinks it went; Thor answers that “he could not say that he had not got much shame in their dealings together,” and that he’s ill-content to be called a man of little might. And then Útgarda-Loki, safely outside his own walls, does the thing no enemy of Thor’s has ever done. He tells him the truth:
Now I will tell thee the truth, now that thou art come out of the castle; and if I live and am able to prevail, then thou shalt never again come into it. — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
By his troth, he adds, Thor would never have gotten in at all had he known beforehand what he was bringing — and then, item by item, courteous and devastating, he opens the books:
But I made ready against thee eye-illusions; and I came upon you the first time in the wood, and when thou wouldst have unloosed the provision-bag, I had bound it with iron, and thou didst not find where to undo it. — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
I came upon you the first time in the wood. Skrýmir was Útgarda-Loki himself — the whole road-trip was the castle, from the glove onward. The knot was iron. And the three blows Thor rained on that sleeping head never touched it — each time, the giant slipped a mountain in between. The first blow alone, he admits, “would have sufficed to slay me, if it had come upon me”:
Where thou sawest near my hall a saddle-backed mountain, cut at the top into threesquare dales, and one the deepest, those were the marks of thy hammer. I brought the saddle-back before the blow, but thou didst not see that. — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
(The transcription’s word “threesquare” is kept as printed.) There is a mountain in Jötunheim with three valleys in its top, and they are hammer-prints. That is what a leaf, an acorn, and a bird did.
Then the games:
So it was also with the games, in which ye did contend against my henchmen: that was the first, which Loki did; he was very hungry and ate zealously, but he who was called Logi was “wild-fire,” and he burned the trough no less swiftly than the meat. But when Thjálfi ran the race with him called Hugi, that was my “thought,” and it was not to be expected of Thjálfi that he should match swiftness with it. — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Loki lost an eating contest to wild-fire; the fastest man alive lost a footrace to thought itself. Nobody in that hall was ever playing a person. And the horn:
Moreover, when thou didst drink from the horn, and it seemed to thee to go slowly, then, by my faith, that was a wonder which I should not have believed possible: the other end of the horn was out in the sea, but thou didst not perceive it. But now, when thou comest to the sea, thou shalt be able to mark what a diminishing thou hast drunk in the sea: this is henceforth called “ebb-tides.” — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Sit with that one. Thor was drinking the ocean — and the level visibly dropped. Every low tide on every shore, says the mythology, is the mark of a god trying to win a bar bet. And the cat:
That cat was not as it appeared to thee: it was the Midgard Serpent, which lies about all the land, and scarcely does its length suffice to encompass the earth with head and tail. So high didst thou stretch up thine arms that it was then but a little way more to heaven. — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The housecat was the world-encircling serpent of №14 and №30, and Thor hauled its arch “but a little way more to heaven” — and, his host confesses, “all were afraid who saw how thou didst lift one foot clear of the earth.” The bored faces on those benches were masks over terror. Last of all, the old woman:
It was also a great marvel concerning the wrestling-match, when thou didst withstand so long, and didst not fall more than on one knee, wrestling with Elli; since none such has ever been and none shall be, if he become so old as to abide “Old Age,” that she shall not cause him to fall. — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Elli is Old Age herself. The harder you grip, the faster she stands — there was never a truer line written about her — and she throws everyone, every single one, in the end. Thor is the only being in any record who met her holds and went down just one knee. Now reread the scoreboard the castle posted, and then read the real one: he lost the drinking game by moving the sea; he lost the lifting game by hoisting the world-serpent toward heaven; he lost the wrestling by holding off Old Age at a single knee. Every defeat, decoded, is the greatest feat anyone has ever performed at that game. That is what the eye-illusions were for. You do not rig the contest against a weak opponent.
The confession ends with terms: better for both sides if they never meet again; the castle will be defended “with similar wiles or with others.” And Thor, who has listened to the entire itemized inventory of his own beguiling with whatever composure he could find, reaches the limit of composure:
When Thor had heard these sayings, he clutched his hammer and brandished it aloft; but when he was about to launch it forward, then he saw Útgarda-Loki nowhere. Then he turned back to the castle, purposing to crush it to pieces; and he saw there a wide and fair plain, but no castle. — Gylfaginning XLVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
No king. No gates. Grass. The truth was told outside walls that never existed, by a host who vanishes mid-sentence, and the strongest arm in the nine worlds is left holding a hammer over a meadow. Snorri appends one more sentence, and long-time readers of this series will feel the floor tilt: Thor went home resolved to seek a meeting with the Midgard Serpent — a meeting that, the teller promises, “came to pass.” That is the fishing trip of №30 — where Snorri told us outright that Thor beguiled the Serpent with the ox-head “no less than Útgarda-Loki had mocked Thor.” This series, following the poems, told the revenge three weeks before the crime. The old books’ shelving strikes again.
And now take the picture down off the wall. This story — a king of illusions, a castle that was never there, games rigged by “deceptions of the eye” — is told inside the frame of the Gylfaginning, where a king under a false name questions hosts who saw him coming and prepared against him deceptions of the eye. The beguilers are telling their guest a story about beguiling; the book’s own title confesses the game on page one. Thor at least got his truth at the gates, from a courteous liar with one foot already vanished. Whether Gangleri gets his — well. The story where Thor loses every game is also the story where losing every game meant drinking the sea, lifting the serpent, and standing up under Old Age. The narrator who didn’t want to tell it was protecting the wrong reputation. It was never Thor who should have feared this telling. It’s the castle that had to cheat.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and next week Thor gets the fair fight this castle never gave him.
Sources: the Gylfaginning (II, XLIV–XLVIII), in The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: after a castle of loaded dice, the old books owe Thor a contest with honest rules — and there is exactly one formal duel in all the mythology, told whole by Snorri. A giant with a stone head and a stone heart, who rode into Valhalla drunk on a golden horse and wagered everything on the race; a second built of clay, nine miles high, with the heart of a mare; a whetstone thrown against a hammer in mid-air; and a shard of it lodged in Thor’s skull that no craft ever loosened — because of a spell interrupted at exactly the wrong moment, by good news. The duel at the stone-fence: Thor and Hrungnir.