September 15, 2026
Last week Bragi told Ægir about the only fair fight in the mythology — the duel Hrungnir offered and Thor accepted with relish, hammer in hand. Ægir wants more. And the question he asks is the door into this week’s tale:
Methinks Hrungnir was of great might. Did Thor accomplish yet more valorous deeds when he had to do with the trolls? — Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916)
Bragi’s answer is the strangest errand in the Thor cycle, and he flags it as such before he begins — “It is worthy to be told at length” — and then, in his second sentence, takes away everything the last seven weeks of this series have taught you to rely on:
At that time he had not the hammer Mjöllnir with him, nor his Girdle of Might, nor the iron gauntlets: and that was the fault of Loki, who went with him. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
No hammer. No girdle. No gauntlets. In №29 the whole world was in crisis because the hammer was stolen for one morning; here Thor walks into a giant’s hall having left it at home on purpose, and the sentence that tells you so ends by naming the reason, and the reason is Loki. Everything in this telling — the bird, the chest, the oath, the river, the chair, the bar of iron — unfolds from that clause. The post is named for the one thing Thor says in it that is not sung, standing mid-river with a stone in his hand, and it is the closest thing to a moral the tale contains: at its source should a river be stemmed.
The standing lesson of this series is that teasers are claims, and last week’s carried one that needs untying rather than correcting. It said Loki was caught “in borrowed feathers.” He was — but whose? Here is this chapter:
For once, flying in his sport with Frigg’s hawk-plumage, it had happened to Loki to fly for curiosity’s sake into Geirrödr’s court. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Frigg’s. But readers of №25 will remember that when Loki flew to fetch Idunn back from Thjazi, the feather-coat was Freyja’s — Snorri says so in the first chapter of this same book: he would go after her “if Freyja would lend him the hawk’s plumage which she possessed.” And Bellows, in his note to the Harbarthsljoth, agrees: for the Idunn flight, he says, Loki went in Freyja’s “hawk’s-dress” — his phrase, his quotation marks. So which goddess owns the feathers? The honest answer, from the page itself, is both. When Snorri lists the ways to name Frigg, one chapter after this tale, he calls her “Mistress of Fulla and of the Hawk-Plumage and of Fensalir” — Frigg has one. And the first chapter has Freyja lending hers. Two goddesses, two feather-coats, and Loki — whose gift is getting people to hand him things — has borrowed both, and crashed in one of them. This series flagged the Frigg/Freyja tangle last week as a knot to handle if touched. Touched: it is not a contradiction. It is an inventory.
Two smaller words, per №30’s kettle precedent. The teaser said “iron gloves.” The source uses two words a page apart: what Thor left at home are “the iron gauntlets”; what the giantess lends him are “iron gloves.” Same object, two translations, both Brodeur’s, a paragraph apart. And the teaser said Thor was summoned. The prose never says how Loki got him to go — but the poem Snorri quotes as his authority does, and we will come to it, because it says Loki lied about the roads.
Here is how a god loses his hammer: a trickster gets bored.
There he saw a great hall, and alighted and looked in through the window; and Geirrödr looked up and saw him, and commanded that the bird be taken and brought to him, But he who was sent could scarce get to the top of the wall, so high was it; and it seemed pleasant to Loki to see the man striving with toil and pains to reach him, and he thought it was not yet time to fly away until the other had accomplished the perilous climb. When the man pressed hard after him, then he stretched his wings for flight, and thrust out vehemently, but now his feet were stuck fast. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Read the psychology in that. Loki has flown, “for curiosity’s sake,” into a hostile giant’s court; he has been spotted; a servant is sent up the wall to take him. And Loki waits — because it is pleasant to watch a man climb toward you in fear and pain, and it would be a shame to fly off before he has finished the perilous part. The trap is not Geirrödr’s wall. The trap is Loki’s own appetite for the servant’s struggle: he stays for the entertainment one beat too long, and when he finally thrusts out to fly, his feet are stuck fast. A hawk, glued to a windowsill by its own amusement. This is the same Loki whose mouth was sewn shut in №28 for enjoying a bet past the point of safety. He does not learn; that is the point of him.
So Loki was taken and brought before Geirrödr the giant; but when Geirrödr saw his eyes, he suspected that this might be a man, and bade him answer; but Loki was silent. Then Geirrödr shut Loki into a chest and starved him there three months. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Two ledgers this series keeps take an entry each here, and they are the same sentence. The eye-ledger: №29’s giants looked into a veiled bride’s face and saw fire, and talked themselves out of it; Geirrödr looks into a hawk’s face and suspects a man, and does not talk himself out of it. The eyes give the god away again — but this time the giant trusts what he sees. And the silence-ledger: №31 gave us the hall that went quiet when Loki walked in. Here it is Loki who goes quiet — the mouth that could out-argue every god at Ægir’s table, shut, for three months, in a box, starving. Geirrödr does not torture him. He simply waits, which with Loki is the crueler instrument. When the chest opens, Loki talks:
And now when Geirrödr took him out and commanded him to speak, Loki told who he was; and by way of ransom for his life he swore to Geirrödr with oaths that he would get Thor to come into Geirrödr’s dwelling in such a fashion that he should have neither hammer nor Girdle of Might with him. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
That is the oath. Not I will bring you Thor — Geirrödr is not a fool — but I will bring you Thor unarmed. Loki has bargained the defence of the world for his own dinner. And the kenning-chapters remember it: when Snorri lists the ways a poet may name Loki, in among “Thief of the Giants, of the Goat, of Brísinga-men, and of Idunn’s Apples” stands the title this story earned him — “Visitor and Chest-Trapping of Geirrödr.” A god named, forever, after the box he starved in.
The prose skips the luring entirely. One sentence Loki is swearing in Geirrödr’s hall; the next, Thor is already on the road — and stops for the night at the one house in Jötunheim that will save his life:
Thor came to spend the night with that giantess who was called Grídr, mother of Vídarr the Silent. She told Thor the truth concerning Geirrödr, that he was a crafty giant and ill to deal with; and she lent him the Girdle of Might and iron gloves which she possessed, and her staff also, which was called Grídr’s Rod. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Stop at her name. Grídr is a giantess, and she is the mother of Vídarr the Silent — the god who, in №14, will avenge Odin at the end of the world, and who in №31 was the one pouring for Loki when the toast went wrong. Which makes Grídr’s other title, one chapter on, the interesting one: when Snorri names Frigg by her rivals, she is “Co-Wife of Jörd and Rindr and Gunnlöd and Grídr.” Odin’s mistress. The series has watched Odin start the trouble in №32 and №34 and step out of frame; here he is absent from the entire tale, and the woman who arms his son against the giant is a giantess he once lay with, whose child by him will be the last god standing. The old books do not comment on this. They simply place her, on the road, with a bed for the night and the truth.
And look at the order of her gifts. First, “the truth concerning Geirrödr” — that he is crafty and ill to deal with, which Thor, walking toward him unarmed on Loki’s word, did not know. Then the three loans: a Girdle of Might of her own (she has one — this is not Thor’s, which is at home; a giantess keeps a spare), iron gloves, and her staff, which has a name. The teaser last week listed two of the three; the gloves are the third, and hold that thought, because the gloves are what save him in the hall.
Then Thor proceeded to the river named Vimur, greatest of all rivers. There he girded himself with the Girdle of Might and braced firmly downstream with Grídr’s Rod, and Loki held on behind by the Girdle of Might. When Thor came to mid-current, the river waxed so greatly that it broke high upon his shoulders. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Mark that clause — Loki held on behind by the Girdle of Might — because the poem under this prose is about to dispute it. For now, the river. Vimur is “greatest of all rivers,” and it is rising, and Thor, in a borrowed belt with Loki clinging to it, does what he does when the water is against him: he speaks to it in verse.
Wax thou not now, Vimur, For I fain would wade thee Into the Giants’ garth: Know thou, if thou waxest, Then waxeth God-strength in me As high up as the heaven. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
It is a bargain shouted at a flood: grow, and I grow; you will not out-rise me. And then Thor looks upstream and sees why the river is rising at all:
Then Thor saw Gjálp, daughter of Geirrödr, standing in certain ravines, one leg in each, spanning the river, and she was causing the spate. Then Thor snatched up a great stone out of the river and cast it at her, saying these words: ‘At its source should a river be stemmed.’ Nor did he miss that at which he threw. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The giant’s daughter, one leg in each ravine, astride the greatest of rivers, causing the spate — Snorri is as decorous as the manuscript allows about how, and this series will be too. What matters is what Thor does about it. He does not fight the river. He finds the person making the river, and throws a stone at her, and says the line: a river should be stemmed at its source. It is a proverb and a battle-tactic and, if you like, the thesis of the whole tale — the flood was never the problem; the flood was a symptom, and the source was standing in the ravines. “Nor did he miss that at which he threw.” Then, wading out:
In that moment he came to the shore and took hold of a rowan-clump, and so climbed out of the river; whence comes the saying that rowan is Thor’s deliverance. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
A rowan bush on the bank, and a saying that outlived the religion. The mythology keeps handing its gods’ near-misses to the hedgerow: the flint in every field is Hrungnir’s hone (№34), and the rowan by every northern river is the bush Thor grabbed.
Now when Thor came before Geirrödr, the companions were shown first into the goat-fold for their entertainment, and there was one chair there for a seat, and Thor sat there. Then he became aware that the chair moved under him up toward the roof: he thrust Grídr’s Rod up against the rafters and pushed back hard against the chair. Then there was a great crash, and screaming followed. Under the chair had been Geirrödr’s daughters, Gjálp and Greip; and he had broken both their backs. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Before the chair — the room. Brodeur puts a footnote on “goat-fold,” and it is one of those small-print doors this series lives to open:
So Cod. Reg. and Cod. Worm.; Cod. Upsal. and Cod. Hypn. read gesta hús = guest’s house. Gering, Simrock, and Anderson prefer the latter reading. I have followed Jónsson in accepting geita hús. — Brodeur, note to Skáldskaparmál XVIII (1916)
Geita hús, goat-house; gesta hús, guest-house. The four manuscripts split two and two, the difference is a single letter, and the letter is the whole meaning of the giant’s hospitality. In two vellums, Thor is received as a guest and shown to the guest-quarters, where the chair is waiting; in the other two, the thunder-god is put in the goat-shed. Brodeur, following Jónsson, chooses the goats; three other scholars choose the guests. Either way the chair is there, and the chair rises. Thor, who has no hammer, has a staff — Grídr’s last-named loan — and he braces it against the rafters and pushes down, and the crash and the screaming tell him what the chair was standing on: the giant’s daughters, Gjálp (the one from the ravines, who has had a bad day) and Greip, lifting the seat toward the roof with their backs. He breaks both. That is the second ambush of the errand, and the second one he ends by going to the source — not the chair, but what was under it.
Then Geirrödr had Thor called into the hall to play games. There were great fires the whole length of the hall. When Thor came up over against Geirrödr, then Geirrödr took up a glowing bar of iron with the tongs and cast it at Thor. Thor caught it with his iron gloves and raised the bar in the air, but Geirrödr leapt behind an iron pillar to save himself. Thor lifted up the bar and threw it, and it passed through the pillar and through Geirrödr and through the wall, and so on out, even into the earth. — Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Called into the hall “to play games.” The teaser called this the hospitality of enemies, and here is the whole of it: fires the length of the hall, a host with tongs, and a bar of iron glowing from the forge, thrown at the guest. Thor catches it. He can catch it because of the gloves — the third loan, the one the teaser forgot — and he raises it, and Geirrödr, who has just thrown molten metal at an unarmed man, dives behind an iron pillar. And then the sentence this whole series of Thor-tellings has been walking toward, in its rhythm of throughs: through the pillar, through Geirrödr, through the wall, “and so on out, even into the earth.” The teaser stopped at the wall. The source does not; the bar keeps going, out of the hall, into the ground, as if the earth itself were the only thing that could take the throw. The giant’s own weapon, returned through him. At its source should a river be stemmed.
That is the prose. Snorri closes it, as he closed Hrungnir, by naming his authority — “Eilífr Gudrúnarson has wrought verses on this story, in Thórsdrápa” — and quoting the poem at great length. And the poem does not tell the same story.
The Thórsdrápa stands in Brodeur’s edition inside the same editorial brackets that swallowed the Hrungnir verses last week — Jónsson’s bracket, which marks what he considered pasted in later. Set that aside; the poem is real, whoever pasted it, and it is one of the densest things in the skaldic record — kenning stacked on kenning, Thor called by his own name only three times in the whole of it. Here is its opening, on how Thor came to go at all:
The winding sea-snake’s father Did wile from home the slayer Of the life of the gods’ grim foemen; –(Ever was Loptr a liar)– The never faithful Searcher Of the heart of the fearless Thunderer Declared green ways were lying To the walled stead of Geirrödr. — Eilífr Gudrúnarson, Thórsdrápa, in Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The winding sea-snake’s father is Loki (he is the Serpent’s father; №30’s fishing trip caught his son). He “Did wile from home” the giant-slayer, and the poet tells you how in the last two lines: he “Declared green ways were lying” to Geirrödr’s walls. The prose skipped the luring; the poem supplies it. Loki said the road was easy — green ways, a pleasant walk — and the parenthesis in the middle of the stanza is the skald’s own editorial: Ever was Loptr a liar. So the teaser’s “summoned” was too kind. Thor was not summoned. He was told there was a nice road.
Then the poem does something the prose cannot survive intact. It names Thor’s companion:
Further in the faring Forward went warlike Thjálfi With the divine Host-Cheerer — Thórsdrápa, in Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Thjálfi. The marrow-boy of №33, the swift-footed liar of №34’s duel — not Loki. Snorri’s prose, three paragraphs earlier, said in so many words that “Loki held on behind by the Girdle of Might” in the river. The poem Snorri cites as his source for that very prose puts Thjálfi at the girdle instead, and names him three times:
Till Thjálfi came uplifted On his lord Thor’s wide shield-strap: That was a mighty thew-test For the Prop of Heaven; the maidens Of the harmful giant stiffly Held the stream stubborn against them; The Giantess-Destroyer With Grídr’s staff fared sternly. — Thórsdrápa, in Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
And notice the second disagreement folded inside the first: “the maidens” — plural — “Held the stream stubborn against them.” In the prose, one daughter, Gjálp, stands astride the river. In the poem, the giant’s daughters are at it together. This series has watched translator’s notes contradict the text (№34), and compilers contradict their poets (№31), and manuscripts contradict each other over one line (№32). This is the rarest kind: the prose author quoting, on the same page, a poem that does not say what his prose says — and leaving both standing. Snorri knew the Thórsdrápa; he copied it out. He also knew a version in which Loki went. He gave us both and let them argue.
The poem’s ending disagrees too. The prose has the bar go through pillar, giant, wall and earth in a single throw. The skald has a fight:
The hall of the doughty trembled When he dashed the massy forehead Of the hill-wight ’gainst the bottom Of the house-wall’s ancient column; Ullr’s glorious step-sire With the glowing bar of mischief Struck with his whole strength downward At the hill-knave’s mid-girdle. — Thórsdrápa, in Skáldskaparmál XVIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Thor — “Ullr’s glorious step-sire,” the poem calls him; Ullr is Sif’s son by another marriage, so the thunder-god is his stepfather — smashes the giant’s forehead against the base of the pillar and then drives the bar downward into his middle. Not a throw through an iron column; a beating at close quarters with the giant’s own iron. And two stanzas on, the poem records what the prose never mentions: the last of Geirrödr’s people are crushed “with the fragment / Of Grídr’s Rod.” The staff broke. (The stanza between them, for the record, calls him “The God with gory hammer” — in the one tale that opens by telling you the hammer stayed home. The skald’s kennings did not always check the plot.) Somewhere between the rafters and the end of the fight, the giantess’s loan snapped in his hands, and he finished the work with the piece.
So: was it Loki or Thjálfi at his belt? One daughter in the river or two? A throw through the pillar, or a head against it? The page contains both answers, prose above and verse below, and Brodeur’s bracket around the verse is Jónsson’s polite way of saying he would rather the poem were not there. The series’ creed is the old words as they actually are — and as they actually are, the witness Snorri himself cites as his authority (Eilífr’s poem) and the most famous one (Snorri’s own prose) do not agree about who was in the river with Thor.
One more door, because the Poetic Edda has a Geirröth of its own, and it is impossible to read the two side by side and not feel the same story breathing. Bellows’ Grimnismol — and he warns that “the manuscripts spell his name in various ways” — opens with a mortal king named Geirröth who receives a stranger in a dark-blue mantle. Bellows’ summary:
Othin, concealed under the name of Grimnir, is through an error tortured by King Geirröth. Bound between two blazing fires, he begins to display his wisdom for the benefit of the king’s little son, Agnar, who has been kind to him. — Henry Adams Bellows, introductory note to the Grimnismol (1923)
Between two fires. The prose that precedes the poem gives the count — “set him between two fires, and he sat there eight nights” — and then the moment the fire wins: “the fire had come so near that the mantle burned on Grimnir’s back.” The god gives one of his names in the forty-ninth stanza — “Grimnir they call me | in Geirröth’s hall” — and his true one in the fifty-fourth, “Now am I Othin,” and the manuscript’s closing prose tells how the king dies:
The sword slipped from his hand, and fell with the hilt down. The king stumbled and fell forward, and the sword pierced him through, and slew him. Then Othin vanished, but Agnar long ruled there as king. — prose after Grimnismol 54, trans. Bellows (1923)
Two Geirröths, one a giant, one a king. Two halls with fire in them — great fires the length of the hall; two blazing fires with a god between. Two gods who walk in without their power: Odin disguised, Thor disarmed. And two hosts killed by their own weapon — Geirröth the king falls on his own sword; Geirrödr the giant takes his own bar of iron through the body. This series will not tell you the two are one story; the sources do not say so. It will only tell you that the old books, twice, imagined the same thing: a god arriving at a hostile hearth with nothing, and the hearth’s owner discovering that the fire he set was his.
Three stones on the cairn. First, as with Hrungnir, the errand became vocabulary. The Thor-kennings in chapter IV run “Smiter of Hrungnir, of Geirrödr and of Thrívaldi,” and a skald named Úlfr called Thor “Vimur’s ford’s Wide-Grappler,” which Snorri glosses for the reader: “Here he is called Giant of Vimur’s Ford. There is a river called Vimur, which Thor waded when he journeyed to the garth of Geirrödr.” The river got into his name. And another skald, Vetrlidi, kept a tally of the giant-women in four lines —
Thou didst break the leg of Leikn, Didst cause to stoop Starkadr, Didst bruise Thrívaldi, Didst stand on lifeless Gjálp. — Vetrlidi, in Skáldskaparmál IV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Didst stand on lifeless Gjálp. The prose broke her back under a chair; Vetrlidi has Thor standing on her corpse. A third version of her death, from a third poet, and the series records it without choosing.
Second, the Bellows debt, since №32 taught us to pay those. In the Harbarthsljoth, when the ferryman asks what Thor was doing, one of his answers is a river: “Eastward I was, | and the river I guarded well, / Where the sons of Svarang | sought me there; / Stones did they hurl; | small joy did they have of winning.” Bellows’ note is helpless — the river is “probably Ifing,” and “nor is there any other account of Thor’s defense of the passage.” Perhaps there is not. But a god in a river in the east, with giants and thrown stones, and a poem that never names which river — the reader who has just waded the Vimur may draw a line the note does not, and the series only points at it.
Third, the honest ledger. In №34 Thor won a fair fight and carried a stone in his head forever. Here he fought with nothing of his own — a borrowed belt, borrowed gloves, a borrowed staff that broke — against a river, a chair, and a bar of molten iron, and walked out with no wound the sources record. The armed god was marked for life; the disarmed one came home clean. The old books do not explain this, and the series will not either, except to notice what the disarmed god had that the armed one lacked: someone on the road who told him the truth before he arrived. Grídr’s first gift was not the belt. It was the warning. Everything after was a river he already knew the source of.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and next week the strongest god wins a contest without lifting anything at all.
Sources: the Skáldskaparmál (I, IV, XVI, XVIII, XIX), in The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916); Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923), the Grimnismol, the Harbarthsljoth and its notes, and the Alvissmol (teaser). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the skald who sang this week’s poem called Thor, once, “the grim Sire of Thrúdr” — and Thrúdr is his daughter, the only one whose name survives. Next week a dwarf comes to collect her. He is called Alvis, “All-Knowing,” and the gods promised her to him while her father was away; Thor, home now, claims a father’s right to break it — and then, instead of breaking it, asks the dwarf a question. Then another. Thirteen questions, every answer perfect, all night long, while the bride’s father keeps him talking toward sunrise. It is the one contest in these tellings Thor wins with his mouth, and its closing words are his: “The day has caught thee, dwarf!” (Bellows’ note says the sun turned him to stone; the poem itself says only that. We will tell you exactly which is which.) The Alvissmol: the god who stalled.