September 28, 2026
Last week the mill-song did something quietly enormous on its way to the salt. Asked why they alone could turn the stone, Fenja and Menja answered with a family tree — "Brothers of Hill-Giants, / Of them were we born" — and the whole tragedy pivoted on Fródi never asking the question the North asks about everybody: whose are you? The teaser promised that this week we would walk east, into the wood where that kind of kindred keeps its mothers, and ask the question Fródi skipped — of the one figure in the old books who is defined by it never being answered. The accounting first, because this series pays at the door: every particular of the teaser stands verified on the pages — the three lines of the Völuspá, the harper on the hill, the red cock, Bellows' confession — and the one question the teaser raised in the open turns out to be even better than promised. The old books do not merely disagree about who the old one of the Ironwood is. They disagree, in the same stanza, about what she bore and which light her child puts out.
When the Völuspá turns from the torments of the dead to the end of all things — Bellows marks the hinge himself: "With this stanza begins the account of the final struggle itself." — the very first thing the seeress shows is not a battle. It is a mother.
The giantess old | in Ironwood sat, In the east, and bore | the brood of Fenrir; Among these one | in monster's guise Was soon to steal | the sun from the sky. — Voluspo 40, trans. Bellows (1923)
Sit with how strange and how great that is. Ragnarök — the doom this series watched whole in its fourteenth telling — begins its telling in a nursery. Before the horn, before the ship of dead men's nails, before fire from the south: a wood of iron in the east, an old giantess, and a brood being born, one of which is going to eat the sun. And the poem, which is happy to name three dozen dwarfs nobody ever mentions again, does not name her. Bellows, in his note, is admirably plain about it: "her name is nowhere stated, and the only other reference to Ironwood is in Grimnismol, 39, in this same connection." Hold that second clause; we will come back to it, because it has a trapdoor in it.
The next stanza follows the child instead of the mother:
There feeds he full | on the flesh of the dead, And the home of the gods | he reddens with gore; Dark grows the sun, | and in summer soon Come mighty storms: | would you know yet more? — Voluspo 41, trans. Bellows (1923)
Even here the handbook's marginalia cannot quite hold still: Bellows notes that many editors move the comma so the lines read "Dark grows the sun | in summer soon" — either way, he observes, "sufficiently striking." A darkness at midsummer or a darkness coming soon; the editors can argue the punctuation while the light goes out.
And then, before the cocks crow the worlds awake to their last morning, the poem does the single most unexpected thing in the whole prophecy. It gives the end of the world a musician.
On a hill there sat, | and smote on his harp, Eggther the joyous, | the giants' warder; Above him the cock | in the bird-wood crowed, Fair and red | did Fjalar stand. — Voluspo 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
Eggther the joyous. Bellows' note sets him in a symmetry the poem itself never spells out: he "seems to be the watchman of the giants, as Heimdall is that of the gods and Surt of the dwellers in the fire-world" — and he "is not mentioned elsewhere in the poems." One appearance, ever, in all the old poetry: a giant on a hill by the wolf-wood, striking his harp, glad, while above him the red cock crows his whole race toward the last battle. The gods' watchman carries a horn to wake the armies; the giants' watchman carries a harp. The next stanza gives the answering cocks — "Then to the gods | crowed Gollinkambi," and beneath the earth another — "The rust-red bird | at the bars of Hel" — whose name, Bellows notes, is likewise "nowhere stated" — three roosters crowing three worlds awake, and between the nameless mother and the nameless bird sits the one joyous figure in the entire prophecy, making music. The old books never say why. Perhaps the side that knows it wins the ruin can afford a song. Perhaps joy is simply what a watchman keeps when there is nothing left to warn anyone about. The poem spends four lines on him and moves on, and no poet since has been able to leave him alone.
So who is she, the old one in the wood? The Völuspá will not say. But this series has a second witness in the house: the handbook. In Gylfaginning, Gangleri asks why the sun hurries "almost as if she were afraid", and Hárr answers that she has reason: "It is two wolves; and he that runs after her is called Skoll; she fears him, and he shall take her. But he that leaps before her is called Hati Hródvitnisson. He is eager to seize the moon; and so it must be." And when Gangleri asks what race such wolves could possibly be, Snorri walks him straight into our wood:
A witch dwells to the east of Midgard, in the forest called Ironwood: in that wood dwell the troll-women, who are known as Ironwood-Women. The old witch bears many giants for sons, and all in the shape of wolves; and from this source are these wolves sprung. — Gylfaginning XII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
A whole community out there — the Ironwood-Women, a sisterhood of the wood, whose Old Norse names (Járnviðr for the wood, Járnviðjur for its women — iron-wood, exactly as both translators render it) we cede to the dictionaries — and at their center the old witch, bearing sons "all in the shape of wolves." And of that race, Snorri says, the saying runs that one shall be mightiest of all, "he that is named Moon-Hound; he shall be filled with the flesh of all those men that die, and he shall swallow the moon" — and, the prose goes on, he shall sprinkle the heavens with blood, the sun shall lose her shining, and the winds shall roar on every side. Then, as his authority, Snorri quotes the very stanza we began with. Watch closely what happens to it on the way:
Eastward dwells the Old One | in Ironwood, And there gives birth | to Fenrir's brethren; There shall spring of them all | a certain one, The moon's taker | in troll's likeness. — Völuspá, quoted in Gylfaginning XII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Set the two side by side and the same four lines have quietly become a different family. In Bellows she bore "the brood of Fenrir" — Fenrir's children; Bellows' note says it outright: "The children of this giantess and the wolf Fenrir are the wolves Skoll and Hati." She is the great Wolf's mate. In Brodeur's Snorri she gives birth to "Fenrir's brethren" — Fenrir's brothers — which sets her a full generation higher, standing exactly where Fenrir's own mother stands. And as if that were not enough, the child in monster's guise steals "the sun" in one version and is "The moon's taker" in the other. Same poem, same stanza, and the two pages on our shelf cannot agree on whether the old one is the Wolf's wife or the Wolf's mother, or on which light her child swallows. Readers of this series have watched the handbook disagree with its own sheet music before — at Geirrödr's, and again last week at both hinges of the mill-tale — but this is the sharpest case yet, because the disagreement sits inside the quotation.
Because here is the thing: there is a famous mother of wolves in Jötunheim, and Snorri names her — twenty-two chapters later, in a different tale.
Yet more children had Loki. Angrboda was the name of a certain giantess in Jötunheim, with whom Loki gat three children: one was Fenris-Wolf, the second Jörmungandr--that is the Midgard Serpent,--the third is Hel. — Gylfaginning XXXIV, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Angrboda — Bellows' notes spell her Angrbotha; the name is usually read as "she who bodes grief" (that gloss, too, lives off these pages) — the mother of the Wolf, the Serpent, and the queen of the quiet lands this series met in its sixteenth telling. The gods, Snorri says, ran the family tree exactly the way Fródi should have: they "perceived by prophecy that from this kindred great misfortune should befall them", expecting ill "first from the mother's blood, and yet worse from the father's". The mother's blood is weighed first. And the Poetic Edda knows her too — once, in a single stanza of the short Völuspá embedded in the Hyndluljóth, the poem of hall-lists this series climbed three tellings ago:
The wolf did Loki | with Angrbotha win, And Sleipnir bore he | to Svathilfari; The worst of marvels | seemed the one That sprang from the brother | of Byleist then. — Hyndluljoth 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
One naming in the whole of the poems, one in the prose. And now the merge that "many books have been sure they know," as last week's teaser put it: mother of Fenrir in Jötunheim; a witch in the Ironwood mothering Fenrir's brethren — surely the same giantess? Read Snorri's way, the pull is real, and centuries of retellings have simply written "Angrboda sat in the Ironwood" as if a page somewhere said it. No page says it. Snorri keeps his witch nameless and his Angrboda woodless — she is "in Jötunheim," full stop — and never joins the two chapters. And read Bellows' way, the merge is impossible: if the old one is Fenrir's mate and the mother of Skoll and Hati, she cannot be Fenrir's own mother without the family tree folding in on itself. One giantess or two, wife or mother, sun or moon — the sources hold the question open on every axis at once. The honest answer, which is also the oldest one, is the title of this telling: her name is nowhere stated.
And the trapdoor promised earlier. Bellows' note said the only other reference to the Ironwood in the poems is Grimnismol 39 — and readers of this series have already stood on that stanza. №39 quoted it whole, between Othin's two fires: Skoll coursing "the glittering god" toward the wood, and Hati, "the son of Hrothvitnir" — the Mighty Wolf, Fenrir himself — awaiting "The burning bride of heaven." There, at least, the family is stated plainly: Hati is Fenrir's own boy, and the hunt for the two lights is a family business. But №39 also caught the confession that matters tonight, and it is worth its weight in iron here, where the wood is the whole subject: Bellows' note to that very stanza admits that Ironwood is "a conjectural emendation of an obscure phrase." The word is not, strictly, there. The manuscripts hold something obscure at that spot, and an editor, reasoning from the Völuspá, wrote the wood in. So run the audit the way the mill-maidens would: the Ironwood's entire standing in the old poetry is one stanza that will not name its giantess and one stanza where the wood itself is an educated guess — and Snorri, whose prose plants the forest "east of Midgard" as solidly as any atlas, populates it with a witch he also declines to name. The most consequential nursery in the old maps, the place the sun's own hunter runs home to, is held up almost entirely by marginalia. The same note adds one more shiver: in the Vafthruthnismol — the riddle-poem of our fortieth telling — it is Fenrir himself, Bellows says, who "appears as the thief" of the light. Son, grandson, or the chained father whole: the old books agree the sun is owed to that family, and will not settle which of them collects.
Last week ended on Fródi, who bought strength and never asked whose it was, and paid at the door. Tonight's telling is the same audit run from the other side. The gods did ask. They looked at three children being raised in Jötunheim, weighed the mother's blood first, and acted on the answer — the Serpent to the sea, Hel to the deeps, the Wolf to a fetter and, at the last, to an island and a silken band and the price of a god's right hand — the ribbon of this series' fifth telling, the held-still hand of its sixth. Every reader may weigh for themselves what the asking bought: the prophecy the gods moved to outrun is the one the Völuspá recites anyway, wood, wolves, harper and all. The old books keep perfect books tonight, as they kept them at the mill: a mother whose name the poems withhold and the prose supplies one tale too late; a wood spelled into the text by its editors; a watchman who answers the end of everything with a harp. The seeress shows the nursery before she shows the war — as if to say the end of the world is, before anything else, somebody's family; and the poem that asks whose keeps its own counsel, all the way down, about whose it is.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else — may your woods stay quiet, your questions get answers, and your watchmen have something worth singing about.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — Voluspo 40–43 and notes; Grimnismol 39 and note; Hyndluljoth 42 and notes. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1916) — Gylfaginning XII, XXXIII and XXXIV. All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: tonight's naming stanza has a neighbor, and it is one of the strangest verses in all the old poetry. №38 met it at a walk — quoted its four lines and had to move on, because a hall-list poem was waiting — and promised nothing; the handbook never retells it; no other page in the old books so much as nods at it. One stanza says the monsters did not all come from Angrboda at all: "A heart ate Loki,-- | in the embers it lay," and from that half-burnt woman's heart Loki himself — the FATHER — conceived, and thence came the monsters all. Bellows threw up his hands in №38's hearing already: "Nothing further is known of the myth here referred to". Snorri's tidy tally — wolf, serpent, Hel, all born of one giantess — against four lines that hand the whole brood to a heart in the embers and make Loki their mother. One stanza, no parallels, no prose to smooth it: next week the series goes back for the smallest telling in the old books, and this time it stays.