September 28, 2026
Last week ended on a promise this series has owed for twelve tellings. When №38 climbed the Hyndluljóth — the poem of hall-lists, where a giantess calls a hero a fool nine times for not knowing his own kin — it passed four lines at a walk, quoted them, said what Bellows says (that nothing more is known), and moved on, because eighteen stanzas of genealogy were waiting. The teaser promised the series would go back for them, and that this time it stays. The accounting first, because this series pays at the door: every particular of the teaser stands verified on the pages — the line quoted letter-true, the editor's surrender letter-true, the handbook's silence confirmed from cover to cover — except that the teaser carried the stanza's last line one word too light. The page does not say the monsters came into the world. It says where they went. Among men. Hold that; it is the door out of tonight's telling and into next week's.
Here is the smallest telling in the old books, whole:
A heart ate Loki,-- | in the embers it lay, And half-cooked found he | the woman's heart;-- With child from the woman | Lopt soon was, And thence among men | came the monsters all. — Hyndluljoth 43, trans. Bellows (1923)
Read it slowly, because there is nowhere else to read it. Somewhere, at some time the poem does not name, a woman was burned — or her heart was; the verse gives us only the embers and what lay in them. Loki found the heart half-cooked and ate it. And from the eaten heart of the woman, Loki — the poem switches, just here, to his other name, Lopt — was "with child." Not the woman. Him. And from that pregnancy, says the fourth line, came the monsters. All of them. Among men.
Four lines. No name for the woman, no fire for the embers, no date, no place, no consequence the poem stays to watch. In a fragment that spends its breath telling where every kind of thing comes from, this is the entry for monsters, and the old books never mention it again.
Because it is worth remembering what this stanza lives in. It is not, strictly, in a poem anyone meant to keep. №38 told the whole comedy: two poems "clumsily put together" by "some blundering copyist," the second a fragment whose name survives, as Bellows says, by a curious chance — Snorri quoted one stanza of it and told us what it was called. Bellows renders the name "the short Voluspo." And here the series can add something №38 could not, because tonight we have the handbook open to the very page where that one quotation lives. Snorri, explaining where the Rime-Giants come from, writes: "and thence are come the races of the Rime-Giants, as it says in Völuspá the Less" —
All the witches | spring from Witolf, All the warlocks | are of Willharm, And the spell-singers | spring from Swarthead; All the ogres | of Ymir come. — Völuspá the Less, quoted in Gylfaginning V, trans. Brodeur (1916)
The short Völuspá; Völuspá the Less. Two translators, two names for the same accidental poem — and two name-sets inside the stanza itself, for Bellows prints the same four lines as sybils from Vitholf, seers from Vilmeith, workers of charms from Svarthofthi (№38 quoted them; last week's telling leaned on their wood-dwelling cousins). Witch-kind from one ancestor, warlock-kind from another, spell-singers from a third, and every ogre from Ymir: the fragment is a taxonomy. It is the poem you consult when you want to know whence — the question №48's mill-maidens answered in a family tree, the question №49 asked of the Ironwood's nameless mother. Everything monstrous or magical gets a source and a founder.
And eight stanzas after Snorri's quotation ends, the same taxonomy files its entry for the monsters themselves. Their founder is not a race or a wood. It is a meal.
Now watch what the marginalia do with it, because tonight the editor's note is a small drama in its own right. Bellows, under the stanza, in full:
Nothing further is known of the myth here referred to, wherein Loki (Lopt) eats the cooked heart of a woman and thus himself gives birth to a monster. The reference is not likely to be to the serpent, as, according to Snorri (Gylfaginning, 34), the wolf, the serpent, and Hel were all the children of Loki and Angrbotha. — Bellows, note to Hyndluljoth 43 (1923)
The first sentence is the surrender №38 quoted, and it deserves its fame: an editor who can find a cross-reference for nearly every line in the corpus writes, of this one, that nothing further is known. But read the rest and count the quiet arguments. The verse says the heart was half-cooked — that is the detail that makes it a found thing, a scavenger's supper, interrupted and imperfect; the note flattens it to "the cooked heart," done and deliberate. The verse says "the monsters all" — a whole category, sourced; the note allows Loki "a monster," one, unnamed. And then the note does the most honest and most telling thing marginalia can do: it reaches for the handbook to keep the poem in line. The stanza cannot mean the Midgard Serpent, Bellows reasons, because according to Snorri the serpent already has a mother — Angrboda, whose tidy three-child tally readers of last week's telling have already seen weighed and filed. The prose is called in to overrule the poem the note is annotating. Which would be a comfort, except for one thing the series verified tonight from cover to cover: on the matter of the eaten heart, Snorri says nothing at all. The handbook that retells everything — that files the divorce twice, the napkin twice, the tears twice — never touches this myth. The only witness is the stanza, and the stanza says monsters all.
So set the stanza against the ledger it embarrasses. The handbook introduces Loki with a roster line №11 made famous in this series — the mischief-monger, the first father of falsehoods — and №11 stopped quoting exactly where tonight's telling needs to begin, because the rest of the sentence is a family record:
he is named Loki or Loptr, son of Fárbauti the giant; his mother was Laufey or Nál; his brothers are Býleistr and Helblindi. — Gylfaginning XXXIII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
There is Lopt, the alias the stanza reaches for at the moment of the impossible motherhood — the handbook knows the name well. There are a father and a mother and two brothers, all named: Loki arrives in the mythology better documented than most gods. The next chapter — №49 quoted its opening, the three children "gat" with Angrboda, the prophecy, the mother's blood weighed first — brings King Gangleri, before it is done, to the whole tradition's verdict in one word. "Marvellous ill children did Loki beget," he says. Beget. The king has been listening to a chapter of fatherhood, and fatherhood is what the word records.
But the handbook itself knows that is not the whole grammar of Loki's parenthood. It knows because it says so, eight chapters later, in its own voice.
The tale is the building of Asgard's wall — №11 told it in passing, and the series lets the handbook have it properly tonight. A wright offers to build the gods an impregnable citadel; his price is Freyja, the sun, and the moon; the bargain is struck on a deadline the gods believe impossible, until his stallion Svadilfari turns out to haul stone worth "more rough work by half than did the wright." When the wall nears finish, the gods convene in something close to panic and ask who got them into this. The answer is a full formal name: it "must have counselled this who is wont to give evil advice, Loki Laufeyarson" — note the name; we will want it in a moment. Threatened with an ill death, Loki swears to spoil the bargain, cost what it might. And so, on an evening when the wright drives out for stone, "a mare bounded forth from a certain wood and whinnied to him." The stallion snaps his traces; the horses run all night; the work misses its deadline; the wright falls into giant's fury and Thor pays him "the wright's wage, and not with the sun and the moon." And then Snorri, without lowering his voice, completes the story:
But Loki had such dealings with Svadilfari, that somewhat later he gave birth to a foal, which was gray and had eight feet; and this horse is the best among gods and men. — Gylfaginning XLII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
He gave birth. The prose does not blink, does not euphemize, does not look away. №11 put the consequence in one line this series has repeated since — the best horse among gods and men has Loki for a mother — and the poems know it too: the naming-stanza last week's telling leaned on pairs the wolf with his mother in its first line and, in its second, has Loki bear Sleipnir to Svathilfari, which Bellows glosses plainly as Loki "in the guise of a mare." At Ægir's feast, №31 heard the same fact flung across the benches as an insult, which tells you the poets considered it common knowledge. So the record is unambiguous and doubly witnessed: the handbook can say, of Loki, he gave birth, and file the child among the treasures of the world.
Which makes what the handbook's other half does next so quietly extraordinary. And notice, before we turn the page, what Snorri called him at the exact moment the gods needed someone to blame: Laufeyarson. His mother's son. Fárbauti fathered him and the mythology knows it — yet when the prose reaches for his full name, here and again in the tale of Sif's hair that №28 told, the name it builds is built on Laufey. The tradition itself files Loki by his mother.
Readers of the last few tellings know the pattern: when this series wants to know what the mythology officially thinks of someone, it opens the handbook's kenning-lists — the entries that taught young poets what a god may be called. Njörd's entry proved his name with his wife's grief; Freyr's with a blessing; Freyja's with six stanzas of weeping. Here, at last, is the entry for Loki — the question "How should one periphrase Loki?" — and it is worth quoting at length, because it is a biography in titles:
Father of the Monster of Ván (that is, Fenris-Wolf), and of the Vast Monster (that is, the Midgard Serpent), and of Hel, and Nari, and Áli; Kinsman and Uncle, Evil Companion and Bench-Mate of Odin and the Æsir, Visitor and Chest-Trapping of Geirrödr, Thief of the Giants, of the Goat, of Brísinga-men, and of Idunn's Apples, Kinsman of Sleipnir, Husband of Sigyn, Foe of the Gods, Harmer of Sif's Hair, Forger of Evil, the Sly God, Slanderer and Cheat of the Gods, Contriver of Baldr's Death, the Bound God, Wrangling Foe of Heimdallr and of Skadi. — Skáldskaparmál XVI, trans. Brodeur (1916)
It reads like this series' own index. The Chest-Trapping of Geirrödr is №35's telling; the Thief of Idunn's Apples is №25's; the Harmer of Sif's Hair began №28; the Contriver of Baldr's Death is №12's grief; the Bound God is №31's ending; the wrangling foes are №15's watchman and №17's huntress. The entry opens, before the span quoted here, with his parents — son of Fárbauti and Laufey, both named — and his brothers. And then, look: the fatherhoods, filed with a clerk's precision. Father of the wolf — by his fetter's river, the kenning built from the very slaver №5 watched run. Father of the serpent. Father of Hel. Father of Nari, and of Áli — two sons here, where Gylfaginning's roster line said "Nari or Narfi," one son with two names; №31 met the same family arithmetic refusing to settle at the binding, and the entry leaves it unsettled still.
And then the horse. The horse the handbook's own prose said, in so many words, he gave birth to. The entry files it: Kinsman of Sleipnir.
Kinsman. The word a genealogist uses when he knows there is a relation and declines to draw the line. Five children filed under Father of, each by name — and the one child the tradition twice, in both its books, records Loki bearing, softened into the vaguest word in the family vocabulary. The entry can say Husband of Sigyn; it cannot say Mother of Sleipnir, though its own Gylfaginning is the page that makes the claim true. And the heart-brood — the "monsters all" of tonight's stanza — are not in the entry at all. Not as children, not as kin, not even as a rumor. The official record of what Loki may be called keeps his fatherhoods exact, his motherhood anonymous, and his strangest brood off the books entirely.
The entry then proves itself with one citation, as the handbook's entries do, and even the citation is on theme. The stanza is Úlfr Uggason's, and it sets two parentages against each other at a stone in the sea:
The famed rain-bow's defender, Ready in wisdom, striveth At Singasteinn with Loki, Fárbauti's sin-sly offspring; The son of mothers eight and one, Mighty in wrath, possesses The Stone ere Loki cometh: I make known songs of praise. — Úlfr Uggason, quoted in Skáldskaparmál XVI, trans. Brodeur (1916)
Heimdall and Loki, wrestling for a stone: and the poet names each combatant by his birth. Heimdall is "The son of mothers eight and one" — the nine mothers №38 counted at the world's edge — motherhood multiplied past all sense, worn as a title. Loki is "Fárbauti's sin-sly offspring" — his father's son, and only his father's. Snorri's gloss under the stanza reads: "Here it is written that Heimdallr is the son of nine mothers." It is; and it is also written, in the same eight lines, that the skalds gave the mythology's most famous mother of monsters no mother-name at all. One god may have nine mothers. The other may not be one.
There is one figure left in the stanza, and she has been waiting in the embers this whole telling. The woman. Her name is nowhere stated either — last week's title, earned twice in two weeks. Who was she, whose heart could carry the origin of every monster among men? The poem does not say; the handbook does not know her; Bellows does not guess.
And here the series must be honest about an itch every reader of the old poems eventually feels. The poems do remember a burned woman — one, famously, whom №8 met at the beginning of the first war in the world: Gollveig, speared and burned in the hall of Hor, "Three times burned, | and three times born, / Oft and again, | yet ever she lives." A woman, a fire, a body that would not stay finished — and a half-cooked heart in someone's embers. If you want them to be the same woman, you are in good company. But you are off the page, and this series stays on it: no line in either book joins them. Bellows reads Gollveig's burning as something else entirely — the lines — one or both of them "probably interpolated" — "seem to symbolize the refining of gold by fire," he writes, and he passes along Müllenhoff's guess that "Gollveig is another name for Freyja"; and the application of the witch-name in the next stanza to Gollveig is, he concedes, "far from clear" even to him. Nothing there about a heart; nothing in Hyndluljóth about a hall. Two fires, two nameless-or-many-named women, and no bridge between them but the reader's wanting one. The old books keep them apart, so tonight's telling does too — and notes only this: that in a tradition which files every kind by its founder, the founder of the monsters is a woman reduced to one organ, found by the one god willing to eat it.
So run the tally the way the handbook runs its own. Loki, son of Fárbauti and Laufey — both on record, and the tradition's formal name for him built, against all its patrilineal habit, on the mother. Father of five, filed by name, monster by monster. Mother of one horse — the prose says gave birth, the poem says bore, and the official entry says kinsman, which is the sound a ledger makes when it clears its throat. And mother, by his own body, of "the monsters all" that went among men — an origin recorded in exactly four lines, in a fragment Bellows rated "a late and very inferior imitation", inside a poem two poems were fooled into sharing, under a note that argues with it, uncopied by the handbook that copied everything twice. The smallest telling in the old books survives the way the strangest things in this series always seem to: not because anyone kept it, but because no one quite managed to lose it. The taxonomy needed an entry for monsters. The entry it got was one nobody — not the editor, not the handbook, not the kenning-clerks — was willing to file under its true heading. The stanza files it anyway. With child from the woman | Lopt soon was — the ledger looked away; the poem did not.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else — may your hearths hold nothing stranger than supper, and may every entry in your ledger be filed under its true name.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — Hyndluljoth 43 and notes 42–43, introductory note; Voluspo 21 and notes 21–22. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1916) — Gylfaginning V, XXXIII, XXXIV, XLII; Skáldskaparmál XVI and XXXV. All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: tonight's stanza ended somewhere the series has never followed it — the monsters went "among men." So next week, for the first time in fifty tellings, the series opens a book that is not an Edda: the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, a churchman writing in Latin around 1200, Englished by Oliver Elton — and meets one of them walking. Saxo, being a historian, files the monster under rumour — "a fabulous yet common rumour has invented tales about his birth which are contrary to reason and flatly incredible," he sniffs of the hero Starkad — and then transmits the tales anyway: some relate that he was "sprung from giants, and betrayed his monstrous birth by an extraordinary number of hands," until the god Thor tore four of them off, so that his body "was thenceforth chastened to a better appearance, and kept within the bounds of human shortness." A monster edited into a man, by a god's hand and a historian's raised eyebrow — tonight's telling has seen both tools before. Then Odin took an interest, and endowed him "with three spans of mortal life, that he might be able to commit in them as many abominable deeds." Three lifetimes, priced in advance at three crimes. The first, ancient tradition says, was a king who trusted him: a sacrifice staged as "the mere semblance of a penalty," a noose of withies, and the moment the semblance stopped pretending. The old books outside the Eddas keep their monsters in the shape of men — and next week the series walks out to meet the first of them.