The Wisdom and Adventures of the Gods

If Hávamál showed Odin's wisdom and Völuspá his vision of doom, these poems show him seeking — restlessly, at any cost. In Vafþrúðnismál, the Allfather, against Frigg's worried counsel, travels to the hall of the wisest of giants, Vafthruthnir, to test his lore in a riddle-contest, each staking his own head on the outcome.^[1] They trade questions about the make and history and end of the world — a whole cosmology delivered as a deadly quiz.

Odin wins, of course, but the way he wins is the point: at the last he asks the one question no one can answer — what he himself whispered in the ear of his dead son Baldr on the funeral pyre.^[2] The giant, realizing he has been contending with Odin himself, knows he is doomed. This is the essence of Odin in the myths: a god so hungry for knowledge that he will gamble his head to gain it, who has given an eye and hanged himself for wisdom, and who carries always the one secret grief — Baldr — that even his vast knowing cannot heal. The chief of the gods is, before all else, a seeker.

Grímnismál gives us Odin in a grimmer guise. Disguised and calling himself Grímnir, the god is taken for a spy by a king he had himself once fostered, and is bound between two blazing fires for eight nights without food or drink, the flames scorching him.^[1] And out of that torment he begins to speak — pouring forth a vast revelation of the cosmos: the halls of the gods, the World-Ash and its creatures, the rivers of the worlds, the making of the earth from Ymir, the wolves that chase the sun.

It is the same pattern as his self-hanging in Hávamál: wisdom wrung out of suffering. The bound, burning god speaks the deepest truths of the universe, and only at the end reveals his true name — Odin — at which the horrified king falls on his own sword. The poem is one of the richest single sources for Norse cosmology, and it carries the tradition's bone-deep conviction that real knowledge has a price paid in pain. Even for the god of wisdom, the cosmos is something suffered into speech, not simply known.

Skírnismál turns from Odin's knowing to the gods' desires — and shows that even a god can be undone by love. Freyr, the great god of fertility and plenty, sits on Odin's high seat from which all worlds can be seen, and there he glimpses Gerd, a radiant giant-maid whose bare arms light up sea and sky.^[1] He falls instantly, helplessly, sickeningly in love — pining, unable to eat or sleep or speak of it.

He sends his servant Skirnir to woo her, lending him his horse and — fatally — his magic sword, the blade that fights of itself. Skirnir wins Gerd only by terrible threats of curse and monstrous exile, and she yields. But the cost is hidden in the bargain: Freyr has given away the sword that would have defended him, and the myths record that at Ragnarök he will face the fire-giant Surtr weaponless and fall. It is a poignant, very human idea — that a god surrenders his greatest protection for love, and pays for it at the end of the world. Desire, even divine desire, has consequences that reach to the last day.

Hárbarðsljóð is one of the Edda's comic gems, and a revealing one. Thor, tramping home from the east, comes to a sound he cannot cross and hails the ferryman on the far side to row him over.^[1] The ferryman — who calls himself Harbarth ('Greybeard') but is plainly Odin in disguise — refuses, and instead the two fall into a long, escalating flyting, a contest of boasts and insults across the water.

The exchange is pointed: Odin boasts of seducing women and stirring up wars and consorting with kings and poets; Thor counters with his honest killing of giants and trolls, his defence of gods and men. It is a comic clash of two ideals — the wily, amoral, aristocratic cunning of Odin against the blunt, plain, hard-working strength of Thor — and Odin gets much the better of the war of words, leaving Thor to find his own way around. Beneath the comedy sits a real cultural tension the whole corpus knows: the contest between cleverness and force, between the lordly schemer and the dependable strong man. Here the two are literally father and son, shouting at each other across a strip of water.

Hymiskviða sends Thor on one of his great adventures. The gods need a vast cauldron to brew ale, and Thor goes to the giant Hymir to fetch one — and on the way the poem gives us the most famous of all Thor's exploits: the fishing for the Midgard-Serpent.^[1] Rowing far out with the reluctant giant, Thor baits his great hook with an ox-head and casts it into the deep — and the world-encircling serpent itself takes the bait.

Thor hauls the monster up to the gunwale, the two locked in a stare of pure enmity, and raises his hammer to kill it — when the terrified Hymir, fearing the sea will swallow them all, cuts the line, and the serpent sinks back into the deep. It is the great might-have-been of Norse myth: the one time Thor nearly destroyed his ultimate enemy, foiled by a giant's terror. And it is a foreshadowing — for the Midgard-Serpent is the very foe Thor is fated to meet and kill at Ragnarök, dying himself of its venom nine steps later. This calm sea, with the monster on the hook, is the first act of a duel that will end the world.

The collection closes with its darkest and quietest poem, Baldrs Draumar — 'Baldr's Dreams'. The gods gather in alarm because Baldr, the bright god, has been troubled by ominous dreams of his own death.^[1] To learn what they mean, Odin saddles his horse and rides down the long road to Hel, to the grave of a long-dead seeress, and wakes her with spells of the dead to compel her prophecy.

She tells him, grudgingly and with dread, the truth he has come to fear: that the benches of Hel stand decked and waiting for Baldr, that he will be slain by his blind brother's hand, and that vengeance will follow. It is the same doom the Seeress sings in Völuspá and the death told in Gylfaginning, here approached from its most intimate angle — a father riding into the realm of the dead to hear, from a corpse, that he cannot save his son. In that image is the whole tragic grandeur of Odin: the god who knows everything, including the one thing he most wishes were not true, and who rides willingly to hear it confirmed. These seven poems show the gods knowing, doing, desiring, and grieving — powerful and flawed and, every one of them, walking knowingly toward an end they cannot escape.