Hymiskviða — Thor's Cauldron-Quest & the Serpent

The gods gather to feast in the hall of the sea-giant Ægir, but there is no vessel large enough to brew ale for them all.^[1] They cast the twigs and read the blood-omens, and learn where such a cauldron may be found — and the quest falls, as the hardest tasks do, to Thor.

It is a homely, almost domestic beginning for a great adventure: the gods simply want enough ale, and lack the pot to make it. But the Norse myths delight in turning a household want into an epic errand. The need for a brewing-kettle will send the strongest god to the end of the world and bring him face to face with his ultimate enemy. The poem starts at the feast-bench and ends at the edge of doom.

Týr tells Thor where the cauldron is: far to the east, beyond Élivágar at the end of heaven, dwells the wise and fierce giant Hymir, who owns a kettle a mile in depth — and Hymir, Týr reveals, is his own father (or grandsire).^[1] The two gods set out together for the giant's hall.

The one-handed war-god Týr makes an apt companion — and the kinship is a nice touch, the god of oaths leading Thor to a giant-relative for a borrowing that will end in theft and slaughter. The journey east, beyond the freezing rivers to the world's edge, marks this as a true otherworld-quest. Thor is going where gods do not casually go, into the giant-lands, for a thing the gods cannot do without.

They reach Hymir's hall and are received warily; Thor's monstrous appetite alarms the household — at supper he devours two whole oxen, eating the giant out of provisions.^[1] Hymir, his stores wrecked, declares they must go fishing the next day if they are to eat at all.

The comedy of Thor's hunger is a recurring delight of the myths (it powers the whole Þrymskviða too): the thunder-god as a force of appetite as much as strength. Here it has a plot-purpose — by eating the giant's larder bare, Thor forces the fishing trip that is the poem's centre. The gluttony and the great deed are linked: it is precisely because Thor eats like a catastrophe that he ends up in the boat where he will meet the serpent.

They row out to fish. Hymir on a single cast pulls up two whales — but Thor, sitting in the stern, has a greater catch in mind. He has taken the head of the giant's best ox for bait, and rows out far over the deep, and fixes the ox-head on his hook; and there, gaping at the bait, rises the foe of the gods — the serpent that girdles all the earth beneath the sea.^[1]

This is the most famous image in all the Thor myths: the thunder-god fishing for the Midgard Serpent. The detail of the ox-head — Thor decapitating Hymir's prize beast for bait — is gloriously characteristic, and the slow rise of the world-encircling monster to the surface is one of the great moments of Norse poetry and art. Thor has gone fishing and hooked the apocalypse: his own fated enemy, the serpent that lies coiled around the world biting its tail, drawn up at the end of his line.

Thor hauls the venomous serpent up to the boat and smites it with his hammer on its loathsome head — the brother of the wolf Fenrir, Loki's monstrous child.^[1] But at the terrible sight the giant Hymir loses his nerve and, in panic, cuts the fishing-line — and the serpent sinks back into the sea, unkilled.

The encounter is left deliberately unfinished, and that is the point. Thor and the Midgard Serpent are fated to destroy each other at Ragnarök — Thor will kill the serpent and then fall, nine steps off, from its venom — and so the myth cannot let him finish it here. Hymir's panicked cut saves the timeline: the great enemies meet, the hammer falls, and then they are parted, their final reckoning held back for the end of the world. It is a rehearsal for Ragnarök, broken off at the last instant.

Back at the hall, Hymir will not give up the great cauldron without a test: Thor must break the giant's seemingly unbreakable drinking-cup.^[1] Thor hurls it at stone pillars to no effect — until, tipped off that the cup will only shatter against the giant's own thick skull, he throws it at Hymir's head, and the cup breaks while the giant's head does not.

The Norse love these riddle-tests of strength, where brute force must be aimed cleverly. The image of the indestructible cup that only the giant's own hard head can break is a small comic gem, and it earns Thor the prize: the cauldron is his. But Hymir, twice bested — his serpent-quarry lost, his cup broken on his own skull — is not done resisting, and the gods must still get the great kettle out of the giant-lands and home.

Thor lifts the mile-deep cauldron onto his head and bears it off — and when Hymir and a host of giants pursue, Thor turns and smites them with his hammer.^[1] (The journey home has one rueful note: one of Thor's goats is left lame, the saga says, through the mischief of Loki.) The gods have their brewing-kettle at last.

So the homely errand ends in triumph and slaughter: the cauldron won, the pursuing giants battered, the ale-feast secured. Hymiskviða is Thor at his fullest — the prodigious appetite, the prodigious strength, the giants beaten, and at its heart the unforgettable fishing trip where he hooked the world-serpent and met, for a moment, the foe that will one day kill him. It belongs with Þrymskviða as the Edda's great comic-heroic Thor adventure: the people's god doing the gods' heavy lifting, larger than life and twice as hungry, and brushing once against his own doom in the deep.