Thor's Wedding — the Lay of Thrym

Among the dark and fated poems of the Edda, Þrymskviða stands out as something rare: a comedy, and a genuinely funny one. It opens with Thor waking in a rage to find that his hammer Mjöllnir — the strongest weapon of the gods, the one thing that keeps the giants at bay — has been stolen in the night.^[1] For the gods this is no joke at all: without the hammer, Asgard itself is defenceless.

The thief, it turns out, is the giant Thrym, who has buried the hammer eight leagues deep in the earth — and he will return it on one condition: that the gods give him the goddess Freyja as his bride. The whole poem turns on this demand and the gods' increasingly absurd efforts to meet it. It is worth seeing, beside the grandeur of Völuspá and the doom of the Sigurd lays, that the same mythology could laugh at itself — that the people who imagined Ragnarök also imagined their mightiest god losing his hammer and having to get it back by the most undignified means possible.

Loki, the gods' clever fixer, borrows Freyja's feather-cloak and flies to the land of the giants to learn the truth.^[1] Thrym, lounging and plaiting golden collars for his hounds, openly admits the theft and names his price: he will not give back the hammer until Freyja is brought to him as his wife.

The gods carry this demand to Freyja — and her reaction is one of the poem's great moments: she is so enraged at the very idea of being married off to a giant that she snorts with fury, and the famous Necklace of the Brisings bursts from her neck. She flatly refuses. So now the gods are stuck: the hammer is gone, the giant wants the one goddess who will not go, and Asgard is still undefended. They gather in council to find another way — and the way they find is the heart of the comedy.

The plan, proposed (in some tellings by the watchman-god Heimdall) and seized on in council, is gloriously absurd: since the giant wants a bride, they will send him one — but it will be Thor himself, dressed up as Freyja.^[1] They deck the thunder-god out in a woman's gown, hang the Necklace of the Brisings on him, set keys jangling at his belt as a housewife's would, pin a bridal veil over his fierce face, and crown him with a woman's headdress.

Thor objects furiously — he protests that the gods will call him unmanly for putting on a bride's dress — but Loki silences him with the plain truth: without the hammer, the giants will soon be living in Asgard. So pride yields to necessity. And Loki, ever the schemer, declares he will go along disguised as the bride's handmaid, the better to manage the deception. The image of the huge, red-bearded, hot-tempered thunder-god trussed up in a wedding gown and veil, with the trickster beside him in a maid's dress, is one the Norse audience clearly relished — the mightiest being in the world made comically ridiculous.

So Thor, decked as the bride, and Loki as the maid ride to the giants' hall, and the comedy reaches its peak at the wedding feast.^[1] The 'bride' falls on the food with a distinctly un-maidenly appetite — devouring a whole ox, eight salmon, all the dainties meant for the women, and washing it down with three casks of mead. Thrym is taken aback: never has he seen a bride eat or drink like that.

Each time the giant grows suspicious, quick-witted Loki, in his maid's disguise, smooths it over with a ready lie: the bride has eaten nothing for eight nights, so wild was her longing for Thrym. When the giant lifts the veil to kiss his bride and recoils from the terrible blazing eyes beneath it, Loki explains those away too — she has not slept for eight nights, so hot was her desire. It is farce of a high order: the monstrous truth barely hidden under the veil, the trickster's smooth excuses, the besotted giant believing what he wants to believe. The whole hall is one breath away from disaster, held together only by Loki's nerve.

Then comes the giant's fatal mistake. Delighted with his bride, Thrym calls for the hammer Mjöllnir to be brought out and laid in the bride's lap — to hallow the marriage, to bless the union, as was the custom.^[1] It is the one thing he must never do. The moment the hammer is set within his reach, Thor's long-suppressed wrath breaks loose.

In the poem's wonderful line, the heart in Thor's breast laughed when he saw his hammer again.^[2] He seizes Mjöllnir, throws off all pretence, and the wedding turns instantly to slaughter: he kills Thrym first, then the whole giant household, and the old giantess who had begged for a bride-gift gets a hammer-blow instead of gold.^[3] So Thor wins back his hammer and his honour, the giants are punished for their overreaching, and the gods' great weapon is restored — all through a scheme that cost the thunder-god his dignity for an afternoon. The greed of the giant, demanding what he should never have asked for, is his undoing: a very Norse moral wrapped in a very funny story.

Þrymskviða is short, fast, and built like a perfect joke, and its place in this atlas matters more than its length. Set beside Völuspá's vision of the world's end and the Sigurd lays' tragedy, it shows the other face of the Norse imagination — the one that could make its own gods ridiculous and laugh out loud.

And the laughter is not separate from the darkness; it sits right inside it. The same Thor who here loses his hammer and clumps off to a wedding in a dress is the god fated to die fighting the Midgard-Serpent at Ragnarök; the same Loki who saves the day here with his quick tongue is the betrayer who will lead the giants against the gods at the end. The poem's comedy is bright precisely because the world it sits in is dark — these are doomed gods, and they can still be funny. That is one of the truest things this corpus has to teach: that in a world without final victory, where every story bends toward an ending that cannot be escaped, people (and gods) still eat, scheme, boast, get caught out, and laugh. The North faced its doom with open eyes — and, sometimes, with a grin.