Trolls, Giants & the Monstrous

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 gods Gylfi hears of are vivid and flawed. Odin the Allfather rules them, one-eyed, having given an eye for a draught of wisdom — the same one-eyed wanderer who, in Sigurd's saga, strides into the hall to thrust a sword into the Branstock for the Völsungs and later shatters that sword in battle, the god reaching down into the legends of men. Thor, his son, strongest of all, defends gods and men against the giants with his hammer. But the most dangerous of the Æsir is one of their own: Loki, clever and beautiful and treacherous, giant-born, counted among the gods yet forever working against them.^[1]

Loki is the engine of much of the mythology — sometimes the gods' rescuer by his wits, sometimes the author of their troubles, always ambiguous. The saga-world's fascination with the clever survivor who works by guile rather than honour — Þrándr of the Faroes, Snorri the Priest — has its divine archetype here. Loki is mind unmoored from loyalty, and the gods keep him close because he is useful, right up until the day his cleverness turns to malice and he engineers the one death they cannot bear. In a pantheon doomed to fall, it is fitting that the agent of the fall sits at the gods' own table.

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.

At Þórhallsstaðir a shepherd named Glámr — a big, surly, godless Swede — died on a haunted hillside one Yule and would not stay dead. He walked: rode the roofs by night, broke the doors, killed beasts and men and servants, until no one would stay on the farm and the whole valley lay under his terror. He was a draugr, the living dead, and the strongest dark thing in the sagas.^[1]

Grettir, drawn by exactly the kind of challenge no one else would face, came to the farm and waited. He let Glámr break in and lay still under his cloak while the monster tore the hall apart — and then they grappled. It was the hardest wrestling of Grettir's life: through the wrecked hall, out into the night, neither able to throw the other, the strongest living man against the strongest dead one.^[2]

This journey gathers the last poems of the great heroic cycle — the bitter dregs after Sigurd and the Niflungs are gone. It opens with Brynhildr, the valkyrie-queen whose love and wounded pride set the whole tragedy in motion, now dead by her own choice and burned on Sigurd's pyre. In Helreið Brynhildar — 'Brynhild's Ride to Hel' — her wagon rolls down the road to the realm of the dead, and a giantess bars her way and reviles her for a wanton who caused men's deaths.^[1]

Brynhild answers her, defending her life and her love across the whole arc of her story — the sleep Odin laid on her, the betrayal by which she was tricked into marrying the wrong man, her love for Sigurd that never died. It is a proud woman's apologia, spoken on the road to death: not repentance but vindication, the valkyrie insisting on the meaning of her doomed life even as she rides into the dark. With this the first great knot of the cycle — Sigurd, Brynhild, the broken troth — is finally closed, and the story passes wholly to the one who must live on: Guðrún.