Angrboða

Angrboða — her name means 'she who brings grief' — is the giantess of Jötunheim who mothered the end of the world. With Loki she bore the three children in whom all the gods' doom was folded: the wolf Fenrir who will swallow Odin, the Midgard Serpent who will kill Thor, and Hel who rules the dead. She barely appears in the surviving tales; she is almost pure origin, the dark womb of the prophecies. Yet everything that brings the gods down passes first through her — the giant-blood that, mixed with Loki's malice, produces the monsters the Æsir can only bind and postpone, never undo. She is the mother of doom, named for the grief she brought, present in the mythology mostly as the source from which the ruin of the gods came into the world.