Geirröðr

Geirröðr is the king who tortured a god and died on his own sword for it. Warned by Frigg that a stranger was coming to do him harm, he seized a blue-cloaked wanderer who would give no name and set him between two fires to burn for eight nights, giving him neither food nor drink — not knowing he had chained Odin himself. Only the king's young son Agnar showed the prisoner a kindness, a single horn of drink, and was blessed for it. Through the long burning the stranger at last began to speak, pouring out the secret names of the worlds and the gods, until he named himself — Odin — and the king understood what he had done. Geirröðr leapt up to free his guest, his sword half-drawn, slipped, and fell on his own blade. He is the Norse warning in a single fate: the man who answers the unknown guest with cruelty instead of welcome, and is destroyed by the god he failed to honour.