Hyndla

Hyndla is the giantess who knows the bloodlines. Freyja rouses her from her cave and makes her ride out into the night to recite the long ancestry of Freyja's favourite, the young man Óttar — for a wager turns on his proving his descent, and the giantess holds the genealogies the way other beings hold treasure. Reluctant, sharp-tongued, seeing exactly through the goddess's flattery (she knows the 'boar' Freyja rides beside her is Óttar in disguise), Hyndla nonetheless unrolls the great catalogue of heroes and kin, and at the end a draught of memory-ale so that Óttar will remember it. She is the keeper of lineage, the figure the Norse turned to when the question was not 'what happened' but 'whose son was he, and whose before that' — wisdom as the unbroken chain of names that tells a man who he is.