Norse Mythology Sleep Stories · The Nine Worlds to Ragnarok

Good evening. Or perhaps good night, by the time you find this, the difference may not matter. You've come here, I imagine, because you'd like to sleep, and you'd like a quiet story to carry you there. Tonight, we have one. Tonight we go north.

Far north. To a place that lived in human imagination for a thousand years before anyone thought to write it down, and that we know now only through fragments, copied centuries late by scribes who had themselves nearly forgotten the gods their grandparents kept. If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you to do very little. Close your eyes. Let your shoulders soften.

The story does not need your attention. It will keep moving whether you follow it or not. If you drift, that is the point. If you wake briefly and find we have moved on to another chapter, that is good. The almanac is patient.

Tonight, then, is the first episode. Episode one of twelve. We are beginning at the beginning, at the shape of the world itself, as the old Norse peoples understood it. Nine worlds. A tree at the center of everything.

Roots that reach down into the dark places, and branches that vanish into the stars. In time, we will meet the gods. We will meet the giants, and the elves, and the dwarves, and the one wolf who waits at the edge of all things. We will arrive, much later, at the end of the world. But not tonight.

Tonight, we only set the stage. And now, let us begin.

Chapter One. The North Before the Gods. Imagine, first, a place. Not a place from one of the stories, not yet. A real place.

The land of long winters, of black coastlines, of low gray skies that hang for months without changing. The fjords of what we now call Norway. The forests of what we now call Sweden. The high empty wind of the Icelandic interior. The salt cold of the islands strung north into the dark sea.

This is the world the storytellers lived in. It is important, I think, to begin there, not with the gods, but with the people who imagined them. Because the gods of the Norse are very particular gods. They were dreamed up by people who knew that winter could kill you. By people who had buried their friends in shallow graves cut into half frozen earth.

By people who had stood, on long nights, looking up at a sky so clear and so absolute that you could believe, without difficulty, that the stars themselves were burning fires in a great hall above the world. The Norse peoples, and that is a generous term for a loose family of cultures spread across Scandinavia and into Iceland and the Faroes and Greenland, were not, on the whole, soft people. They were farmers, mostly. They were fishermen. They were ironworkers, and shipbuilders, and weavers of wool.

They were also, when the season turned poor, raiders. The image we have inherited of them, horned helmets, axes raised, longships full of howling men, that image is largely a Victorian invention, much later, and not entirely fair. But it is fair to say that they understood violence. They lived close to it. And the gods they dreamed up understood it too.

Their world was, in some sense, a working farmer's world. There were the close things, the longhouse, the byre, the field, the hearth. There were the middle things, the boundary stones, the edges of the woods, the path down to the shore. And there were the far things, the open sea, the high mountains, the unmapped forests where it was said that other peoples lived. People who were not quite people.

People who were older than people. Or younger. Or made of different material entirely. Out of this geography came their cosmology. Out of their close hearth came the idea of Miðgarðr, the Middle Enclosure, the place where mortals lived.

Out of the wild edges came Útgarðr, the Outer Enclosure, the place where the giants lived. Out of the high sky came Ásgarðr, the place where the gods lived, with their golden halls and their high mead. And out of the deepest dark came Hel, with a little H, the cold gray country beneath the roots, where most of the dead went, eventually, to wait quietly for nothing in particular. But these were only four of the nine worlds. We will get to all of them.

Tonight, I want only to plant the picture in your mind, a tree, vast beyond imagining, holding the cosmos in its branches. Some worlds in its high boughs. Some worlds along its trunk. Some worlds tangled in its deepest roots. The Norse called this tree Yggdrasill.

The name is older than the stories themselves. It comes apart, if you press it, into two pieces. Drasill is a poetic word for a horse. Yggr, well, Yggr is one of the many names of Odin. The High One.

The Allfather. The god who, as we will hear in due course, hung from this very tree for nine days and nine nights, in pursuit of wisdom. So the name is half translatable: Yggr's horse. Odin's horse. The tree on which he rode himself.

But for now, we are still in the time before any of that. Before Odin. Before any of the gods you may have heard of. We are in the time before the worlds even existed. The Norse poets, and they were poets, before anything else; the stories we have were sung long before they were written, were unusually candid about how little they knew of the beginning.

In the great mythological poem the Vǫluspá, the wise woman who speaks the poem says, in the very first stanzas, that she remembers a time before the worlds were made. She remembers the void. She remembers the first beings. She remembers, she says, before Miðgarðr, before the Middle Enclosure was raised. And she remembers a sound, or perhaps the absence of a sound.

A great yawning. A great gap. Ginnungagap, she called it. The Yawning Void. That is where we begin, in the next chapter.

With nothing at all. Or with very nearly nothing, with a kind of space, a kind of absence, that the Norse mind imagined not as black emptiness but as something more like a great quiet that had not yet decided what to be. But before we go there, I want to say a small thing about the sources. Most of what we know about Norse mythology comes from two books, both written in Iceland in the thirteenth century, long after the conversion to Christianity, long after the old gods had been pushed to the edges of memory. The first is called the Poetic Edda, a collection of older mythological poems, copied down by a scribe whose name we have lost.

The second is called the Prose Edda, written by a man named Snorri Sturluson, who was himself a Christian, and who wrote his book in part as a kind of textbook, a manual to help young Icelandic poets understand the old metaphors they were still using in their verse. Snorri's Edda is more orderly, more readable, more like a story. The Poetic Edda is older, stranger, more fragmentary, and, most scholars agree, closer to the original tradition. Where the two disagree, this almanac will tell you. Where they're ambiguous, this almanac will not pretend otherwise.

The Norse worldview was a working mythology, lived for centuries, and the gods they kept were not the tidy gods of a single canonical text. They were the gods of a thousand longhouses, told a thousand ways. We will try, when we can, to keep that texture. For now, though, let me give you only this: a picture. A great tree.

Nine worlds hanging in its branches and along its trunk and around its roots. A cold sea at the edge of everything. A long dead wisewoman, somewhere in the dark, remembering when none of it yet existed. And a wind. The wind that always seems to be moving, in these stories.

The wind that came before the gods, that will outlast them, that is, perhaps, the only thing the Norse imagined to be older than the void itself. Listen for that wind, if you can, as you fall asleep. It runs all through the rest of this season. And now, the void itself.

Chapter Two. Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void. There is a phrase, at the very opening of the Vǫluspá, the Old Norse poem in which a long dead wise woman, called a vǫlva, recounts the beginning and the end of the world, that has given translators a great deal of trouble for the better part of two centuries. The phrase is short. It is only a few words long.

It runs, in the original: gap var ginnunga. The void was yawning. Or, more loosely: there was a great gap. The phrase itself comes after a stanza that tells us, with admirable economy, that in the beginning there was nothing at all. No sand.

No sea. No cold waves. No earth, no heaven above. There was only, and here the poet pauses, almost as if searching for the right word, the gap. The yawning.

Ginnungagap. I want to spend some time with this word, because the Norse conception of the primordial nothing is, in my reading, one of the most interesting things in any old mythology. The Greeks had Chaos, but Chaos for the Greeks was a roiling, churning, primal jumble, full of pre stuff. The Hebrews had the formless void of Genesis, but their void was traveled over by the spirit of God almost from the first sentence. The Vedic hymns of ancient India spoke of a kind of unbreathing single breath, neither being nor not being.

Each tradition reached for something different. The Norse reached for a hush. Ginnungagap was not black. It was not full of darkness. It was not even, strictly speaking, empty, emptiness, after all, implies a container, and there was no container yet.

It was simply a kind of held space. A kind of yawning. A kind of pause before any breath. If you have ever stood, very late at night, in a place so quiet that the silence itself seems to take on a weight, that is, perhaps, the closest a modern person can come to the feeling. Ginnungagap was a presence that had not yet become anything.

Snorri Sturluson, writing in the thirteenth century in his book the Prose Edda, tries to be a little more orderly about it. He writes that Ginnungagap was a great gap, yes, but a great gap with sides. To the north of it lay a realm called Niflheimr, the Mist Home, a place of cold and fog and frost so old it had no beginning. To the south of it lay another realm called Múspellsheimr, the Home of Fire, a place of heat and embers and sparks that flew up endlessly and went out endlessly and were replaced. And between them, in that long held space, lay Ginnungagap itself.

I should pause here to acknowledge something, because the almanac will keep its promises about being honest with you. The Vǫluspá itself does not describe Ginnungagap in this way. The Vǫluspá describes only the gap. It does not place a fire realm to one side and a frost realm to the other. That neat geography comes from Snorri, who was working two hundred years later, and who was almost certainly trying to make a tidy diagram of what had originally been a much stranger, much vaguer picture.

Most scholars now agree that Snorri's neatness should be taken with a grain of salt. He was a Christian writing about gods who were no longer worshipped, and he was, in some sense, organizing them on a page for the first time. So when I describe what comes next, the fire to the south, the frost to the north, the slow meeting of their breath in the middle, I want you to know that this is mostly Snorri's picture. The older poetry is messier. It hints.

It does not draw a map. Still. The picture is beautiful. And it has, over the centuries, become the standard way of imagining the Norse beginning. So I will give you Snorri's picture, gently, knowing that the truth was probably stranger.

To the south, then, far to the south, far beyond anywhere a person could walk, there was Múspellsheimr. The land of fire. We will hear more about it in the next chapter. For now, only this: imagine a place where heat had always existed, and would always exist, and where the air itself shimmered. A place no living thing could survive.

A place that, in the very beginning, no living thing yet existed to attempt. To the north, equally far, equally unreachable, there was Niflheimr. The land of mist. A place of cold so absolute it could not even be called cold; cold is something that happens to a thing, and there was no thing yet to be cold. It was simply the place where, in time, the first frost would begin to gather.

And between them, neither cold nor hot, neither bright nor dark, lay the gap. The held breath. There is one small detail I want to add, because I love it. In the Vǫluspá, when the wisewoman lists what was not yet present in this earliest age, she names, among the absences, gras. Grass.

There was no grass yet. Of all the things she might have named, no sun, no moon, no stars, no rivers, no shore, she chose, for some reason, to specifically mention grass. There was a gap. But no grass. I think about this often.

I think it tells us something about the people who first sang the Vǫluspá. To them, even grass, small, ordinary, ankle high grass, was a kind of miracle. It belonged to the made world. It was a sign that things had been put in order. And so, at the beginning, when nothing had been put in order yet, there was no grass.

The absence of grass was the absence of everything. If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you to hold that image for a moment, before we go on. The great quiet. The yawning. The place that has not yet decided to be a place.

And nowhere, in any direction, no grass. Not yet. You can feel, can't you, that something is about to coalesce. There is no narrative reason for it to do so, the void could, in principle, go on forever, and in some other tradition perhaps it does. But the Norse poets seem to have understood something about voids that all very old traditions seem to have understood, which is that they do not, in the end, stay empty.

Something will drift into the gap. Something will drift down from the north and up from the south, and they will meet in the middle. And out of that meeting, out of the simplest possible reaction, frost meeting heat, will come the first drops of water in the cosmos. And from those drops, in time, will come the first being. But that is the next chapter.

For now, only the gap. Only the great yawning that has not yet become anything else. Only the wind, somewhere, and yes, even here, in the void, there is wind in the old poetry; the Norse imagination could not quite conceive of a place with no wind in it at all. Only the wind, somewhere, very far off, moving against nothing, and making no sound. And the absence of grass.

Chapter Three. The First Fire and the First Frost. We left off, in the last chapter, with the void. With Ginnungagap. With the great held space between the fire realm and the frost realm.

With the absence of grass. Tonight, that long stillness is going to begin, very slowly, to end. I want to be careful, in this chapter, to honor how slowly the Norse imagined this. Most modern retellings of the creation story rush through what comes next, they give you a paragraph, perhaps, on the meeting of fire and ice, and then they hurry on to the first being. But the older poetry, when we can recover it, lingers.

The image of frost slowly creeping out into a void, of heat slowly pressing against it, of the long, long, long time before anything alive happens, this is, I think, one of the most patient images in any creation myth. The Norse mind seems to have understood that the universe took a great while to put itself in order, and saw no reason to hurry. So let us begin, then, with the frost. To the north of Ginnungagap lay Niflheimr. The Mist Home.

Or, in some older readings, simply the Dark Home, the syllable nifl in Old Norse carries a meaning closer to gloom than mist, and the realm may originally have been a place of darkness more than of fog. Either way, what mattered about Niflheimr is that it was old. Older than the gods. Older than the void's other edge. It had simply, somehow, always been there.

At the heart of Niflheimr there was, and this detail comes from Snorri, in the Prose Edda, a spring. A great spring of dark cold water. The name of this spring was Hvergelmir, which translates, loosely, as the Roaring Cauldron. From Hvergelmir, eleven rivers flowed. The Norse called them the Élivágar, which means something like the Ice Waves.

They poured outward, away from the heart of Niflheimr, and they ran a long way, and they froze. This is where, in the old poetic imagination, the long process began. The rivers ran. They poured out into the void. They froze, slowly, into great walls of ice that stretched out across the empty space.

They built up and built up and built up, over what must have been an unimaginable stretch of time, there is no clock in this story, and no calendar; the time before the gods is, in the deepest sense, untimed, until the cold of Niflheimr had pressed itself a long way across the void, and Ginnungagap, which had been hushed and empty and grass less, now had, in the north of it, a great wall of slow black ice. Meanwhile, to the south, the other thing was happening. Múspellsheimr, the Home of Fire, was as old as Niflheimr, and just as opposite. Where Niflheimr was dark and cold and damp, Múspellsheimr was bright and hot and dry. Where Niflheimr had a spring at its heart, Múspellsheimr had, well, the sources are less clear on what exactly stood at the heart of the fire realm.

The Vǫluspá does not describe it in detail. Snorri describes it, but mostly as a place of perpetual burning. Most translators settle on something like an endless field of fire, with sparks rising and falling, and embers cooling and reigniting, in a kind of slow eternal blaze. There is, however, one figure that all the sources do agree on. At the edge of Múspellsheimr, at the very southern boundary of the world, the place where fire met void, there stood a being.

His name was Surtr. The Black One. We will hear far more of him in later episodes, because he will play a part in the ending of the world; he is the one who, in the very last days, will lead the armies of fire against the gods. But for now, in the first age, he simply stood there. Watching.

Waiting. The sources do not tell us what he was waiting for. He carried a flaming sword. I find this detail extraordinary, the more I think about it. Most creation myths begin with quiet, with darkness, with water, with breath.

The Norse creation begins with a sentinel. Even at the very beginning, when there are no gods and no humans and no worlds, the Norse imagination places a figure on guard. As if the universe has been at risk, even from its first second, of something terrible. So. We have Niflheimr to the north, with its spring and its eleven rivers and its ever creeping walls of ice.

We have Múspellsheimr to the south, with its endless burning and its silent watchman. And between them, the void, which has been getting slowly less empty. What happens next is, in some ways, the simplest physics in any mythology. The ice from the north creeps a long way into the gap. The fire from the south sends its heat a long way into the gap.

And somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the very heart of Ginnungagap, where the absolute cold of the north met the absolute heat of the south, the ice began to melt. It happened slowly. It would have happened slowly. There is no rushing in this story. The first drops of water in the universe formed on the southern face of the great ice walls, and they hung there for a long time, gathering weight, before they finally fell.

They fell into nothing, into the void, and they did not land anywhere, because there was nothing to land on. But they were there. Drops of water. The first liquid that had ever existed. I'd like you to hold that image, if you are still with me.

The void, mostly empty. The great walls of ice. The slow sun warm of the fire realm pressing against them. And, beginning to form, drops of water, perfectly clear, perfectly cold, perfectly slow, hanging from the edges of the ice and then falling, one by one, into the great quiet. In Snorri's account, what happens next is that the drops begin to take a shape.

The Prose Edda is quite specific about this. The drops, as they fell, did not simply become water. They began, and here Snorri's language gets strange, almost reverent, to quicken. To stir. To become, somehow, alive.

The Norse word that is sometimes used for this is kvikna, which carries the sense of an awakening, or a quickening, the way an unborn child quickens in the womb. Something in the drops of water was beginning to live. And from that quickening, from the slow meeting of fire and frost, in the heart of a void that had been empty since before time, there began to form, slowly, the first body. Its name was Ymir. We will spend the next chapter with him.

But for tonight, only this: the void was not empty anymore. The ice was meeting the fire. The first drops of water were falling. And something, deep in the middle of all that meeting, was beginning to stir. The wind was still moving.

It had not stopped, in the long age between Chapter Two and Chapter Three. It had simply waited. Now, perhaps, it was starting to bring news.

Chapter Four. Ymir, the First Being. There is a being now. A body. A shape in the void.

I want to say his name carefully, because the Norse sources give it to us in two forms, and both are correct. In the Prose Edda, in Snorri's account, he is called Ymir. In one of the oldest mythological poems of the Poetic Edda, the Vafþrúðnismál, he is called Aurgelmir, a name whose first part is uncertain, but which most scholars translate as something like the Gravel Yeller or the Mud Yeller, referring, perhaps, to the wet primal slurry of melting frost and fire warmed earth from which he was made. Most scholars now think these are two names for the same being, kept in different traditions and eventually reconciled by Snorri into a single figure. The almanac will use Ymir, because it is the more familiar name.

But you may keep both, in your mind, if you prefer. Ymir was, in the Norse imagination, the first living thing. He was older than the gods. He was older than the worlds. He was older than the first dawn.

He came into being, as we said in the last chapter, from the meeting of fire and frost, from the drops of water that quickened in the heart of Ginnungagap, in the warm place where the ice walls of Niflheimr were finally beginning to melt against the breath of Múspellsheimr. He was not a god. The sources are very clear on this. He was something older than gods. He was a jǫtunn, a giant, though the word giant is not quite right; the Old Norse jǫtunn refers to a being of great size and great age, not necessarily evil, not necessarily hostile, but other.

Older. Pre divine. The first jǫtunn was Ymir, and from him, eventually, all the other giants of Norse mythology would descend. Snorri describes Ymir's appearance only obliquely. He says that Ymir was very large.

He says that Ymir was, in some readings, neither male nor female, or perhaps both at once; the Old Norse word used for him, hrímþurs, the frost giant, does not specify a sex, and there is some indication in the poetic tradition that the first being was, in modern terms, intersex. From Ymir's body, in time, other giants would be born, not in the way that modern living things are born, but more strangely, more primally. The sources say that when Ymir slept, sweat formed under his arms, and from the sweat under his left arm, a man and a woman grew together, and from his two feet, a son was born. This is the way the first family of giants came into being, in the Norse imagination, not from coupling, but from the body itself, almost as if the body of Ymir was a kind of slow fountain of beings. I should pause here, again, to acknowledge how strange this is.

The Norse creation account, taken literally, is one of the strangest in any mythology. There is a body. From the body, other bodies come, not by birth, but by exudation. The first beings appear under arms and between feet. This is not metaphor, in the sources.

This is what Snorri describes, and what the Vafþrúðnismál implies. I think the strangeness is important. The Norse imagination did not begin with anything like the dignified, ordered, almost legal creations of other traditions. It began with a great body in the void, sweating new life out of itself, and a long slow process of beings emerging from the meeting of fire and ice. This is a mythology that does not flinch from the body.

It does not flinch from process. It begins messy. Now. There is one more being who comes into existence in this earliest age, and she is one of my favorite figures in any mythology, because she is so quiet, so domestic, so utterly unlike what a creation story usually contains. Her name was Auðumbla.

She is sometimes spelled Auðhumla in older sources; the spelling varies. She was a cow. That is not a joke. The Norse creation story, as Snorri tells it, includes a cow. Auðumbla, like Ymir, came into being from the slow meeting of fire and frost in the heart of Ginnungagap.

The sources do not tell us why a cow, of all things, formed in the void. Snorri seems to take it for granted, as if of course there would be a cow, what else would feed the first being? Four rivers of milk, the sources tell us, flowed from her, one stream from each of her four teats. And from those rivers, Ymir drank, and was nourished, and grew strong. I love this image.

I love the patience of it. The first being is a giant, alone in the void. The void is mostly empty. There is no land, no sky, no other beings. And there is a cow.

And the cow has milk. And the giant drinks the milk. And this goes on, for what must have been a very long time, before anything else happens at all. But the cow also had something else to do. According to Snorri, and this detail does not appear in the Poetic Edda, only in the Prose; so it may be Snorri's invention, or it may be a tradition older than the surviving poetry, Auðumbla, in addition to feeding Ymir, was also slowly licking a great stone of salt rime.

A stone of frozen salt, formed in the meeting of fire and ice. She licked it gently, day after day, the way a cow will lick a salt block in a barn. And as she licked, the stone began, very slowly, to reveal something. On the first day of her licking, there appeared, in the stone, the hair of a man. On the second day, the head emerged.

On the third day, the whole man stepped forth. His name was Búri. And he was, the sources tell us, very tall and very beautiful. He had been, somehow, inside the stone all along, the way a sculpture is said to be inside the block of marble before the sculptor begins. The salt and the milk and the patient tongue of the cow had, over three days, revealed him.

Búri was, in some sense, the first ancestor of the gods. Snorri says he had a son, though the source does not tell us how, since there were no women yet, only the giants and the cow. Perhaps Búri, like Ymir, simply produced his son from his own body. Perhaps the sources are silent because the storytellers themselves did not know. In any case, the son's name was Borr.

And Borr eventually took a wife, a wife from among the early giants, a being called Bestla, who was the daughter of one of Ymir's descendants. And Borr and Bestla had three sons. You may have heard of the eldest. His name was Odin. The middle son was called Vili.

The youngest was called Vé. These three would become, in time, the first gods of the Norse pantheon, the Æsir, the gods of Asgard, the high ones, the rulers of the world to come. But they were not yet gods, at this point in the story. They were three young men, born in the void, born among giants, born long before there was any world for them to rule. They were Borr's sons, and they were the descendants of the patient cow and her salt stone, and that is all they were.

For now. I would like you to hold this scene in your mind, if you are still listening, before we move on to what they did. The void. The first giant, Ymir, drinking from a cow's four rivers of milk. The cow, licking a stone, day after day, until a man emerged.

The man fathering a son. The son taking a wife from among the giants. The three boys born to them, in the great quiet, with no world yet to put their feet on, and no fire to gather around, and no stars yet hung overhead to look up at. There is one important thing the sources tell us about the three boys. They were unlike Ymir.

They were unlike the giants. They were something new. And when they were grown, they would do something that the giants could not have done, and that would change the universe forever. They would decide that the world needed to be made. But that, again, that is the next chapter.

For now, the wind is still moving. The cow is still licking. The giant is still drinking. The three young men are still small, still gathered close to their mother, still listening to her stories of what had been before. The void is mostly quiet.

And the great work, the work of making the world, has not begun yet. Sleep, if you can.

Chapter Five. The Sons of Borr and the Slaying of Ymir. We arrive now, in this chapter, at a moment in the Norse creation story that I have, over the years, found difficult to tell. It is not difficult because it is graphic, though it is somewhat graphic, in a slow archaic way. It is difficult because it is, on its face, a story about three brothers who killed their great grandfather.

And to tell that story in a way that does not jolt you awake, which is, after all, the purpose of this almanac, requires some care. So I will tell it gently. I will not linger. And I will frame it the way the Norse themselves seem to have framed it, which is as a kind of necessary turning, not a tragedy, not a triumph, but the moment at which the world tilted from one age into another. You will remember, from the last chapter, that three young men had been born to Borr and Bestla in the void: Odin, Vili, and Vé.

They were the sons of a man who had himself been produced by a cow's slow licking of a salt stone. They were the great grandsons of Búri, the first ancestor. They were, in some sense, the first beings in the cosmos to be fully neither giant nor god, to be something new. And as they grew, in the patient quiet of those earliest ages, they came to a decision. The world, as it was, was not yet a world.

The void had a giant in it. The void had a cow. The void had three brothers and the lingering presence of older giants who had emerged, as we said, from Ymir's own body. But the void did not yet have land, or sea, or sky, or sun, or moon. It did not yet have anywhere for the three brothers to make a home.

And the three brothers, in their long quiet conversations during those ageless ages, came to feel that something needed to change. The Norse sources are not entirely clear on why they decided what they decided. The Prose Edda tells us only that they killed Ymir. The Vafþrúðnismál implies it, but does not describe it. There is no scene of confrontation.

There is no quoted speech. There is only, in the texts, the matter of fact statement that Borr's sons slew the great giant, and that from his body the world was then made. Some scholars have read this as a kind of necessary act of cosmic gardening, the Norse equivalent of the Indo European pattern in which a primordial being must be sacrificed in order for the world to take shape. The Vedic tradition of ancient India has a strikingly similar story, in which a primordial figure named Purusha is sacrificed by the gods, and from his body the elements of the world are formed. The Persian tradition has Gayōmard, the first man, whose body is similarly broken open to produce the materials of the cosmos.

Across the Indo European world, this image of a primal being whose body becomes the world is so widespread that most scholars now think it must trace back to a single very ancient story, told and retold by peoples whose languages would later split and migrate across continents. The Norse account is, in this reading, one branch of a story so old that we cannot any longer trace its root. I am drawn to this reading. It feels honest. The Norse poets, working in their cold longhouses two and three thousand years after that original story was first told, were not, in the deepest sense, inventing.

They were preserving something they had inherited. And what they had inherited included the idea that the world could not begin without the death of something very large and very old. So. The three brothers killed Ymir. The texts tell us only that they did it.

They do not tell us how. There is no weapon named, no blow described. We are simply told, as if it had always been the case, that Ymir was dead. When he died, and here the sources do become more specific, a great quantity of blood flowed from his body. The Old Norse word used for this flowing is hreyrr, which carries something of the meaning of a torrent.

And in the cosmos as it then existed, with no land yet and no sea, this great flowing of blood became a kind of flood. It rolled outward across the void. It surrounded all the other giants, who had themselves been born from Ymir's body in the earlier ages. And it drowned them. All of them, the sources say, except one.

His name was Bergelmir. And he was, by the time of the slaying, an old giant, already a grandfather, already wise. He and his wife, whose name the sources do not give, escaped the flood. The Vafþrúðnismál tells us specifically how: they climbed onto a hollow log, a kind of mill trough, in some translations; a kind of small boat, in others, and they rode the great flood out, the two of them clinging to the wood, while around them all the other early giants drowned. And in time, when the flood receded, Bergelmir and his wife stepped down from their boat and went on to father the second great line of giants, the line that survives into the later mythology and that will play a part, in due course, in the war between the gods and the giants at the end of the world.

But that is far off. For tonight, I would like you to hold the moment after the slaying. The void. The great body of Ymir, no longer alive. The flood of his blood spreading outward in a slow tide.

The single hollow log carrying the only two survivors. The three brothers, Odin, Vili, and Vé, standing somewhere in the middle of all that. And the silence afterward. The strange immense silence of having done a thing that could not be undone. The Norse poets do not, as far as I can tell, ever describe what the three brothers said to each other after the killing.

They do not describe regret. They do not describe pride. They describe, instead, what came next, which is that the three brothers went to work. They had, lying before them, the great dead body of the first being. And they had a decision to make.

They could leave him there, in the void, and continue to drift in the ageless quiet of pre creation. Or they could begin, with what they now had, to build something. They chose to build. And the way they chose to build is one of the strangest and most arresting images in any mythology. Because what they did, in the next chapter, was take Ymir's body apart, piece by piece, and from each piece make a part of the world.

His flesh became the earth. His blood became the seas. His bones became the mountains. His teeth became the rocks. His skull became the dome of the sky.

His brains became the clouds. His hair became the trees. His eyebrows, and this detail I love, his eyebrows became the wall around Miðgarðr, the middle enclosure where humans would, in time, come to live. But I am racing ahead. I will tell you about each transformation slowly, in the next chapter, because each is worth its own quiet pause.

For now, only this: the killing has happened. The flood has receded. The three brothers are standing in the void, with the great body of their ancestor before them, and the work of making the world is about to begin. Sleep, if you can. The hardest part of the story is behind us.

What comes next is gentler, though no less strange.

Chapter Six. The Making of the World. I want to begin this chapter with a small confession, which is that the chapter you are about to hear is, in my reading, the most difficult chapter in the entire creation story to tell well. Not because it is violent, the violence is behind us, and the slaying of Ymir, as we said, has been done. The difficulty, rather, is that what comes next is, on the page, almost laughably matter of fact.

The Prose Edda, when it describes the making of the world, does it in something like five sentences. Snorri lists the parts of Ymir, lists the things they became, and moves on. The Grímnismál, one of the older mythological poems of the Poetic Edda, is similarly economical. It gives us a few stanzas, almost a kind of inventory, and then proceeds. There is no narrative drama.

There is no scene of construction. There is no point in either text where the three brothers stand back, sweat on their brows, and admire their work. There is, instead, a list. I have come to think that the list, in its strange flatness, is part of what makes the Norse creation story feel so old. There is no rhetoric.

There is no celebration. There is only a body, and the body has parts, and the parts become the world. So let me give you the list. Slowly. The way I think the old Norse storytellers would have given it, as a series of simple, almost reverent statements, each followed by a long pause for the listener to imagine.

The flesh of Ymir, the sources say, became the earth. I would like you to think about this for a moment. Not the violence of it, the violence is over. Think about the image. The great body of the first being, no longer moving, no longer breathing.

And the flesh of that body, slowly, somehow, through whatever process the gods used, becoming earth. Becoming soil. Becoming the loamy, dark, ordinary stuff that grass would, in time, grow out of. The same earth that you and I have walked on. The earth was once, in this reading, a body.

The blood of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the seas. The Norse, of course, knew the sea well. They lived against it. They depended on it. They had thrown their dead into it, in long ship funerals; they had fished from it; they had crossed it in great migrations to Iceland and Greenland and as far west, in time, as the eastern coast of North America.

And they imagined, when they imagined the beginning of things, that the sea, that great salt restless thing, was, in some deep sense, the blood of an ancient body. The brine taste of it. The slow heave of it. They imagined that this had once been alive. That every wave was, in some measure, the slow pulse of a heart that had stopped a long time ago.

The bones of Ymir, the sources say, became the mountains. This image, perhaps, is easier for us. The mountains do look like bones, when you have lived among them. They have that quality of jutting, of structural, of geometry from some larger body. The Norse, who lived among the dramatic mountains of Norway and the volcanic ridges of Iceland, would have seen this resemblance directly.

Their mountains were, in their imagination, the skeleton of the first being, lifted up into the daylight. The teeth of Ymir, the sources say, and the broken pieces of his bones, became the rocks. The stones. The smaller scattered things on the surface of the earth. The pebbles in a streambed.

The boulders on a hillside. The hand sized rocks a person might pick up and turn over in their palm. All of them, in the Norse imagination, were the smaller pieces of that great old body. The hair of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the trees. I find this one beautiful.

The forest as the hair of a body. The slow growth of pine and birch and oak and fir, the long boreal forests of northern Europe, all of it imagined as a kind of slow hair, emerging from the earth that had once been flesh, blowing in the wind, growing and falling and growing again. Trees in this reading are not simply alive. They are the living growth of an older life. They are what continues, in green, after the great body has stilled.

The skull of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the dome of the sky. This image, I think, requires the most patience. The sky as a skull, arched overhead, holding everything in. The Norse imagination did not picture the sky as we picture it, as an open atmosphere fading into the vacuum of space. They pictured it as a kind of bowl, or a kind of dome, set over the earth like a ceiling.

And the dome, in their picture, was the inside of a skull. The skull of the first being. To hold the great dome of the sky in place, because, in the Norse cosmology, even the sky needed to be held up, the gods placed four dwarves at its four corners. The names of these dwarves are given in the Prose Edda. They are called Norðri, Suðri, Austri, and Vestri.

North, South, East, and West. They stand, the sources say, at the four corners of the sky, one at each corner, holding up the great curve of the dome forever. They are, in this reading, the first laborers in the cosmos, and the most patient. They have been at their work since the very beginning, and they will be at their work until the end. Each carries one corner.

None of them, the sources tell us, ever sets it down. The brains of Ymir, the sources say, became the clouds. This detail is, in some ways, the strangest. It has, I think, more poetry than logic in it. The clouds as the brains of a body, drifting, soft, gray and white, gathering and dispersing across the sky.

There is something almost humorous about the image, and yet something almost devastating about it. The Norse seem to have wanted, in this final detail, to suggest that even the thinking of the first being, even his mind, had been given over to the world. The clouds drift. The mind drifts. The body had become the world, and the mind had become the things that drift across the world.

There is one more transformation, and I want to give it to you because it is among my favorites. The eyebrows of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the wall around Miðgarðr. Miðgarðr, the Middle Enclosure, the realm where humans would, in time, come to live, was, in the Norse imagination, a kind of fortified middle ring of the world. A safe place. A bounded place.

And the wall that surrounded it, that kept out the giants and the trolls and the older creatures of the outer dark, was, in this reading, made from the eyebrows of the first being. I cannot fully explain why I love this detail. I think it has something to do with the smallness of eyebrows in the context of a body, and the importance of the wall in the context of a world. A small thing, in the body, became a large thing, in the cosmos. As if every part of Ymir, even the smallest and most ordinary, had a role in the world to come.

And there is one more detail, before we close this chapter. The Vǫluspá tells us that the gods, in the course of making the world, took sparks from Múspellsheimr, the realm of fire we visited two chapters ago, and used them to make the stars. The sun. The moon. The points of light in the dome of the sky.

The fire realm, in this reading, gave the cosmos its lights. The frost realm gave it its first being. And the body of the first being gave it everything else. The world, after this great work, was no longer a void. It was a world.

There was earth, and there was sea. There were mountains, and there were trees. There was a sky, and there were stars. There was a wall around the middle of it all, where humans had not yet appeared but would soon. There was a dome held up by four patient dwarves.

It was not yet finished. There was no Yggdrasill yet, no great tree at the center. There were no nine worlds yet, as we now know them. There were no gods other than the three brothers, and there were no humans, and there were no elves, and there were no dwarves other than the four corner dwarves and a few others who had begun to appear from the maggots that crawled in Ymir's flesh, a detail I have left out only because it is, even by Norse standards, a little strange, and because we will get to the dwarves properly in a later chapter. But there was a world.

There was, for the first time, something to stand on. The making of the world was, in some sense, finished. The shaping of the worlds, the nine of them, with the great tree at their center, was about to begin. That is the next chapter. For tonight, sleep, if you can.

The void is gone. The world has been made. Whatever else comes, from here forward, will be built on top of what was raised tonight. The wind, of course, is still moving. It is now moving across the new earth.

It is now lifting through the new trees. It is now pulling at the edges of the new clouds. It has, perhaps, more to do. But it does not seem to be in a hurry.

Chapter Seven. Yggdrasill, the World tree. There is a tree now. Or, at least, the sources tell us that there came to be a tree, somewhere in the long age after the world had been made and before the first humans walked on it. The Norse did not, as far as I can tell, ever describe the moment of the tree's appearance.

There is no scene of planting. There is no description of a seed. The tree, in the surviving poetry, simply is, as if it had been there all along, or as if it had grown so slowly and so quietly that no one noticed until it was already touching the sky. Its name was Yggdrasill. We met the name in the first chapter, Yggr's horse, Odin's horse, the tree on which the High One would one day hang.

But tonight I want to spend time not with the future of the tree, but with the tree itself. As an image. As a presence. Yggdrasill was, in the Norse imagination, an ash. The Old Norse word askr, which gives us the English word ash, the tree species, is used in the sources.

Some scholars have argued that it might originally have been a different kind of tree, perhaps a yew, given certain ambiguous references; but the dominant tradition gives us an ash. A great ash tree, growing somewhere in the center of the cosmos, with its roots going downward and its branches going upward, holding the worlds in its great architecture. The sources tell us that Yggdrasill had three roots. Only three. This is one of the details on which all the Norse sources seem to agree.

Where the three roots went is, however, a matter of some disagreement. The Prose Edda, written by Snorri, tells us that one root went down to Asgard, where the gods lived; one root went down to Jǫtunheimr, where the giants lived; and one root went down to Niflheimr, the old frost realm we visited many chapters ago. The Poetic Edda, specifically the poem Grímnismál, gives us a slightly different account. It says one root goes to the world of men, one root goes to the giants, and one root goes to Hel, the realm of the dead. The two accounts are similar but not identical, and most scholars now believe that the older poetic version is closer to the original tradition.

Snorri, in his usual way, was probably reconciling several variant accounts into a single tidy diagram. The almanac will tell you both. Where the sources disagree, the almanac will not pretend otherwise. What is consistent across both accounts is that the roots of Yggdrasill go down into very different places. One root reaches into the realm of the gods or the realm of men, depending on the source.

One root reaches into the realm of the giants. And one root reaches into the deep cold places, where the dead and the older powers live. The tree connects the high realms and the low realms. It holds the cosmos together. Now.

The branches of Yggdrasill, what was happening up there, in the high air, where the leaves moved? The sources tell us a great deal about this. More, in fact, than they tell us about the roots. Yggdrasill, in the Norse imagination, was alive in a particular and beautiful way. It had inhabitants.

It had visitors. It had its own ongoing private cosmic drama. At the very top of the tree, at the highest point, where the branches reached into the open air above the dome of the sky, there sat an eagle. The eagle was nameless in most of the sources. He was simply called the eagle.

He sat in the topmost branches and looked out across the worlds. Between the eyes of the eagle, the Grímnismál tells us, there sat a hawk. His name was Veðrfǫlnir, which translates loosely as the Storm Pale. Why a hawk would sit between the eyes of an eagle, and what the hawk did up there, the sources do not explain. He is simply there.

The almanac will not invent a reason for him. Running up and down the trunk of Yggdrasill, moving constantly between the eagle at the top and the dragon at the bottom, which we will get to in a moment, was a squirrel. His name was Ratatoskr, which translates roughly as the Drill Tooth, or in some readings the Bore Tooth. The Old Norse name is faintly comic; ratatoskr sounds, even to a modern ear, like a small busy creature. And he was, by all accounts, a busy creature.

He spent his days running up the trunk of the great tree, bringing messages, usually insulting messages, from the dragon at the roots to the eagle at the top. And then running back down, bringing the eagle's insults to the dragon. He was, in the Norse imagination, the gossip of the cosmos. I find this detail wonderful. The great world tree, holding all the realms together, holding the gods and the giants and the dead all in its branches and roots, and at its center, going about its work, a small chattering squirrel, carrying messages of mutual irritation between an eagle and a dragon who could not, by reason of their stations, speak to each other directly.

The Norse imagination had room for the cosmic and the petty in equal measure. In the middle branches of the tree, the sources tell us, there were four stags. Four red deer. They are named in the Grímnismál, and the names are worth giving you, because they are quite beautiful in Old Norse. They were called Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr, and Duraþrór.

Their names, very roughly translated, mean something like the Sleeper, the Unconscious One, the Thundering in the Ear, and the Thriving Slumber. They moved among the branches of the tree, eating the leaves, the bark, the new shoots. The dew that gathered in their antlers, the sources tell us, became, in some readings, the rivers of the world. I will say that last detail again, because I think it is one of the most striking images in any mythology. The dew that gathered, on cold mornings, in the antlers of four deer eating leaves in the middle branches of a cosmic tree, that dew became, when it dripped to the ground, the rivers of the world.

The rivers of the world, in this reading, were the slow morning shake off of four sleeping deer in a tree. Now. At the roots, at the very bottom of Yggdrasill, in the dark wet places where the great tree drove down into the older realms, there was a dragon. The Norse called him Níðhǫggr, which translates roughly as the Striker of Malice, or the Tearer in the Dark. He lay coiled around one of the roots of the tree, and he did, the sources tell us, three things.

He gnawed. He waited. And he occasionally surfaced, into the upper world, to feed on the corpses of the wicked dead. He was not, like a dragon in a later European story, a hoarder of gold. He was, in the Norse imagination, simply a slow dark hunger at the base of the world.

Along with him, the sources tell us, there were many other serpents. They had names, in the Grímnismál, Góinn and Móinn (the sons of an older serpent called Grafvitnir), and Grábakr, and Grafvölluðr, and Ófnir, and Sváfnir, and they gnawed at the roots alongside Níðhǫggr. The great tree, in the Norse imagination, was constantly being eaten from below. The leaves were constantly being eaten from the middle, by the four stags. The bark was constantly being scarred, in the higher branches, by Ratatoskr's claws.

And yet the tree stood. The Norse poets do not tell us, exactly, why the tree did not die. The sources say only that the Norns, three women who lived at one of the roots, whom we will meet properly in two chapters, tended the tree. They drew water from the well at its root. They poured the water back onto the bark.

They kept the tree alive against all the small daily destructions of squirrel and stag and dragon and serpent. This image, of a tree being slowly, patiently, ceaselessly destroyed, and slowly, patiently, ceaselessly mended, is, in some readings of Norse mythology, the deepest image the tradition has. It is the image of the cosmos itself. Always being unmade. Always being remade.

Held together, in the end, by the patient daily work of beings whose names we have nearly lost. The tree holds the worlds. The worlds hang in the tree. And in the next chapter, we will walk through each of them, slowly, by name. Sleep, if you can.

The picture is now complete. The world has been made. The tree has been raised. The squirrel is still running up and down. The stags are still eating.

The dragon is still gnawing. The Norns, whom we have not met yet, are still pouring water. And the wind is still moving, through the leaves, in a sound that has been going for so long, by now, that it has nearly become the sound of the universe itself.

Chapter Eight. The Nine Worlds Named. We have come, in the slow course of this episode, to the heart of what its title promised. The Nine Worlds. I want to be honest with you, before we name them, about a problem in the sources.

The Norse sources are unanimous that there were nine worlds. The number nine recurs all through Norse mythology, Odin hung on the tree for nine nights, Heimdallr was said to have nine mothers, the messenger god Hermóðr would later ride for nine nights through dark valleys to reach the realm of the dead, and the number had, for the Norse, a kind of cosmic importance that scholars have spent two centuries trying to fully account for. So we can be quite sure that there were nine worlds. The Vǫluspá says so explicitly. The wise woman who speaks the poem remembers, she says, nine worlds.

What the sources do not give us, anywhere, is a clean numbered list of those nine worlds. This is the problem. We have, scattered across the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda and several other sources, references to a great many worlds. We have Ásgarðr and Vanaheimr and Álfheimr and Miðgarðr and Jǫtunheimr and Niflheimr and Múspellsheimr and Svartálfaheimr and Niðavellir and Hel. That is ten names, at least.

And depending on how you count, you could find one or two more in passing references. So which nine make the canonical list? The honest answer is that there is no canonical list. Different modern scholars have proposed different reconstructions. Most agree on the same seven or eight names; the disagreement comes around the edges.

Was Svartálfaheimr the same place as Niðavellir, just under a different name? Were both real, and did the count include both? Was Hel a separate world, or was Hel merely a region of Niflheimr? On these questions, the medieval sources are silent or contradictory, and modern scholarship has had to guess. What I will give you, tonight, is the list that most scholars now consider the most defensible reconstruction.

It is not the only possible list. But it is the list that comes closest to what the surviving evidence suggests. I will walk through the nine slowly. One paragraph, more or less, per world. We will hear all of these again, in much greater detail, in later episodes of this season.

The first world is Ásgarðr. The realm of the Æsir gods. The high enclosure of the high ones. This is where Odin lives, in his great hall Valhǫll, and where his wife Frigg sits, and where Thor and Týr and Heimdall and most of the gods you have heard of make their home. Ásgarðr sits, in the Norse imagination, at the very top of the cosmos, usually pictured as a kind of high plateau or great floating realm, with golden halls and bright meadows and the high seat of the Allfather at its center. It was reached, from the world of men, by a single bridge of light.

We will hear about the bridge in two chapters. The second world is Vanaheimr. The realm of the Vanir. The Vanir were a second family of gods, older perhaps than the Æsir, or perhaps simply different from them. They were associated, in the Norse imagination, with fertility, with the seasons, with the slow growth of crops and the slow movement of animals.

The Vanir included Njǫrðr, the god of the sea, and his children Freyr and Freyja, the great twin gods of love and harvest. The Vanir and the Æsir, the sources tell us, fought a great war in the very early days, and then made peace; afterwards, certain Vanir came to live in Ásgarðr, and certain Æsir went to live in Vanaheimr, as a kind of mutual hostage exchange. Most of the lore now positions Vanaheimr as a quieter, more agricultural, more pastoral realm than Ásgarðr, though the sources are spare, and we know less about it than we would like. The third world is Álfheimr. The realm of the elves.

The Old Norse álfar, which gives us our English word elf, referred to beings of light and grace, neither gods nor humans, who lived in their own separate realm. The Prose Edda specifies that Álfheimr was the home of the ljósálfar, the light elves, and goes on to imply, somewhat confusingly, that there were also dökkálfar, dark elves, who lived elsewhere. The light elves, Snorri says, were fairer than the sun to look upon. They lived their own lives in their own realm, and they appear only rarely in the surviving myths. We will return to them, in a later episode, but tonight only this: they were, in the Norse imagination, beings of a beauty that we cannot fully picture, and a realm of a brightness we cannot fully imagine.

The fourth world is Miðgarðr. The Middle Enclosure. The world of human beings, of you and me. This is where the wall of Ymir's eyebrows stands, holding off the wilder powers of the outer dark. This is where mortals plant their crops, raise their children, bury their dead.

The Norse imagined Miðgarðr as a ring or a disk at the center of the cosmos, surrounded, in some accounts, by a great sea, and in that sea a great serpent called Jǫrmungandr, who lay coiled around the world with his tail in his mouth. We will meet the serpent properly in a later episode. For tonight, only this: Miðgarðr is the human realm, and it is the only one of the nine worlds where we can be quite sure that we have ever set foot. The fifth world is Jǫtunheimr. The realm of the giants.

The home of the jǫtnar, the older beings, who descended from Ymir's body and from Bergelmir's surviving line. Jǫtunheimr was, in the Norse imagination, a wild place. A place of high mountains, of deep cold forests, of long ravines and frozen rivers. The giants who lived there were not, on the whole, evil, though some were dangerous, but they were other. They belonged to an older order.

They had been there before the gods came. And in the very last days of the world, as we will hear in due course, they would rise against the gods in a great final battle. The sixth world is Niflheimr. The Mist Home. The old frost realm we visited many chapters ago, when we were still in the time before the world was made.

Niflheimr is, in the surviving sources, the great cold pole of the cosmos. It is where the eleven rivers come from. It is where the dragon Níðhǫggr lies, gnawing at the root of Yggdrasill. It is, in some accounts, where the cold dead go, those who died of old age, of sickness, of any death that was not heroic. The seventh world is Múspellsheimr.

The Home of Fire. The other primal realm we visited long ago. Múspellsheimr is the hot pole of the cosmos. It is where Surtr, the dark sentinel, stands at the southern edge with his flaming sword. From Múspellsheimr come the sparks that became the stars.

In the very last days of the world, the sources tell us, the armies of Múspellsheimr will ride out across the rainbow bridge, and the bridge itself will break beneath their weight. The eighth world is Svartálfaheimr. The realm of the dark elves. Or, in some readings, the realm of the dwarves, the sources are unclear on whether the dark elves and the dwarves were the same beings under different names, or two different peoples sharing similar realms, or whether Svartálfaheimr and Niðavellir were two names for the same place. Most scholars now think there was a single underground or twilit realm where the smith peoples lived, the dwarves who forged the great weapons of the gods, who made Thor's hammer and Odin's spear and the ship that could be folded up to fit in a pocket.

They were craftsmen. They were patient. And they lived, in the Norse imagination, in long deep workshops where the forges never went out. The ninth world, in most reconstructions, is Hel. The realm of the dead.

Not, as in later medieval Christian imagination, a place of fire and punishment, that is a different idea, from a different tradition. The Norse Hel was a cold quiet country, a kind of long gray underworld, ruled by a goddess named Hel, who was the daughter of Loki. Most of the dead went there, eventually, to wait. There was no torment in Hel. There was simply, the sources suggest, a great quiet that went on and on.

The heroes who died gloriously in battle did not go to Hel; they went, instead, to the high halls of Ásgarðr, Valhǫll, or Freyja's hall Fólkvangr. But for the ordinary dead, Hel waited. That is the list, then. Ásgarðr. Vanaheimr. Álfheimr. Miðgarðr.

Jǫtunheimr. Niflheimr. Múspellsheimr. Svartálfaheimr. Hel.

Nine worlds. Hanging in the branches and along the trunk and at the roots of the great tree. Each different. Each with its own peoples. Each, in some sense, its own private world.

The wind, by now, is moving through all of them. The wind has somehow always been moving. It does not require introduction. In the next chapter, we will go down to the roots. We will look at the three wells beneath the great tree.

We will meet the women who tend them. And we will, finally, find the place where fate itself is woven. Sleep, if you can.

Chapter Nine. The Wells Beneath the Roots. If you would like to know where fate itself comes from, in the Norse imagination, you have to go down. You have to leave the high branches, where the eagle sits, and the middle branches, where the stags eat, and you have to follow the slow downward run of the great tree to its base. You have to go past the trunk.

You have to go past the visible roots. You have to go beneath, into the dark wet places where the tree drinks its water. There you will find the wells. There were three wells beneath Yggdrasill, the sources tell us. Three, the way there were three roots.

The Prose Edda gives us a tidy account: one well beneath each root. The Poetic Edda is, again, less tidy, sometimes the wells overlap, sometimes the same body of water seems to wear two names. But on the number three, the sources agree. Three wells. One at each root.

The first well is called Urðarbrunnr. The Well of Urðr. The Well of Fate. This is, perhaps, the most important place in all of Norse mythology that no one ever fully describes. The sources say it is a body of water.

They say it is sacred. They say that the gods come to it, in the course of their long lives, to hold council together, the Æsir ride down from Ásgarðr, every day, in some accounts, to gather around the well and decide matters of importance. The water of Urðarbrunnr was, the sources say, so pure that anything which touched it became white. White as the inside of an eggshell. White as the membrane between yolk and white.

White in a way that was not a color, exactly, but a kind of purity that had passed beyond color. By this well lived three women. Three figures who, in many ways, are the most important figures in all of Norse cosmology, more important, even, than Odin, though Odin himself feared them. They were called the Nornir. In English, the Norns.

Their names, the sources tell us, were Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. The names themselves carry meaning. Urðr means what has been. Verðandi means what is becoming. Skuld means what must come.

They were the past, the present, and the future. They were not goddesses, exactly, they did not live in Ásgarðr, they were not numbered among the Æsir or the Vanir. They were older. They were stranger. They had been there since the beginning, and they would be there at the end, and in between, they wove fate.

How they wove it, the sources tell us, varied. Some accounts speak of them carving runes on the trunk of Yggdrasill. Some accounts speak of them spinning a great thread, the way women in the longhouses of medieval Iceland would spin wool, measuring out a length of thread for each newborn child, and cutting it when the time came for that child to die. Some accounts speak of them simply tending the tree, pouring water from the well over its bark, packing white clay around its wounds, keeping the great cosmic ash alive against the slow gnawing of the serpents below. All three accounts may be right.

The Norns, in the Norse imagination, were never quite pinned down to a single image. They were what was, what is, and what must come. They were the weight of fate itself. And even the gods, the sources tell us, were subject to them. That is a remarkable thing, and worth pausing over.

In Norse mythology, the gods are not all powerful. Odin himself does not know everything; he has to work hard, in many of the surviving stories, to learn even small pieces of what is to come. But the Norns know. The Norns have always known. They sit at the root of the tree, they pour their white water onto its bark, they keep their threads in order, and they know how everything will end.

This is the first well. Urðarbrunnr. The Well of Fate. The second well is called Mímisbrunnr. The Well of Mímir.

The Well of Wisdom, though it is also, in some readings, the Well of Memory. The Old Norse word mímir is etymologically related to the English word memory. The sources tell us that this well lay beneath the root of Yggdrasill that reached into Jǫtunheimr, the realm of the giants. By the well lived a being called Mímir, who was sometimes counted among the giants, sometimes counted among an older order of beings, sometimes counted as something else entirely. He was, the sources are clear, very wise.

The water of his well was wisdom itself, and Mímir drank from it daily, and he had been drinking from it since the beginning of things. There is a story, which we will tell properly in a later episode, about how Odin came to this well. About what Odin gave, and what he received. The short version is that Odin wanted to drink from the well of wisdom, and Mímir would not let him drink without a price, and the price was an eye. Odin's eye.

So Odin gave his eye. The Vǫluspá, the older of the two main sources, does not describe the moment in detail. It tells us only that Odin's eye lies, to this day, at the bottom of Mímir's well, given as a pledge for the wisdom he drank. The image of him physically plucking it out comes mostly through later tradition. What the older poetry tells us is simpler.

The eye is in the well. The wisdom was bought. We will return to this. For tonight, only this: there was a well of wisdom, beneath one of the roots of the great tree. A being named Mímir kept it.

And the eye of the All Father lay, the sources say, at the bottom of that well, and lies there still, looking up through the water at whoever might lean over to drink. The third well is called Hvergelmir. The Roaring Cauldron. We have heard the name before, Hvergelmir was the spring at the heart of Niflheimr, in the old time, from which the eleven rivers flowed when the world was still being made. It was older than the tree.

It was older than the gods. And when the tree finally raised itself over the cosmos, one of its three roots came down, the sources tell us, into the same dark cold water where Hvergelmir had always been. By this well there lived no gentle being. No three women, no patient Mímir. By this well, instead, there coiled Níðhǫggr, the dragon we met two chapters ago, in our walk through the tree itself.

He gnawed at the root of Yggdrasill that came down to Hvergelmir. He waited. The water around him, the sources say, was full of writhing serpents, the same serpents whose names were given in the Grímnismál, the slow tireless eaters of the deepest root. The water itself was said to be cold, and dark, and very old. The three wells, in some readings, are three different faces of the same thing.

The well of fate. The well of wisdom. The well of decay. What has been. What we have learned.

What is slowly being lost. The Norse imagination put all three at the root of the same tree, and asked you to imagine that a tree that grew from such waters would be a tree of all of those things at once, a tree of fate, of memory, of slow ruin. A tree, in other words, exactly like the cosmos. I find this image, more than almost any other in the Norse tradition, the one that lingers. The great tree.

The three wells. The fates pouring white water on the bark. The eye in the dark. The dragon at the cold root. All of it underneath the worlds we live in.

All of it slowly happening, every minute, even as we sleep. Sleep, if you can. The wells are quiet down there. They have been quiet for a long time.

Chapter Ten. The Bridge of Burning Light. There is one more piece to set in place, before we close the picture of the Norse cosmos. One more structure to name. We have the tree.

We have the nine worlds. We have the three wells beneath the roots. What we do not yet have, in our picture, is the way between any of them. How did the gods, who lived in Ásgarðr at the top of the tree, come down to Miðgarðr, to the world of men, when they wished to? They did not, in the Norse imagination, simply step down.

The cosmos was not arranged so casually. The realms were genuinely separate, genuinely far apart, genuinely walled off from one another. To go between them, you needed a road. And the road, in this mythology, was a bridge. The bridge had a name.

The Norse called it Bifrǫst. In some older spellings, it appears as Bilrǫst, the spelling is debated, and most scholars now think the older form may have been Bilrǫst, with the more familiar Bifrǫst arising later. The name, in either spelling, translates roughly as the trembling road, or the swaying way. A road that was not entirely solid. A road that you could see, on a fair day, arching across the sky between worlds.

You may already have guessed what Bifrǫst was. The sources, when they describe it, describe a great arch of three colors in the sky. A great band of light, suspended between Miðgarðr and Ásgarðr, with the colors of a rainbow. It was a rainbow. The Norse imagined the rainbow, that occasional bright shimmering thing that appears in the sky after rain, as a bridge.

A road. The visible track between the world of men and the world of the gods. When you stood, in medieval Norway or Iceland, in your wet farmer's field after a long shower, and saw a sudden arc of color over the mountains, you were looking, in the imagination of the people who told these stories, at the place where the gods walked when they came down. You were looking at infrastructure. I find this beautiful, and a little funny, in equal measure.

The Norse imagination took something we all know, a rainbow, the most ordinary heavenly sight, present in every sky on every continent, and made it the most important piece of architecture in the cosmos. Their bridge between worlds was not hidden. It was not secret. It was, in fact, the most visible thing in the sky after the sun and the moon. You could see it any time you were lucky with the rain.

The three colors of Bifrǫst, the sources tell us, had meaning. The red was fire, burning fire, the sources specifically say, the kind of fire that would consume any giant or troll who tried to climb the bridge from the lower worlds. The other two colors are less clearly identified in the sources, they may have been a kind of greenish blue and a kind of yellow gold, in some interpretations; the medieval Icelandic poets do not seem to have agreed exactly on what the rainbow's other bands were. But the fire was important. The bridge, the sources insist, was not just beautiful.

It was a defense. The red band of fire was meant to burn anyone who attempted, in the slow age of the worlds, to march on Ásgarðr from below. There was a guardian of the bridge. His name was Heimdallr. We will hear far more of him in later episodes, because Heimdallr is one of the strangest and most interesting of the Norse gods.

For tonight, only this: he stood at the upper end of Bifrǫst, where the rainbow met the high walls of Ásgarðr, and he kept watch. He had, the sources tell us, extraordinary senses. He could hear, the Prose Edda says, the grass growing in the fields. He could hear the wool growing on a sheep's back. He could see for hundreds of miles in any direction, by day or by night.

He needed no more sleep than a bird. He stood at his post, and he watched, and he watched, and he watched. He watched, in particular, for the day when the giants would come. The day was prophesied. The day was, in some sense, certain.

Heimdallr did not know when, exactly, even the gods, as we have said, did not know what the Norns knew, but he knew that one day, in the long fullness of time, the giants of Jǫtunheimr would rise. They would march toward Ásgarðr. They would attempt to cross Bifrǫst. And the bridge, the sources tell us, would not hold. This is one of the most striking images in the entire Norse tradition.

The bridge, the great burning road between worlds, was always meant to fail. It was never meant to last forever. It had been built to be beautiful, and to be defended, and to be, in the very end, broken under the weight of the armies who would come riding across it. The Norse poets seemed to find this neither tragic nor hopeful. It was simply how the cosmos was made.

Some things hold for a long time, and then they do not. Even the rainbow. When Heimdallr saw the giants coming, the sources tell us, he would blow his horn. The horn had a name. It was called Gjallarhorn, which means, roughly, the Yelling Horn, or the Loud Horn.

He carried it at his belt. He had carried it for a very long time. He had never yet blown it. But he would, one day. And the sound of it would be so loud, the sources say, that it would be heard in every one of the nine worlds at once.

That sound, that long single blast, would be the beginning of the end. The Norse called the ending Ragnarǫk, the Fate of the Gods. We will tell that story properly in the last episode of this season. For tonight, only that the sound was waiting. The horn was at the watchman's hip.

The bridge was still standing, burning at its midpoint, swaying in the wind between worlds. I would like to leave the picture there, before we move on to a chapter of reflection. The bridge. The three colors. The fire in the middle band.

The watchman at his post, on the high end, with his horn ready. The world of men below, going about its business, none of the men or women below ever quite realizing that the colors they sometimes saw in the wet sky were the same colors that had been there since the world began, holding the gods and the mortals apart and connected at once. In some translations of the Vǫluspá, in the very last age of the world, the bridge is described breaking. Not in dramatic detail. Just a line.

The bridge of the gods, the wise woman says, will fall. And after that, very quickly, everything else will fall too. But for now, for now, in this chapter, in this episode, the bridge is still there. The watchman is still watching. The wind is still moving across the high arch of color.

Nothing has yet given way. The picture is nearly complete. There is one more chapter of reflection, and then a quiet closing. We are almost to the end of tonight. Sleep, if you can.

The bridge will hold for a long time yet.

Chapter Eleven. A Quiet Reflection on the Edda. I would like, in this chapter, to step back from the story. We have spent most of tonight inside the Norse cosmos, in the void, in the meeting of fire and frost, in the body of Ymir, in the slow construction of the world, in the high branches and deep roots of Yggdrasill, in the nine worlds named, in the three wells of fate, in the rainbow of Bifrǫst. We have moved, more or less, through the whole shape of the Norse imagination as it relates to the structure of things.

What I want to do now, before we say goodnight, is acknowledge something. The Norse cosmos that I have described tonight is, in some sense, my construction. And also Snorri Sturluson's construction. And also the unknown thirteenth century scribe's construction, who first wrote down the Poetic Edda. And also the construction of the long lost generations of poets who memorized the stories in the centuries before that scribe ever lifted his pen.

What I mean is: the Norse cosmos as we now have it has passed through many hands. Most of what we know comes, as I have said before, from two books. The Prose Edda was written by Snorri Sturluson, a man we know more about, by accident, than we know about almost any other figure in this story. Snorri lived from roughly 1179 to 1241, in Iceland. He was a wealthy chieftain.

He was a politician. He was, in the very last years of his life, assassinated. The order came from the king of Norway, who had declared him a traitor for leaving the royal court without permission. The killing was carried out by men sent by Gizurr Þorvaldsson, an Icelandic chieftain who had once been Snorri's son in law, and who had since turned against him. They came in the night, on the twenty third of September, twelve hundred and forty one, to Snorri's house at Reykholt.

Snorri heard them at the door. He fled, the chronicler tells us, down into his cellar. Five men followed him. His last words, the same chronicler records, were Eigi skal höggva, Do not strike. The man with the axe struck.

He was also a Christian. The Iceland in which he lived had officially converted from the old gods to Christianity in the year 1000, more than a century and a half before he picked up his pen to write the Edda. By Snorri's day, the old religion was no longer practiced. The Norse gods were no longer worshipped. The stories were still told, in farms and in halls, but more as inheritance than as belief.

Snorri wrote his Edda not because he believed in Odin or Thor, but because he wanted to preserve, for young Icelandic poets, the technical vocabulary of the old kennings, the elaborate metaphorical phrases that had been the bread and butter of Old Norse poetry for centuries. To use those metaphors, a young poet had to know who Odin was, and what he was famous for, and what kinds of phrases were associated with him. Snorri wrote the Edda as a manual. That is, in some ways, the strangest fact about Norse mythology as we now know it. The most important single source we have for it was written by a Christian, as a poetry textbook, two centuries after the religion had died.

The Poetic Edda is, I should say, older, most of the poems in it appear to date from earlier, perhaps from as early as the ninth or tenth century, when the old religion was still being practiced. But we have those poems only in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, which was copied down around 1270 by a scribe whose name we do not know. The manuscript was lost, for a while, after being copied. It was rediscovered, in 1643, by an Icelandic bishop named Brynjólfur Sveinsson, who found it in the personal collection of a country farmer who had it kept among other old papers in a chest. It was given, eventually, to the king of Denmark, and then, after centuries in Copenhagen, and after a long legal dispute that was finally settled by the Danish Supreme Court in March 1971, it was returned to Iceland.

It came home on the twenty first of April, 1971, aboard a Danish naval vessel called the Vædderen. A crowd gathered at the harbor in Reykjavík to meet the ship. The manuscript came down the gangplank, in its small protective case, after more than three centuries away. So our knowledge of Norse mythology depends, in a real way, on a few accidents of preservation. On a Christian writing in the thirteenth century.

On an unknown scribe also writing in the thirteenth century. On a single farmer's chest, in seventeenth century Iceland, which happened not to burn. On a Danish ship, in 1971, which crossed the North Atlantic in spring weather without incident. I find this remarkable, and a little humbling. We talk about Norse mythology as though it were a tradition we have inherited intact.

But what we have is a fragment. A handful of poems. A textbook by a Christian. A few names whose meanings we still argue about. Most of what was once known about these gods is gone.

The longhouses in which the stories were first told are gone. The poets who first composed the kennings are gone. Even the runic memorials, scattered across Scandinavia, are mostly silent on cosmology, they tend to record names and short events, not stories. What we do have, we have because someone cared enough to write it down. I think about that, sometimes, when I sit with the old material.

I think about how easy it would have been for all of it to vanish. How thin the chain of preservation is. How many ancient mythologies, peoples, languages, ways of understanding the world, have not, in fact, been preserved at all. The Norse story survives because of accidents. The Mayan creation story survives partly because of accidents.

The Sumerian creation story survives partly because of accidents. Every old mythology we still have is, in some sense, a piece of luck. I do not want to make this a sermon. But I do want, before we close this episode, to mark gratitude. Gratitude that someone, in the thirteenth century, in Iceland, took the trouble to copy down the Vǫluspá.

Gratitude that the farmer, in the seventeenth century, did not throw out the chest. Gratitude that the airplane, in 1971, did not crash. Gratitude that the language survived. Gratitude that the names, Yggdrasill, Bifrǫst, Urðarbrunnr, still mean something, to anyone, in the year you are now listening to this. The stories are an inheritance.

They are not a perfect inheritance, they are partial, contested, sometimes contradictory. But they are an inheritance, and they have come through a long dark hallway of centuries to arrive in your room tonight, in whatever form they are arriving, in this voice, on this recording, drifting through the soft late night air toward where you are lying. Sleep, if you can. The chapter is almost done.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight, and the Beginning. We have come, then, to the close. I would like to return, at the very end, to where we began. To the cold northern shore.

To the fjords and the high empty wind and the longhouses with their small warm windows lit against the dark. To the people, eleven hundred years ago, who imagined all of this, who first sat in their halls on long winter nights and told one another, in slow careful voice, about a void, about a giant, about a tree, about the nine worlds hung in its branches. It has been a long episode. You have been very patient. We have walked, tonight, through the beginning.

We have seen the void. We have seen the meeting of fire and frost. We have seen Ymir, the first being, fed by the cow Auðumbla in the great quiet. We have seen the three brothers, Odin, Vili, Vé, and the slaying that made the world. We have walked through the parts of the body that became the parts of the world.

We have stood at the trunk of Yggdrasill, where the squirrel runs up and down. We have named the nine worlds, and gone down to the three wells beneath them, and stood for a moment in the burning light of the bridge. It is, in the Norse imagination, the picture of everything that is. A great tree. Nine worlds hanging in it.

A burning bridge. Three wells of fate beneath the roots. A wind that has been moving since before the gods. In two days' time, on Wednesday at eight in the evening Eastern, the next episode will appear in your feed. It is called Odin's Search for Wisdom.

We will follow the All Father, the highest of the gods, the wanderer, the giver of his own eye, through the long strange journey by which he came to know what the Norns knew. It is a darker story than tonight's. It has more action. But it is paced, as all the episodes will be paced, for sleep. For now, however, you are here.

In this room. In this night. With whatever else you carry into bed with you tonight, the worries, the small unresolved things, the day that has just ended. The almanac would like to offer, if it can, a small companionship. We have walked, tonight, through the entire shape of the Norse cosmos.

We have visited the void. We have seen the world made. We have learned where the rivers come from, and what the dwarves are doing at the corners of the sky, and where the gods walk on rainy afternoons. You can let all of it go now. The story has been told.

The picture is complete. There is nothing left to follow. Close your eyes, if they are not already closed. Let your shoulders settle. The wind, in the old poetry, is still moving, across the great tree, across the new earth, across the dome of the sky held up by four patient dwarves.

It is moving now in the room around you, too. It has always been moving. It will go on moving long after this recording ends. Until next time. Sleep well.

One small note before the quiet. The voice telling these stories is an AI clone of my own voice, made from recordings of me. Sleep well.

Good evening. Or perhaps good night, if you've made your way here in the small hours, the difference may already have stopped mattering. You've come back, perhaps, because the first episode helped you sleep. Or you've come for the first time, and the second episode happened to be the one that found you. Either is fine.

Tonight stands on its own. We will not require you to remember anything from before. If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you to do very little. Close your eyes. Let your jaw soften.

Let your shoulders drop, even a little, even if you didn't know they were tight. The story does not need your attention. It will keep moving whether you follow it or not. If you drift, that is the point. If you wake briefly to catch a single sentence and then sink again, that is good.

The almanac is patient. Last episode, we set the stage. Nine worlds. A great tree at the center of everything. Roots that reach down into the dark places, and branches that vanish into the stars.

Tonight, we meet the figure at the heart of it all. The wanderer. The one eyed god. The Allfather. The hanged god, who gave himself to himself, on a tree, in the wind, for nine nights, in pursuit of something he could not get any other way.

This is the story of Odin. And of what a god is willing to give, when what he wants is wisdom. Now, let us begin.

Chapter One. The God Who Could Not Be Still. Before we go to the well, and before we go to the tree, we should first sit, for a while, with the figure of the god himself. Because Odin is not what most people now think of when they think of a chief god. If you've grown up with the Greek and Roman tradition, you may picture a great seated figure, Zeus on Olympus, Jupiter in his temple, a king god, settled, established, presiding over a stable cosmos.

A god who does not need to leave his throne, because the world comes to him. Odin is not that. Odin is a god who cannot be still. He has a throne, we'll come to it in a few chapters, and from it, the medieval Icelander Snorri Sturluson tells us, he can see across the nine worlds. He has a hall, called Valhǫll, where the slain warriors gather.

He has wives, sons, beasts that follow him. He has every reason, if he wanted, to sit and rule. But the surviving stories almost never find him sitting. They find him walking. They find him on the road, in a wide brimmed hat pulled low over his face, leaning on a staff.

They find him in disguise at the courts of kings. They find him in the wilderness, between worlds, on the back of a strange horse with eight legs. They find him asking riddles of a giant whose name no one else has dared to learn. They find him hanging from a tree in a wind that does not stop. The old stories almost never let him rest.

And the reason, or one reason, the reason the surviving sources keep coming back to, is that Odin is hungry. He is hungry for one specific thing. He is hungry for wisdom. Now, hold that word lightly for a moment. The old Norse poets did not mean by it quite what we now mean.

They did not mean book learning, or cleverness, or the kind of wisdom one ascribes to a quiet old man on a porch. The word the poets used, the word that appears, again and again, when the sources describe what Odin is reaching for, is closer to knowledge of hidden things. Frœði. Visdómr. The kind of knowledge that is kept under stones.

Under roots. Under the surface of dark water. The kind of knowledge that has to be paid for. That is what Odin pursues. You will hear, in many of his stories, the same arc, repeating.

Odin discovers that someone, somewhere, knows something he does not. The someone is usually old. Usually a giant. Usually living far from Asgard, at the edge of the world, in a place no other god wants to go. And Odin goes.

Often alone. Often in disguise. He pays, sometimes in his body, sometimes in his form, sometimes in something more precious than either. And he comes back changed. This is the shape of the god you should hold in your mind tonight.

A king god who refuses to behave like a king. A god who would rather walk than sit. A god who is willing, again and again, to give up something he already has, because he cannot bear the thought of not knowing the thing he doesn't have. In one reading of the Eddas, and this is the reading the great twentieth century mythographer Mircea Eliade favored, Odin is not properly a king god at all. He is a god of a much older type.

A god of the seekers. A god of the shamans. A figure whose nearest cousins are not Zeus and Jupiter but the spirit walkers of the Sámi north and the great hunter gods of Siberia. A god who travels not by chariot but by trance. A god whose throne is not a seat of authority but a vantage point, used the way an old hunter uses a high rock to see what is moving on the plain.

That reading is not the only reading. Other scholars, Georges Dumézil among them, placed Odin firmly within an Indo European tradition of sovereign gods, the kind one finds across many cultures. There is no need, tonight, to settle the question. The texts allow both readings, and the truth is probably that Odin contained both, that he was, by the time the surviving sources were written, already a layered figure, with the older shaman god still visible beneath the newer king god. You don't need to choose.

You only need to know, as we begin, that the god we are following tonight is not the kind of god who waits for you to come to him. He goes. And in this episode, we will follow him on the two journeys for which he is best remembered. The journey to a well, at the foot of the great tree, where the giant Mímir keeps watch over a water that holds something Odin needs more than he needs his own eye. And the journey, longer and stranger, that took him up into the branches of that same tree, where he hung for nine nights, in the dark and the wind, given to himself, with the point of his own spear in his side, until something rose out of the depths to meet him.

These are the two great sacrifices of Odin. The eye. And the body on the tree. The two payments he made, in the surviving stories, for the kind of knowledge he could not get any other way. We will come to both, slowly.

But first, before the well, before the tree, we should learn the rest of who he is. We should walk with him for a little while. We should learn the company he keeps, the gear he carries, the throne he uses on those rare occasions when he does sit. We should learn his names. He has many names.

Chapter Two. The Many Names of the Allfather. In one of the strangest passages of the Poetic Edda, a poem called Grímnismál, the Sayings of the Masked One, Odin is sitting between two fires, bound by a king who does not yet realize who his prisoner is. And in this position, in the long terrible heat of the fires, the god begins to speak. And one of the things he speaks is his own list of names.

He gives them slowly, in long lines of old Norse verse. He gives them in clusters. He gives them like a man who is trying to make a young king understand, before he runs out of time, that he is in the presence of someone much older than he had imagined. The names go on for stanzas. I will not give you all of them tonight.

The list, if you count every variant in every source, Grímnismál, the longer prose tradition of Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, the scattered references in skaldic poetry, runs to well over a hundred. Some scholars put the figure closer to two hundred. We do not need that many. But we should sit, for a little while, with a few of them. Because the names of Odin are not, in the way modern names are, just labels.

Each one is a small description. Each one tells you what kind of god he is in the moment that name is used. Some of them are quiet. Some are unsettling. Some sound, even at a thousand years' distance, like the names of figures who would not necessarily wish you well.

The most familiar to modern ears is Allfather. Alfǫðr. The father of all. It is the name Snorri uses most often in the Prose Edda, and it carries the king god weight of the Christian period in which Snorri was writing. It is also a name Odin uses of himself.

It is a true name. But it is not, I think, the truest one. Consider, beside it, the name Yggr. The Terrible One. The Awful One.

The one who makes you afraid. From this name comes the name of the great tree itself, Yggdrasill, which in Old Norse means Yggr's horse. Odin's horse. And the horse, here, is not a horse. The horse, here, is the gallows.

Because in the old Norse poetic tradition, a hanged man was said to be riding the gallows tree, the way one rides a horse. To call the tree Yggr's horse is to name it as the gallows on which Odin once hung. So the great tree at the center of the world, the one we spent so much of last episode describing, it carries Odin's name in its own. And the name it carries is not the comforting Allfather. It is the unsettling Yggr.

The Terrible One. The hanged one's gallows. Consider, beside that, the name Bölverkr. Evil Doer. Worker of Bale.

This is the name Odin uses when he goes, in disguise, to steal the mead of poetry from a giant, a story we will arrive at later in the season. He gives himself the name Evil Doer the way a thief gives himself a false name in a tavern. He does not, in that moment, deny that what he is doing is theft. He simply does it. Consider Grímnir.

The Masked One. The Hooded One. The traveler in the wide hat with his face turned away. The figure on the road who does not wish to be recognized. Consider Hangatýr.

The God of the Hanged. The one to whom hanged men were said to belong. The Roman writer Tacitus, looking at the Germanic peoples a thousand years before Snorri, wrote that they sacrificed men to a god he called Mercury, and many scholars believe Tacitus's Mercury is, at least in part, an early form of Odin. The sacrifices were sometimes made by hanging. Consider Vegtam.

Way Tame. The One Used to the Road. The wanderer. Consider Síðhǫttr. Long Hat.

Wide Brim. A name not a man would normally use, but a description that became a name. The hat pulled low over the face. The half shadow over the missing eye. Consider Gangleri.

Walk Weary. Wandering Tired. The one whose feet are sore. Do you hear what these are doing? They are not titles.

They are not royal honorifics. They are descriptions of a god who travels, who hides his face, who is known to the dead, who lies when it is useful, who is tired, who is feared. They are descriptions of a god you might not, if you met him on a road at dusk, immediately want to invite home. In one reading of the Eddas, the proliferation of Odin's names is itself part of the point. Odin is a god who refuses to be one thing.

He is the figure who appears in many forms, in many places, at many moments, and the names are the way the old poets kept track of him. Here he is the wanderer. Here he is the hanged one. Here he is the masked one in the king's hall. Here he is the wise one in the giant's cave.

Here he is the terrible one. This is not, I think, a god who is easy to love. The Norse sources do not present him that way. They present him as a god you respect, and one you fear, and one you are careful around. The skaldic poets sometimes addressed him with a kind of nervous formality, the way one addresses a powerful patron who is also unpredictable.

And yet. He is also the god who, in his hunger to know hidden things, is willing to suffer. He is the god who gave his eye. He is the god who hung on the tree. These are not the acts of a comfortable king.

These are the acts of a seeker who has decided, somewhere in the long dark of his own beginning, that knowledge is worth more than comfort, more than wholeness, more than the body's safety. So the names matter. They are how we know what kind of seeker he is. He is the masked one. The hooded one.

The wanderer. The hanged one. The terrible one. The all father. The evil doer.

The way weary. The god of the gallows. He is, by his own count, given to a young king who did not know he was speaking to a god, many. Tonight, we are going to follow one of him. The seeker.

The one who gave up his eye, and the one who gave up his body, in the pursuit of something the rest of the gods did not even know how to ask for. But first, let us meet the company he keeps. He has, in the surviving stories, three sets of companions. Two ravens. Two wolves.

And one horse, with eight legs, which we will come to in its own chapter. We will start with the ravens.

Chapter Three. Thought and Memory, the Two Ravens. Each morning, in the surviving Norse tradition, two ravens leave Odin's shoulders. They are large birds. Black, of course.

The poets do not bother to describe their appearance in any detail, the audience already knew what a raven looked like, and the audience already knew, in particular, what a raven looked like at dawn, lifting from a high place and turning into the wind. The Norse poets are spare in this way. They tell you what matters, and they assume the rest. What matters is the names. The first raven is called Huginn.

The name comes from the Old Norse word hugr, which is usually translated thought, but which carries a fuller meaning than the English word can hold. Hugr is mind, intent, attention, the directed force of a person's interest. It is what you are doing, in your head, right now, even as you let your eyes close, the gentle drifting that is still, just barely, the work of attention. The second is called Muninn. From munr, which is usually translated memory, but which also means desire, longing, the things one holds in oneself across time.

Munr is what you carry. The unsent letter. The face of someone you have not seen in years. The smell of the kitchen of the house you grew up in. The thing you cannot quite stop turning over.

Munr is the part of memory that is alive. Thought, and memory. This is what Odin sends out, each morning, to bring him news of the world. The ravens fly out across the nine realms. They go over fjords and forests and battlefields.

They go down into the deep places. They go to the houses of men, and to the halls of giants, and to the borders of the underworld. They see what is happening. They listen. They watch.

And in the evening, they come back, and they land on Odin's shoulders, and they tell him, in low voices that only he can hear, what they have seen. This is the image. A god sitting on a high place at evening, with two black birds whispering into his ears, the world being delivered to him in fragments, hour by hour, from every horizon. It is one of the most beautiful images in Norse mythology. It is also one of the more melancholy.

Because in the Poetic Edda, in Grímnismál, Odin himself describes the arrangement. And then he adds a line. A line that is, when you stop to consider it, almost startling. Hugin and Munin fly each day over the wide world, he says. I fear for Hugin, that he may not return.

But more anxious am I for Munin. I fear for Hugin, that he may not return. But more anxious am I for Munin. Read it twice. The god, the king of the gods, the figure of greatest power in his pantheon, admits that he is afraid.

He admits that each morning, when his thought and his memory leave him, he does not know with certainty that they will come back. And he admits that of the two, it is memory that worries him more. Now, scholars have spent a great deal of time on this line, and there is no single agreed reading. Some take it literally, that Odin fears his ravens, who are after all only birds, may meet an accident in the wide world. Others read it as a meditation on what it means to be a god of wisdom, that even Odin, with all his power, cannot guarantee that thought and memory will continue to serve him.

Others read it as a foreshadowing, that Odin is a god who, in the long view, is fated to lose everything, including, perhaps, the contents of his own mind. Others read it as a moment of vulnerability that the poet allowed the god, deliberately, to humanize him, to make the listener feel, even at a great distance, that the Allfather himself was not free of the worry every old person eventually carries, that one's mind will not, at the end, be reliable. You can hold whichever reading you prefer. The Norse poets, more often than the Greek, leave room for the listener to settle into the line themselves. What is consistent, across readings, is the structure of what the ravens represent.

Odin does not know the world directly. He is too big, in some sense, to know it directly. He is the Allfather. He sits in the high place. His sight is broad, but it is broad in the way a mountain's view is broad, it sees everything, and so it sees no one thing closely.

To know the world closely, he sends out birds. The birds are smaller. The birds can land on a windowsill. The birds can hear what is said in a kitchen. The birds can listen to a king's whisper to his queen, or to a farmer's complaint, or to the secret of a giant's grief.

And the birds can come back, in the evening, and place what they have heard at Odin's ear. In one reading of the Eddas, and this reading I find quietly compelling, the ravens are not separate creatures at all. They are extensions of Odin himself. They are his thought, sent out. They are his memory, sent out.

The god does not have two ravens because he needs spies. The god has two ravens because that is how a being of his kind goes looking. He casts pieces of his own mind into the wind, and waits for them to come back. It is not so different, though I offer this only as a suggestion, from what your own mind is doing, on a long quiet evening, when you let yourself drift back over the day. Pieces of your attention go out.

They return with what they found. You sift through what they bring you, and you decide what to keep, and what to release before sleep. You are, in this small way, doing what Odin was said to do. You are sending out Thought. You are sending out Memory.

You are letting them go to the corners of the day, and you are waiting for them to come back. When they do, when the last of the day's images have been turned over and set down, you sleep. The ravens, in the old stories, did the same. They flew. They returned.

The god received them. And the day, in Asgard, ended. Now, we have spoken of the ravens. Let us turn to the wolves.

Chapter Four. The Wolves at His Throne. Odin keeps wolves. This may surprise you, depending on what associations the word wolf now carries for you. In the modern imagination, wolves and chief gods do not often go together.

Wolves, in many later traditions, Christian, Roman, fairy tale, are figures of menace. The wolf at the door. The wolf in the fold. The wolf who eats grandmothers. By the time of the European Middle Ages, the wolf had become, in much of the surviving folklore, something close to a villain.

The Norse, by contrast, lived with wolves. They knew them. They feared them, yes, they hunted them, yes, but they also recognized in the wolf a kind of dignity. A great hunter. A creature of the long winter.

A creature that, in its way, deserved the respect that one beast of the cold gives another. And so Odin has wolves. The first is called Geri. The name means, simply, the greedy one. Ravenous.

The one who is hungry. The Old Norse word gerr carries the suggestion of a creature whose hunger is constant, not desperate, not starving, but simply present, the way breathing is present. The second is called Freki. The name also means, more or less, the greedy one. Another word for hunger.

The Old Norse poets liked these doubled names, pairs whose meaning rhymes. Huginn and Muninn. Geri and Freki. The two birds of the mind. The two beasts of the appetite.

The pattern is intentional. So at Odin's throne, on either side of him, there are two beasts of hunger. And here, the Eddas tell us something quite striking. In Grímnismál, the same poem in which Odin gives his many names, there is a small stanza that describes what the god does with his food. The gods, of course, feast in Valhǫll.

The slain warriors, in the old vision of the afterlife, feast with them. There is meat, and there is mead, and the tables are long. But Odin himself, the Allfather, the king god, eats nothing. The stanza tells us: the food set before him, he gives to Geri and Freki. The Old Norse phrase is precise.

Geri ok Freki seðr Herjafǫðr, Geri and Freki, the father of armies sates them. The food is for the wolves. The god himself, the stanza adds, lives on wine alone. On mead. On the drink, not the meat.

This image is worth sitting with. The god of war, the god of the slain, the god who is said to gather the heroic dead into his hall after every battle, that god does not eat the meat of the feast. He passes it down. He feeds his wolves. He drinks the wine.

There are several readings. One reading is ritual: that the poet, in describing Odin this way, was making him fit the pattern of certain initiated men and certain magicians in the historical record, figures who, in the surviving accounts, were said to fast from solid food during periods of trance or vision. To live on drink alone, in the old Norse imagination, was already to be moving toward the kind of state where wisdom became possible. A man who ate normally was a man with his feet on the ground. A man who lived on wine was a man whose feet were already, slightly, off it.

A second reading is symbolic: that the wolves are Odin's hunger. That, in giving his food to them, he is acknowledging that the hunger he experiences is not, in fact, for meat. It is for something else. The hunger has been transferred. The hunger has been embodied, in two beasts, who can be fed in his place.

The god himself can then turn his attention to the harder thing, to the hunger that the wolves cannot eat for him. A third reading is poetic: that the Norse poets simply liked the picture. A great hall. A long table. A king god at its head.

Two black wolves at his feet, eating what he passes down. A horn of mead at his hand. The hunger of warriors all around him, satisfied. And the god himself, the only being in the hall whose hunger is not satisfied, and who, somehow, has been at peace with that hunger for as long as anyone can remember. You can choose your reading.

They are not exclusive. What I want you to carry away, for the rest of this episode, is the shape of the image. Because we are going to come back to it, in different forms, again and again. Odin is a god of withheld appetite. He is a god who does not let his own hunger be satisfied in the normal way.

He gives the meal to the wolves. He gives his eye to the well. He gives his body to the tree. Each act, in its way, is the same act. Each one is the god refusing to take what is offered, in order to reach for something further out.

In one reading of the Eddas, this is again the kind of reading Eliade favored, Odin is the patron god of every figure in human culture who has ever traded comfort for vision. The seeker. The mystic. The poet who could have lived an easier life, but who chose the harder one because the easier one would not have given him what he wanted. Odin is the divine face of the choice, repeated, in human form, across cultures, to refuse the meat in front of you because you sense, somewhere, that there is something further you have not yet reached.

That is the god we are following tonight. He has thought. He has memory. He has hunger, given to two wolves so that he can be free of it. And he has, at his side, two pieces of gear that the poets gave him by name.

A spear. A ring. We will turn to those now.

Chapter Five. The Spear and the Ring. Every god, in every pantheon, has objects. Zeus has his thunderbolt. Thor, we will come to him next episode, has a hammer.

Poseidon has his trident. Hermes has his winged sandals. The objects are not, in the surviving traditions, accidental. The objects are part of the god. They tell you what kind of god you are looking at.

They are, in a sense, the god's body extended out into the world, the hammer is part of Thor, the way Thor's beard is part of Thor. Odin has two such objects. The first is a spear, called Gungnir. The second is a ring, called Draupnir. We will begin with the spear.

Gungnir, in the Norse tradition, was made by the dwarves of Svartalfheim. We met that realm last episode, briefly, the great underground city of forges, where the most skilled metalworkers of the nine worlds lived. The name Gungnir comes from a verb meaning to sway, to tremble. The spear that trembles. Some scholars read this as a reference to the haft's quiver in flight, a well thrown spear is a thing that hums in the air.

Others read it as a kind of magical attribute, that the spear, when not in use, shivers slightly at Odin's side, the way a hunting dog shivers when it senses game. The defining property of Gungnir, in the surviving sources, is simple: it never misses. Whatever Odin throws it at, it strikes. Whatever Odin aims at, even in the dark, even at a great distance, even with one eye, the spear goes there. This is a small but consequential detail.

Because in the Norse worldview, the throwing of a spear was not merely a military act. It was, at certain moments, a sacred one. To throw a spear over an army before battle, the spear of Odin over you, was to dedicate that army's enemies to the god. The throw was the marking. The throw was the giving.

Whichever side received the spear's flight was, in some sense, already promised to Odin. So Gungnir is not only a weapon. It is a marker. A spear that always finds its target is a god's way of saying: this one is mine. I have chosen.

We will see this spear again, later in the episode, in a different and more troubling context. Because the spear that always finds its target, when Odin himself hangs from the tree, in the great sacrifice we are circling toward, pierces the god's own side. Geiri undaðr, the Hávamál says. Wounded by a spear. And though the text does not specify which spear, the long tradition of reading has assumed it was his own.

The spear that always finds its target finds, on Yggdrasill, the god who throws it. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Hold the spear for now. Set it down. We will come back to it.

The second object is Draupnir. Draupnir is a ring. Specifically, it is a great gold arm ring, the kind of object a chieftain would wear on his upper arm, the kind that signified, in the old Norse world, both wealth and the obligation to give wealth away. A ring giver was a leader. A king.

A man whose hands were open. The chieftains in the surviving sagas are praised, often, for the freedom with which they distributed their gold. Draupnir is the perfect ring for such a giver. Because of all its qualities, the one the poets emphasize is this: every ninth night, from Draupnir, eight identical gold rings drip. The name itself means the dripper.

The Prose Edda is precise on this, eight new rings of the same weight as the original, on every ninth night, without interruption. The wealth, in the surviving picture, is the kind that flows so steadily a king could give and give from it, and never empty his hoard. In the surviving stories, Draupnir was made by the dwarven brothers Sindri and Brokkr. They made it as part of a larger contest, a strange episode, which we will come to in a later season, in which Loki bet his own head that the brothers could not make objects finer than those another set of dwarves had made. The brothers, working at their forge, made three things: Draupnir, the ring; Gullinbursti, a golden boar that ran through the air faster than any horse; and Mjǫllnir, the hammer of Thor, which we will discuss at length next episode.

The objects were judged. The brothers were declared the winners. Loki, by sleight of language, escaped the loss of his head, but Draupnir, by then, was already in Odin's keeping. The ring tells you something about the god. Odin is a giver.

Odin keeps a hall, in which he gives. Odin's followers, in the surviving sagas, are themselves often described as ring givers, chieftains who hold open hands, the way Odin does, modeling themselves on him. The ring is not just an ornament. It is a description of how the god wishes to be in the world. The god of withheld appetite is also, in his way, the god who cannot stop giving the wealth of his arm away.

Both can be true at once. Now hold these together. The spear. The ring. Both gifts from the dwarves.

Both with magical properties. Both descriptive, the spear says I always find what I choose, the ring says what I have I give. Together they describe a god who decides, and a god who gives. A god who is willing to mark a man for death with a thrown spear, and a god who is also willing, in the next moment, to lay a ring of gold on the table for whichever follower has earned it. It is not a tidy combination.

Norse gods rarely are. We have, then: thought, memory, hunger, the spear, the ring, the throne. We have the god's company and the god's gear. We have the names. We have the shape of who he is.

Now, at last, we can begin to walk with him toward the journey for which he is most remembered. The journey to the well of Mímir.

Chapter Six. The Well Beneath the World. We must, for this chapter, return to the great tree. Last episode, we walked all the way around Yggdrasill. We described it from a distance, the way the old Norse poets did, its three roots reaching down into different realms, its branches lost among stars, the eagle at its crown, the squirrel running its length, the four stags eating its leaves, the serpent gnawing at its base.

We described it as a structure. As the architecture of the cosmos. Tonight, we return to it for a smaller purpose. We are going to go to one of its roots, and we are going to look at what is kept there. There is, depending on which source you trust, some disagreement about exactly how many wells lay beneath Yggdrasill, and which root led to which.

Snorri Sturluson, writing the Prose Edda in the early thirteenth century, names three. The Poetic Edda mentions wells without always specifying which is which. The names overlap. The traditions have, by the time they reach us, been folded together by centuries of telling and re telling. What is consistent is this.

Beneath at least one of Yggdrasill's three great roots, there is a well of water. And the well is not ordinary water. The well holds, depending on which source you read, wisdom. Memory. The deep knowledge of how the world is and how it is going.

The water of that well is something older than the gods. Something the tree itself drinks from. The well we are going to tonight is called the well of Mímir. Mímisbrunnr. Mímir's spring.

It sits beneath the root of Yggdrasill that reaches into the realm of the frost giants, the place last episode we called Jotunheim. So Odin, to reach it, must leave Asgard. Must cross the bridge. Must travel down the long cold reach of one of the world's three great taproots. This already tells us something.

The wisdom that Odin wants is not stored in Asgard. The wisdom is kept in the giants' country. The giants, the older powers, the beings who came before the gods, the children of Ymir's children, hold what Odin needs. He must leave home to find it. The keeper of the well is called Mímir.

We do not, in the surviving sources, know much about him. He is, by general agreement, a being from before the named gods, but the Norse sources do not agree on which side of the divine families he belonged to. The Ynglinga saga places him among the Æsir, and tells us he was sent, after a war between the Æsir and the other divine family, the Vanir, as a hostage, and was eventually beheaded, and his head preserved by Odin for counsel. Other sources place him simply among the jötnar, the giant kind, of an unusually wise sort. Either way, he is older than most of the named gods, and his wisdom is the kind that pre dates them.

His name, in Old Norse, is related to the verbs minna, to remember, to bring to mind, and minni, memory. He is, in his name itself, the rememberer. The one who keeps. The one who does not let things be lost. Before we go to what Mímir keeps, we should spend a small moment with what Mímir was.

Because the figure who sits at the well is not, in the surviving sources, simply a quiet old keeper who has always been there. He has a history. And the history, briefly told, helps us understand why the well is where it is, and why the keeper is the one chosen to keep it. The story comes to us, in its fullest form, from Snorri Sturluson, writing in the early thirteenth century, and from a shorter account in the Ynglinga saga, attributed to Snorri or to his school, depending on which scholar you read. The two sources, taken together, give us this.

There was, in the older days of the gods, a war. Not the great battle at the end of time, that war is still to come, and we will arrive at it in its season. This was an earlier war. A war between two families of divine beings. On one side, the Æsir, the family to which Odin belongs, the family that lives in Asgard, the family whose names we have been learning.

On the other side, the Vanir, an older family, gods of a different kind, associated with fertility, with the sea, with the slow patient work of growing things. The Vanir lived in their own world, called Vanaheim. They had their own ways. They were, in the surviving sources, not lesser than the Æsir, only different. And for reasons the sources do not entirely explain, the two families went to war.

The war, the sources tell us, was long and went badly for both sides. Neither family could entirely defeat the other. And eventually, in the way such wars sometimes end, the two families made peace. The terms of the peace were these. Each side would send to the other two of its most valued members, to live among the foreign family, and to serve, in effect, as both ambassador and hostage.

The Vanir sent Njǫrðr, the sea god, the older one, and his children Freyr and Freyja, beautiful, generous, gods of fertility and of the harvest, to live among the Æsir. The Æsir, in return, sent two of their own. One of them was a god named Hœnir, tall and handsome and impressive in council. The other was Mímir. Mímir, the wise one, the rememberer, the keeper of memory.

The Æsir sent the wisest of their own number to live among the Vanir, in token of the seriousness of the peace. The peace did not, for Mímir, end well. What happened, in the surviving accounts, was that the Vanir came eventually to suspect they had been cheated. Hœnir, they discovered, was a fine speaker only when Mímir stood at his side, without Mímir, Hœnir gave only short answers, and seemed to depend on his companion for every important word. The Vanir, feeling deceived, did to Mímir what was, in the old usage, sometimes done to a hostage whose value had turned out to be different than promised.

They cut off his head. And they sent the head back, by some long road, to the Æsir. What Odin did when the head arrived is one of the strangest acts in all of Norse mythology. He did not bury it. He did not burn it.

He took the head, the sources tell us, and he treated it with herbs that would keep it from decaying, and he spoke charms over it, and he kept it by him. And the head, the head, continued to speak. Mímir, even severed from his body, continued to give counsel. The Allfather, in many of the later stories, is described as carrying his wisdom counselor's preserved head with him, consulting it in private, listening to it speak the way one listens to an oracle. This is the Mímir we meet at the well.

Or rather, and this is the point, this is the Mímir we meet, depending on which source you trust. Because in some of the Eddic poems, Mímir is alive at the well, sitting beside it, drinking from it every morning. In other sources, the well is associated with the head Odin keeps, the well is where the head was set, or where the head dwells, or where the head's wisdom is somehow gathered. The two traditions do not entirely line up. What is consistent, what every surviving source agrees on, is that Mímir, in whatever form he persisted, was the keeper.

The wisdom of the well was his. And when Odin came, in his disguise, down the long cold root of the tree, he came to a being who had himself paid a price for the knowledge he held. Mímir had given his body. The well had taken his head. Whatever was left of him sat, or floated, or rested, beside the still water, waiting for whichever god would be foolish enough to come asking for a drink.

And what does he keep? He keeps the well. The water of Mímir's spring, the sources tell us, contains the deep knowledge of the past, not the past as one might recall it casually, but the past as it really happened, in all its weight, with all its consequences visible. To drink from Mímir's well is to know the world the way Mímir knows it. To see, in any present moment, the full lineage of choices and counter choices that led to it.

To know, with certainty, what has been done. You can imagine, perhaps, what such knowledge would mean to a god whose central concern was wisdom. The Allfather, who already knows much, who already has thought and memory flying back to him each evening, who already sits on a high throne and surveys nine worlds, even he does not have this. The well holds something he cannot get any other way. And so he goes.

In one reading of the Eddas, and the sources here are spare, so a good deal must be inferred, Odin first travels to the well alone. He travels in his disguise, the wide hat, the dark cloak, the staff, the half shadow over his face. He walks the long road down the great cold root of the tree, and he comes, at last, to the place where Mímir keeps watch. The well, the surviving images suggest, is set in stone. The water is still.

Around it, perhaps, there are runes, though the sources do not specify. Mímir himself sits beside it, in some accounts; in others, he is somewhere nearby, perhaps within the great root itself, perhaps in a small stone seat at the water's edge. The atmosphere, in every account, is quiet. The well is not a place of crowds. The well is a place where one being keeps watch over a water that very few have been allowed to drink.

Odin asks for a drink. The sources do not give us, in any complete form, the conversation that follows. There is no preserved dialogue. There is no recorded back and forth. There is only the bare fact, which appears in Vǫluspá, the Seeress's Prophecy, one of the oldest surviving Eddic poems, and which is elaborated, briefly, by Snorri in the Prose Edda.

The fact is this. Mímir agreed. Odin was permitted to drink. But the drink was not free. The price was an eye.

We will go to that scene in the next chapter. We will sit with it for a while. We will look at it carefully, because it is one of the most consequential scenes in all of Norse mythology, and the surviving sources, sparse as they are, give us enough to look closely. For now, only hold the structure. A god, on a long road, in a disguise.

A keeper at a stone well. A water that holds the past. A price that has not yet been named. Outside, in whatever room you are listening from, the wind is doing what wind does. The night is doing what night does.

The almanac is moving slowly. We have time. We will go to the well now.

Chapter Seven. The Eye in the Water. I want to slow down, here, for a moment. This is a scene that the surviving sources do not give us in detail, and I think that is on purpose. The Norse poets had a kind of restraint, in their most consequential moments, that is easy to miss if you read them quickly.

They did not, as the Greek poets sometimes did, linger on the visual. They did not describe the god's face. They did not describe the keeper's face. They did not give us the small psychological detail. They simply told us, in a few lines, what was done.

In Vǫluspá, the seeress is speaking. She is telling Odin himself, in a kind of summoned vision, what she knows of his own life. And she says, and this is a paraphrase, because I do not wish to be precise to the line, She says: I know where your eye is hidden, Yggr. It is in the deep well of Mímir. There Mímir drinks the mead, every morning, of Valfǫðr's pledge.

That is the line. That is, very nearly, all we are given. Odin's eye is in Mímir's well. Mímir drinks from it. Every morning.

The eye is the pledge. The eye is the price. The exchange has been made. Snorri, three centuries later, elaborates only slightly. He tells us, in Gylfaginning, that Odin came to the well and asked for a single drink.

Mímir would not grant it without payment. The payment was an eye. Odin gave it. The eye remained, after that, in the well, visible, in some accounts, to anyone who looked carefully into the water. That is the scene.

Let me sit with it for a moment. Because what the source does not give us is the small thing, the human thing, that I think we are meant to feel, even at a thousand years' distance. The god, standing at the well. The keeper, waiting. The naming of the price.

Now imagine, for a moment, what such a moment would actually contain. To give an eye is not, in any human or godly sense, a small matter. It is not a piece of clothing. It is not a coin. The eye is a part of the body that, once given, does not return.

There is no replacing it. There is no second eye, kept in reserve, that will grow back. The god who gives an eye gives it permanently. Whatever he sees afterward, he sees with one fewer aperture than he had before. And yet, and this is the central strangeness of the scene, Odin, in every surviving account, gives the eye without hesitation.

There is no recorded protest. There is no recorded bargaining. The keeper names the price, and the price is paid. You may be wondering, as you listen, whether there is any way to read this other than as a kind of madness. To give half of one's sight, permanently, for a single drink of water, even magical water, even water that holds the past, seems, by any ordinary measure, a wild exchange.

The god is taking the worst of the deal. He is giving what cannot be recovered, in exchange for what amounts, in the moment, to a swallow. And yet the surviving Norse tradition does not present it as madness. It presents it as the defining act of the god. There are, again, a few ways to read this.

One reading, the simplest, is that what the well gave was worth what the well asked. That the drink of Mímir's water was not, in fact, a single moment of vision. It was a permanent reorganization of how the god understood the world. The past, after the drink, was visible to Odin in a way it had not been before. Every present moment carried, for him, its full lineage.

He saw, in the face of every being, what had happened to bring that being to be there. He saw, in every battle, the long chain of choices that had led to its first blow. He saw, in himself, the long arc of his own becoming. The wisdom was permanent. The eye was a one time cost.

The math, by that reading, makes sense. A second reading, more subtle, is that the loss of the eye was itself part of the wisdom. That a god who gave up half his sight in exchange for deeper sight became, by that act, a different kind of seer. A one eyed god cannot see what is in front of him the way a two eyed god can. But a one eyed god has paid, in his own body, for the right to see what is behind the front of things.

He has bought, in a way, the right to see crookedly. The right to see askance. The right to see what cannot be seen straight on. In this reading, the loss is not a side effect. The loss is the wisdom.

The wisdom and the loss are the same thing. A third reading, and this is the reading the great mythographer Eliade leans toward, is that the scene at the well is a kind of shamanic initiation. In the surviving accounts of circumpolar shamanism, the spiritual traditions of the Siberian and northern Eurasian peoples, there is a recurring pattern in which the initiate must give up part of their body, or part of their identity, in order to enter the spirit world. The loss is the ticket. The wound is the door.

Odin, in giving his eye, is buying not a single drink but an entire mode of being. He becomes, by the act, the kind of being who can travel the deep places. He becomes, by the act, a shaman god. You can hold any of these readings. They are not exclusive.

But what I want you to hold, as we close this chapter, is the image itself. Because it is one of the most affecting images in all of mythology. A god, in a wide hat, standing at the edge of a stone well. The keeper beside him. The water, dark and still.

The god's hand, perhaps, lifted to his own face. The act. The moment of giving. The water, after, accepting what has been given. The eye, settling somewhere into the depths, visible, the sources tell us, to anyone who later looked closely.

A small bright thing at the bottom of the well, where Mímir himself would drink, every morning, after. And then the drink. The god, lifting the cup. The water. The taste of the deep past.

The flood of what is now known. The world, when the god lifted his face from the cup, was the same world it had been. But the god was not the same. He was now what the sources call him for the rest of his existence. Báleygr, the Flame Eyed.

Bileygr, the Wavering Eyed, the Weak Eyed. New names, now, accumulate around this moment, around the missing eye, around the price he has paid. The names mark it. The names tell us, across a thousand years, what the act meant. He paid in body.

He received in mind. The exchange was permanent. He turned, after, from the well. He walked back up the long root of the great tree. He returned to the upper world.

He took up his throne again. He let the ravens fly. He fed his wolves. He drank his wine. But he was different now.

And the next time he wanted something deeper, something the well of Mímir, even, could not give him, he would have to pay again. He would have to pay more. He would have to pay, this time, in his whole body. He would have to give himself to the tree.

Chapter Eight. Sleipnir, the Eight legged Horse. Before we go up the tree, we should meet the horse. I want to give you the horse now because the horse, in the sources, is the way Odin gets between worlds. He is, in the literal sense, the god's vehicle, the means by which Odin, who travels constantly, travels at all.

And because much of what is left in this episode is travel, into the upper branches of the tree, into the dark of the nine nights, into and out of the places where the runes lie, it helps, before we go further, to know what Odin rides. The horse is called Sleipnir. The name means, roughly, the slipper. The glider. The verb root carries the sense of moving smoothly, of slipping, of passing over surfaces without effort.

It is, by every account, the finest horse in the nine worlds. It has eight legs. This is, in the surviving Norse iconography, one of the most consistent and recognizable details about the god. Wherever Odin appears in surviving art, on standing stones, on small bronze figurines, in the carvings of medieval Sweden and Norway, he is often accompanied by a horse with more legs than a horse should have. Two extra.

Four pairs. The legs, in the images, double back on themselves. The horse is in motion even when it is not, in the sense that an eight legged creature is, by definition, moving four times as fast as a four legged one. The horse is built for distance. Where does the horse come from?

The origin story is, I am afraid, one of the stranger ones in the corpus. It involves the gods' decision to hire a builder for the walls of Asgard, an obscure stranger who turned out to be a giant, a wager about completion dates, and the trickster god Loki, whom we will meet much more thoroughly in later episodes. The full story is long enough that we will not, tonight, walk all the way through it. We will arrive at the bottom of it, which is what matters for our purposes here. At the bottom of the story is this.

Loki, for reasons we will not now untangle, found himself needing to distract a great work stallion called Svaðilfari, the giant's horse. The simplest distraction Loki could think of was to take the form of a mare. He did. Svaðilfari followed. Loki ran.

Svaðilfari followed further. The mare led the stallion off into the woods, and the work the giant was doing stopped, and the gods escaped a costly bargain, and Loki, sometime later, returned to Asgard with a foal. The foal was Sleipnir. It had eight legs from the start. It was, by all surviving accounts, supernaturally strong, supernaturally fast, supernaturally calm.

Loki gave it to Odin. Or, in some readings, Loki simply abandoned it in Asgard and Odin claimed it. Either way, the horse became the god's. And it remained, from then on, the means by which Odin moved. I want you to sit, for a moment, with the strangeness of this.

The chief god of the Norse pantheon, the Allfather, the lord of the slain, the figure of greatest authority and dignity in his cosmos, is mounted on a horse that was born from a male trickster god in the form of a female horse, who allowed himself to be pursued by an actual male horse in order to delay a building project. The genealogy is, to put it mildly, unconventional. The Norse, however, did not treat this as scandalous. They treated it as, simply, what had happened. Loki is a trickster, and tricksters do trickster things.

The trick worked. The foal was produced. The foal turned out to be the finest horse in the worlds. The god received it. The story ended.

This is, I think, one of the differences between the Norse and the Greek mythological imaginations. The Greeks would have, in such a moment, made the genealogy into a problem, a source of shame, a thing to be hidden or fought over. The Norse simply accepted it. The horse was excellent. The god rode it.

The conversation moved on. What you should keep, then, is the function of Sleipnir, not the genealogy. Sleipnir is the means by which Odin crosses between worlds. A horse with four legs runs across the ground. A horse with eight legs, the surviving Norse imagination suggests, runs across other surfaces.

Across air. Across the surface of water. Across the boundary between the upper world and the lower. Across the path from Asgard down to Hel. There is, in the Eddic poem Baldrs Draumar, The Dreams of Baldr, a passage in which Odin rides Sleipnir down into the underworld, down to the gates of Hel, to summon a long dead seeress to answer his questions.

The horse carries him there. The horse carries him back. The boundaries that, for a four legged horse, would be impassable, the horse with eight legs simply slips through. In one reading of the Eddas, Sleipnir is, like the ravens, an extension of Odin himself. The god is a god of motion.

The god moves. The horse is the vehicle of the motion. The eight legs are the structural fact that allows the motion to be more than natural. The god is not, in fact, traveling on a horse. The god is traveling on a piece of his own travel.

In another reading, and this reading some folklorists have explored at length, the eight legs are a particular kind of magical sign. Eight is, in the surviving Norse symbolism, a number associated with the passage from one state to another. Eight legs may suggest a creature that exists in two worlds at once, four legs in this one, four legs in the next, and that can move between them at will. Either reading is available to you. What matters, for the rest of this episode, is that when we follow Odin up onto the tree, in the next chapter, we are following him on a horse that does not behave like a horse.

We are following a god who, by the time he reaches the great tree, has already traveled between worlds in a way no mortal horse could carry him. We are following a god who has, by the moment he begins to climb, already made the kind of journey that human imagination usually reserves for dreams. The tree is in the wind. The horse is between the worlds. The god is going up.

Let us follow him.

Chapter Nine. The Hanging on the Tree. I am going to do something now that I do not, in the ordinary course of these episodes, do. I am going to read you a piece of the original source. Not in Old Norse, though I will give you the Norse words, briefly, because they are themselves part of the texture of the moment.

I will read you the English of the Hávamál. The high speech. The sayings of the high one. And specifically I will read you the stanzas that scholars have come to call the Rúnatal, the runic tale, in which Odin himself, speaking in the first person, describes what happened on the tree. I will give you the lines in plain modern English, paraphrased lightly for the cadence of narration.

I will not over translate. The original is spare. The narration should be spare with it. Here is what the god says. Hávamál 138 141.

I am paraphrasing slightly: I know that I hung on the windy tree, vindgameiðr, the wind swept gallows, for nine full nights. Wounded by a spear, and given to Odin. Myself, to myself. On that tree of which no man knows from what root it runs. They gave me neither bread nor any drink from a horn.

I looked downward. I took up the runes, screaming, I took them up. Then I fell back from there. That is the passage. Read it again, slowly, in your own mind, because we are going to spend the next chapter sitting with it.

I hung on the windy tree, for nine full nights, wounded by a spear, and given to Odin. Myself, to myself. Let us look at what the god has just told us. He has hung on a tree. The tree is in the wind.

He has hung there for nine full nights, not nine days, not nine days and nights, but specifically nine nights. The Norse, for what it is worth, often counted time in nights rather than days. Eight nights ago meant, in the old usage, something like a week and a day in modern English. So nine full nights is, in old time keeping, just shy of a fortnight. A long, long stretch to hang from anything.

He has been pierced by a spear. The text does not specify whose. The long tradition of reading has assumed it was his own, Gungnir, the spear that never misses, here finding the body of the god who threw it. Some scholars argue the spear was wielded by someone else, perhaps a priest, perhaps a personification of the act itself. The text is, in its bareness, ambiguous.

But the most common reading, and the one most consistent with the Norse sense that Odin is the god who sacrifices himself to himself, is that the spear was Odin's own. He was given to Odin. Gefinn Óðni. He was a sacrifice to himself. The god, in this passage, is both priest and victim.

He is the giver and the given. He is the one performing the rite, and the one upon whom the rite is performed. There is no other god involved. There is no audience. There is no one watching except, perhaps, the tree.

Myself, to myself. Sit with that line. It is, by general scholarly agreement, one of the most striking lines in all of Germanic poetry. It is the moment in which a god says, in plain words, that the sacrifice he is making is internal. That what is being given is not being given to another being.

That the god is reaching some part of himself, and offering it to another part of himself, and the rest of the cosmos is simply the place where the act happens. I do not want, in a sleep narration, to push too hard on the philosophy of this. But I would like you to notice that there is no exchange, in this scene, with anyone else. There is no Mímir. There is no keeper.

There is no other being from whom a price has been demanded. There is only Odin, and Odin, and the tree. There is something I want to say about the nine nights themselves, before we follow the god's eye downward. The text gives us, you may have noticed, almost nothing about what happened in those nine nights. The Hávamál, in the stanzas we are walking through, does not describe them.

The god says, in the spare way the Old Norse poets had, that he hung on the tree, that he was wounded, that he was given to himself, that no one brought him bread or drink. He does not describe the slow turning of the wind. He does not describe the cold deepening, hour by hour, as the first night gave way to the second. He does not describe the way his body, which was a god's body and could not die, nevertheless began, by the third or fourth night, to forget what being a body meant. The Old Norse poets, in their restraint, did not give us the inside of the experience.

They gave us only the outside. The act, the duration, the price. But you can, if you sit a moment, imagine what was probably inside. You can imagine the first night. The cold coming on.

The wind not yet so terrible. The body still familiar to itself. The spear wound, no doubt, sharp at first, a single bright line of pain in a body that had not, until that moment, been a body in pain. The mind, in that first night, would have been alert. It would have been counting hours, in the way a mind counts hours when the mind has just begun a thing it has chosen to endure.

You can imagine the second night. The cold deeper now. The wound, somewhere, dulling toward an ache that did not move. The wind, picking up. The first long dark stretch in which the eye no longer found anything new to fix on, because there was nothing to fix on except the tree and the wind and the long fall beneath.

You can imagine the third night, and the fourth. The body becoming strange to itself. The thirst, in particular, becoming a presence in the throat that was no longer separable from the rest of the body's sensation. The arms, perhaps, no longer felt as arms. The shoulders, somewhere in the second or third night, no longer felt as shoulders.

The pain, no longer felt as pain, only as a great cold weight, holding the god to the tree. You can imagine the fifth night. The mind, by now, no longer counting. The hours, no longer separable. The wind, the wood, the long dark, the small distant stars, all of it folding together into a single condition that the god, hanging there, simply was.

And then, somewhere in the sixth or seventh or eighth night, and here we are passing entirely beyond what the surviving sources are willing to say, into what later readers have only inferred, somewhere in those middle nights, the dark beneath the tree, the dark that the god, in the surviving line, had begun to look downward into, began to give back something. Not a shape. Not yet. Only a sense. A pressure.

A weight in the dark that had not been there at the beginning. A slow rising, the way a dim shape rises out of black water as the eye learns to see it. The god, the sources tell us, hung for nine nights. We do not know what happened in the first eight. We know only that on the ninth, at the end of the ninth, something rose up to meet him.

The shape that had been gathering in the dark beneath the tree, the thing his downward gaze had been calling, came up to meet him. I would like you to hold, as you listen, that the nine nights were not nothing. They were the price. They were the slow weathering of a god into a vessel that could receive what the runes were. They were the long emptying, by hunger and thirst and wind, of everything that would have kept the god full of his ordinary self.

You cannot, the Norse sources seem to suggest, receive deep knowledge while you are still full. The god had to become empty. The nine nights were the emptying. They gave me neither bread nor any drink from a horn. The plural is interesting.

The text says they. There is no specified subject. The most common reading is that the they refers to anyone who might have, in the ordinary course of things, given the god food or water. The tree did not offer him bread. The wind did not offer him drink.

The other gods, wherever they were, did not come to bring him sustenance. The god hung in the wind for nine nights, without food, without water, alone. This is, by any measure, an extreme of bodily suffering. A human body without water for nine days does not survive. The god's body, being divine, does not die, but the god, hanging there, is by every measure suffering.

He is, in the Norse imagination, undergoing what we now might call an ordeal. A controlled extremity. A pushing of the body to a place where the ordinary boundary between the body and the spirit becomes thin. I looked downward. A small line.

Easy to miss. The god, hanging on the tree, looked down. What was beneath him? The sources do not specify. The tradition has read it many ways.

Some readers have understood the downward gaze as a turning of the god's attention away from the bright upper world, the world of Asgard, of feasts, of names, and toward the darker root realms, the deep places, the wells beneath the tree. Some have understood it as the god's gaze passing into himself, into the inner darkness that ordinary daylight does not penetrate. What is consistent is that the looking downward is followed by an event. I took up the runes. The Old Norse is upp nam ek rúnar.

I took them up. Upward. To me. The runes are what the god finds, when he looks down. The runes rise up.

The god takes them. There is, in the Norse syntax, no mention of climbing or reaching. The runes are simply there, beneath the god, and the god, looking, lifts them. Screaming, I took them up. This line, more than any other in the passage, is the one I find affecting. Œpandi nam.

The act of taking the runes is not a quiet act. The god, in the moment of receiving them, screams. The wisdom, when it comes, is not gentle. It does not arrive as a soft whisper. It does not arrive as a benediction.

It arrives, the god tells us in his own words, as something that pulls a cry from his throat. There are several readings of why. The simplest reading is physical. The god has been hanging for nine nights, in the wind, without food, without water, with a spear in his side. He is, by every measure, in agony.

The scream is the body's release. The runes, when they come, come at the moment the body could not have held on any longer. The cry is the cry of an exhausted creature finally being given what it has been waiting for. A second reading is mystical. The runes, in the Norse tradition, are not merely letters of an alphabet.

They are forces. They are condensations of the world. To take a rune is to take, in a sense, a piece of the structure of being into one's mind. The body cannot accept such things easily. The cry is the cry of a finite vessel suddenly being filled with something larger than itself.

A third reading, and this is the reading I find most affecting, though it is not necessarily the right one, is that the cry is grief. That the god, in the moment of receiving the runes, becomes aware of what they will cost him. They will give him knowledge. They will give him power. They will give him the ability, in the coming centuries of his rule, to see further than any other being.

But they will also bind him to a fate. They will show him, in the future, the death of his son. They will show him the final battle. They will show him his own end. The cry, in this reading, is the cry of a god who in a single instant has been given everything he wanted, and has seen what it will cost.

Then I fell back from there. The line is bare. The Old Norse: fell ek aptr þaðan. The god falls. He falls aptr, back.

The act is finished. The god, by his own account, falls from the tree. And then the passage ends. The Hávamál goes on, in the stanzas after, to discuss the runes themselves and what they enable. The god lists spells.

He lists the kinds of knowledge he can now exercise. He lists the words and shapes by which a wise man can affect the world. But the hanging, the act itself, ends with the falling. We do not know where he fell. We do not know who, if anyone, was there to receive him.

We do not know what state his body was in. We do not know how long it took him to walk again, or whether walking was even the right word. We know only that the god, who entered the tree as one being, descended from it as another. He was now the god who had taken the runes. He was now the god who knew.

And the rest of his eternity, the rest of the stories that the surviving Norse tradition tells about him, proceeds from that moment. Outside, in whatever room you are listening from, the wind is doing what the wind does. The night is doing what the night does. The almanac is moving slowly. We have, in the chapters left, only a small amount of unwinding still to do.

We will look, more closely, at what the runes themselves were. We will look at what the god brought back. And then we will say goodnight. For now, let the image of the tree stay with you. The god, hanging.

The wind. The spear. The dark beneath him. The thing rising up to meet him. The scream.

The fall. The act is done. Let us look at the runes.

Chapter Ten. What the Runes Whispered. What are the runes? This is a question scholars have spent a very long time on, and the answer, frustratingly, is not single. In one sense, the runes are simply an alphabet.

The historical fact is that the Germanic speaking peoples of northern Europe, sometime in the first or second century after the Roman period began, developed a writing system. The earliest examples, short inscriptions on objects, on stones, on weapons, date to roughly the second century. The system is now called, by linguists, the Elder Futhark. The name comes from the first six letters of the script: F, U, Th, A, R, K. Twenty four characters.

Each one corresponds to a sound. Each one can be carved into wood, into stone, into bone, into metal. Each one, when arranged in lines, can spell out a word. In this sense, when Odin takes the runes, he takes, quite literally, the technology of writing. He takes the ability to fix language in matter.

He takes the means by which words can outlast the throats that spoke them. He becomes, by the act, the god who introduced literacy to the Germanic world. This is one reading. It is not, in the surviving sources, the most prominent one. In a second sense, the runes are not merely letters.

They are powers. Each rune, in the surviving Norse tradition, has a name. Fehu, the first rune, means cattle, wealth. Úruz means the aurochs, the great wild ox. Thurisaz means giant. Ansuz means god, and specifically, in many readings, Odin himself.

Raidho means journey. Kenaz means torch. Gebo means gift. Wunjo means joy. Hagalaz means hail.

Naudhiz means need. Isaz means ice. Jera means year, the harvest cycle. Eihwaz means yew. Pertho means a cup, or a dice cup.

Algiz means protection, sometimes elk. Sowilo means sun. Tiwaz means the god Tyr. Berkano means birch. Ehwaz means horse.

Mannaz means man. Laguz means water. Ingwaz means the god Ing, or Yngvi. Othalaz means inheritance, homeland. Dagaz means day.

Each of these, and this is the second sense in which the runes were not merely letters, was a name for a force. A pattern in the world. A thing that could be invoked, or warded against, or aligned with. To carve the rune Ansuz onto a stick was not only to write the sound A. It was to invoke the presence of the gods.

To carve Algiz was to ask for protection. To carve Naudhiz was to acknowledge a moment of necessity, or to compel one. Let me give you a few of these runes more carefully, because the names do not tell you, by themselves, what the rune was felt to be. The names are the doors. The forces are behind the doors.

Take Ansuz. The rune of the gods. The rune whose name means a god, and which, in many of the surviving accounts, points specifically at Odin himself. Ansuz, when carved, was understood to draw the presence of the divine word, the breath of the god, his speech, his ability to make a thing real by naming it. The poets, when they wanted to invoke their craft, sometimes invoked Ansuz.

The skalds, sitting before a king, sometimes traced it in the air before they began. To carve Ansuz was to say, in a single mark, that what was about to be spoken was not ordinary speech. The mouth, in that moment, was the god's mouth. Take Algiz. The rune of protection.

The shape that the Old English rune poem associates with sedge grass, sharp leaves that wound the hand that grasps them, and that the long Norse rune tradition has come to read as the standing posture of the great elk in the forest, the antlers raised, the body held. Algiz, in the rune traditions that descend from the Norse, became the rune of warding. The shape one carved, in later practice, on a token before a journey. The shape one carved, in later practice, on the threshold of a home. The rune of the standing upright, the not falling, the held line.

To carve Algiz was to ask the long pattern of the world to keep what it had been keeping. Take Naudhiz. The rune of need. The shape that is carved, the sources tell us, in moments when there is no other path. When the harvest has failed.

When the road is closed by snow. When the loved one is sick beyond the medicines that are known. Naudhiz was not a hopeful rune. It was an honest one. To carve it was to acknowledge that the moment one was in was a moment of necessity, and to ask, by the act of marking it, that the necessity be answered, somehow, by whatever in the world was capable of answering.

The rune does not promise. It only names the condition under which the speaker is asking. Take Thurisaz. The rune of the giant. The hostile force.

The pressure that pushes back against the world the gods made. To carve Thurisaz was to acknowledge that the world contained powers older than the named ones, powers that did not particularly wish humans well, powers that could be invoked, if one were brave enough, to do harm to enemies. In some of the surviving inscriptions, Thurisaz appears in curse formulas. It is, of the runes we have been describing, perhaps the most uncomfortable. The Norse imagination did not flinch from acknowledging that the world contained, alongside its protective forces, forces that were the opposite.

Take Hagalaz. The rune of hail. The sudden, destructive moment. The thing that comes from above and ruins, in a quarter of an hour, the work of a season. Hagalaz was the rune of disruption, but also, in some of the deeper Norse readings, the rune of necessary disruption.

The world, in the Norse imagination, sometimes required hail. The pattern occasionally needed to be broken before it could be re set. To carve Hagalaz was to acknowledge that something in one's life had been broken, and to suggest that the breaking, perhaps, had been necessary. And take, last, Sowilo. The rune of the sun.

The wheel of the year. The bright thing in the sky that the Norse, living in the long northern dark, watched with particular attention. The Old English rune poem describes the sun as a joy to seafarers when they cross the wide sea, a small bright thing that meant home was still findable. In the rune traditions that descend from the Norse, Sowilo became the rune of healing, of warmth, of the return of light. The shape one might carve on a token for a sick child.

The shape one might trace on a threshold as winter began to break. It was the most hopeful of the runes, the one that asked, simply, for the sun to come back. These are six of the twenty four. The other eighteen each have, in the surviving Norse tradition, similar depth. The Hávamál, in the long passage immediately following Odin's account of the hanging, lists eighteen spells the god learned through the runes.

The list is famous in Norse studies. The spells include the ability to give help in distress. To heal the sick. To dull the edges of enemy weapons. To free oneself from bonds.

To turn aside arrows in flight. To turn back hostile sorcery. To put out a fire with a word. To reconcile a feud. To calm a storm at sea.

To bring a hanged man down from the gallows so that he walks and speaks. To make a woman love. The list ends with one final spell, the eighteenth, which the god declines to share with anyone, except, the verse says, his sister or his wife. Each spell, in the surviving tradition, was associated with a particular rune or combination of runes. The god, by taking up the runes, took up the spells.

This is the third sense in which the runes were not merely letters. They were practical magic. You can choose, depending on your temperament, which of these readings you wish to hold. The Norse, I think, held all three at once. The runes were letters.

They were forces. They were spells. The god, in taking them, took the alphabet, the metaphysics, and the toolkit of the magical practitioner, and he took them, the sources are clear, by hanging on a tree for nine nights and screaming. I want to spend a moment on what this combination means. In modern English, the word wisdom is almost entirely interior.

It refers to a quality of mind. To say a person is wise is to say something about how they think. It does not, in most modern usage, refer to anything they can do. The Norse word, vísdómr, was different. Vísdómr was not only interior.

It was also operative. A wise person, in the Norse imagination, was a person who could affect the world. The wise man could carve a stick. He could whisper a word. He could put his hand on a wound and stop the bleeding.

He could speak over a sword and dull its edge. The wisdom was knowledge that did something. This is the wisdom Odin won. He did not, by hanging on the tree, become merely contemplative. He did not become merely thoughtful.

He became the kind of being who, with twenty four small marks and a knowledge of how to combine them, could change what happened next. The cost, the sources are clear, was real. Nine nights. The spear. The hunger.

The thirst. The scream. The fall. But what he received, the sources are equally clear, was real too. In one reading of the Eddas, and this is the reading that the great twentieth century historian of religion Mircea Eliade leaned toward, the runes are themselves a kind of shamanic knowledge.

They are the knowledge that an initiated practitioner brings back from the spirit world. The hanging on the tree is the initiation rite. The runes are the souvenir. The god is the patron of every human practitioner who, in the centuries after, would carve runes onto cattle horns and ships and grave stones and silver brooches, hoping to attract some small piece of the same power. In another reading, more sober, the runes are simply the writing system.

The mythological frame is a poetic explanation, by a tradition that valued poetry above accuracy, of how such a thing as written letters came to exist among the Germanic peoples. The god is credited with the invention not because anyone literally believed he carved the first stone, but because the gift was understood to be of the kind that, in the Norse imagination, only a god could give. Either reading, again, is available. What I would invite you to hold is the third reading, which is mine, and I offer it only as a suggestion, since I cannot prove it and the Norse sources do not directly support it. The third reading is that the runes, whatever else they were, were a kind of language that Odin found by looking down.

By facing his own depths. By hanging long enough, and going hungry long enough, and giving up enough of the ordinary supports of his being, that something that lived beneath the surface of consciousness rose up to meet him. In this reading, the runes are what every long sleepless night, every long fast, every long silence has always brought to the seeker who would not turn away. The runes are not invented. The runes are found, by anyone willing to sit long enough at the edge of their own depth that the depth begins to give up what it has been keeping.

This is, I think, why the Norse imagination held the god of the runes in such complicated regard. Odin is not safe. Odin is not comfortable. Odin is the god who proved that wisdom is gettable, but only at a price. And the price, he showed, is paid in the body.

In the eye, given. In the body, hung. In the cry, released. In the fall, taken. And then the god went back to his hall.

And he taught what he could. And he carried, for the rest of his eternity, the knowledge of what such things cost. We have one chapter left, before the goodnight. Let us turn to what he became.

Chapter Eleven. The Wisdom He Brought Back. When Odin fell from the tree, he was changed. The surviving sources do not give us, in detail, the moment of his return. They do not tell us who, if anyone, found him at the foot of the tree.

They do not tell us how long he lay there. They do not tell us whether he was helped to stand, or whether he stood on his own. They tell us only that, after the hanging, Odin was Odin in a different sense than he had been before. The god, having taken the runes, returned to the company of the other gods and the work of his rule. But the rule was now done by a being who had experienced what he had experienced.

What does it mean, in the surviving stories, to be a god who has hung on a tree? It means, first, that he is permanently associated with the act. The names accumulate. Hangatýr, the god of the hanged. Hangaguð, the hanged god.

Yggr, the terrible one, whose horse is the gallows. Galga valdr, the wielder of the gallows. The act, in the language, becomes the god's identity. He cannot, after the hanging, be referred to without the hanging being implied. The wind in his name is the wind in the tree.

It means, second, that he becomes the patron of certain kinds of human practice. Men who, in the Norse historical world, were hanged in sacrifice, and there is some evidence in the archaeological record that ritual hanging was occasionally practiced, were said to be given to Odin. The god received them. He had himself been hanged, and so he, more than any other god, knew what it meant. It means, third, that he becomes the god of seekers.

Of the men and women in human history who, in the Norse imagination, undertook the kind of self imposed ordeals, the long fast, the long vigil, the long silence, by which deep knowledge had traditionally been pursued. Odin was their patron. He had done it first. He had paid the price, and he had returned, and he was the proof that the act could yield something. The shamans of the Sámi north, the seiðr workers of the Norse south, the wise women in the small villages who knew the runes, all of them, in their way, were continuing the act Odin had begun on the tree.

It means, fourth, and this is the hardest one, that he carries the knowledge of his own end. Because among the things the runes gave Odin, the surviving sources are clear, was foresight. The ability to see what is coming. And what is coming, for the gods of Asgard, in the long arc of the Norse imagination, is not survival. You may already know the word.

Ragnarǫk. The twilight of the gods. The final battle. The day on which the wolf swallows the sun. The day on which the great serpent rises out of the sea.

The day on which the gods of Asgard go out to meet their fates, and most of them fall. Odin, after the tree, knows this is coming. Every other god in Asgard lives, in the surviving stories, in a kind of innocence about the end. They feast. They drink.

They fight. They love. They go about the business of being gods, in the great hall of the world, without the heavy knowledge of how the hall will end. Odin, alone, knows. This is the wisdom he brought back.

Not only the runes. Not only the spells. Not only the alphabet. But the long sight that sees, in every present moment, the fate that is approaching. The god who hung on the tree is, from that moment on, the god who knows what is going to happen, and who continues, despite knowing, to do the work of being a god.

In one reading of the Eddas, and I find this reading the most affecting, the entire rest of Norse mythology is shaped by this. Odin's restlessness, his constant traveling, his hunger to know more, all of it, after the tree, can be read as the work of a god who is trying, in whatever time is left, to find a way out. He cannot find one. The end is fixed. But the god keeps moving, keeps gathering wisdom, keeps sending his ravens, keeps feeding his wolves, keeps drinking the wine, because what else is there to do, when you know how the story ends, but to live the days you have with as much attention as you can.

That is the Odin who, in the later stories, will steal the mead of poetry from the giants. That is the Odin who will gather warriors into Valhǫll, training them, the surviving sources tell us, for the battle that is coming. That is the Odin who will, on the last day, ride out himself, in golden armor, on Sleipnir, to meet the wolf Fenrir. He will lose. He has known he will lose, for as long as there has been a him to know it.

He goes anyway. This is, I think, the deepest reason the Norse held Odin in such ambivalent regard. He is not a god of comfort. He is not a god whose stories are easy. He is the god who showed, by his own example, that knowledge is gettable, and that what knowledge gives you is not always peace.

Sometimes, often, in the Norse imagination, knowledge gives you the certainty of how things will end, and the work of continuing to live, and to rule, and to be good to those who depend on you, anyway. This is the god we have followed tonight. We have walked with him from the throne to the well. We have watched him give his eye. We have met his ravens, his wolves, his horse.

We have followed him up onto the tree. We have heard him scream. We have heard him fall. We have heard, in his own words, what the act gave him. And we have arrived, now, at the place in the story where he goes back to his hall, and sets up his throne, and continues the rule that had been waiting for him.

The almanac, like the god, has done its work for the evening. We will say goodnight in a moment.

Chapter Twelve. A Quiet Reflection on the Allfather. Before we go to goodnight, I would like to sit, for a few minutes, with what we have been holding tonight. Because Odin is a strange god to sit with. He is not a god of comfort.

He is not a god whose stories end with everything restored. He is, in the surviving tradition, a god who got what he wanted, and who paid for it, in his body, in his sight, in the long knowledge of how the story he was inside would eventually end. The Norse imagination did not, in its wisest moments, soften him. They held him as he was. A god who could not be still.

A god who paid in his eye for the past, and in his body for the future, and who returned from both transactions changed in ways he could not have undone if he had wanted to. This is not, by any modern measure, an easy figure. There is no part of the Odin story in which the god is rescued. There is no part in which someone else makes the sacrifice for him. There is no part in which a wiser elder tells him he need not pay.

The god, in every version of every surviving story, pays. He pays himself, to himself. He hangs, on a tree, in a wind, in the dark, alone. And then he goes back to his hall, and he does the work, and he keeps moving. If there is a teaching here, and the Norse poets did not, mostly, write to teach, but the stories nevertheless do, it is, I think, this.

That deep knowledge is not free. The Norse imagination held, in all its sources, that the things worth knowing in this world have prices. That a person who wishes to see the past clearly will give up, in the giving, some part of what they had before. That a person who wishes to see the future will pay, in the seeing, more than they thought they had. That the wisdom you actually receive will not be the wisdom you imagined.

It will be harder. It will be costlier. It will leave you carrying things you cannot put down. And yet, and the Norse poets seem, very gently, to insist on this, the act is, in the end, recommended. Not by anyone in particular.

Not by Odin himself, who in the surviving Hávamál says only what he did, not what others should do. But by the long shape of the tradition. The god, the tradition seems to say, was not wrong to pay what he paid. The hanging, the eye, the cry, the fall, these were the right acts. The wisdom was, in the end, worth the wisdom's cost.

The god, hanging in the wind for nine nights, was doing what gods are sometimes called upon to do. He was doing what, in your own smaller scale, you have probably been called upon to do, in the long nights of your own life, when something you needed to know was on the far side of a darkness you had to pass through. You may, when you wake in the morning, not remember any of this. That is fine. The almanac does not require remembering.

The almanac is here to hold, while you rest, the kind of stories that took the old peoples a thousand years to set down. You have rested, for an hour or two, in the company of a god who paid for what he wanted, and who continued, after, to do the work of being himself. That is enough, for one evening. The Allfather, somewhere, is continuing. The wind is doing what the wind does.

We are nearly to goodnight.

Chapter Thirteen. Goodnight, and the Allfather Continues. The episode is nearly over. Whether you have heard much of it, or only a little, or only this last chapter, you have done what you came here to do. You have given the night somewhere to rest.

The almanac has carried what attention you had to give it, and the rest, the almanac has carried alone. In the long quiet of the Norse imagination, this is what the god himself is now doing. He has finished his work for the evening. He has come back from the tree, in some moment beyond our reach. He has resumed his hall.

He has fed his wolves. He has called his ravens back. He has lifted, perhaps, a horn of mead, and let himself sit. And in the deep north, in the wind that has not stopped since the world began, the great tree is doing what it has always done, standing in the long dark, with its branches in stars, and its roots in places older than the gods. You may, sometime in the coming nights, want to come back.

The almanac will be here. Episode three is coming next. It is the story of how the dwarves of Svartalfheim made the hammer Mjǫllnir for the god Thor. We will spend a night with the smiths in their underground city. We will meet the trickster Loki, who set the whole thing in motion.

We will meet Thor himself, the son of Odin, the protector of the world of men. And we will see how a hammer, which, on first encounter, sounds like a small thing, became the object on which the safety of nine worlds depended. That story comes next. It will be here, on the same schedule. New episodes Wednesdays and Sundays, at 8pm Eastern.

For tonight, though, you have done enough. The wind in the tree is doing what the wind has always done. The runes are where the runes have always been, in the small inscriptions on old stones, in the carvings of old grave markers, in the dark, beneath the surface of things, where they have waited, since the god first reached down and took them up. The god himself is in his hall. The ravens are on his shoulders.

The wolves are at his feet. The horse is between worlds. The spear is at hand. The ring is heavy on his arm. The eye is in the well.

He is, in his hall, quiet. The Allfather is, for the moment, at rest. As you, in your bed, are at rest. Let the breath slow. Let the shoulders drop.

Let what remains of the day go to the same long darkness in which the runes lay before Odin found them. Let it go down. Let it rest there. The almanac will continue. The next chapter of the season will arrive in its time.

For tonight, the work of the day is finished. Goodnight. Sleep well. The Sleeping Almanac will be here when you come back.

Good evening.

Or perhaps good night, if you've made your

way here in the long hours after midnight

the difference may already have stopped mattering.

You've come back, perhaps, because the last two episodes

helped you sleep.

Or you've come for the first time.

And the third episode happened to be the one

the algorithm offered.

Either is fine.

The almanac is patient.

Tonight stands on its own.

If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you

to do very little.

Close your eyes.

Let your jaw loosen.

Let your shoulders drop, even a little

even if you didn't know they were tight.

The story does not need your attention.

It will keep moving whether you follow it or

not.

If you drift, that is the point.

If you wake briefly to catch a single sentence

and then sink again, that is good.

In the first episode, we walked the shape of

the world, nine realms joined by one great

tree.

In the second, we met the wanderer, the Allfather

the hanged god.

Tonight we meet the figure who stood between the

world of men and the great old powers at

its edges.

The god of thunder.

The red bearded one.

The one who carried, at his belt

a hammer that had been forged in the underground

halls of the dwarves, under conditions so strange they

have been told and retold for a thousand years.

This is the story of how that hammer came

to be.

And of the small cruelty.

And the long descent.

And the bet that nearly cost a god's head

that lay behind it.

Now, let us begin.

Chapter One.

Thor, the God of the Hammer.

Before we go to the dwarves.

And before we go to the forge

we should sit, for a while, with the figure

of the god whose hammer this story is about.

Thor.

If you have come to Norse mythology through the

surface of modern culture, through comic books

through summer blockbuster films, through the cheerful merchandise that

fills airport shops near Reykjavík, you may carry

in your mind, a particular picture of him.

A tall blond figure.

A square jaw.

A red cape.

A hammer with a short handle held aloft as

lightning strikes around him.

A face that smiles easily.

The Thor of the old Norse sources is

in some ways, that figure .

And in other ways, not quite that figure at

all.

He is described, in the surviving texts, as red bearded.

Rauðskeggr.

The redbeard.

A man, or a god.

But the texts often use the language of men

for him, of enormous appetite and enormous strength.

He eats more than any other being in Asgard.

He drinks more.

He sleeps deeply.

He is, by every account, the strongest of the

gods, and one of the few who openly enjoys

his own strength.

He laughs easily.

He grieves easily.

He is, in the long view of the surviving

stories, the most directly accessible of the Norse gods

the one whose feelings, when he has them

are not hidden behind cunning or grief or many

names.

He shows you what he feels.

The redbeard.

Rauðskeggr.

The word in Old Norse means exactly what it

looks like.

The color was, in the old Scandinavian world

not common, fewer than one in fifteen people

were born with it .

And a red beard, on a god

was the sort of detail the poets did not

include by accident.

Red was the color of fire.

Of the smithy.

Of the moment when iron came out of the

coals and could be shaped.

It was the color, too, of the lightning that

the old farmers in Norway and Sweden saw flicker

across summer skies and named for him.

The skies in the north were his work.

The thunder, the storms that broke open the long

midsummer afternoons, the rain that came after

all of it carried his name.

Þórsdagr.

Thor's day.

The fifth day of the week, in the old

Norse calendar, was named for him.

It still is, in every Germanic language that survives.

In English we say Thursday and most of us

no longer remember why.

But the name has been carried, across a thousand

years, by the simple weight of repetition.

Children learn it without knowing it is a name.

The god of thunder, in this small daily way

has outlived nearly every temple and every ceremony that

was ever raised to him.

And there is more to him than the lightning.

His father, the sources tell us, was Odin.

Whom we met last episode.

The Allfather.

The wanderer.

And, in this single particular, the two could not

be less alike.

The father is the god of hidden things

of long roads, of self imposed ordeals, of wisdom paid

for in body.

The son is the god of openness, of feasts

of direct collision with whatever stands in his way.

The father goes alone.

The son arrives at the gallop, on his goat drawn

chariot, with the sky cracking behind him.

His mother, in the surviving accounts, was Jǫrð.

The Earth.

Sometimes called Hlóðyn or Fjǫrgyn in the older Eddic

poems.

Thor is, by this lineage, the son of the

wanderer god and of the earth itself.

Sky and ground, joined in a single body.

The figure who, in the old Norse worldview

was meant to stand exactly at the place where

Asgard met Midgard, where the high world of

the gods reached down to the world of human

farms and human halls.

He had a hall of his own.

The texts call it Bilskírnir.

Lightning Bright.

The hall is said to have had five hundred

and forty rooms, which is the largest hall in

Asgard, larger even than Odin's Valhǫll.

The figure comes to us from Grímnismál

one of the older Eddic poems, and Snorri Sturluson

who liked numbers, preserved it in his

Prose Edda.

Whether it is literal or simply a poet's way

of saying immeasurably large is a matter for the

listener to decide.

He had a wife.

Her name was Sif.

We will meet her, in earnest, in the next

chapter.

Because she is essential to the story we are

walking toward tonight.

He had children.

The principal ones in the surviving sources were two

sons, Magni and Móði, whose names mean, roughly

Strength and Courage.

There is also a daughter, Þrúðr, whose name means

Strength in a different sense, closer to Might.

The children are mentioned in the sources but rarely

take center stage.

Thor's stories are, with very few exceptions, Thor's stories.

And he had two goats.

This is the detail that, more than any other

separates the Norse Thor from the modern Thor of

popular culture.

The Norse Thor did not fly.

The Norse Thor did not, in the surviving texts

hover above the ground or call down lightning at

will from the sky.

The Norse Thor moved across the worlds the way

most beings moved, on a vehicle.

And his vehicle was a chariot, pulled by two

goats.

Their names were Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr.

Which translate, in the rough English the names allow

as Tooth Barer and Tooth Grinder.

The surviving sources do not, by and large

describe the goats themselves, only their function.

They are the animals that pull Thor's chariot.

Their names suggest, in the Norse imagination

the kind of bared teeth countenance one might still meet

today, in the highlands of Iceland or the Faroe

Islands, on a path one would not particularly want

to share.

The goats had a remarkable quality, which I cannot

in good conscience leave out of an episode about

Thor.

They could be eaten, and then resurrected.

In the Eddic story of Thor's journey to the

giant Útgarða Loki, which we will not visit in

full tonight, since it deserves its own episode in

a later season, Thor and his companions

traveling across the long roads of the world

stop at a peasant's farm for a meal.

Thor slaughters his own goats, butchers them

and shares the meat with the family.

After eating, he gathers the bones in the goatskins

blesses the hides with his hammer.

And the goats stand up alive in the morning.

There is no explanation.

The text simply records what happened.

This image is, in some ways, more telling about

Thor than any description of his appearance.

The hammer was not only a weapon.

The hammer was also, in the Norse imagination

a tool of consecration.

A thing one used to bless.

A thing that could, when laid on the right

thing, restore what had been broken.

We will come back to this.

What you should keep, from this short tour of

the god, is the shape of the being we

are following tonight.

He is the son of the wanderer and the

earth.

He is red bearded, easily moved, openly strong.

He has a hall larger than his father's.

He has a wife with golden hair

whom we will meet in the next chapter.

He has two goats, who pull his chariot across

the worlds, and who can be killed and brought

back to life.

And he has, by the time the surviving

stories were written

a hammer.

A short handled hammer.

Mjǫllnir.

The crusher.

The lightning tool.

The defense of the gods.

The weapon that, in the old Norse imagination

stood between everything that mattered and everything that wanted

to break it.

Tonight is the story of how that hammer came

to be.

And before we go down into the dwarven forges

where the hammer was made, we should first meet

the figure whose suffering set the whole story in

motion.

Because the hammer was made by accident.

The hammer was made because Loki, the trickster

had done something cruel to Thor's wife.

We meet her now.

Chapter Two.

Sif and the Golden Hair.

The wife of Thor was called Sif.

This is, on first encounter, a remarkably short name.

Two syllables.

Almost a sound.

In Old Norse, the word sif means, roughly, kinship.

Relation by marriage.

In law.

In its broadest sense, it is the word for

the bonds between people who are not bound by

blood but who are bound, nonetheless, by the structures

of family.

To be in sif with someone is to be

tied to them by something other than birth.

This is, scholars have long noted, an unusual sort

of name.

Most Norse god names are descriptions, Allfather, Thunder

The Just, The Bright One.

Sif's name is, by contrast, almost an abstraction.

She is named after the very idea of being in relation.

She is, in her name itself, the one who

is tied.

We know remarkably little about her, in the surviving

sources.

The Norse poets, who lavished long stanzas on the

deeds of the male gods, were briefer when they

came to the goddesses.

Sif appears in the Eddic poems mostly as Thor's

wife, the woman waiting in Bilskírnir when he

is away on his long journeys.

She is not given speeches of her own in

the major poems.

She is mentioned, briefly, in genealogies.

She is, in the old word, sif.

The relation.

The tie.

But what is consistent, across every surviving reference to

her, is the description of her hair.

It was gold.

Not gold as a color, not blonde

not honey, not flax.

Gold.

The metal.

The substance.

The hair of Sif was, in the Norse imagination

literal gold.

It fell from her head the way real hair

falls.

It was warm.

And it grew.

And it moved in the wind.

But it was, by every account, made of gold.

This is the kind of detail that the Norse

poets allowed to stand without explanation.

They did not feel the need to tell us

how such a thing was possible.

They simply told us it was so.

The wife of Thor had hair of gold.

It is the principal thing the surviving texts want

us to know about her.

Why does this matter?

In the Norse cultural imagination, hair was not

as it sometimes is in our own age

a casual or decorative thing.

Hair was a marker of identity.

A marker of social standing.

A marker, in particular, of the relationship between a

woman and her household.

A wife's hair, in the old Norse world

was bound up tightly during the workday and let

down only in private, only with her husband.

To touch a married woman's hair was

in the legal codes that survive from the Icelandic

settlement, an offense that could be punished.

To cut a woman's hair against her will was

an offense graver still, close, in the old

legal language, to the offense of cutting off a

part of her body.

And the wife of Thor had hair that was

itself, a treasure.

Gold.

The most precious substance the Norse imagination knew.

The hair on her head was, in literal weight

and value, the wealth of a kingdom.

Hair, in the old Norse world, was not a

small thing.

It was not, as it sometimes is in

our world, simply a matter of style.

A woman's hair, in particular, carried meaning.

It was, in the surviving texts, a sign of

her honor, of her standing in the household

of her unbroken connection to the family line.

A married woman bound her hair, often

beneath a cloth headcovering, a symbol of her

vows.

An unmarried woman wore her hair loose.

To cut a woman's hair without her consent

in the old Scandinavian law codes that have survived

from later centuries, was an act of grievous insult

a crime that carried a fine roughly equal

to the wounding of her father, or her husband

or her brother.

To cut a goddess's hair was something the old

poets had no measure for at all.

And Sif's hair, in the surviving accounts

was not only hers.

It was, the poets tell us, gold.

Real gold.

Or something the eye could not tell from gold.

When she stood in the firelight of her hall

with her hair loose around her shoulders

the light moved through it the way light moves

through a fall of wheat at evening

before the harvest.

Some of the old commentators have suggested that her

hair was the wheat, that Sif was

in the old farmer's understanding, the field itself

ripening.

And Thor was the rain that came down upon

her.

I want you to hold this image

for a moment, before we move on.

A woman sleeping.

The wife of the strongest god in the pantheon.

In her own hall.

Her hair, spread on the pillow around her

glinting in the low light of the banked hearth fire.

Gold.

The whole of it.

The Norse poets do not tell us

in the surviving texts, much about her inner life.

They do not tell us what she thought

or what she did during the days when Thor

was away.

They do not give her a voice in the

major poems.

She is named, Sif .

And she is described, gold haired

and that is, for the most part

what the texts give us.

What they do tell us, in clear and lingering

detail, is what happened to her one night.

While she slept, in the deep middle of the

night, in her own hall, in the long quiet

of Asgard, someone came to her.

The someone, a figure we will meet properly

in the next chapter, moved very quietly.

The figure approached the bed where she lay.

The figure leaned over her, in the dark

while she went on breathing in the rhythm of

sleep.

And the figure cut.

He cut her hair.

All of it.

The Old Norse verb the surviving sources use

skera, means to cut or to shave.

And the texts say he shaved off all of

it.

The gold fell in long heavy strands

in the dark, onto the floor of the hall.

What is consistent across every surviving telling is the

central act.

Sif, the wife of Thor, woke in the morning

to find her hair gone.

The Norse poets do not, in the surviving texts

give us her reaction in dialogue.

They do not let her speak the words anyone

in such a moment might speak.

They simply tell us, in the careful, restrained

almost formal language the Norse used for the most

painful moments, that she woke.

And she found.

And she was, in their phrase, unconsoled.

She was a goddess.

She was the wife of the strongest god in

the pantheon.

She was, by the standards of the old Norse

world, untouchable.

And someone had, in the night, come to her

and taken from her the one thing the texts

repeatedly tell us defined her.

She did not speak, in the surviving texts.

She wept.

And when Thor came home, which he did

eventually, as the texts always have him do

returning from one of his long journeys

and found his wife in her hall

with her head bare, weeping, the response of the

strongest god in the Norse pantheon was

in its own way, exactly what one would expect.

He went to find the figure who had done

it.

He had, the texts tell us, a fairly good

idea of who that figure was.

Because in the surviving Norse imagination, this kind of

cruelty, this kind of small inexplicable malice

this kind of cutting in the dark while someone

slept, this was the work of one specific

god.

And every other god in Asgard knew it.

In the next chapter, we meet him.

We meet Loki.

Chapter Three.

Loki, the Trickster.

I want to spend some time, in this chapter

sitting with the figure of Loki

because Loki is, more than almost any other figure

in Norse mythology, a being who resists the simple

descriptions one might want to apply to him.

The modern English word for what Loki is is

trickster.

This is a useful word.

And a true one, as far as it goes.

Loki is a trickster.

He plays tricks.

He moves things around.

He hides things.

He pretends to be other than what he is.

He lies, when lying serves him.

He shape shifts.

He laughs when no one else is laughing.

He upends, again and again, what the gods of

Asgard would have otherwise been able to settle into.

But trickster is, in the modern English ear

often a softer word than the Norse texts mean.

The trickster of the modern imagination

the figure in fables, the prankster, the funny uncle

of a pantheon, is a figure of mostly

harmless mischief.

The trickster in the modern sense is someone you

can, in the end, laugh along with.

Loki is, sometimes, that figure.

The Norse texts certainly let him be that figure

when they want him to be.

There are stories in the corpus in which Loki's

tricks save the gods, or at least save them

money, or rescue them from situations they could not

have escaped on their own.

In one of the more famous of these stories

which we will arrive at, in its own

time, in a later season, Loki turns himself

into a mare in order to distract the great

work horse of a giant builder.

And the gods escape the giant's bargain because of

it.

The trick costs Asgard nothing.

The trick produces, as a side effect

the eight legged horse Sleipnir, which we met last episode.

The trick, in the end, was good for the

gods.

But Loki is also, sometimes, something else.

He is the figure who, in the surviving end of the world

poetry of the Norse, the Vǫluspá

leads the army of the dead against Asgard

on the last day.

He is the figure who, by the end of

the surviving cycle of stories, has been chained to

a stone in a cave, with a venomous serpent

dripping poison onto his face, in punishment for crimes

the gods could no longer overlook.

He is the figure whose children, in the surviving

genealogies, are the wolf that swallows Odin

the serpent that fights Thor.

And the half rotted woman who keeps the underworld of

the dead.

Loki is not, in the long view

a harmless prankster.

Loki is, in the long view, the agent of

the gods' ending.

This is the problem of Loki.

He is both at once.

He is the helpful trickster and the eventual enemy.

The same being.

The Norse texts do not, I think

fully resolve this.

They simply allow both to be true.

Loki is one of the strangest figures in any

mythology that has ever survived.

The other gods of the north, Odin, Thor

Freyr, Freyja, Týr, sit, more or less

in the seats that mythologies usually have.

The wise one.

The strong one.

The fertile one.

The brave one.

Loki sits in none of them.

He is, in the surviving sources, not a god

of anything in particular.

He has no temples that we know of.

He has no day of the week.

He has no festival, no ritual, no farmer's prayer

raised to him at the turning of the season.

And yet he is everywhere in the stories.

Every great story of the Norse gods

the building of Asgard's walls, the death of Baldur

the binding of Fenrir, the recovery of Thor's hammer

when it was later stolen, the very ending of

the world at Ragnarǫk, has Loki at its

center.

He is the figure, the old commentators have suggested

who makes the stories move.

Without him, the gods would sit in their halls

and feast forever.

Nothing would happen.

With him, every door is opened that the gods

did not mean to open.

Every wager is offered that the gods did not

mean to take.

Every crime is committed that the gods did not

until then, know was possible.

And he was, in the old sources

blood brother to Odin.

A blood brother.

Sworn.

Bound by oath.

Who is he, in his nature?

The surviving sources give us several pieces.

They tell us he is not, properly speaking

a god of the Æsir.

He was born among the giants.

His father was Fárbauti, Cruel Striker

and his mother was Laufey, sometimes called Nál

who may or may not have been a goddess.

He was brought into Asgard, the texts tell us

through a blood brotherhood with Odin.

The two gods, in a moment not preserved in

detail in the surviving sources, swore brotherhood by mingling

their blood.

From that moment, Loki was of the Æsir

in the legal sense of the old Norse world.

He could not be expelled.

He could not be killed by the gods.

He had the same standing among them as any

born god.

But he was not, ever, quite one of them.

The texts return to this, again and again.

Loki is in Asgard but not of it.

Loki sits at the gods' tables but is not

in some deeper sense, at the gods' table.

Loki is a guest who never quite leaves.

And he is.

The texts are clear, a being of changing shape.

This is one of the most consistent features of

his character.

He becomes a mare, as we mentioned.

He becomes, in another story, a falcon

borrowing the feather cloak of the goddess Freyja

to fly between the worlds.

He becomes, in still another story, a salmon

trying to hide from the gods in a river

after a particularly bad piece of work.

He becomes, the texts tell us, a fly

when he needs to be small enough to get

into places he could not otherwise reach.

He becomes an old woman, when he needs to

weep beside a goddess's coffin and refuse to grant

the tear that would release her from the underworld.

The shapes are many.

There is no surviving source that tells us

in clear language, what Loki is in his most

basic form.

The texts do not give us a definitive description.

He is described, when he is described at all

as fair faced.

Quick.

Slim.

With a slightly cruel mouth.

Beyond that, the sources let his appearance shift with

his moods.

And he is, and this is the part

of his character that matters most for tonight's episode

moved, often, by a kind of malice that

does not have an obvious source.

The Norse texts are honest about this

in a way the surviving Greek and Roman texts

about their own gods sometimes are not.

The Greek gods, when they are cruel

are cruel for reasons.

They want something.

They are punishing someone.

They are settling a score.

Loki is not always like that.

Loki, sometimes, does cruel things for no reason the

text can fully explain.

He does them, the surviving phrase often suggests.

Because the chance presented itself.

Because he saw a way to disturb something that

was otherwise still.

Because the cruelty was, in the moment, available.

This is the Loki who, the surviving texts tell

us, came to Sif's bed in the middle of

the night.

The texts do not give him a motive.

The texts do not tell us he was angry

at Sif.

The texts do not tell us he had quarreled

with Thor.

The texts do not tell us he was acting

on behalf of anyone else.

The surviving phrase in Snorri's Prose Edda is

in its bare Old Norse: Loki Laufeyjarson hafði þat

gjört til lævísi at skera hár alt af Sif.

In Anthony Faulkes's standard modern translation: Loki Laufey's son

had done this out of mischief

had cut off all of Sif's hair.

Out of mischief.

Til lævísi.

Out of cunning malice.

The Norse word lævísi carries a darker weight than

the modern English mischief.

It is closer to intentional harm done because one

is the kind of being who does intentional harm.

It is the malice of a creature who recognizes

that another creature is sleeping safely, and who chooses

in that moment, to do something to break the

safety.

This is the Loki we are dealing with tonight.

He is not, in this story, the trickster who

saves Asgard from a costly bargain.

He is the trickster who, for no reason the

surviving texts can fully explain, came in the night

to the wife of his blood brother's son

and cut from her head the gold hair she

had been known by for as long as anyone

in Asgard could remember.

And then, when he was caught

he had to set right what he had done.

We turn now to the cutting itself.

And to what followed.

Chapter Four.

The Cutting.

I want to begin this chapter by telling you

what the surviving sources do not give us.

They do not give us, in any version of

the story I have been able to find

the scene of the cutting itself.

Snorri Sturluson, who is by far our most detailed

source for this story, gives us only the bare

fact.

Loki had done this out of malice

had cut off all of Sif's hair.

The act is named.

And the chapter moves on.

This is, in the way of Norse literature

the customary restraint.

The Norse poets did not, by and large

linger in their most painful moments.

They told you what had been done.

And they trusted you, the listener, to do the

rest of the imagining.

The work of the imagination was understood to be

the work of the audience.

The poet's job was to give the bone.

The audience's job was to put the flesh on

it.

So I will not, tonight, give you an invented

scene of the cutting.

I will not give you Loki's face in the

dark, or Sif's breathing in the bed

or the weight of the gold strands in his

hand.

The sources do not give them to me.

And to invent them feels like a betrayal of

the texts' chosen restraint.

The story does not tell us why he did

it.

This is, we should pause here for a

moment, one of the marks of these old

stories that the modern reader sometimes finds difficult.

We are used, in our novels and our films

to motivation being supplied.

A character does a thing.

And the writer tells us why.

The Norse poets did not work that way.

They told us, often, what was done.

They told us, often, what the consequences were.

They very rarely told us what the person inside

the act was thinking.

The story is the act and the consequence.

The interior is for the listener to fill in

or to leave empty, as they prefer.

So we are not told whether Loki cut Sif's

hair out of envy, or out of malice

or out of some quarrel with Thor that has

not survived in the texts.

Some of the old commentators have read it as

a grudge against Thor specifically, Thor being the

god most directly opposed to Loki's tricksterism

the one most likely to threaten violence when Loki

crossed a line.

Others have read it as something more shapeless

as the sort of small cruelty that some figures

in some old stories, simply perform because the performing

of it is its own kind of pleasure.

We are not told.

We may rest in that.

What the sources do give us

and what we can sit with

is what happened next.

Thor came home.

He had been away.

The surviving accounts do not specify where he had

been, in this particular story.

Thor was often away.

The work of being Thor was, in large part

the work of going out, of taking the

chariot of goats and the hammer not yet his and crossing the

long roads between the worlds, dealing with whatever needed

to be dealt with along the way.

The defense of Asgard, in the old Norse imagination

was not a passive thing.

It was the work of the strongest god to

go, again and again, out into the dark places.

And to come back.

He came back, the surviving sources tell us.

And he found his wife in her hall.

Her hair was gone.

She was, in the Norse phrase, unconsoled.

The word in the original is something close to

that, óhuggat, uncomforted, not yet able to be

settled.

She was, in her own hall, in her own

life, in a state from which the ordinary rhythms

of being her had been broken.

The wife of the strongest god in the pantheon

sitting in her own hall, with her head bare

was a sight that, the surviving texts make

very clear, none of the gods of Asgard

had seen before.

Thor asked her what had happened.

She told him.

The sources are spare on her dialogue.

We do not have her exact words preserved.

What we have, in the structure of the narrative

is the shape of her telling.

She told him what she could tell him.

She told him that someone had come to her

in the night.

She told him what they had done.

She named, by all surviving indications, the figure she

suspected.

She would not have had to look hard.

Every god in Asgard.

By every surviving account, would have known.

It was Loki.

And Thor, the texts tell us in plain

and unguarded language, went to find him.

This is the moment in the story I want

to slow down on, because it is one of

the more affecting moments in all of Norse mythology.

And the surviving Norse sources do something with it

that I find, even at a thousand years' distance

very moving.

Thor caught Loki.

The catching itself is not described in detail.

The texts give us the bare fact.

Thor went, Thor found him, Thor caught him.

The implication, in the way the sources tell it

is that Loki did not run very hard.

He may have tried to talk his way out

in his customary fashion.

He may have offered explanations.

He may have laughed, the way he often did

when caught doing what he had done.

The surviving phrase suggests that whatever Loki tried

it did not work for very long.

Thor, and here I will paraphrase Snorri carefully

because the passage matters, Thor would have broken

every bone in Loki's body, then and there

if Loki had not been very quick about offering

an alternative.

The phrase Snorri uses is, in Faulkes's standard translation:

Thor caught Loki.

And he would have broken every bone in his

body, except that he swore an oath.

Read the sentence again.

He would have broken every bone in his body

except that he swore an oath.

This is, in the Norse imagination, the very edge

of what Thor was capable of.

The strongest god, in the moment of finding the

figure who had cut his wife's hair, was

by the sources' explicit testimony, about to dismember

him, in his own body, slowly and completely.

Not kill him.

Killing would have been easier.

Thor was, in this moment, in the kind of

fury that would have made him take Loki apart

bone by bone, while Loki was still alive to

feel it.

The oath stopped him.

Loki swore, quickly, urgently, in the way one

swears when one is about to be unmade

that he would set right what he had done.

He would not, by any of his own arts

be able to give Sif her hair back;

the hair was gone.

And the gold of it lay on the floor

of her hall.

And even Loki could not make a goddess's own

hair grow back overnight.

But he swore, and this is the central

pivot of the story, that he would get

the dwarves, the great metal workers of Svartalfheim

the most skilled smiths in the nine worlds

to make her a new head of hair

of true gold, that would grow on her head

as if it had always been there.

Thor accepted the oath.

He did not, the sources tell us

let Loki out of his sight until the work

was done.

He did not break his bones.

He did not unmake him.

He stood, the surviving accounts suggest, and watched Loki

gather himself, and watched him prepare to descend to

the underground country where the dwarves worked.

And let him go on the condition that he

would return with what he had promised.

This is the cutting, and what came after.

A small cruelty.

A great wrath.

An oath.

And the beginning of a long journey down

into the dark places of the world

where the substances that became the great treasures of

Asgard were waiting to be made.

We follow Loki, now, down into Svartalfheim.

Chapter Five.

Down to Svartalfheim.

The dwarves, in the Norse imagination, lived underground.

This is, on first encounter, a familiar enough idea.

Most cultures that knew metal working knew that the substances

metal workers worked with came from underground.

Iron from the iron mines.

Copper from the copper mines.

Gold, often, from the deep beds of rivers or

from the seams of certain mountains.

To work metal was.

In some sense, to bring up what had been

buried.

The Norse, like many of their neighbors

put this into mythological form.

They imagined a people whose entire life took place

underground.

A people who had been born in the dark

who lived in the dark, who worked in the

dark.

A people who had become, by long habit and

by the patience of generations, the greatest metal workers any

of the worlds knew.

These were the dwarves.

The name in Old Norse is dvergar.

Singular dvergr.

The word is related, distantly, to the modern English

dwarf, and carries roughly the same meaning.

The dwarves were, in the Norse imagination

short of stature, broad of shoulder, long of beard

and, most consistently, very

very skilled.

Their realm was called Svartalfheim.

We mentioned it briefly, in the first episode of

this season.

Svart alf heim.

Black elf home.

The home of the dark elves.

The Norse, in some of their sources

conflated dwarves with the dark elves

a related group of underground beings, often referred to

in the same breath, sometimes as if they were

the same people.

The scholarly consensus, today, is that the Norse themselves

were not always clear on the distinction.

Sometimes dwarves and dark elves were two different peoples.

Sometimes they were one.

The sources are, on this point, comfortable with the

ambiguity.

What is consistent is the geography.

Svartalfheim was beneath the worlds of the surface.

To go there, one descended.

Svartalfheim, sometimes called Niðavellir in the older Eddic

poems, sometimes called simply "the dwarf realm"

sits in the Norse cosmology beneath Midgard.

Below the world of men.

Beneath the roots of the world tree.

It is one of the nine worlds.

Though the old sources do not always agree on

its exact placement among them.

Some texts treat it as part of the same

vast underground that contains Helheim, the realm of the

dead.

Some treat it as a separate underground entirely.

The poets did not, in this matter

take great pains to be consistent.

The image they meant to convey was simpler than

a map.

Down.

Beneath the surface.

In the dark.

Where the things that the gods used were made.

The dwarves themselves, in the surviving accounts

are an old people.

The Prose Edda, in Snorri Sturluson's telling

says they were born, or, in some readings

that they grew, from the body of Ymir

the first giant, after the gods slew him at

the beginning of the world.

From his flesh, the maggots.

And from those maggots, the dwarves.

The texts give the impression of a people who

had been in the world from very nearly its

beginning.

Older than the gods, perhaps, in a certain sense

or at least as old.

Old, in any case, in the way that very

old craftsmen are old.

They had been making things, in their underground halls

for as long as anyone could remember.

And what they made, no one else could make.

Loki, the surviving sources tell us, went to Svartalfheim.

The journey is not described in detail.

The Norse poets, again, gave us the bare structure.

Loki went down.

He went to the dwarves.

He found, in particular, a group of dwarves called

the Sons of Ivaldi, Ívalda synir in the

Old Norse.

They were.

By every surviving account, among the finest of the

dwarven smiths.

Their forge was old.

Their craft was the kind that had been passed

from father to son and son to son for

as long as any of them could remember.

To go to them was to go to the

experts.

I want to spend a moment, before we follow

Loki into their forge, sitting with the picture of

Svartalfheim as the Norse imagined it.

Because the picture is, in its way

one of the most affecting in all of Norse

cosmology.

Imagine a vast underground country.

There is no sky.

Where the sky should be, there is rock.

The rock is dark.

And it is high.

And it forms the ceiling of the world.

In some places the rock is broken

and small openings let in, far above

the faintest glimpse of starlight from the world above.

But these are rare.

For the most part, the country is lit by

its own light, by the amber glow of

forges, by the orange flicker of furnaces

by the patient steady light of metal being worked.

The country is full of sound.

Hammering.

The slow steady wheeze of bellows.

The hiss of metal being quenched in water.

The voices of dwarves, calling to each other across

the great halls, in a language the surface peoples

did not always understand.

The country has a rhythm.

It works.

There are no women in the surviving accounts.

The dwarves of Svartalfheim are described, in every Norse

source I have been able to find

as men.

The texts do not tell us how this is

possible.

They do not tell us how the dwarves reproduce.

They simply tell us that the dwarves are who

they are.

And that they are very many.

And that they have been working their craft for

as long as anyone in the worlds above has

been able to remember.

It is a country, in some ways

of nothing but work.

This is the world Loki entered.

He came, the surviving sources tell us

with a request.

He came with the memory of his blood brother's son

standing over him, ready to take him apart.

He came with the gold of Sif's hair, perhaps

gathered in some fold of his cloak .

Though the sources do not specify whether he brought

the original hair or simply came with the need.

He came with what he had to offer the

dwarves in exchange.

He came, in particular, with his own cunning.

Because Loki, by the time he reached the Sons

of Ivaldi, had already had time to think.

Whatever bargain he struck with them

whatever the dwarves asked for, whatever Loki gave them

or promised them, the surviving sources do not

specify.

Snorri does not tell us what Loki paid.

The Sons of Ivaldi, the texts simply say

made the things Loki asked for.

They made them well.

They made, in particular, three things.

They made a head of hair for Sif.

Real gold, fine as silk, that would attach itself

to her head and grow there as if it

had always been there.

It would, the dwarves said, look like ordinary hair.

It would behave like ordinary hair.

The only thing about it that would be unordinary

was that it would be, in its substance

gold.

They made a ship.

Not an ordinary ship, a ship called Skíðblaðnir.

We will come to it in the next chapter.

And they made a spear.

The spear was called Gungnir.

We met it, in passing, last episode.

We will come to it too.

But before we look at the three gifts of

the Sons of Ivaldi, we should look at what

happened next.

Because Loki, having gotten what he came for

did not simply leave Svartalfheim and go home.

Loki, having gotten what he came for

did something else.

He decided to make a bet.

Chapter Six.

The Sons of Ivaldi.

Before we follow Loki into his bet

we should sit, for the length of this chapter

with the three gifts the Sons of Ivaldi made.

Because they are, individually, among the great treasures of

Norse mythology.

And they will each return, in this episode

in later episodes.

And in the long arc of the season

in ways that matter.

The first gift was the hair for Sif.

I have already described it, briefly, in the last

chapter.

It was made of true gold.

It was fine as silk, finer, perhaps

than any actual hair could be.

It was the kind of object that

in the Norse imagination, could only have come from

the patient skill of beings who had spent generations

learning to draw metal into impossibly thin strands.

The Sons of Ivaldi.

By every surviving account, knew how to do this.

But the hair had a quality beyond its substance.

When it was placed on Sif's head

the surviving sources tell us, it took root.

It attached itself to her scalp the way real

hair did.

It grew.

It moved in the wind.

It would, the dwarves promised, behave in every way

as her own hair had behaved

except that it would be, by its substance

gold.

She would, in time, be unable to tell the

difference.

The people who loved her would be unable to

tell the difference.

The hair would, by the time it was settled

on her head and had grown for a season

simply be her hair.

This is, I think, the most quietly remarkable of

the gifts.

The dwarves had not made a wig.

They had not made an ornament.

They had made a kind of replacement that

by some craft the Norse imagination did not fully

explain, had become indistinguishable from the original.

The cruelty Loki had done to Sif could not

in the strict sense, be undone

what is done in time cannot be unmade.

But the cruelty could be, in a way the

texts allow themselves to believe in

covered over.

The gold hair would grow.

Sif would have her hair again.

The wound, while it would always have happened

would not, after this, be a visible wound.

The second gift was a ship.

The ship was called Skíðblaðnir.

The name, in Old Norse, means roughly board bladed or

thin planked.

It comes from skíð, meaning a thin board or

wooden strip.

And from blað, meaning a blade or a leaf.

The name is descriptive: the ship was

the sources tell us, made of many thin pieces

of wood, fitted together with a skill so precise

that the seams were nearly invisible.

The ship had three remarkable qualities, all of which

the surviving sources preserve in some detail.

The first was its size.

Skíðblaðnir was, when fully extended, the largest ship in

the worlds.

It could carry, the sources say, all the gods

of Asgard, with all their gear, all their weapons

all their horses, all at once.

There was room for everyone.

The second was its winds.

Skíðblaðnir, the sources tell us, sailed always with a

favorable wind.

Whenever the ship's sails were raised, a wind would

come to fill them, from the right direction

at the right strength.

The ship did not, in the ordinary sense

need to wait for weather.

The weather came when the ship needed it.

The third was its most remarkable quality.

Skíðblaðnir could be folded.

Not folded as in collapsed.

Folded as in taken apart, into its many thin

pieces of wood, and folded together, as one might

fold a cloth, into a small bundle that could

be carried in a pouch.

The Sons of Ivaldi.

By every surviving account, had made a ship the

size of a great hall that, when not needed

could be carried in a man's hand.

This is the kind of detail at which modern

readers sometimes pause.

Snorri Sturluson did not.

He simply told us what the dwarves had made.

And let the audience marvel at it as they

would.

The ship was given, in the eventual distribution of

these gifts, to the god Freyr.

We will not meet Freyr in detail until later

in the season, he is the god of

the Vanir, the older order.

And he deserves his own episode.

Tonight it is enough to know that Skíðblaðnir went

to him.

And that he was, in the surviving accounts

much pleased.

The third gift was a spear.

The spear was called Gungnir.

We met Gungnir in the last episode.

It is Odin's spear.

The spear that never misses.

We will not repeat the description here in full

you can return to the last episode if

you'd like to sit with that gift again.

What is worth noting, in the context of tonight's

episode, is that all three of these things

the hair, the ship, the spear

were made by the same dwarves, in the same

forge, in what the surviving sources suggest was a

single visit.

The Sons of Ivaldi had, in the time Loki

was there, made three things of such craft that

any one of them would have been the achievement

of a lifetime.

They had made them, by all surviving indications, easily.

The forge was old.

The skill was deep.

The work, when it was their work

came out fine.

The first gift, the new hair of Sif

was, by some readings of the old text

not exactly hair at all.

The Prose Edda, in Snorri's account, calls it gold

drawn into threads so fine that they would grow

upon a head the way hair grew

and would settle when the head moved

and could not be told from real hair by

anyone who looked.

This is one of the small details that the

old sources tend to slip past quickly.

But that rewards a listener's attention.

Gold that grows.

Living gold.

The dwarves' work was not merely metal

it was metal that had been given, somehow

in their underground forges, a small portion of life.

The dwarves' three works, the hair, the ship

the spear, would each, in time

be given to a different god, and each god

would find that the gift suited him so precisely

it could only have been made for him alone.

The hair to Sif, by way of Thor.

The ship to Freyr, the god of fruitfulness

who needed the largest of all vessels and yet

could fold it like a cloth into a pocket.

The spear to Odin, of which there are stranger

things still to say.

The Sons of Ivaldi, in their underground country

had done in one sitting what most smiths of

any kind would not do in a lifetime.

Loki took the three gifts.

He thanked the dwarves, presumably, in whatever way Loki

thanked anyone.

He prepared, presumably, to leave Svartalfheim and return to

the upper world, where his blood brother's son was waiting

to see what he had brought.

But Loki, and this is the moment that

turns the whole story, did not

after receiving the three gifts

simply leave.

He went, instead, to another forge.

There were, in Svartalfheim, many dwarves.

The Sons of Ivaldi were not, by any means

the only smiths in the underground country.

There were others.

There were, in particular, two dwarves who were brothers

who had their own forge, who were known

among the dwarves who knew the trade

as smiths whose work was, by some accounts

the rival of the Sons of Ivaldi's.

Their names were Sindri, sometimes called Eitri.

And Brokkr.

Loki, with the three gifts of the Sons of

Ivaldi already in his keeping, went to find them.

The reason he went is the substance of the

next chapter.

The reason he went is, though Loki himself

may not have known it at the time

the reason this entire episode exists.

We meet the brothers now.

Chapter Seven.

The Wager, Loki Bets His Head.

Sindri and Brokkr.

These are the two names that, by the end

of the Norse mythological corpus, are bound up forever

with the hammer of Thor.

Without them, without the strange brothers

working in their forge somewhere in the deep underground

of Svartalfheim, there would be no Mjǫllnir.

The hammer that defended Asgard against the giants

that called down lightning in the surviving stories

that returned to the thrower's hand, that was the

great weapon of the Norse cosmos, would not

in the Norse imagination

exist.

Sindri and Brokkr are the reason it does.

A brief note on the names, before we go

further.

Snorri Sturluson, in chapter 35 of his Skáldskaparmál

the chapter that is our principal source for this

whole story, gives the brother's name as Eitri.

Eit ri.

The word in Old Norse means, roughly

poison worker or the venomous one.

Though the meaning is debated.

Other sources in the surviving Norse corpus

including the Eddic poem Hyndluljóð and certain references in

the Vǫluspá, give the same figure as Sindri.

Sin dri.

A name that may relate to cinder or spark.

The scholarly consensus today is that Sindri and Eitri

are two names for the same dwarf.

And that the Norse tradition itself did not always

settle which name was canonical.

I will, for clarity, use Sindri in tonight's narration

but you should know, if you read the

original sources, that Eitri is the same dwarf

working at the same forge, on the same gifts.

Brokkr, by all surviving accounts, is the second brother.

The bellows man.

The one who does, in the story to come

most of the physical work.

The name in Old Norse means, roughly, badger.

Whether this is meant as a description of his

appearance, or his temperament, or his way of moving

the sources do not specify.

Loki came to their forge.

The surviving accounts do not describe the forge in

detail.

We are left to imagine it.

A stone room, probably.

A hearth at one end, glowing amber.

A long iron anvil.

Bellows worked by hand.

Heaps of raw metal, gold, iron, silver

stacked along the walls.

The two brothers, working in the close concentration that

all skilled craft requires, in the long low light.

Loki entered, the texts tell us.

He praised, in passing, the things the Sons of

Ivaldi had just made for him.

He may have shown the brothers the gifts.

The accounts are not specific.

What is consistent is the central act.

Loki, having received three treasures from one group of

dwarves, came to a second group of dwarves

and proposed a contest.

He said, and I am paraphrasing

because Snorri does not give us the exact dialogue

I do not believe you brothers can make

three gifts as fine as the gifts I have

just received from the Sons of Ivaldi.

He said this knowing, perhaps, that the brothers had

a reputation.

He said this, perhaps, because he wanted to see

what would happen.

He said this, perhaps, because Loki was Loki.

And the chance to set one set of dwarves

against another set of dwarves was the kind of

thing he found, in his nature

irresistible.

The brothers, as Loki may or may not have

predicted, took the bait.

Brokkr, the surviving sources tell us, replied immediately.

He said, in essence, We can do better.

My brother can do better.

We can make three gifts that will make the

Sons of Ivaldi look like apprentices.

Loki said, Very well.

I will bet you that you cannot.

Brokkr asked what he was willing to wager.

This is the moment that, more than any other

in the story, marks Loki as the figure he

is.

Because a more cautious being, and almost every

being in the Norse mythological corpus was a more

cautious being than Loki, would have wagered something

small.

Something concrete.

Some piece of gold he could afford to lose.

Some object whose loss would not, by any reasonable

measure, be ruinous.

Loki, instead, wagered his head.

The surviving phrase, in Old Norse, is unambiguous.

Loki veðjaði höfði sínu.

Loki wagered his head.

If the brothers could not make three gifts finer

than the gifts of the Sons of Ivaldi

Loki said, he would keep his head.

If they could, if the brothers' work was

judged by the gods of Asgard to be greater

than the Sons of Ivaldi's, then the brothers

could have Loki's head, to do with as they

pleased.

We should sit, here, for a moment

with the strangeness of what Loki has just done.

He has wagered his head.

Not, as we sometimes hear the phrase used

today, as a manner of speaking.

He has actually, in the literal terms of the

surviving story, said: if these brothers make a better

thing than the sons of Ivaldi, you may take

my head from my shoulders.

And the brothers have accepted.

The work will be done.

And at the end of it, three gifts will

be judged against three gifts, and one wager will

be lost, and one head will be taken.

This is the kind of thing that

in the Norse stories, happens often enough that we

should pay attention to it.

The wager that is too high.

The bet that should not have been offered.

The oath that, once spoken, cannot be unspoken.

The Norse gods, in the surviving sources

are again and again caught by these

by promises they regret, by terms they did not

think through, by a single careless word that locks

the world into a path it cannot leave.

The old poets seem to have felt

on this matter, that the world ran on these

moments.

That every great story turned on a single ill considered

yes.

Why?

The surviving sources do not give us a clear

answer.

Loki had no obvious need to make such an

extreme bet.

He could have wagered a piece of gold

or a season's worth of work, or any one

of a thousand smaller things.

He wagered his head.

Some scholars have read this as evidence of Loki's

deep confidence in the Sons of Ivaldi.

He had just seen their work.

He had carried their three gifts in his arms.

He could not, in his own assessment

imagine that any other dwarves could surpass them.

The wager, in this reading, was the wager of

a man who believed he could not lose.

Others have read it differently.

Some have suggested that Loki, in his nature

was simply drawn to extremity.

That the chance to wager nothing of importance would

have bored him.

That only by wagering his head could he make

the contest feel real.

Still others, and this is the reading I

find most affecting, have suggested that Loki

on some level, was always a being who wanted

to be punished.

That across the long arc of the surviving Norse

stories, Loki kept doing things that would, eventually

lead to his own undoing.

That the wager of his head was

in some submerged way, an early instance of the

pattern.

Loki was, in this reading, always heading toward the

cave.

The cave was.

In some sense, what he was for.

The wagers, the cruelties, the descents

they were the steps along the road.

You may choose whichever reading you prefer.

The Norse texts, as ever, let several be true

at once.

What the texts do agree on, in full clarity

is what the brothers did.

Brokkr accepted the wager.

The brothers.

By every surviving account, began to work immediately.

They piled fuel into the forge.

They worked the bellows.

They drew out the raw metal they would be

using for the first of their three gifts.

They moved, in the practiced rhythm of long craft

to their stations.

And Loki, having staked his head on what

was about to be made, settled down to

watch.

Or so he pretended.

In the next chapter, we will see what Loki

actually did.

Chapter Eight.

The Fly at the Bellows.

I want to read you, slowly, the central passage

of the story.

Because what happens in this chapter is

in some ways, the heart of the whole Norse

tradition's account of how Mjǫllnir was made .

And the surviving Old Norse text is unusually direct

in its telling.

Loki, having wagered his head, sat down in the

brothers' forge.

Sindri began the work.

He placed, on the fire, a pigskin

the source material for the first of his three gifts.

He turned to his brother Brokkr and said

in the surviving paraphrase, Pump the bellows.

Do not stop pumping the bellows.

Whatever happens, do not stop.

If you stop, all the work is lost.

Brokkr began to pump.

Sindri left the forge briefly, to fetch something.

Whether he was gone for long, the texts do

not specify.

While he was away, the work continued.

Brokkr at the bellows, in the rhythm of long

craft.

The pigskin in the fire.

The amber heat building.

And then, and here Snorri's text is

in the surviving original, unusually direct

Then a fly flew onto Brokkr's hand and stung

him.

The fly was Loki.

That is the text.

Sú var Loki.

The fly was Loki.

Snorri does not allow the reader any ambiguity.

He does not write some say the fly was

Loki or it was rumored that Loki had taken

the form of a fly.

He simply tells us, in the bare voice of

his prose, that this was what Loki had done.

Loki, who had wagered his own head on

the contest, had taken the form of a

fly, and entered the forge.

And was now actively trying to sabotage the work.

This is, I think, one of the strangest moments

in all of Norse mythology.

The figure who has bet his own head is

the same figure who is trying to make sure

he loses the bet.

The being who, by every rational calculus

should be wanting the brothers to fail

should be doing nothing, should be sitting on his

hands, should be hoping that the brothers' work crack

apart in the flames, is the one taking

active measures to ensure the brothers cannot succeed.

The texts do not explain this contradiction directly.

They simply let it stand.

Loki is Loki.

And Loki, in his nature, does not always act

in the way his interests would dictate.

Loki, sometimes, simply acts in the way that produces

the most interesting story.

The Prose Edda's telling of this moment is one

of the small comic masterpieces in the whole of

Norse literature.

The trickster, with his head wagered, with his life

literally on the line, with the work going against

him, and his only weapon, in the underground

forge of the dwarves, is to become an insect.

To become small enough that Brokkr cannot easily kill

him.

To bite, and bite, and bite again

in the hope that one of the bites will

land in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

And the work will go wrong.

The image, Loki as a fly

circling the head of a sweating dwarf at the

bellows of a fire that is making the most

powerful object ever to exist in the Norse cosmos

is the sort of image that the modern

reader sometimes laughs at.

And the laughter is, I think, intended.

The Norse poets had a sense of humor about

their own gods that the modern reader sometimes underestimates.

The trickster, brought low.

The cosmic stakes, balanced on the head of an

insect.

The dwarf, who has been forging for hours

finally pausing for one moment to wave away the

irritation .

And in that single pause, in that single moment

of distraction, the hammer's handle came out shorter than

it should have.

The whole long history of Mjǫllnir's short handle begins

with that fly bite.

The fly stung Brokkr's hand.

Brokkr did not, the texts tell us, stop pumping.

The sting was painful.

The pain went through his hand, up his arm

into the muscle of his shoulder.

But he had been told, by his brother

that whatever happened, he should not stop.

So he did not stop.

Sindri returned to the forge.

He looked at the work.

He took, from the fire, the first of the

three gifts.

It was, the texts tell us, a boar.

A boar made entirely of gold.

Bristles, hide, tusks, eyes, every part of it

gold.

The boar was called Gullinbursti.

Gold Bristled.

Gull in burst i.

We will come to it, in detail

in the next chapter.

Sindri then turned to his brother again.

Now we make the second gift, he said.

He placed, on the fire, gold itself.

Raw gold.

He told Brokkr again, in the same words:

Pump the bellows.

Do not stop, whatever happens.

If you stop, all the work is lost.

Brokkr began again.

The fly came back.

This time the fly stung Brokkr's neck.

The sting was, by Snorri's own phrase

half again as hard as the first

hálfu fastari in the Old Norse, the kind of

careful comparative ratio the Norse texts liked to put

on physical pain.

The pain went down into Brokkr's shoulder

into his back, into the muscle between his shoulder blades.

But Brokkr did not stop pumping.

He had been told.

He kept the rhythm.

Sindri returned.

He looked at the work.

He took, from the fire, the second of the

three gifts.

It was a ring.

A great gold arm ring, with, though Brokkr did

not know it yet, a quality that would

make it one of the most coveted objects in

Asgard.

The ring was called Draupnir.

The Dripper.

We met it last episode.

We will come back to it in the next

chapter.

Sindri then turned to his brother for the third

time.

The third gift would be the most demanding

he said.

The third gift would be the one that

if completed, would win them the wager.

He placed, on the fire, iron.

A great mass of iron.

He told Brokkr, this time more urgently than before:

Pump the bellows.

Do not stop.

Above all, on this one, do not stop.

If you stop, even for an instant

the gift will be ruined.

Brokkr began.

The fly came back.

This time the fly stung Brokkr's eyelid.

The bite, the surviving texts tell us

was the hardest of all.

The blood came immediately.

It ran down from Brokkr's eyelid, into his eye

blinding it.

He could not see.

Blood was pouring into his vision.

The fly was still on his eyelid, biting again.

Brokkr, who had been told, again and again

that he must not stop, let go of

the bellows for an instant.

Only an instant.

Long enough to lift his hand to his face

and wipe the blood from his eye.

Then he returned to the bellows.

He kept pumping.

But Sindri, when he came back to take the

third gift from the fire, looked at it and

frowned.

The third gift was a hammer.

The head of the hammer was.

By every surviving account, perfect.

The metal was the finest dark iron the dwarves

knew how to work.

The shape was the perfect shape for what the

hammer would need to do.

The weight was the correct weight.

The balance was the correct balance.

But the handle of the hammer was short.

Shorter than Sindri had intended.

Shorter, the surviving accounts tell us, than any normal

hammer's handle would have been.

The handle was short.

The sources are explicit about why, because of that

one brief moment when Brokkr had stopped pumping the

bellows.

The instant when the metal had cooled, just slightly.

The instant when, in the patient long heat of

forging, the metal had not been quite hot enough

to take the full length of the handle.

The handle was short.

Sindri was, the surviving accounts tell us

deeply unhappy about this.

He looked at his brother.

He saw the blood.

He understood, in the way two long working craftsmen come

to understand each other without speaking, that something had

happened.

He did not, in the surviving texts

blame Brokkr directly.

He simply observed that the hammer's handle was shorter

than he had wanted.

And .

Though he could not have known it then

that the imperfection would, in the end

become part of the legend.

The hammer was called Mjǫllnir.

We will come to it, in detail

in the next chapter.

We will come to its qualities, its weight

its return, its small concealability, in the chapter

after that.

But for now, let me leave you with the

image.

The forge in the deep.

The amber light.

The brothers, one with blood on his cheek

the other looking down at the three gifts laid

on the cooling stone.

And, somewhere, perhaps still in the forge

perhaps already gone, a fly, on whose head

in some way the dwarves did not yet know

the entire wager would now turn.

Loki, who had bet his head

and who had spent the bet itself trying to

lose it, slipped back to his own form

somewhere in the dark.

He gathered his things.

He prepared to go up.

He took the three gifts of the Sons of

Ivaldi.

He took the three gifts of Sindri and Brokkr.

And he made his way, the surviving accounts suggest

back up the long roads of Svartalfheim

toward the surface, toward Asgard, toward the judgment that

he knew was waiting.

He had, by his own assessment, won the bet.

The brothers' work was good, but the hammer

had a short handle.

The hair, the ship, the spear of the Sons

of Ivaldi were each perfect in their own way.

The brothers' work, while striking, had a visible flaw.

He may have been smiling as he climbed.

He did not yet know what the gods would

decide.

Chapter Nine.

Gullinbursti and Draupnir.

I want to slow down, in this chapter

and sit with the first two of the brothers'

three gifts.

Because they are, in their own right

two of the more remarkable objects in Norse mythology

.

And they have, in the surviving stories

lives of their own that extend far past the

moment of their making.

The first is the golden boar.

Gullinbursti.

The name in Old Norse means, literally, gold bristled.

Gull, gold.

Bursti, bristle.

The boar's distinguishing feature is that every bristle of

its coat, every hair on its body

is made of true gold.

The whole animal, in the surviving accounts, shines.

This shining is not, in the Norse imagination, ornamental.

The shining is functional.

The boar, the surviving sources tell us

gives off its own light.

Wherever it goes, the gold of its bristles glows

the way burning coals glow.

And the darkness around it lifts.

The boar can run through the deepest of nights

and create, around itself, a small moving zone of

illumination.

A traveler riding the boar would never

in the surviving Norse imagination, lack for light.

The boar has other qualities.

It can run, the texts tell us

faster than any horse.

It can run through air.

It can run on water, the surface

not under.

It is, in the long view, a creature whose

nature is to move at speed, in any element

in any condition, with its own light.

Gullinbursti was given, in the eventual distribution of the

gifts, to the god Freyr.

We mentioned him briefly in the last chapter;

he is the god of the Vanir

the other order of gods.

And we will meet him in proper detail later

in this season.

For now it is enough to know that the

boar went to Freyr.

And that Freyr, who was, in the surviving

accounts, much pleased, kept it as one of

his principal companions.

Whenever Freyr traveled, the boar traveled with him.

Whenever Freyr needed light, the boar gave it.

The boar appears, in the surviving Norse poems

in scenes you may not yet have read

but if you continue with this season

you will encounter it again.

There is a famous funeral scene, late in the

season's arc, in which Freyr arrives at the pyre

of a fallen god in a wagon drawn by

Gullinbursti, the boar's own light moving across the

dark gathering of mourners.

The boar is, in the surviving corpus

one of the small recurring figures whose presence the

poets liked to note.

Gullinbursti was there.

The light moved with him.

The second gift is the ring.

Draupnir.

We met it last episode.

I will not, here, repeat the description in full.

What is worth noting, in the context of tonight's

episode, is the surrounding circumstance.

The ring was made by Sindri and Brokkr

in the same forge, in the same single sitting

in which they made the boar and the hammer.

The ring was the second of the three.

The fly, Loki, stung Brokkr's neck during

the working of it.

And Brokkr did not stop pumping the bellows.

The ring came out, the surviving sources tell us

perfect.

Draupnir, you may recall, was a great gold arm ring

of the kind a chieftain would wear on his

upper arm.

Its distinguishing quality was that, every ninth night

eight identical gold arm rings dripped from it.

The wealth of the ring was, in principle, inexhaustible.

A king who wore Draupnir could give and give

and never empty his hoard.

The ring was given, in the eventual distribution of

the gifts, to Odin.

The Allfather.

The wanderer.

The figure who, in the surviving stories

was the principal ring giver of the gods

the patron of every chieftain in the human world

who held an open hand.

Draupnir, in Odin's keeping, became a kind of emblem

of the office of leadership itself.

To be a true leader, in the old Norse

imagination, was to be the kind of being from

whom gold could be expected to flow.

Odin kept Draupnir.

The ring appears, in the surviving stories

on several occasions, including, with particular weight

in a funeral scene we will arrive at much

later in the season, in which Odin lays the

ring on a fallen god's pyre.

And the ring is sent down with the body

and is, the texts tell us, given back to

Odin some time later by means I will not

spoil here.

The ring is a recurring object.

It has a life.

I want to note something about the pattern of

the gifts, before we move on to the hammer

in the next chapter.

The two gifts we have just discussed

Gullinbursti and Draupnir, were given, eventually

to two different gods.

The boar went to Freyr.

The ring went to Odin.

The third gift, the hammer, would go to Thor.

Three gifts.

Three gods.

One for each of the three principal male powers

of the surviving Norse pantheon, the god of

fertility, the god of wisdom, the god of thunder.

This is, scholars have long noted, not an accident.

The surviving sources, in their structure, were arranging the

gifts in such a way that the three great

male gods of Asgard each received an object suited

to their particular nature.

Freyr, the god of harvest, of fertility

of golden things growing in fields

received the golden boar that ran through the air

and gave its own light.

Odin, the god of wisdom, of long roads

of the open hand, received the ring that

gave and gave.

Thor, the god of thunder, of direct force

of the defense of Asgard, received

in due time, the hammer.

Each god got the object he was best suited

to wield.

Draupnir, the ring, is worth pausing on

for a moment longer.

The name, in the old Norse, means "the dripper."

Or, in a slightly different reading, "that which drips."

It is one of the rare objects in Norse

mythology whose name is, itself, a description of what

the object does.

Every ninth night, the Prose Edda tells us

eight rings of equal weight and equal beauty dropped

from it.

Every ninth night.

Without ceasing.

The ring was, in effect, a self replicating source of

wealth, a perpetual fountain of gold

in the form of more rings.

The reader of the modern world may find this

absurd.

The reader of the medieval north, who lived in

a world where wealth was a thing you could

weigh and where rings were one of the standard

forms in which it was carried, would have understood

it as a deeply serious image.

A king with Draupnir on his finger could

in nine months, become richer than any other king

who had ever lived.

The ring, in the surviving sources, was buried with

the god Baldur at his funeral

placed on his pyre as the boat burned.

The story, later, of Hermód's ride to the underworld

to retrieve it, is one of the saddest in

the whole of the Norse corpus.

But that story, tonight, is not ours.

Tonight we have one more gift left to forge.

In the next chapter, we come to the hammer

itself.

We come to Mjǫllnir.

Chapter Ten.

The Making of Mjǫllnir.

The hammer was made, as we said in the

previous chapter, in the same forge, in the same

single sitting in which the brothers made the boar

and the ring.

The hammer was the third and final gift.

It was the one Brokkr had been told

most urgently of all, that he must not stop

pumping for.

It was the one the fly bit Brokkr's eyelid

during.

And the blood ran into his eye.

And he stopped, for just an instant

to wipe his face.

The hammer came out of the fire with a

short handle.

I want to spend most of this chapter sitting

with the hammer itself, with its properties

with its qualities, with what it meant to the

Norse imagination.

Because Mjǫllnir is, by some distance, the most famous

of all the objects in Norse mythology.

It is the object that, more than any other

has survived into the modern world.

You can buy a small replica of it, today

in any airport shop in Reykjavík.

And from many shops in the world far from

there.

The hammer of Thor has, in its way

outlived even the religion that produced it.

What did the dwarves make?

They made a tool of dark iron.

The head of the hammer was, the surviving sources

tell us, square, though some accounts describe it

as more rounded, like a maul.

The metal was, by every account, the finest dark

iron the dwarves knew.

The weight of the head was such that no

being in Asgard but Thor could lift it

Thor's strength, in the surviving descriptions, was specifically the

strength required to swing the hammer.

The hammer demanded a god of his particular kind

to be useful at all.

The hammer had a name.

Mjǫllnir.

The etymology of the name is, even today, contested.

Some scholars derive it from a verb meaning to

crush or to grind, mala in some forms

and so read the name as Crusher or

Grinder.

Others derive it from a root meaning lightning or

flash, related to words for sudden white light in

some of the older Indo European languages.

Still others have proposed that the name is older

than any of these readings, that it comes

from a time before the Old Norse language existed

in its surviving form.

And that we can only guess what it once

meant.

What is consistent is that, in the surviving Norse

use of the word, Mjǫllnir is the hammer's proper

name.

It is treated, in the texts, the way the

name of a person is treated.

The hammer is referred to, again and again

as if it had a personality of its own.

The hammer had three principal qualities.

The surviving sources are clear about all three.

The first was its strike.

Mjǫllnir, the texts tell us, could strike as hard

as Thor wished it to strike

against any substance, any creature, any obstacle .

And the hammer would not break.

Not on the bones of the largest giant.

Not on the stones of the deepest mountain.

Not on the shell of the great serpent that

lived under the world's sea.

Mjǫllnir was, in this sense, indestructible.

Whatever Thor swung the hammer at, the hammer would

either pass through, or the hammer would shatter .

And the hammer never shattered.

Therefore the thing struck always gave way.

This was the simple math of the weapon.

The second was its return.

Mjǫllnir, the surviving sources tell us, could be thrown.

The hammer, when thrown, would strike whatever Thor had

aimed it at, striking with the same impossible

force, breaking whatever needed to be broken

and then, after striking, the hammer would return to

Thor's hand.

There was no need to retrieve it.

There was no need to walk over to the

corpse of the giant and pull the hammer out.

The hammer simply came back, as if it knew

the way home.

This is a more remarkable quality than it sometimes

seems.

In the long history of mythological weapons across the

world's traditions, the returning weapon is rare.

Most weapons in mythology, once thrown, must be retrieved.

The Norse, in giving Thor a hammer that returned

of its own accord, were giving him a weapon

that could be used again and again

in rapid succession, against multiple enemies.

The hammer was, in this respect, the perfect weapon

for a god who would be fighting alone

in distant places, against many.

The third quality was the most surprising.

Mjǫllnir, the surviving sources tell us, could be made

small.

Small enough that Thor could tuck it inside his

tunic, under his cloak, against his chest.

The hammer could become, in this concealed form

the size of a pendant.

It could be hidden completely.

Thor could walk through any hall, any settlement

any human village, with the hammer on him

and no one would know.

This too is a more remarkable quality than it

sometimes seems.

The hammer, in the modern imagination

in the comic books, in the films

is a great visible object, a thing always present

in Thor's grip.

The Norse imagination, by contrast, gave Thor a hammer

that could disappear.

The god, in the surviving stories, could move through

the world without the weight of the weapon being

apparent.

He could arrive in a hall as a stranger.

He could sit by a peasant's fire as a

guest.

He could pass through a giant's gate as a

merchant.

And only when the situation required it

only when the moment came for the hammer to

be drawn, would the hammer appear, full sized

in his hand.

This quality, scholars have noted, is one of the

reasons Thor figures so often, in the Eddic poems

in stories of disguise and infiltration.

The hammer being concealable made the god.

In some sense, mobile.

He could go where he wanted to go

in any form, and still be

at any moment, what he was.

And then there was the imperfection.

The handle was short.

The surviving sources are explicit about why this mattered.

Mjǫllnir's short handle meant, in the texts' language

that Thor could not, when swinging it

get the full leverage that a longer handle would

have given him.

He had to grip the hammer close to his

body.

He had to swing it with the strength of

his arm, rather than the leverage of a long

shaft.

The short handle made the hammer, in this respect

slightly less than what it could have been.

But here is the strange thing.

It did not, in any surviving account

prevent Thor from doing what he needed to do.

The hammer's short handle is referenced, throughout the Norse

corpus, mainly as a curiosity.

The dwarves regret it.

Sindri, when the gift is presented in Asgard

mentions it.

Brokkr is, in some surviving accounts, blamed for it.

But Thor, in the surviving texts, does not seem

to mind.

He takes the hammer.

He grips it where the handle is.

He swings it.

It strikes what he wants it to strike.

It returns to his hand.

It becomes small when he asks it to become

small.

The flaw, in the end, is more of a

story than a problem.

This is, I think, one of the quietly affecting

things about the whole story of Mjǫllnir's making.

The hammer is, by every objective measure

one of the great achievements of the Norse mythological

imagination.

It is the weapon that defends the world.

It is the tool by which the gods hold

the giants at bay.

It is the object whose presence, in the long

arc of the surviving stories, is the difference between

continued existence and the early arrival of Ragnarǫk.

And it has a short handle.

The flaw is part of the gift.

The gift is not less for having a flaw.

The flaw.

In some sense, is what makes the gift the

gift it became, a hammer that

by the texts' own account, was both perfect and

imperfect at the same time.

And that was, in any case, the greatest weapon

any of the gods had ever held.

A note on the name.

The most likely origin of Mjǫllnir, by the most

thorough modern philological work, is from an old Indo European

root meaning "to grind" or "to crush"

the same root that gives us the modern English

word "mill," and the German Mehl for flour.

And the Latin malleus for "hammer." Mjǫllnir

in this reading, is "the crusher." The thing that

grinds.

The instrument of the great mill that turns the

seasons, that breaks open the storm cloud, that strikes down

whatever stands across its path.

The connection between the hammer and the agricultural mill

is older, perhaps, than any of the stories we

are telling tonight.

Thor was, in the original old farmer's worship

the god of the field as much as he

was the god of the storm.

The same hammer that broke the giants' skulls was

the hammer that blessed the bride at a wedding

that blessed the field at sowing, that blessed the

harvest at the year's turn.

The hammer was, for the old Scandinavian farmer

who carved a small Mjǫllnir shape on a pendant and

hung it on a leather cord around his neck

of which the archaeological record has preserved over a

thousand examples across Scandinavia and the British Isles

not a weapon.

It was a protector.

A small piece of the storm god, carried at the

throat, against whatever the night might bring.

We turn now to the moment when the gifts

are brought back to Asgard.

And the gods sit down to judge them.

Chapter Eleven.

The Judgment of the Gods.

The surviving sources tell us that the brothers Sindri

and Brokkr followed Loki up out of Svartalfheim.

They brought their three gifts with them.

Loki brought the three gifts of the Sons of

Ivaldi.

The whole party, by the time it reached Asgard

was a procession, a trickster, two dwarves

six treasures.

They came to the gods.

The judgment, the surviving sources tell us

was to be made by three specific gods.

Odin, the Allfather.

Thor, the strongest.

Freyr, the god of the Vanir, who had joined

the Æsir's company after the war between the two

divine families.

These three sat in their high judgment seats

the texts tell us.

And the gifts were laid out before them.

And the dwarves and the trickster waited to hear

how the gods would decide.

The first set of gifts was the work of

the Sons of Ivaldi.

Sif's hair was presented.

Skíðblaðnir was presented, folded, perhaps, into a small

bundle of wood the size of a piece of

cloth, and unfolded, for the gods, to its full

size.

Gungnir was presented.

The gods looked at the three.

They were pleased.

Each gift, in its own way, was a wonder.

The hair, when laid on Sif's head

immediately took root and began to grow as ordinary

hair grew.

She wept again, the texts suggest.

But the weeping this time was different

the weeping of a being who has had a

wrong made right, rather than of a being who

has had a wrong inflicted.

The ship, when unfolded, was as large as the

texts had promised.

And the gods could see that it would carry

all of them with their gear.

The spear, when balanced in Odin's hand

felt to him, the texts suggest.

Though they do not give us Odin's exact words

like a continuation of his own arm.

The Sons of Ivaldi had made fine things.

Then the brothers Sindri and Brokkr presented their three

gifts.

Gullinbursti was led out.

The boar, the surviving accounts tell us

was put on its feet on the floor of

the hall.

And the light from its gold bristles immediately filled

the space around it.

The gods marveled.

Freyr, who would receive it, was particularly pleased.

The boar, the dwarves said, would run faster than

any horse, through air or over water

and would always give its own light.

Draupnir was placed in Odin's other hand.

The gods watched it.

The dwarves explained its property, that every ninth

night, eight identical rings would drip from it.

Odin, the texts tell us, ran his thumb along

the edge of the ring, and felt the weight

of it.

And was, the texts suggest, in the careful

way they had of suggesting Odin's feelings without naming

them, moved.

And then Mjǫllnir.

The brothers brought the hammer forward.

They laid it on the long table at which

the gods sat.

They told the gods what the hammer was.

They told the gods, with some embarrassment

that the handle was shorter than they had intended.

They explained, in the surviving accounts, why this had

happened, a fly had stung Brokkr's eyelid during

the forging.

And Brokkr had stopped pumping the bellows for an

instant to wipe the blood from his eye.

And the handle had emerged shorter than the design

had called for.

The gods looked at the hammer.

Thor, for whom the gift was intended

picked it up.

He felt the weight of it.

He felt the balance.

He gripped it where the dwarves had made the

grip, close to the head.

He swung it, gently, in the air of the

hall .

And the hall, the surviving accounts tell us

vibrated faintly with each swing, the way the air

vibrates when a great bell is rung but the

sound has not yet escaped.

The three judges conferred.

The conversation, in detail, is not preserved.

But the outcome is.

The three gods, Odin, Thor, Freyr, declared

unanimously, that the hammer was the greatest of the

six gifts.

Not because it was the most beautiful.

Not because it was the most ingenious.

But because, in their judgment, it was the gift

that would matter most in the long defense of

Asgard.

Their reasoning, the surviving texts give us, was simple.

The world of the gods was surrounded

on all sides, by the world of the giants.

The giants would, at some unknown future moment

come against Asgard in numbers no other god's weapon

could resist.

The hammer, the indestructible, returning, concealable hammer

was the only object among the six that could

in the long view, hold the giants back.

The ship was beautiful.

The hair was a wonder.

The boar gave its light.

The ring gave its gold.

The spear, in Odin's hand, was a marker of

fate.

But the hammer was, in the gods' assessment

the difference between Asgard's continued existence and its end.

The hammer was the greatest gift.

Therefore the brothers Sindri and Brokkr had

by the gods' unanimous verdict, won the wager.

Loki had lost.

Brokkr, the surviving texts tell us, immediately stepped forward.

He was, by every account, a dwarf of strong

feeling.

The fly had stung him three times.

He had pumped the bellows through pain and blood.

He had been told, by his brother

that the work demanded everything of him.

And he had given everything.

And now Loki had lost the bet

the bet Loki himself had proposed

and Brokkr had come to collect what he had

been promised.

He had come, the surviving texts tell us

for Loki's head.

We come, in the final chapter before goodnight

to what Loki did then.

Chapter Twelve.

Goodnight.

And the Hammer at Rest.

Loki, when he saw the verdict, did what Loki

always did.

He looked for a way out.

He did not, in the surviving accounts

try to deny the verdict.

The judgment had been unanimous.

The three gods had spoken.

The brothers had won.

By the terms of the bet

the terms Loki himself had set

Loki's head was now forfeit.

Brokkr was entitled, in the harsh law of the

old Norse wager, to take it.

But Loki, and this is the moment that

more than any other, defines his cunning, found

in the wording of the bet, a small crack.

He turned to the gods, the surviving sources tell

us.

And he said: I wagered my head.

I did not wager my neck.

The brothers may have my head.

But they may not have my neck.

The gods looked at him.

The cunning of the argument is, in its old

Norse form, sharper than it sometimes seems in modern

paraphrase.

Loki was pointing out that one cannot remove a

head without cutting the neck.

The two are joined.

The head, in any literal sense, includes the upper

portion of the neck.

To take the head is, necessarily, to take part

of the neck.

But Loki had only wagered the head.

The neck, even the small portion of neck

through which a beheading must pass, was not

by the strict terms, his to give.

If Brokkr cut into the neck, Brokkr would be

taking something he had not won.

The gods, the surviving texts tell us, considered this.

The argument was, in the old Norse legal sense

sound.

Loki had identified a real ambiguity in the terms.

The wager, as it had been stated

did not give Brokkr the right to cut into

the neck, and there was, in the strict

logic, no way to take the head without doing

so.

Therefore Brokkr could not, by the gods' judgment

have what he had won.

The gods sided with Loki.

I want you to sit with this for a

moment, because it is one of the more affecting

passages in the Norse corpus.

Loki had done a real wrong.

He had cut Sif's hair.

He had taunted the brothers.

He had wagered his head, and lost.

And now, in the moment the consequence was

meant to come down on him, he found

in the precise language of his own wager

a wriggle.

And the gods let him have it.

Why?

The surviving sources do not, I think

fully answer this.

Several readings have been offered.

Some scholars have suggested that the gods

in this moment, were not yet ready to let

one of their own be put to death over

a craft contest, that the relation between the

Æsir and Loki, complicated and ambiguous as it was

was not something they wished to dissolve over the

technicality of a bet.

Others have suggested that the gods admired the cunning

of the argument itself, that the Norse old law

tradition placed a real value on the kind of

sharp parsing Loki had just done.

And that to deny him his wriggle would have

been to deny the rules of their own legal

system.

Still others have suggested, more darkly, that the gods

knew Loki would, eventually, do worse

and that letting him off this once

in this small way, was the cost of keeping

him close enough to watch.

Whatever the reason, the gods sided with Loki.

Brokkr could not take the head.

We should sit with this for a moment.

This is, exactly, the sort of argument

that the trickster, in nearly every mythology in the

world, makes.

The letter of the agreement, held up against the

spirit of the agreement.

The literal word, used against the meaning.

The Norse poets, in their old way

seem to have admired this kind of legal cunning

even when it offended them.

They preserved many such moments, figures wriggling out

of impossible bargains by finding the small unsaid clause

the loophole, the technicality.

Loki was, in this single way, the patron of

every clever lawyer who has ever stood in any

court, anywhere, since the world began.

The Norse legal imagination, even outside of the mythological

texts, took these wrigglings seriously.

The Icelandic Grágás law codes, written down in the

centuries after the conversion to Christianity, are full of

careful parsings of exactly this kind.

What was promised, in the exact words.

What was withheld, by silence.

Where the boundary of an oath ran

when the oath had been spoken in a hurry.

The Norse, in their long Atlantic settlement

lived in a world where the precise word of

an agreement could mean the difference between life and

exile.

Loki's argument, in the story, would have been read

by a Norse audience not as cheating but as

a particularly fine specimen of the art they all

practiced.

He had read the contract.

He had found the gap.

He had walked through it.

And the gods, who lived by the same law

could not, in justice, refuse him the walk.

Brokkr was.