Most of what we know about the Norse gods comes from a handful of medieval Icelandic books: the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda and the sagas. They are stranger and funnier than their modern retellings. Meet a god who can hear grass grow, a cow that licked the ancestor of the gods out of the ice, a ship built from dead men's nails, and a list of dwarfs that reads like the cast of The Hobbit.
Every tile in a Norse Mythology game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Gods
nine stories
1The god who sacrificed himself to himself
On the tile: Odin
Odin, chief of the gods, paid a strange price for the runes. In the poem Havamal he recalls hanging on a windswept tree for nine full nights, wounded with a spear and offered to Odin, "myself to myself." Nobody brought him bread or a drink from a horn. At last he peered down, took up the runes, screaming as he seized them, and fell back. After that, he says, he began to thrive and grow wise, each word leading him on to another word and each deed to another deed.
Thor's chariot was pulled by two goats, and on one trip they were also supper. The Prose Edda says Thor stopped at a farmer's house, killed and cooked both goats, and invited the family to eat, asking them to throw the bones onto the goatskins. The farmer's son, Thjalfi, split a thigh bone to get at the marrow. At dawn Thor raised his hammer over the skins and the goats stood up again, but one limped. The terrified family offered everything they owned, and Thor took their two children, Thjalfi and Roskva, as his servants.
In Marvel's version, which dates to a 1962 comic book, Loki is Thor's adopted brother and the son of Laufey, king of the Frost Giants. The medieval sources tell it differently. In the Prose Edda, Laufey is Loki's mother, and his father is the giant Farbauti. He is no brother of Thor's. His bond is with Odin instead: in the poem Lokasenna, Loki reminds Odin that in olden days the two of them mixed their blood, and that Odin promised never to drink ale unless it was brought for them both.
Frigg once won a bet with Odin by rigging it. In the prose that opens the poem Grimnismal, Odin boasts that his foster son Geirrod is now a king. Frigg retorts that Geirrod is so stingy he tortures his guests if too many come. Odin calls that the greatest of lies, and they wager. The claim was a slander, but Frigg sends her maid Fulla to warn the king about a visiting wizard. So when Odin arrives in disguise, Geirrod seizes him and sets him between two fires for eight nights.
Freyja, the most famous of the goddesses, traveled in a chariot drawn by two cats. The Prose Edda adds a sadder detail. Her husband, Od, went far away, and Freyja weeps for him, but her tears are red gold. She has many names, the book explains, because she took a new one among each of the peoples she visited while searching for him, among them Mardoll, Horn, Gefn and Syr. The same book's guide for poets lists Freyja's tears among the many poetic ways to say gold.
Tyr was the boldest of the gods. The Prose Edda says anyone who surpassed others in bravery and never yielded was called Tyr-strong. When the gods bound the wolf Fenrir, it would not believe they would free it until Tyr put his hand in its mouth as a pledge. The wolf bit the hand off at the wrist, a spot called the wolf's joint. Tyr still turns up every week. The Romans named a day for their war god, Mars; Germanic peoples swapped in their own, Tiw in Old English. It became Tuesday.
Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, had remarkable senses. The Prose Edda says he needs less sleep than a bird and sees as well by night as by day. He can hear grass growing on the earth and wool growing on sheep, and, the book adds, everything louder than that. He sits at the edge of heaven guarding the rainbow bridge against the giants, and his horn, Gjallarhorn, can be heard in all the worlds. He was also born of nine mothers, all sisters, and his teeth were made of gold.
Skadi, daughter of a giant the gods had killed, marched into Asgard in helmet and mail to avenge him. The gods offered a settlement instead: she could choose a husband from among them, but she could see only their feet. She picked the most beautiful pair, sure they belonged to the handsome Baldr. They were Njord's, the god who rules the winds and calms the sea. They took turns living in her mountains and by his shore, but Njord hated the howling wolves, and Skadi could not sleep for the screaming seabirds.
The Norse gods stayed young by eating apples kept by the goddess Idunn, and they nearly lost them. Loki, trapped by the giant Thjazi in the form of an eagle, bought his freedom by promising to hand her over. He lured Idunn into a forest with talk of even better apples, and the eagle carried her off. Without her, the gods grew gray-haired and old. Threatened with death, Loki borrowed Freyja's falcon shape, turned Idunn into a nut and flew her home. The pursuing eagle crashed into a fire the gods lit on Asgard's walls.
The gods raised the wolf Fenrir themselves, and grew alarmed as he got bigger every day. He snapped their first fetter, Laeding, then burst Dromi, though it was half again as strong. So dwarfs made Gleipnir, soft as a silk ribbon, from six things: the noise of a cat's footfall, a woman's beard, a mountain's roots, a bear's sinews, a fish's breath and a bird's spittle. As proof, the Prose Edda points out that women have no beards, cats make no sound when they leap and mountains have no roots.
The Midgard Serpent lies in the ocean circling all the lands, and Thor once had it on a fishing line. Rowing out with the giant Hymir, Thor baited his hook with the head of Hymir's biggest ox. The serpent bit, and Thor pulled so hard that his feet broke through the boat onto the sea floor. He hauled the monster up, and they glared at each other as it spat venom, until the terrified giant cut the line. Some say Thor killed it anyway, the Prose Edda notes, but the narrator thinks it still lives.
3The squirrel who carried insults through the world tree
On the tile: Ratatoskr
The world tree had its own gossip. A squirrel named Ratatoskr, the Swift-Tusked, runs up and down Yggdrasil carrying envious words between an eagle in its branches and the dragon Nidhogg at its roots. The eagle, the Prose Edda adds, knows many things and has a hawk named Vedrfolnir sitting between its eyes. Little more is said about the squirrel, but that has not stopped the theories. When one cast him as the undying hatred between gods and giants, translator Henry Adams Bellows called the idea "a trifle far-fetched."
4The cow that licked the gods' ancestor out of the ice
On the tile: Audhumla
Before there were gods, there was a cow. In the Prose Edda's creation story, melting frost formed the giant Ymir and a cow named Audhumla, whose four streams of milk fed him. She fed by licking salty, frost-covered stones. On the first evening a man's hair came out of the stones, on the second day his head, and on the third day the whole man, Buri. His son Bor married Bestla, a giant's daughter, and their sons were Odin, Vili and Ve. So Odin's grandfather was licked out of the ice by a cow.
Odin kept two ravens on his shoulders, Huginn and Muninn, names usually translated as Thought and Memory. At dawn he sent them flying over the whole world, and by breakfast time they were back, telling him everything they had seen and heard. That, the Prose Edda says, is why he was called the raven-god. In the poem Grimnismal, Odin admits a worry: he fears that Huginn may not come home, but for Muninn, Memory, he fears more.
Valkyrie means chooser of the slain, and on the battlefield that was the job: Odin sent them to every battle to choose who would die and to decide the victory. In Valhalla they had a second job. The Prose Edda says they carried the drink around, waited on the tables and passed the ale horns to the fallen warriors. The poem Grimnismal names thirteen of them, including Hrist and Mist, Hild and Thrud, and Randgrid and Reginleif. The youngest of the Norns, Skuld, rode out with them to choose the slain.
Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit will find familiar names in the Poetic Edda. The poem Voluspa pauses to list the dwarfs, and the roll includes Durin, Dvalin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Thorin, Thror, Thrain, Fili, Kili, Gloin, Dori and Ori. It even includes Gandalf, which Henry Adams Bellows translated as Magic Elf, and Eikinskjaldi, Oak Shield. The Prose Edda gives the dwarfs a less charming origin: they first came to life like maggots in the flesh of the dead giant Ymir, until the gods gave them human form and understanding.
About 200 years before Snorri Sturluson wrote his Edda, someone carved Fafnir's death into Swedish rock. In the Volsunga saga, the hero Sigurd digs a pit on the dragon's path to water and stabs upward as it crawls over. Roasting the heart for the smith Regin, Sigurd burns his finger, sucks it and suddenly understands the birds, who warn that Regin plans to kill him. The Ramsund carving near Eskilstuna shows it all, down to Regin beheaded beside his smithing tools. Its runes record a bridge built by a woman named Sigrid.
Grettir, the famous Icelandic outlaw, was afraid of the dark, and his saga blames a ghost. Glam, a shepherd found dead after a stormy night, would not stay dead; he rode the roofs of the farm at night and broke down doors. Grettir wrestled him until they crashed out of the house. Just then the moon came out, and the sight of Glam's eyes drained Grettir's strength. Glam cursed him with exile and loneliness, those eyes always before him. Grettir beheaded him, but afterward he dared not go anywhere alone at night.
Yggdrasil, the ash whose branches spread over all the world, is always under attack. The poem Grimnismal says a hart bites its top, its trunk is rotting and the dragon Nidhogg gnaws beneath. So every day, the Prose Edda says, the Norns who live by Urd's well sprinkle the tree with the well's holy water and the clay around it, so its branches will not wither. The book adds two bonuses: the dew that falls from the tree feeds the bees, and two birds fed in the well are the ancestors of all swans.
2A world built from a giant, walled with his eyebrows
On the tile: Midgard
Midgard, the world of humans, was made from a dead giant. After Odin and his brothers killed the frost giant Ymir, the Prose Edda says, they made the earth from his flesh, the rocks from his bones and the seas from his blood. His skull became the sky, held up at its four corners by four dwarfs named East, West, North and South, and his brains were thrown into the air as clouds. Midgard itself was a stronghold ringing the world to keep out the restless giants, and it was built from Ymir's eyebrows.
Valhalla gets the fame, but in the Eddas it took only half the fallen. The poem Grimnismal says the goddess Freyja rules Folkvang, the Field of the Folk, where she decides who sits in her hall. Each day she chooses half of the dead, and Odin has the other half. The Prose Edda agrees. Translator Henry Adams Bellows saw no reason for Freyja to share the slain with Odin, and he passed on a scholar's view that she had been blended with Frigg, Odin's wife.
Hel is no lake of fire. In the Prose Edda, Hel is both a realm and its ruler, a daughter of Loki whom Odin cast into Niflheim, the misty world where cold and all grim things began. She receives those who die of sickness or old age, and the wicked as well. Her hall is Sleet-Cold, her dish Hunger, her knife Famine and her bed Disease, and she herself is half blue-black and half flesh-colored. The English word hell is related to her name; both go back to a root meaning to conceal.
Bifrost, the bridge from earth to heaven, is what people call the rainbow, the Prose Edda explains, and its red is burning fire that keeps giants from climbing up. The gods ride over it every day to hold court beneath the world tree, except Thor, who walks and wades rivers. The book even records a complaint. Told the bridge will break when the sons of Muspell ride over it, the questioner grumbles that the gods did not build honestly. Not their fault, comes the reply: nothing in the world can stand against them.
The god Freyr received an entire world when he cut his first tooth. In the poem Grimnismal, Odin runs through the homes of the gods and notes that Alfheim, home of the elves, was given to Freyr as a tooth-gift in ancient times. Translator Henry Adams Bellows explained that a tooth-gift was a present for a child cutting its first tooth, a custom the scholar Vigfusson said was still alive in Iceland. The Prose Edda says Alfheim's Light-Elves are fairer than the sun, unlike the Dark-Elves who live in the earth.
Muspelheim, the realm of fire, existed before the world did. The Prose Edda describes a southern land so bright and hot that no outsider can bear it, guarded at its border by Surt with a flaming sword. Its sparks helped build the world, set in the sky to light heaven and earth. At the end, Surt will ride out and burn the whole world. Astronomers have put his name back in the sky: a small moon of Saturn, discovered in 2006 and only a few miles across, is named Surtur.
Modern retellings name the nine realms with confidence, but the medieval poems never list them. In Voluspa the seeress says only that she knew nine worlds, and in another poem a giant claims he has visited nine worlds down to Niflhel. Every list is a later reconstruction, and they disagree. In 1879 translator Rasmus B. Anderson counted Niflheim and Niflhel as two separate worlds. In 1923 Henry Adams Bellows listed eight, suggested the home of the dwarfs as the ninth, and admitted that the ninth world is uncertain.
Odin's missing eye is at the bottom of a well. Under the root of the world tree that reaches toward the frost giants lies Mimir's Well, where wisdom and understanding are stored, and its keeper, Mimir, is wise because he drinks from it. When Odin asked for one drink, the Prose Edda says, he had to leave one of his eyes as a pledge. In the poem Voluspa, the seeress needles him about it: she knows where his eye is hidden, and every morning Mimir drinks mead from Odin's pledge.
Thor's hammer has a design flaw, and the Prose Edda explains it. Loki bet his head that the dwarf Sindri could not match three treasures another family of dwarfs had just made. While Sindri's brother Brokk worked the bellows, a fly stung his hand, then his neck, then his eyelid, and he let go for a moment. The result, Mjolnir, would never miss and always came back, but its handle was rather short. The gods still judged it best. Loki argued that his head was forfeit but not his neck, so Brokk sewed his lips shut.
When the giant Thrym stole Thor's hammer, his price was the goddess Freyja as a bride. Freyja's fury shook the gods' hall, so Heimdall proposed dressing Thor as the bride, veil and all, with Loki as his maid. At the feast the bride ate an ox and eight salmon and drank three casks of mead. Freyja had fasted eight nights from longing, Loki explained. When Thrym peeked under the veil at her burning eyes, Loki said she had not slept either. Then the hammer was laid in the bride's lap, and Thor took it back.
To protect her son Baldr, Frigg made fire, water, metals, stones, trees, sicknesses, beasts and more swear not to harm him. Only a sprout of mistletoe was skipped as too young. Loki learned this and guided the blind god Hod to throw it, killing Baldr. Hel agreed to release him if all things wept for him. Nearly everything did, even stones and metals, which the Prose Edda says is why they seem to weep when brought from frost into warmth. Only a giantess named Thokk refused, and people believed she was Loki.
At the hall of the giant king Utgarda-Loki, Thor lost every contest. He managed a few gulps from a drinking horn, lifted one paw of a gray cat, and was forced to one knee by an old woman. Loki lost an eating race, and Thor's servant Thjalfi lost a footrace. Only as they left did the king confess. The horn's end reached the sea, and Thor drank enough to cause the ebb tides. The cat was the Midgard Serpent, the old woman was Old Age, Loki had raced fire and Thjalfi had raced thought.
Norse poetry began as spit. To seal a peace, the gods and the Vanir spat into a vat, and from it shaped Kvasir, so wise no question stumped him. Two dwarfs killed him and mixed his blood with honey into a mead that made any drinker a poet or scholar. Odin later won the mead from the giant Suttung's daughter and flew home as an eagle to spit it into jars. With Suttung close behind, he let some escape backward. Anyone may have that part, the Prose Edda says: it is the poetaster's share.
Thor carries a souvenir of his duel with the stone-hearted giant Hrungnir. Their weapons met in midair, and the giant's whetstone shattered. Part fell to earth as all the flint rocks; the rest lodged in Thor's head. A wise woman named Groa began singing spells to loosen it. To cheer her, Thor described carrying her husband out of giant country in a basket and tossing his frozen toe into the sky as a star. Groa was so delighted she forgot her spells. The stone is still there, so never throw a whetstone across the floor.
Ragnarok is often called the end of the world, but the Eddas give it a sequel. After the fire, the poem Voluspa says, the earth rises green from the waves, waterfalls tumble and an eagle hunts fish below the cliffs. The surviving gods meet and remember the past, and the golden gaming tables they owned long ago stand again in the grass. Fields bear fruit unsown, and Baldr comes back. Two humans, Lif and Lifthrasir, ride out the fire hidden in a wood, living on morning dew, and from them the world is peopled again.
Norse myth has two record-setting ships. Skidbladnir, the best, was built by dwarfs for the god Freyr; it always had a fair wind and could be folded up like a napkin and carried in a pocket. Naglfar, the largest, is made of dead men's nails. At Ragnarok it will break loose and float on the flood, steered by the giant Hrym. Hence the Prose Edda's warning: anyone who dies with untrimmed nails adds material to Naglfar, a ship that gods and men alike hope will be finished as late as possible.
The best-known book of Norse myths was written by a hard-edged politician. Snorri Sturluson, born in Iceland about 1179, became one of its richest and most powerful chiefs. His Edda, which translator Henry Adams Bellows called "clearly a handbook for poets," retold the myths so poets could understand the old figures of speech. His politics caught up with him. King Hakon had forbidden him to sail home to Iceland; he went anyway, and Icelandic chiefs acting at the king's urging murdered him at Reykholt in September 1241.