Norse Mythology Read online

  Beautiful Freya stood at the gateway, watching him.

  “You have only ten stone blocks with you,” she told him. “You will need twice that many bricks to finish our wall.”

  The builder said nothing. He carried on hauling his blocks toward the unfinished gateway, his face a mask. There were no smiles, no winks—not any longer.

  “Thor is returning from the east,” Freya told him. “He will be with us soon.”

  The gods of Asgard came out to watch the builder as he hauled the rocks toward the wall. They joined Freya, stood about her protectively.

  They watched, silently at first, and then they began to smile and to chuckle, and to call out questions.

  “Hey!” shouted Balder. “You only get the sun if you finish that wall. Do you think you will be taking the sun home with you?”

  “And the moon,” said Bragi. “Such a pity you do not have your horse with you. He could have carried all the rocks you need.”

  And the gods laughed.

  The builder let go of the stone-boat then. He faced the gods. “You cheated!” he said, and his face was scarlet with exertion and with anger.

  “We have not cheated,” said Odin. “No more than you have cheated. Do you think we would have let you build our wall if we had known you were a giant?”

  The builder picked up a rock one-handed and smashed it against another, breaking the granite block into two. He turned to the gods, half of the rock in each hand, and now he was twenty, thirty, fifty feet tall. His face twisted; he no longer looked like the stranger who had arrived in Asgard a season before, placid and even-tempered. Now his face looked like the granite face of a cliff, twisted and sculpted by anger and hatred.

  “I am a mountain giant,” he said. “And you gods are nothing but cheats and vile oath-breakers. If I still had my horse, I would be finishing your wall now. I would be taking the lovely Freya and the sun and the moon for my wages. And I would be leaving you here in the darkness and the cold, without even beauty to cheer you.”

  “No oath was broken,” said Odin. “But no oath can protect you from us now.”

  The mountain giant roared with anger and ran toward the gods, a huge lump of granite in each hand as a club.

  The gods stood aside, and only now the giant saw who was standing behind them. A huge god, red-bearded and muscular, wearing iron gauntlets and holding an iron hammer, which he swung, once. He let go of the hammer when it was pointing at the giant.

  There was a flash of lightning from the clear skies, followed by the dull boom of thunder as the hammer left Thor’s hand.

  The mountain giant saw the hammer getting rapidly bigger as it came hurtling toward him, and then he saw nothing else, not ever again.

  The gods finished building the wall themselves, although it took them many more weeks to cut and haul the last ten blocks from the quarries high in the mountains and drag them all the way back to Asgard and place them in position at the top of the gateway. They were not as well shaped or as well fitted as the blocks the master builder had shaped and placed himself.

  There were those of the gods who felt that they should have let the giant get even closer to finishing the wall before Thor killed him. Thor said that he appreciated the gods having some fun ready for him, when he got home from the east.

  Strangely, for it was most unlike him, Loki was not around to be praised for his part in luring away the horse Svadilfari. Nobody knew where he was, although there were those who spoke of a magnificent chestnut mare seen on the meadows beneath Asgard. Loki stayed away for the best part of a year, and when he showed up again, he was accompanied by a gray foal.

  It was a beautiful foal, although it had eight legs instead of the usual four, and it followed Loki wherever he went, and nuzzled him, and treated Loki as if he were its mother. Which, of course, was the case.

  The foal grew into a horse called Sleipnir, a huge gray stallion, the fastest and the strongest horse that ever there had been or ever there would be, a horse that could outrun the wind.

  Loki presented Sleipnir to Odin as a gift, the best horse among gods and men.

  Many people would admire Odin’s horse, but only a brave man would ever mention its parentage in Loki’s presence, and nobody ever dared to allude to it twice. Loki would go out of his way to make your life unpleasant if he heard you talking about how he lured Svadlifari away from its master and how he rescued the gods from his own bad idea. Loki nursed his resentments.

  And that is the story of how the gods got their wall.

  THE CHILDREN OF LOKI

  Loki was handsome, and he knew it. People wanted to like him, they wanted to believe him, but he was undependable and self-centered at best, mischievous or evil at worst. He married a woman named Sigyn, who had been happy and beautiful when Loki courted and married her but now always looked like she was expecting bad news. She bore him a son, Narfi, and shortly afterward another son, Vali.

  Sometimes Loki would vanish for long periods and not return, and then Sigyn would look like she was expecting the very worst news of all, but always Loki would come back to her, looking shifty and guilty and also as if he were very proud of himself indeed.

  Three times he went away, three times he—eventually—

  returned.

  The third time Loki returned to Asgard, Odin called Loki to him.

  “I have dreamed a dream,” said the wise old one-eyed god. “You have children.”

  “I have a son, Narfi. A good boy, although I must confess that he does not always listen to his father, and another son, Vali, obedient and restrained.”

  “Not them. You have three other children, Loki. You have been sneaking off to spend your days and your nights in the land of the frost giants with Angrboda the giantess. And she has borne you three children. I have seen them in the eye of my mind as I sleep, and my visions tell me that they will be the greatest foes of the gods in the time that is to come.”

  Loki said nothing. He tried to look ashamed and succeeded simply in looking pleased with himself.

  Odin called the gods to him, with Tyr and Thor at their head, and he told them that they would be journeying far into Jotunheim, to Giantland, to bring Loki’s children to Asgard.

  The gods traveled into the land of the giants, battling many dangers, until they reached Angrboda’s keep. She was not expecting them, and she had left her children playing together in her great hall. The gods were shocked when they saw what Loki and Angrboda’s children were, but that did not deter them. They seized the children, and they bound them, and they carried the oldest between them, tied to the stripped trunk of a pine tree, and they muzzled the second child with a muzzle made from knotted willow, and they put a rope around its neck as a leash, while the third child walked beside them, gloomy and disturbing.

  Those on the right of the third child saw a beautiful young girl, while those on the left tried not to look at her, for they saw a dead girl, her skin and flesh rotted black, walking in their midst.

  “Have you noticed something?” Thor asked Tyr on the third day of their journey back through the land of the frost giants. They had camped for the night in a small clearing, and Tyr was scratching the furry neck of Loki’s second child with his huge right hand.

  “What?”

  “They are not following us, the giants. Not even the creatures’ mother has come after us. It’s as if they want us to take Loki’s children out of Jotunheim.”

  “That is foolish talk,” said Tyr, but as he said it, even though the fire was warm, he shivered.

  Two more days of hard traveling and they were in Odin’s hall.

  “These are the children of Loki,” said Tyr shortly.

  The first of Loki’s children was tied to a pine tree and was now longer than the pine tree it was tied to. It was called Jormungundr, and it was a serpent. “It has grown many feet in the days we have carried i
t back,” said Tyr.

  Thor said, “Careful. It can spit burning black venom. It spat its poison at me, but it missed. That’s why we tied its head to the tree like that.”

  “It is a child,” said Odin. “It is still growing. We will send it where it can harm nobody.”

  Odin took the serpent to the shore of the sea that lies beyond all lands, the sea that circles Midgard, and there on the shore he freed Jormungundr, and watched it slither and slip beneath the waves and swim away in loops and curls.

  Odin watched it with his one eye until it was lost on the horizon, and he wondered if he had done the right thing. He did not know. He had done as his dreams had told him, but dreams know more than they reveal, even to the wisest of the gods.

  The serpent would grow beneath the gray waters of the world ocean, grow until it encircled the earth. Folk would call Jormungundr the Midgard serpent.

  Odin returned to the great hall, and he ordered Loki’s daughter to step forward.

  He stared at the girl: on the right side of her face her cheek was pink and white, her eye was the green of Loki’s eyes, her lips were full and carmine; on the left side of her face the skin was blotched and striated, swollen in the bruises of death, her sightless eye rotted and pale, her lipless mouth wizened and stretched over skull-brown teeth.

  “What do they call you, girl?” asked the all-father.

  “They call me Hel,” she said, “if it pleases you, All-father.”

  “You are a polite child,” said Odin. “I’ll give you that.”

  Hel said nothing, only looked at him with her single green eye, sharp as an ice chip, and her pallid eye, dull and spoiled and dead, and he saw no fear in her.

  “Are you alive?” he asked the girl. “Or are you a corpse?”

  “I am only myself, Hel, daughter of Angrboda and of Loki,” she said. “And I like the dead best of all. They are simple things, and they talk to me with respect. The living look at me with revulsion.”

  Odin contemplated the girl, and he remembered his dreams. Then Odin said, “This child will be the ruler of the deepest of the dark places, and ruler of the dead of all the nine worlds. She will be the queen of those poor souls who die in unworthy ways—of disease or of old age, of accidents or in childbirth. Warriors who die in battle will always come to us here in Valhalla. But the dead who die in other ways will be her folk, to attend her in her darkness.”

  For the first time since she had been taken from her mother, the girl Hel smiled, with half a mouth.

  Odin took Hel down to the lightless world, and he showed her the immense hall in which she would receive her subjects, and watched as she named her possessions. “I will call my bowl Hunger,” said Hel. She picked up a knife. “This is called Famine. And my bed is called Sickbed.”

  That was two of Loki’s children with Angrboda dealt with, then. One in the ocean, one to the darkness beneath the earth. But what to do with the third?

  When they had brought the third and smallest of Loki’s children back from the land of the giants, it had been puppy-sized, and Tyr had scratched its neck and its head and played with it, removing its willow muzzle first. It was a wolf cub, gray and black, with eyes the color of dark amber.

  The wolf cub ate its meat raw, but it spoke as a man would speak, in the language of men and the gods, and it was proud. The little beast was called Fenrir.

  It too was growing fast. One day it was the size of a wolf, the next the size of a cave bear, then the size of a great elk.

  The gods were intimidated by it, all except Tyr. He still played with it and romped with it, and he alone fed the wolf its meat each day. And each day the beast ate more than the day before, and each day it grew and it became fiercer and stronger.

  Odin watched the wolf-child grow with foreboding, for in his dreams the wolf had been there at the end of everything, and the last things Odin had seen in any of his dreams of the future were the topaz eyes and the sharp white teeth of Fenris Wolf.

  The gods had a council and resolved at that council that they would bind Fenrir.

  They crafted heavy chains and shackles in the forges of the gods, and they carried the shackles to Fenrir.

  “Here!” said the gods, as if suggesting a new game. “You have grown so fast, Fenrir. It is time to test your strength. We have here the heaviest chains and shackles. Do you think you can break them?”

  “I think I can,” said Fenris Wolf. “Bind me.”

  The gods wrapped the huge chains around Fenrir and shackled his paws. He waited motionless while they did this. The gods smiled at each other as they chained the enormous wolf.

  “Now,” shouted Thor.

  Fenrir strained and stretched the muscles of his legs, and the chains snapped like dry twigs.

  The great wolf howled to the moon, a howl of triumph and joy. “I broke your chains,” he said. “Do not forget this.”

  “We will not forget,” said the gods.

  The next day Tyr went to take the wolf his meat. “I broke the fetters,” said Fenrir. “I broke them easily.”

  “You did,” said Tyr.

  “Do you think they will test me again? I grow, and I grow stronger with every day.”

  “They will test you again. I would wager my right hand on it,” said Tyr.

  The wolf was still growing, and the gods were in the smithies, forging a new set of chains. Each link in the chains was too heavy for a normal man to lift. The metal of the chains was the strongest metal that the gods could find: iron from the earth mixed with iron that had fallen from the sky. They called these chains Dromi.

  The gods hauled the chains to where Fenrir slept.

  The wolf opened his eyes.

  “Again?” he said.

  “If you can escape from these chains,” said the gods, “then your renown and your strength will be known to all the worlds. Glory will be yours. If chains like this cannot hold you, then your strength will be greater than that of any of the gods or the giants.”

  Fenrir nodded at this, and looked at the chains called Dromi, bigger than any chains had ever been, stronger than the strongest of bonds. “There is no glory without danger,” said the wolf after some moments. “I believe I can break these bindings. Chain me up.”

  They chained him.

  The great wolf stretched and strained, but the chains held. The gods looked at each other, and there was the beginning of triumph in their eyes, but now the huge wolf began to twist and to writhe, to kick out his legs and strain in every muscle and every sinew. His eyes flashed and his teeth flashed and his jaws foamed.

  He growled as he writhed. He struggled with all his might.

  The gods moved back involuntarily, and it was good that they did so, for the chains fractured and then broke with such violence that the pieces were thrown far into the air, and for years to come the gods would find lumps of shattered shackles embedded in the sides of huge trees or the side of a mountain.

  “Yes!” shouted Fenrir, and howled in his victory like a wolf and like a man.

  The gods who had watched the struggle did not seem, the wolf observed, to delight in his victory. Not even Tyr. Fenrir, Loki’s child, brooded on this, and on other matters.

  And Fenris Wolf grew huger and hungrier with each day that passed.

  Odin brooded and he pondered and he thought. All the wisdom of Mimir’s well was his, and the wisdom he had gained from hanging from the world-tree, a sacrifice to himself. At last he called the light elf Skirnir, Frey’s messenger, to his side, and he described the chain called Gleipnir. Skirnir rode his horse across the rainbow bridge to Svartalfheim, with instructions to the dwarfs for how to create a chain unlike anything ever made before.

  The dwarfs listened to Skirnir describe the commission, and they shivered, and they named their price. Skirnir agreed, as he had been instructed to do by Odin, although the dwarfs’ price w
as high. The dwarfs gathered the ingredients they would need to make Gleipnir.

  These were the six things the dwarfs gathered:

  For firstly, the footsteps of a cat.

  For secondly, the beard of a woman.

  For thirdly, the roots of a mountain.

  For fourthly, the sinews of a bear.

  For fifthly, the breath of a fish.

  For sixth and lastly, the spittle of a bird.

  Each of these things was used to make Gleipnir. (You say you have not seen these things? Of course you have not. The dwarfs used them in their crafting.)

  When the dwarfs had finished their crafting, they gave Skirnir a wooden box. Inside the box was something that looked like a long silken ribbon, smooth and soft to the touch. It was almost transparent, and weighed next to nothing.

  Skirnir rode back to Asgard with his box at his side. He arrived late in the evening, after the sun had set. He showed the gods what he had brought back from the workshop of the dwarfs, and they were amazed to see it.

  The gods went together to the shores of the Black Lake, and they called Fenrir by name. He came at a run, as a dog will come when it is called, and the gods marveled to see how big he was and how powerful.

  “What’s happening?” asked the wolf.

  “We have obtained the strongest bond of all,” they told him. “Not even you will be able to break it.”

  The wolf puffed himself up. “I can burst any chains,” he told them proudly.

  Odin opened his hand to display Gleipnir. It shimmered in the moonlight.

  “That?” said the wolf. “That is nothing.”

  The gods pulled on it to show him how strong it was. “We cannot break it,” they told him.

  The wolf squinted at the silken band that they held between them, glimmering like a snail’s trail or the moonlight on the waves, and he turned away, uninterested.

  “No,” he said. “Bring me real chains, real fetters, heavy ones, huge ones, and let me show my strength.”