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The Binding of Fenrir · Norse Mythology Sleep Story · 3 Hours · The Sleeping Almanac: Sleep Stories for Adults from Myth and Fairy Tale

• 0:00
  Good evening.
• 0:00
  Or perhaps good night, if you've made your
• 0:04
  way here in the long hours after midnight
• 0:08
  the difference may already have stopped mattering.
• 0:09
  You've come back, perhaps, because the last three episodes
• 0:14
  helped you sleep.
• 0:15
  Or you've come for the first time.
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  And the fourth episode happened to be the one
• 0:20
  the algorithm offered.
• 0:21
  Either is fine.
• 0:23
  The almanac is patient.
• 0:24
  Tonight stands on its own.
• 0:27
  If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you
• 0:31
  to do very little.
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  Close your eyes.
• 0:34
  Let your jaw loosen.
• 0:36
  Let your shoulders drop, even a little
• 0:39
  even if you didn't know they were tight.
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  The story does not need your attention.
• 0:46
  It will keep moving whether you follow it or
• 0:49
  not.
• 0:50
  If you drift, that is the point.
• 0:54
  If you wake briefly to catch a single sentence
• 0:57
  and then sink again, that is good.
• 1:01
  In the first episode, we walked the shape of
• 1:05
  the world, nine realms joined by one great
• 1:10
  tree.
• 1:10
  In the second, we met the wanderer, the Allfather
• 1:14
  the hanged god.
• 1:15
  In the third, we went down into the dwarven
• 1:18
  forges and watched, in a single strange wager
• 1:21
  the making of the hammer that would defend the
• 1:25
  gods.
• 1:25
  Tonight, we follow a quieter and a sadder story.
• 1:30
  A story about a wolf.
• 1:32
  A wolf who was a child.
• 1:34
  A wolf who was raised in the high halls
• 1:36
  of Asgard among the very beings who would one
• 1:39
  day decide they had to bind him.
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  This is the story of how that binding was
• 1:46
  done.
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  And of the small ribbon, woven of impossible things
• 1:50
  that finally held the wolf.
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  And of the god, the brave god
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  the just god, who put his hand into
• 2:00
  the wolf's mouth so that the binding could be
• 2:05
  made.
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  Now, let us begin.
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  Chapter One.
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  The Three Children of Loki.
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  Before we go to the wolf.
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  And before we go to the chain.
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  We should sit, for a while, with the figure
• 2:22
  who gave the wolf his life.
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  We met him, briefly, in the last episode.
• 2:28
  The trickster.
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  The one who cut Sif's hair while she slept
• 2:32
  and who then was made to descend
• 2:35
  by Thor's anger, into the underground halls of the
• 2:38
  dwarves to bring back gifts of recompense.
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  We saw him there at the bellows.
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  We saw him take the shape of a fly.
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  We saw him try, in his way
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  to ruin the work of the smiths.
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  And we saw the work be made anyway
• 2:56
  despite him.
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  Loki.
• 2:58
  The Old Norse sources do not give us a
• 3:01
  tidy biography of him.
• 3:03
  They give us scattered passages, in the Eddic poems
• 3:06
  and in Snorri's Prose Edda, and from those passages
• 3:10
  we are meant to assemble a figure.
• 3:12
  The figure that emerges, when you look at the
• 3:15
  texts together, is more complicated than the figure who
• 3:19
  appears in modern films and comic books.
• 3:22
  The modern Loki is, often, a quick and witty
• 3:24
  schemer with the suggestion of a redemption arc.
• 3:27
  The Norse Loki is something stranger.
• 3:30
  He is something older.
• 3:32
  And tonight's story is one of the places where
• 3:34
  his strangeness shows.
• 3:36
  The texts call him, sometimes, a son of giants.
• 3:39
  His father, in the surviving accounts, was a giant
• 3:43
  named Fárbauti.
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  Whose name means, roughly, Cruel Striker.
• 3:46
  His mother was Laufey, whose name means Leafy.
• 3:50
  Or Leaf-Island.
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  There has been long argument among scholars about whether
• 3:55
  Laufey was a giantess or a goddess.
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  The surviving texts are not certain.
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  What is certain is that Loki, by birth
• 4:02
  was not of the Æsir.
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  He was a being who came into Asgard from
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  outside, and who was made a member of the
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  Æsir by oath of blood-brotherhood with Odin.
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  The texts preserve this oath.
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  The Eddic poem Lokasenna refers to it.
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  Loki and Odin had, at some point in the
• 4:22
  deep past, sworn together that they would drink no
• 4:26
  ale that was not poured for them both.
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  They had become brothers in the older Germanic sense
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  bound by ceremony, bound by ritual
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  bound to share a single fate.
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  This is worth holding in mind, as we walk
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  through tonight's story.
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  Loki is, by oath, Odin's brother.
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  Even when he is doing things the gods do
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  not approve of, he is doing them inside the
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  bonds of that brotherhood.
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  The gods cannot simply expel him.
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  He has the rights of one of their own.
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  Loki had a wife in Asgard.
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  Her name was Sigyn.
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  She does not appear often in the surviving sources.
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  But when she appears, she is faithful to him
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  beyond any reasonable measure.
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  There is a story we will tell
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  in a later episode, in which she stands beside
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  him for ages with a bowl held above his
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  face.
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  We will not tell that story tonight.
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  Tonight is not that story.
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  What Loki had, that we do need tonight
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  were three other children.
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  By another woman.
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  A giantess.
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  Her name, in the surviving accounts, was Angrboða.
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  Angrboða.
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  The name means, in Old Norse, Sorrow-Bringer.
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  Or Grief-Bringer.
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  The texts do not describe her closely.
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  They tell us only where she lived
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  which was in Jötunheim, the world of the giants
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  in a forest the sources call Járnviðr
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  the Iron Wood.
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  They tell us she had relations with Loki, somehow
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  at some point.
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  And they tell us that she bore him three
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  children.
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  The Iron Wood.
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  The Sorrow-Bringer.
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  The three children.
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  This is the kind of detail that
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  in the older Norse imagination, would have settled
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  in the listener's mind, the kind of children we
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  are about to meet.
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  They were not going to be ordinary.
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  They were not going to be welcome.
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  They were going to be of the wild forests
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  of the giants' world, of the deep places that
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  the high halls of Asgard did not reach.
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  And they were not.
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  The first of Loki's children by Angrboða was a
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  daughter.
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  Her name was Hel.
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  She came into the world, the texts tell us
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  half one color and half another.
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  One half of her body, the surviving accounts say
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  was the color of living flesh.
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  The other half was the color of corpse.
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  She was, from her birth, marked.
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  The second of Loki's children was a serpent.
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  He had no proper name at first.
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  He grew.
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  He kept growing.
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  He grew until he was longer than the world
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  could contain.
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  The third of Loki's children was a wolf.
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  We will get to him in a moment.
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  The gods, the sources tell us, did not know
• 7:30
  about these children at first.
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  The trickster had kept them in the Iron Wood
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  away from Asgard, away from the eyes of the
• 7:40
  Æsir.
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  He was raising them, perhaps.
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  Or he was hiding them.
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  The text does not specify which.
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  But Odin, the Allfather, who saw far
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  whose ravens flew across the nine worlds at dawn
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  and brought him back what they had seen
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  Odin learned of them.
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  Whether through his ravens or through one of the
• 8:03
  seers he sometimes consulted, the texts do not say.
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  He learned.
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  And what he learned alarmed him.
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  He learned that these three children of Loki had
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  been seen, by those who could see such things
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  in the visions of the future.
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  He learned that all three would be present at
• 8:24
  Ragnarǫk.
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  The great unmaking at the end of the world.
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  He learned that the daughter, Hel, would gather the
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  dead under her cold rule.
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  He learned that the serpent would rise from the
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  sea and poison the air with his breath.
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  And he learned that the wolf
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  the wolf would do something terrible.
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  Something the surviving sources hint at but
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  in the early passages, do not yet describe.
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  So Odin acted.
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  He sent for the three children to be brought
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  to Asgard.
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  And when they came, the gods sat in their
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  hall, and they looked at them, and they decided
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  what was to be done.
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  Hel, the daughter, the gods sent down.
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  They sent her into Niflheim, the lowest of the
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  cold worlds beneath the world, and they gave her
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  dominion there.
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  They gave her a hall called Eljúðnir.
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  They gave her a table called Hunger and a
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  knife called Famine.
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  They gave her authority over the dead who had
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  not died well, those who had died of
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  sickness or of age, the dead who would not
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  feast in Valhǫll or in the halls of Freyja
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  the great gentle mass of the unspectacular dead.
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  The gods made her queen of those.
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  She would gather them under her hand and rule
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  them in the cold dark below.
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  This is, in its way, one of the strangest
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  acts of administration in any mythology.
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  The gods looked at a half-dead child and said:
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  you.
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  You will look after the half-dead.
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  You will look after the ones who go quietly.
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  There is something honest about it.
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  There is something, too, that is cruel.
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  The texts do not say which the gods intended.
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  Jǫrmungandr, the serpent, the second child
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  Odin took him and threw him into the sea.
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  The great sea that surrounds Midgard.
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  The serpent kept growing in the sea.
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  He grew until he could encircle Midgard entirely.
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  Until he could put his own tail in his
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  own mouth.
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  He lies there still, in the world's ocean
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  biting his tail, his body coiled around all of
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  the lands of men.
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  The sailors of the old Scandinavian world knew his
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  name.
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  They knew that what they were sailing on was
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  in some long old reckoning, the back of him.
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  He waits in the sea.
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  He will rise at Ragnarǫk.
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  And then there was the wolf.
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  The wolf was different.
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  The wolf, the gods decided, they could not yet
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  send away.
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  They brought him into Asgard.
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  They thought, perhaps, that if he was raised among
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  them, if he was raised in the high halls
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  he might grow up to be something other than
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  what the seers had foretold.
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  They thought, perhaps, that the future was not yet
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  certain.
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  That the wolf could be loved into something gentler.
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  They were wrong.
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  But they were not, in the beginning
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  foolish to try.
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  We will come to what happened.
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  His name was Fenrir.
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  In the Old Norse, Fenris-úlfr, the wolf of
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  the fen, or the wolf of the wetland.
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  The lowland wolf.
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  The wolf of the dark wet places at the
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  edges of the settled world.
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  The name carries, in its sound, the kind of
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  cold the old Scandinavians would have known well.
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  The marsh in winter.
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  The mist over the bog.
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  The wolf that you heard at the edge of
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  your light at night, and that you knew
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  even in the safety of your hall
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  was there.
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  He came to Asgard as a child.
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  As a pup, the texts tell us
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  though the texts do not use that word.
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  He was small.
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  He was the kind of small that grows.
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  The gods looked at him in their hall
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  and they took him in.
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  And the texts pause here, before they tell us
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  what came next.
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  We pause too.
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  Sleep, if you are ready to.
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  The next chapter will tell you what it was
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  like to feed him.
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  Chapter Two.
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  The Wolf Brought to Asgard.
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  Imagine, if you can, the high hall of the
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  gods.
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  The hall is built of timber and gold.
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  The roof is shielded with shields
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  the texts use that phrase, that the roof of
• 13:11
  Valhǫll was thatched with the war-shields of the slain.
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  The fires are kept burning in long stone hearths
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  down the center of the hall.
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  The benches along the walls are long and broad
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  and meant to hold many.
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  The Æsir gather here at evening to drink
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  to talk, to argue, to settle the business of
• 13:30
  the worlds.
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  Into that hall, the gods brought a wolf-pup.
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  He was small, at the beginning.
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  The texts make this point.
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  He was small enough that the gods could carry
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  him.
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  He was small enough to be set down on
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  the bench beside them.
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  Small enough to be looked at, in the firelight
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  as a curious and unusual ward.
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  But he grew.
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  Wolves, in the natural world the old Scandinavians knew
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  grew quickly.
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  A wolf-pup at six weeks was a small bundle.
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  A wolf-pup at six months was a creature you
• 14:09
  would not lightly approach.
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  A wolf at one year was, in the eyes
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  of any farmer in the long north
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  fully a wolf, already capable of taking a
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  sheep, already capable of running with a pack across
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  a frozen field, already wearing the full silvered coat
• 14:27
  of the adult.
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  The growth of a wolf, the people of the
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  old north knew, was fast and frightening and could
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  not be slowed.
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  Fenrir's growth was faster.
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  The texts do not give us numbers.
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  They do not say in what week he doubled
• 14:43
  in size, in what month he tripled.
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  They give us, instead, the impression of growth that
• 14:50
  exceeded its own kind.
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  They give us a wolf who, in the great
• 14:55
  hall of the gods
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  grew.
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  And kept growing.
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  Until he was the size of a horse.
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  Until he was the size of two horses.
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  Until he was the size of one of the
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  high benches in the hall.
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  This is a detail worth letting settle.
• 15:13
  The benches in a Norse longhouse were long enough
• 15:16
  to seat many warriors and broad enough to sleep
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  on.
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  To say a wolf was the size of one
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  of those benches is, in the imagination of the
• 15:26
  old Scandinavian world, to say a wolf that would
• 15:29
  not fit in any normal hall.
• 15:32
  A wolf that bowed the timbers when he moved.
• 15:35
  A wolf whose breath, when he panted
• 15:36
  fogged the fires.
• 15:37
  The gods watched him grow.
• 15:39
  They had taken him in for a reason.
• 15:42
  They had thought, and the texts hint at
• 15:45
  this even where they do not say it
• 15:49
  that if the wolf was raised among them
• 15:53
  if he was given the kindness of the high
• 15:57
  hall, he might be made gentle.
• 15:59
  They had thought, perhaps, that the prophecies of what
• 16:02
  he would do at Ragnarǫk could be unmade by
• 16:05
  love.
• 16:05
  It is one of the most poignant choices in
• 16:10
  all of Norse mythology.
• 16:11
  The gods, knowing what the seers had said.
• 16:13
  The gods, having looked at the future.
• 16:17
  Choosing, nonetheless, to try.
• 16:18
  And the wolf, in the early years
• 16:19
  did not refuse the kindness.
• 16:23
  He came into the hall.
• 16:24
  He ate what was given to him.
• 16:26
  He grew.
• 16:28
  But he was not, the texts tell us
• 16:32
  a tame wolf.
• 16:33
  He was not a pet.
• 16:35
  He was not, in the way of a dog
• 16:40
  of the household, a being that lay at the
• 16:45
  feet of the gods and looked up at them
• 16:49
  in trust.
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  He was something else.
• 16:51
  He was something the gods had brought into their
• 16:54
  own hall, and that was changing, week by week
• 16:59
  into something they had not foreseen.
• 17:01
  The wolf grew not just in body.
• 17:05
  He grew in the strangeness of his eye.
• 17:10
  He grew in the depth of his voice.
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  He grew in the way the other gods
• 17:17
  when they came past him in the hall
• 17:20
  found themselves walking a little wider.
• 17:22
  Found themselves not making eye contact.
• 17:25
  Found themselves, without knowing why, holding their breath.
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  There came a point, the texts tell us
• 17:32
  at which only one of the gods was still
• 17:37
  willing to feed him.
• 17:38
  Before we go to that god, who is the
• 17:41
  heart of tonight's story, we should sit a little
• 17:45
  longer with the wolf himself.
• 17:47
  The Old Norse word for wolf, úlfr
• 17:52
  is one of the oldest words in the Germanic
• 17:55
  family of languages.
• 17:56
  It is related to the German Wolf
• 17:59
  the English wolf, the Gothic wulfs.
• 18:02
  It is, in the long deep past
• 18:05
  one of the words that the Germanic peoples carried
• 18:08
  with them from their earliest reckoning of the world.
• 18:11
  And the wolf, in the imagination of those peoples
• 18:15
  was not one thing.
• 18:16
  It was many.
• 18:18
  The wolf was, in some readings, the enemy.
• 18:21
  The animal at the edge of the firelight that
• 18:26
  took the sheep from the fold and that
• 18:28
  in the long cold winters, came into settlements when
• 18:32
  the snow lay deep.
• 18:33
  The wolf was the thing the hall was built
• 18:37
  against.
• 18:37
  The thing the door was barred against.
• 18:40
  The thing the children, in their straw-stuffed beds
• 18:43
  learned to listen for in the night-quiet.
• 18:46
  But the wolf was also, in other readings
• 18:49
  the kindred figure.
• 18:50
  The animal that, of all the animals in the
• 18:55
  Norse imagination, was closest to the warrior.
• 18:57
  The wolf-warriors of the old Germanic peoples, the úlfheðnar
• 19:00
  were a specific class of fighters who
• 19:02
  in the surviving sources, took on the strength and
• 19:06
  the savagery of the wolf in battle.
• 19:09
  They wore wolf-pelts.
• 19:10
  They were said, in the older heroic poems
• 19:12
  to fight as wolves fight.
• 19:14
  They were the kindred of the wolf.
• 19:18
  And there were the wolves of the gods themselves.
• 19:21
  Odin, the Allfather, kept two wolves at his throne.
• 19:25
  Their names, we learned in the second episode
• 19:29
  were Geri and Freki.
• 19:30
  Greedy and Ravenous.
• 19:31
  Odin fed them, from his own table
• 19:34
  the meat that came to him in Valhǫll.
• 19:38
  The wolves of Odin were not, in the surviving
• 19:42
  sources, a problem.
• 19:43
  They were, in their way, members of the household
• 19:46
  of the gods.
• 19:47
  They were honored.
• 19:48
  They were kept.
• 19:49
  So when Fenrir came to Asgard as a small
• 19:53
  thing, the gods were not afraid of him because
• 19:57
  he was a wolf.
• 19:59
  They were not, in the early days
• 20:01
  afraid of him at all.
• 20:03
  They had wolves at the Allfather's own throne.
• 20:07
  Wolves were known.
• 20:08
  Wolves were, in their way, kindred.
• 20:10
  What changed was not the kind of being Fenrir
• 20:13
  was.
• 20:14
  What changed was the scale of him.
• 20:16
  The simple terrible fact that, week by week
• 20:20
  the small thing they had taken in was becoming
• 20:24
  larger than any wolf had ever been.
• 20:27
  He was passing out of the country of the
• 20:30
  familiar wolf.
• 20:31
  He was passing into the country of the unfamiliar.
• 20:33
  The country of the monstrous.
• 20:36
  The country in which the gods, who had known
• 20:39
  wolves all their long lives, no longer knew what
• 20:42
  was sitting in their hall.
• 20:45
  There came a point, the texts tell us
• 20:48
  at which only one of the gods was still
• 20:52
  willing to feed him.
• 20:54
  We will come to that god in the next
• 20:57
  chapter.
• 20:57
  He is the heart of tonight's story.
• 21:00
  What you should hold, from this short telling
• 21:03
  is the shape of the situation that had come
• 21:08
  slowly, to be true in the hall of Asgard.
• 21:11
  The gods had taken in a child.
• 21:14
  The child had grown into something the gods could
• 21:19
  no longer pretend was a child.
• 21:20
  The gods had not yet, in their council
• 21:22
  decided what to do about it.
• 21:25
  They were watching.
• 21:26
  They were waiting.
• 21:27
  They were hoping, perhaps, that the growth would slow.
• 21:33
  Or that the wolf would, by some unforeseen change
• 21:37
  become something other than what the seers had said.
• 21:40
  But the wolf did not slow.
• 21:42
  And the day was coming when the gods would
• 21:45
  have to act.
• 21:47
  Before we walk into that day, we should meet
• 21:49
  the god who fed him.
• 21:52
  Chapter Three.
• 21:53
  Týr, the One Who Fed Him.
• 21:56
  There was a god whose name was Týr.
• 22:00
  The name, in Old Norse, was spelled in three
• 22:04
  letters, T-Ý-R.
• 22:05
  In runic carving, it was a single rune
• 22:09
  the Týr rune, which stood for both the god
• 22:13
  and for the sound at the start of his
• 22:16
  name.
• 22:16
  The rune itself is shaped like a small upward-pointing
• 22:20
  arrow.
• 22:21
  ↑.
• 22:21
  A figure with arms raised.
• 22:22
  A figure standing, looking up, with arms open.
• 22:26
  In the old Scandinavian world, warriors would sometimes scratch
• 22:30
  this rune onto the hilt of a sword before
• 22:35
  battle, as a quiet asking of the god's protection.
• 22:37
  The rune is one of the most often found
• 22:40
  in the surviving inscriptions of the runic age.
• 22:42
  The god, even in the late telling of the
• 22:46
  Norse stories, had not been forgotten.
• 22:47
  But by the time of the surviving texts
• 22:51
  by the time, that is, of Snorri Sturluson in
• 22:54
  the thirteenth century, sitting at his desk in Iceland
• 22:57
  writing down what was left of the old religion
• 23:01
  the god of Týr had become a thinner
• 23:05
  figure than he once had been.
• 23:07
  There are passages in the Prose Edda where Snorri
• 23:11
  pauses before describing him, as if reaching
• 23:13
  in his own thirteenth-century way, for a memory that
• 23:17
  was already fading from the world.
• 23:19
  Týr.
• 23:19
  What the surviving texts do tell us is that
• 23:23
  he was, in the older Germanic religious system
• 23:26
  one of the highest gods.
• 23:27
  There is good reason to believe
• 23:31
  and many scholars have argued this
• 23:34
  that Týr was, in the deep past
• 23:36
  before Odin became the chief of the gods
• 23:40
  the chief of the gods himself.
• 23:42
  The name Týr is etymologically related to the Greek
• 23:46
  Zeus and the Latin Iupiter (which we say as
• 23:49
  Jupiter), all of them descended from a single Proto-Indo-European
• 23:53
  root meaning sky, or shining
• 23:55
  or sky-god.
• 23:56
  Týr was, once, the sky-father of the Germanic peoples.
• 24:00
  By the time the Norse texts were written down
• 24:03
  that role had passed to Odin.
• 24:04
  But the older, simpler god of justice and of
• 24:08
  law and of the right outcome
• 24:13
  that god was still Týr.
• 24:14
  He is described, in what survives of him
• 24:17
  as the bravest of the gods.
• 24:19
  Snorri uses this exact word.
• 24:22
  He says, in Gylfaginning, that Týr was the bravest.
• 24:24
  He says that Týr was the wisest.
• 24:27
  He says that anyone who wishes to surpass the
• 24:31
  rest of men in courage and good sense should
• 24:35
  call upon Týr.
• 24:36
  Týr was the god, that is, that you went
• 24:41
  to when you needed a hard thing done.
• 24:45
  A right thing.
• 24:46
  A thing that other gods, more cunning or more
• 24:49
  clever or more politic, would not do.
• 24:53
  The texts do not give us a long biography
• 24:56
  of him.
• 24:57
  They give us, in passing, that he had only
• 25:01
  one hand.
• 25:02
  That his right hand had been lost.
• 25:05
  We will come to how he lost it.
• 25:08
  And the texts give us, almost as an aside
• 25:10
  what he did for the wolf.
• 25:13
  When Fenrir was first brought into Asgard
• 25:16
  when he was small, the gods all took turns
• 25:20
  with him.
• 25:22
  They all, in the texts' careful phrasing, fed him.
• 25:25
  They all, in the early days, were willing to
• 25:28
  walk to the wolf and lay food before him
• 25:32
  and stand beside him while he ate.
• 25:35
  But the wolf grew.
• 25:37
  And as he grew, the other gods
• 25:40
  one by one, stopped going to him.
• 25:43
  By the time the wolf was at the size
• 25:47
  that bent the timbers of the hall
• 25:50
  only Týr was still willing.
• 25:53
  Only Týr would walk, each day, to where the
• 25:57
  wolf was lying.
• 25:58
  Only Týr would carry the meat.
• 26:00
  Only Týr would set it down.
• 26:02
  And only Týr would stand there, his hands empty
• 26:06
  and his eye open, while the wolf ate.
• 26:09
  We should pause on this.
• 26:12
  The other gods of Asgard had, by then
• 26:14
  the high cunning.
• 26:16
  The far-seeing.
• 26:17
  The names that had been earned across worlds.
• 26:19
  Thor had his hammer.
• 26:22
  Odin had his ravens.
• 26:24
  Heimdallr could hear the grass grow.
• 26:26
  Freyr had his shining sword.
• 26:29
  Freyja could fly, in her cloak of falcon-feathers
• 26:32
  across any sky.
• 26:34
  The Æsir were, in every account, beings of enormous
• 26:37
  power.
• 26:39
  And none of them, the texts tell us
• 26:42
  would walk up to Fenrir.
• 26:44
  Only Týr.
• 26:45
  There is, in this, something the texts do not
• 26:49
  need to say in so many words.
• 26:52
  Týr was the bravest.
• 26:54
  Not because he was the strongest.
• 26:56
  Thor was stronger.
• 26:57
  Not because he was the wisest.
• 27:01
  Odin had drunk from Mímir's well and Týr had
• 27:05
  not.
• 27:05
  Not because he was the highest.
• 27:07
  By the time the texts were written
• 27:11
  Týr had been, for centuries, no longer the chief
• 27:15
  god.
• 27:15
  Týr was the bravest because Týr did the thing
• 27:19
  that needed doing.
• 27:20
  The wolf needed to be fed.
• 27:22
  So Týr fed him.
• 27:24
  The other gods, who had taken the wolf in
• 27:29
  who had brought him into their hall
• 27:31
  who had decided that they would try to raise
• 27:34
  him, the other gods had, by then
• 27:39
  stepped back.
• 27:40
  They were watching from a distance.
• 27:42
  They were leaving the daily task to one of
• 27:45
  their own.
• 27:46
  Týr did not refuse.
• 27:47
  The texts give us very little of what passed
• 27:51
  between Týr and the wolf in those long quiet
• 27:55
  feedings.
• 27:56
  They do not give us conversation.
• 27:59
  They do not give us a slow growth of
• 28:02
  understanding.
• 28:02
  They give us, only, the steady fact:
• 28:04
  Týr fed him.
• 28:06
  Daily.
• 28:06
  Without fail.
• 28:06
  While the gods watched from the high benches.
• 28:09
  There is a question worth asking, here.
• 28:12
  Did the wolf, in those years, know what Týr
• 28:18
  was doing?
• 28:19
  The Norse sources do not believe in unintelligent monsters.
• 28:23
  Fenrir, in the surviving texts, is not portrayed as
• 28:27
  a brute or as a beast.
• 28:29
  He is portrayed, when he speaks, as articulate.
• 28:32
  He is portrayed as suspicious, as careful
• 28:35
  as alert to the meanings of what is done
• 28:38
  to him.
• 28:39
  He is, in his own way, a person
• 28:43
  a person in a wolf's shape and at a
• 28:47
  wolf's terrible scale, but a person.
• 28:49
  So when Týr came to him with meat
• 28:52
  day after day.
• 28:53
  When Týr stood quietly beside him while he ate.
• 28:57
  When Týr did not pull back, did not show
• 29:01
  fear, did not look away.
• 29:04
  What did the wolf understand of that?
• 29:06
  The texts do not tell us.
• 29:09
  In my reading, and the texts do not
• 29:12
  tell us this, the wolf came
• 29:15
  in those long quiet feedings, to understand Týr in
• 29:19
  a way he did not understand any of the
• 29:23
  other gods.
• 29:24
  Not as a friend, exactly.
• 29:25
  The wolf was not, by any reading of the
• 29:29
  texts, a being who had friends.
• 29:31
  But as the one god whose presence did not
• 29:35
  carry the small flicker of fear that the wolf
• 29:39
  was, by then, accustomed to seeing in every other
• 29:42
  face.
• 29:42
  Týr came to him steadily.
• 29:43
  Týr fed him steadily.
• 29:45
  Týr stood beside him steadily.
• 29:48
  And the wolf, in his huge intelligent watching
• 29:51
  came to know that this god was not afraid
• 29:54
  of him.
• 29:56
  The moment that comes later, the moment when
• 30:00
  the wolf, having seen through the gods' deception
• 30:03
  asks for one of them to put a hand
• 30:06
  in his mouth as surety, has
• 30:10
  when you sit with it, a particular shape.
• 30:12
  The wolf does not ask for any hand.
• 30:15
  He asks, by his refusal to be tested otherwise
• 30:20
  for the hand of the god who has been
• 30:24
  willing to come close to him.
• 30:26
  The text does not give us the wolf's reasoning.
• 30:30
  But the wolf's reasoning, in my reading
• 30:32
  is there beneath the surface of what the text
• 30:36
  gives us.
• 30:36
  But the texts do tell us this.
• 30:39
  When the moment came, much later, when the gods
• 30:42
  needed someone to put a hand into the wolf's
• 30:46
  mouth as surety.
• 30:47
  When they needed a god to step forward and
• 30:51
  offer that hand.
• 30:52
  The wolf knew which god to ask for.
• 30:54
  He did not ask for Odin.
• 30:57
  He did not ask for Thor.
• 30:58
  He asked for Týr.
• 31:01
  The bravest.
• 31:01
  The just.
• 31:02
  The one who had fed him.
• 31:05
  We will get to that moment.
• 31:09
  What you should hold, from this chapter
• 31:13
  is the shape of Týr in the hall of
• 31:17
  the gods.
• 31:18
  He is not loud.
• 31:20
  He is not in the front of the stories.
• 31:24
  He is the god who, when the other gods
• 31:28
  stepped back, walked forward.
• 31:30
  He is the god who, when the cost would
• 31:34
  be paid, was the one to pay it.
• 31:38
  He is the figure who, in tonight's story
• 31:41
  will lose more than any other.
• 31:43
  In the next chapter, we go to the first
• 31:48
  of the gods' attempts to bind the wolf.
• 31:51
  Chapter Four.
• 31:52
  The First Two Chains.
• 31:54
  The gods, the texts tell us, came at last
• 31:58
  to their council.
• 31:59
  The wolf could no longer be hosted in the
• 32:02
  high hall.
• 32:04
  The wolf had become too large, too suspicious
• 32:06
  too aware.
• 32:08
  The Æsir gathered, the texts say, and they spoke
• 32:12
  of what was to be done.
• 32:14
  And what they decided was this.
• 32:17
  The wolf, the gods said, must be bound.
• 32:20
  Not killed.
• 32:21
  The texts are clear on this.
• 32:24
  Not killed.
• 32:25
  Even in the height of their alarm
• 32:28
  the gods did not move to kill Fenrir.
• 32:31
  There has been long argument among scholars about why.
• 32:33
  One reading is that, because the gods had taken
• 32:37
  him in as a foster-child, killing him would have
• 32:40
  been the breaking of the most ancient and most
• 32:43
  binding of social obligations, the obligation of the
• 32:45
  foster-parent to the foster-child.
• 32:48
  Another reading is that, because Fenrir was Loki's son
• 32:51
  and Loki was Odin's blood-brother, killing the wolf would
• 32:54
  have been the killing of a kinsman.
• 32:56
  A third reading is that the gods, foreseeing Ragnarǫk
• 32:59
  knew the wolf could not be killed by ordinary
• 33:03
  means.
• 33:03
  He was to be the killer of Odin himself
• 33:07
  at the end of the world.
• 33:08
  Such a being could not be put down with
• 33:12
  a sword.
• 33:13
  Whatever the reading, the texts agree.
• 33:16
  The decision was not to kill but to bind.
• 33:19
  And to bind, the gods first thought
• 33:22
  would be simple.
• 33:23
  They were gods.
• 33:24
  The wolf, after all, was only a wolf
• 33:28
  even a wolf of unusual size and strangeness was
• 33:33
  in the imagination of the Æsir at this council
• 33:37
  a creature that could be wrapped in iron and
• 33:40
  held.
• 33:40
  So they made a chain.
• 33:42
  The first chain was called Lœðingr.
• 33:44
  The etymology of the name is not entirely certain
• 33:48
  the Old Norse scholars have argued about it
• 33:51
  for a long time.
• 33:52
  One reading connects it to a root meaning to
• 33:56
  lay down.
• 33:56
  Another connects it to the kind of binding-word used
• 34:00
  in legal proceedings.
• 34:00
  Whichever reading is right, the name carries the sense
• 34:05
  that this was a chain meant to settle the
• 34:07
  wolf.
• 34:08
  To hold him in place.
• 34:10
  The Æsir made this chain themselves, in their own
• 34:13
  forges.
• 34:13
  They did not yet go to the dwarves.
• 34:16
  They thought, at this stage, that the work of
• 34:21
  binding could be done with their own hands.
• 34:24
  They forged the iron.
• 34:25
  They linked the links.
• 34:28
  They tested the strength of the chain against the
• 34:31
  strength of their own arms, and they were satisfied.
• 34:34
  Then they brought the chain to the wolf.
• 34:37
  The texts give us, here, one of the most
• 34:40
  quietly cunning passages in all of Norse literature.
• 34:44
  The gods did not come to Fenrir and say
• 34:49
  this is a chain.
• 34:50
  We have made it to bind you.
• 34:52
  Lie still while we place it around you.
• 34:55
  They did not say that.
• 34:57
  They said, instead, and the surviving accounts preserve
• 35:01
  this almost as a joke, they said: Fenrir
• 35:05
  we have made this chain.
• 35:08
  We do not know how strong it is.
• 35:09
  Would you let us try it on you?
• 35:15
  It will be a test of your strength against
• 35:19
  the chain's.
• 35:20
  We will see which is the greater.
• 35:23
  It is one of the small dark comedies of
• 35:28
  the surviving Edda.
• 35:28
  The gods, in their first attempt to bind the
• 35:30
  wolf, came to him in the language of sport.
• 35:34
  As if it were a game.
• 35:36
  As if there were no consequence.
• 35:39
  As if they were saying, come, friend
• 35:43
  let us see how strong you are today.
• 35:46
  The wolf agreed.
• 35:46
  He agreed, the texts say, because he was confident
• 35:51
  in his own strength.
• 35:53
  He had grown to the size he had grown
• 35:56
  to.
• 35:56
  He had felt the bones of horses give way
• 35:59
  under his jaw.
• 36:00
  He had felt the timbers of the hall flex
• 36:03
  beneath his weight.
• 36:04
  The wolf looked at the chain.
• 36:06
  He looked at the gods.
• 36:09
  And he said, in effect: very well.
• 36:13
  Place it on me.
• 36:17
  We will see.
• 36:19
  The gods placed the chain Lœðingr around him.
• 36:21
  They drew the chain tight.
• 36:24
  They stepped back.
• 36:26
  Fenrir kicked once.
• 36:27
  The chain Lœðingr fell to the ground in pieces.
• 36:31
  The gods looked at it.
• 36:33
  The wolf looked at it.
• 36:35
  And the wolf, the texts tell us
• 36:39
  was not displeased.
• 36:41
  He had won the game.
• 36:43
  He had proven his strength.
• 36:45
  He was, perhaps, even a little pleased to be
• 36:48
  in a game with the gods, who had until
• 36:51
  now never tested him in this way.
• 36:54
  The gods were silent.
• 36:56
  They went away to their council and they spoke
• 36:59
  again of what to do.
• 37:01
  It was decided that they would make a second
• 37:04
  chain.
• 37:05
  A stronger one.
• 37:07
  Twice as strong, the texts tell us
• 37:11
  as the first.
• 37:12
  Or, in some readings, of a stronger metal
• 37:15
  of an iron worked with secret runes by the
• 37:19
  gods' best smiths.
• 37:21
  The chain was called Drómi.
• 37:23
  The name, in Old Norse, comes from a root
• 37:27
  meaning fetter or bond.
• 37:29
  It was a fetter in the most literal sense.
• 37:33
  A binding-thing.
• 37:34
  The gods brought Drómi to the wolf.
• 37:37
  They came, again, in the language of sport.
• 37:40
  They came, again, as if it were a game.
• 37:46
  They said, and this is where the surviving
• 37:49
  texts begin to give us, very gently
• 37:51
  the suggestion that the wolf was no longer entirely
• 37:54
  fooled, they said: Fenrir, your fame for breaking
• 37:58
  Lœðingr has spread among us.
• 38:00
  We have made a stronger chain.
• 38:04
  Will you not test your strength again?
• 38:06
  Will you not be praised by all of the
• 38:09
  Æsir for the breaking of this one too?
• 38:12
  The wolf looked at Drómi.
• 38:15
  It was visibly heavier than Lœðingr.
• 38:16
  It was visibly thicker.
• 38:18
  The eye of the wolf, the texts tell us
• 38:23
  was beginning to grow wary.
• 38:25
  But the wolf said: very well.
• 38:27
  Place it on me.
• 38:30
  I am willing.
• 38:31
  The gods placed Drómi around him.
• 38:33
  They drew it tight.
• 38:35
  The chain was so heavy that even the gods
• 38:38
  the texts say, strained to lift it.
• 38:42
  They stepped back.
• 38:43
  The wolf gathered himself.
• 38:45
  He had to work this time.
• 38:48
  He kicked once.
• 38:50
  The chain held.
• 38:51
  He kicked again.
• 38:52
  The chain bent but did not break.
• 38:57
  He bucked.
• 38:58
  The chain creaked.
• 38:59
  The wolf, the texts tell us, had to put
• 39:04
  forth, for the first time, his real strength.
• 39:06
  And then the chain broke.
• 39:09
  The links of Drómi flew apart across the field.
• 39:13
  The pieces, the surviving sources say, lay scattered.
• 39:18
  The wolf rose, panting.
• 39:19
  He looked at the gods.
• 39:21
  And the wolf was even more pleased now than
• 39:24
  before.
• 39:24
  He had proven his strength a second time.
• 39:27
  He had broken even the strongest chain the gods
• 39:31
  themselves could make.
• 39:33
  The gods, the texts tell us, were beginning to
• 39:36
  be afraid.
• 39:37
  They went away again to their council.
• 39:40
  And they spoke of what was to be done.
• 39:43
  And there was, by now, the slow heavy understanding
• 39:46
  in the council that they could not bind the
• 39:50
  wolf with the strength of their own forges.
• 39:53
  The gods of Asgard could not, by themselves
• 39:58
  make a chain that would hold him.
• 40:01
  They would have to send for help.
• 40:03
  They would have to send for the dwarves.
• 40:08
  In the next chapter, we go down again
• 40:11
  as we did, last week, for the hammer
• 40:15
  into the underground halls of Svartalfheim.
• 40:17
  Chapter Five.
• 40:17
  Down to Svartalfheim Again.
• 40:19
  We were last in Svartalfheim only the week before
• 40:22
  in the long telling of how Mjǫllnir was made.
• 40:27
  We walked there with Loki, then, on the long
• 40:30
  road down.
• 40:31
  We watched him stand at the bellows.
• 40:33
  We watched the dwarves Sindri and Brokkr work at
• 40:36
  the anvil.
• 40:38
  We watched the gold form into the boar Gullinbursti.
• 40:43
  The ring Draupnir.
• 40:44
  The hammer that would, from that night forward
• 40:47
  hang at Thor's belt.
• 40:50
  Tonight we go back.
• 40:51
  The gods, having failed twice to bind the wolf
• 40:54
  with chains of their own making, send a messenger
• 40:56
  down to the same dark country.
• 40:59
  This time, it is not Loki who goes.
• 41:02
  The texts give us the name of the messenger.
• 41:07
  He was called Skírnir.
• 41:09
  The bright one.
• 41:11
  The shining one.
• 41:13
  He was the servant, or, in some readings
• 41:17
  the friend and follower, of the god Freyr.
• 41:19
  Freyr, who we will meet at length in a
• 41:23
  later episode of this season, was one of the
• 41:26
  Vanir, the second tribe of gods, who had come
• 41:30
  into Asgard after the long Æsir-Vanir war.
• 41:32
  Freyr was the god of fertility, of the sun
• 41:36
  in summer, of growing things.
• 41:40
  Skírnir was his messenger, his runner, the one he
• 41:43
  sent on tasks the surviving texts portray as urgent
• 41:46
  delicate, and almost diplomatic.
• 41:48
  It is interesting that the gods chose Skírnir for
• 41:51
  this errand and not, for example
• 41:54
  Loki.
• 41:54
  Loki had been to Svartalfheim before.
• 41:57
  Loki, in the previous episode, had stood at the
• 42:00
  bellows and watched the dwarves work.
• 42:02
  Loki knew the road.
• 42:03
  Loki, in the trickster's way, would have been the
• 42:08
  obvious messenger.
• 42:09
  But the gods, by this point in the story
• 42:13
  no longer entirely trusted Loki.
• 42:15
  They knew that Fenrir was Loki's son.
• 42:16
  They knew that Loki, while sworn to the Æsir
• 42:21
  had his own loyalties and his own ambivalences.
• 42:23
  They did not want, on this errand
• 42:26
  the trickster's hand on the message.
• 42:29
  They wanted someone simpler.
• 42:30
  Someone bright.
• 42:31
  Someone whose loyalty to the high gods was uncomplicated.
• 42:34
  So they sent Skírnir.
• 42:37
  Skírnir went down.
• 42:38
  The texts do not describe his journey in detail.
• 42:42
  They give us only that he went.
• 42:45
  He passed through whatever roads the messengers of the
• 42:48
  gods knew, perhaps along Bifrǫst, the rainbow bridge
• 42:52
  perhaps along older paths that the surviving texts do
• 42:54
  not name.
• 42:55
  He came to Svartalfheim.
• 42:57
  He came to the door of the smiths.
• 43:01
  This time, the smiths are not Sindri and Brokkr.
• 43:03
  The surviving texts do not name them.
• 43:06
  Snorri tells us, in the Prose Edda
• 43:09
  only that Skírnir came down to "certain dwarves." He
• 43:12
  does not give them faces.
• 43:14
  He does not give them lineages.
• 43:16
  They are, in the only account that has come
• 43:19
  down to us, simply dwarves of the deep country
• 43:22
  the unnamed smiths of Svartalfheim, who already
• 43:25
  the texts hint, knew why Skírnir had come before
• 43:29
  he had spoken.
• 43:31
  You will remember, perhaps, that in the previous episode
• 43:34
  the dwarves we met were named.
• 43:37
  The sons of Ívaldi, who made Sif's new gold
• 43:40
  hair and the spear Gungnir and the ship Skíðblaðnir.
• 43:44
  The brothers Sindri and Brokkr, who made the boar
• 43:47
  Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir, and Mjǫllnir itself.
• 43:50
  Those dwarves the surviving sources named because the story
• 43:53
  of the wager required them to be named
• 43:56
  the wager was between two specific sets of smiths
• 44:01
  and the gods needed to know who had made
• 44:04
  which treasure.
• 44:05
  Tonight's story is different.
• 44:06
  Tonight's story has no wager.
• 44:08
  Tonight's story has only a binding.
• 44:11
  The makers of the binding the texts have not
• 44:13
  preserved by name.
• 44:14
  We can, in our own imagination, hold them as
• 44:17
  unnamed.
• 44:17
  As deeper, perhaps, even than the named dwarves.
• 44:20
  As the dwarves of dwarves.
• 44:22
  The smiths the other smiths went to when the
• 44:27
  work was beyond what they themselves could do.
• 44:30
  Skírnir came to them in their hall.
• 44:33
  He brought a message from the gods.
• 44:36
  The message, in the surviving telling, was this.
• 44:39
  The gods, said Skírnir, need a binding.
• 44:43
  They need a thing that will hold a wolf.
• 44:47
  The wolf is large, very large, larger than the
• 44:52
  gods' own forges can make a chain to hold.
• 44:56
  The gods have failed twice.
• 44:57
  They need a third binding.
• 45:00
  They need it to be different.
• 45:03
  They need it to be of such a kind
• 45:07
  that the wolf, when he sees it
• 45:11
  will not believe it can hold him.
• 45:13
  And they need it to hold him anyway.
• 45:18
  The dwarves listened.
• 45:18
  The texts do not give us their faces.
• 45:21
  They give us, only, that they listened.
• 45:25
  And that after they had listened, they were quiet
• 45:28
  for a while.
• 45:30
  And that after they had been quiet
• 45:34
  they said, and this is the part the
• 45:38
  surviving sources preserve almost as a riddle
• 45:42
  they said: we will make it.
• 45:44
  We will make it of six things.
• 45:47
  The things we will use, we will use up.
• 45:51
  There will not be any of them left in
• 45:55
  the world after we are done.
• 45:57
  Skírnir, the texts tell us, did not understand.
• 46:00
  He asked, what six things?
• 46:03
  And the dwarves said: you will see.
• 46:06
  And they began.
• 46:08
  The dwarves of Svartalfheim, in the long old Norse
• 46:10
  imagination, were the keepers of the deepest crafts.
• 46:14
  They were the ones who knew the runes that
• 46:19
  the gods themselves did not yet know.
• 46:22
  They were the ones who could draw
• 46:25
  from the materials of the deep world
• 46:27
  the qualities that lived in those materials.
• 46:29
  The hardness of stone.
• 46:32
  The brightness of gold.
• 46:33
  The silence of shadow.
• 46:34
  For Gleipnir, the texts give us the name
• 46:37
  of the binding here, Gleipnir, which means
• 46:40
  in rough Old Norse, the open one
• 46:42
  or the deceiver, the one that catches
• 46:45
  the dwarves used six things.
• 46:49
  Six things that, in the world before the binding
• 46:54
  of Fenrir, the texts tell us, were present and
• 46:57
  known.
• 46:58
  And that, after the binding of Fenrir
• 47:01
  were no longer present in the world.
• 47:05
  The dwarves used them up.
• 47:07
  The world has been thinner ever since.
• 47:09
  We come, in the next chapter, to what those
• 47:13
  six things were.
• 47:15
  Sleep, if you are ready to.
• 47:17
  The list is one of the most beloved passages
• 47:21
  in all of Norse mythology.
• 47:23
  And the listing of it is, in its own
• 47:26
  quiet way, a lullaby.
• 47:28
  Chapter Six.
• 47:28
  The Six Impossible Things.
• 47:31
  The first of the things the dwarves used in
• 47:34
  the making of Gleipnir was the sound of a
• 47:36
  cat's footfall.
• 47:38
  This is what the texts say.
• 47:40
  The Prose Edda preserves the line.
• 47:43
  The first of the six was the sound that
• 47:48
  a cat makes when it walks.
• 47:50
  The slight, almost-not-there pressure of a cat's foot on
• 47:53
  a wooden floor.
• 47:53
  The almost-silence of it.
• 47:56
  The way a cat can cross a room while
• 47:59
  a person who is sitting in it does not
• 48:02
  look up.
• 48:02
  The dwarves took this.
• 48:04
  They took the sound.
• 48:06
  They wove it into the cord.
• 48:08
  This, the surviving Edda tells us, is the reason
• 48:12
  that cats now walk silently.
• 48:14
  The sound, before, had been in the world.
• 48:17
  The dwarves used it.
• 48:18
  The sound that remained, the sound that a
• 48:22
  cat now makes when it crosses a floor
• 48:27
  is what was left after the dwarves had taken
• 48:30
  what they needed.
• 48:30
  Cats walk silently because the dwarves needed the sound
• 48:35
  of their footfalls for the binding of the wolf.
• 48:40
  This is a beautiful piece of mythic reasoning.
• 48:42
  It is also, in the way the old Norse
• 48:45
  sources sometimes do, a small piece of folk explanation.
• 48:48
  Why do cats walk silently?
• 48:50
  Because the dwarves used up the rest of the
• 48:53
  sound long ago.
• 48:55
  The second of the things the dwarves used was
• 48:58
  a woman's beard.
• 49:00
  This may sound strange to a modern ear.
• 49:02
  But the texts are specific.
• 49:04
  The second ingredient was the beard of a woman.
• 49:07
  And the explanation, and this is one of
• 49:10
  the small dry jokes of the surviving sources
• 49:13
  is that, before the binding of Fenrir
• 49:15
  women had beards.
• 49:17
  After the binding of Fenrir, they did not.
• 49:20
  The dwarves used them up.
• 49:22
  The Old Norse word for beard, skegg
• 49:25
  would have been familiar to every household.
• 49:27
  The beard of a man was, in the old
• 49:30
  Scandinavian world, one of the markers of his standing.
• 49:34
  The beard of Thor, of Odin, of every warrior
• 49:38
  in the longhouse, was groomed and tended.
• 49:41
  The texts of the Edda do not tell us
• 49:45
  what a woman's beard, in the time before the
• 49:49
  binding, had looked like.
• 49:50
  The texts tell us, only, that there had been
• 49:54
  one.
• 49:54
  And that, after the binding, there was no longer.
• 49:58
  The third of the things the dwarves used was
• 50:02
  the roots of a mountain.
• 50:04
  This one, perhaps, lands more easily in the modern
• 50:07
  ear.
• 50:08
  The roots of a mountain.
• 50:10
  The deep parts of stone that go down into
• 50:13
  the earth, that anchor the mountain to whatever is
• 50:18
  below, that hold it in place against the slow
• 50:22
  turning of the world.
• 50:23
  The dwarves, the texts say, took those roots.
• 50:26
  Used them.
• 50:28
  The mountains have, since the binding of Fenrir
• 50:31
  been rootless.
• 50:33
  They are held in place now only by their
• 50:35
  own weight.
• 50:36
  By their own resting.
• 50:37
  The roots are gone.
• 50:39
  This is the kind of detail that
• 50:41
  when you sit with it for a long quiet
• 50:45
  moment, does something to your sense of the world.
• 50:50
  It says, the mountain is heavier than it looks.
• 50:54
  It says, the mountain is balanced now where once
• 50:57
  it was anchored.
• 50:58
  It says, the world has been, since this story
• 51:03
  a little less steady than it once was.
• 51:05
  The fourth of the things the dwarves used was
• 51:09
  the sinews of a bear.
• 51:11
  Sinew, the tough silvery cord that runs along
• 51:15
  the muscle of an animal and connects it to
• 51:20
  the bone.
• 51:21
  In the old Scandinavian world, the sinews of large
• 51:24
  animals were used for the strings of bows
• 51:27
  for binding the iron-head onto a spear-shaft
• 51:30
  for the silent strength inside every craft.
• 51:34
  The sinew of a bear was particularly valued.
• 51:36
  A bear was the largest land animal of the
• 51:41
  Norse imagination.
• 51:41
  Its sinew was the strongest of the bindings the
• 51:44
  human craft could make.
• 51:45
  The dwarves took the sinews of a bear.
• 51:48
  Used them.
• 51:49
  Wove them into Gleipnir.
• 51:51
  The fifth of the things the dwarves used was
• 51:53
  the breath of a fish.
• 51:55
  You may, listening now, find your eye opening a
• 51:59
  little at this.
• 52:00
  The breath of a fish.
• 52:01
  What does a fish breathe?
• 52:04
  A fish, in the old Norse imagination
• 52:05
  did not breathe the air that humans breathe.
• 52:08
  A fish moved through the water, opening its mouth
• 52:12
  and from its gills came a slight pulse
• 52:15
  a small almost-silent rhythm that the old Norse people
• 52:18
  who knew their cold rivers and their cold seas
• 52:23
  would have noticed as they pulled fish from the
• 52:27
  water and watched them lie in the bottom of
• 52:31
  the boat.
• 52:32
  The breath of a fish was that pulse.
• 52:34
  That small last quiet exhalation.
• 52:36
  The dwarves took it.
• 52:38
  Used it.
• 52:39
  And the sixth, the last, of the things the
• 52:43
  dwarves used was the spittle of a bird.
• 52:46
  The Old Norse texts pause on this one too
• 52:49
  in the way they do.
• 52:51
  The spittle of a bird.
• 52:53
  The almost-nothing, the just-barely-there, the moisture inside a bird's
• 52:55
  beak that you would not see unless you looked
• 52:59
  very closely.
• 52:59
  The dwarves used it.
• 53:01
  These were the six things.
• 53:04
  The sound of a cat's footfall.
• 53:07
  A woman's beard.
• 53:08
  The roots of a mountain.
• 53:10
  The sinews of a bear.
• 53:12
  The breath of a fish.
• 53:14
  The spittle of a bird.
• 53:16
  You may notice, if you let the list settle
• 53:20
  that each of the six is a thing that
• 53:24
  the old Norse imagination would have called almost-not-there.
• 53:27
  They are not, like iron, or like gold
• 53:29
  or like stone, the things you can pick up
• 53:33
  and hold.
• 53:34
  They are not, like the strength of a god
• 53:38
  or the speed of a wind, the things you
• 53:41
  can name and measure.
• 53:43
  They are the things at the very edge of
• 53:48
  presence.
• 53:48
  The sound a cat makes that is just barely
• 53:51
  a sound.
• 53:52
  The beard of a woman that, even when it
• 53:55
  was in the world, was not the central marker
• 53:59
  of her.
• 54:00
  The roots of a mountain that no one had
• 54:05
  ever seen, only inferred.
• 54:06
  The sinew of a bear, which is the strength
• 54:10
  inside the strength.
• 54:11
  The breath of a fish, which is the breath
• 54:14
  inside an animal that does not seem to breathe
• 54:18
  at all.
• 54:18
  The spittle of a bird, which is the smallest
• 54:22
  moisture inside the lightest of all flying things.
• 54:24
  The surviving texts do not tell us why the
• 54:28
  dwarves chose these six things.
• 54:29
  The Prose Edda lists the ingredients without explaining the
• 54:33
  reasoning behind them.
• 54:35
  What I would offer here, as one way of
• 54:39
  understanding the choice, is this.
• 54:40
  The gods had tried to bind the wolf with
• 54:44
  the things he could feel.
• 54:46
  The iron of Lœðingr.
• 54:47
  The iron of Drómi.
• 54:48
  The chains of the high forges.
• 54:51
  The wolf had felt them and had broken them.
• 54:53
  So the dwarves, when the gods came to them
• 54:56
  in their need, may have reasoned in the deep
• 54:59
  way of the dwarves, that the wolf could
• 55:03
  not be bound by anything he could feel.
• 55:05
  He could only be bound by what he could
• 55:09
  not feel.
• 55:10
  By the absences.
• 55:10
  By the things at the edge of presence.
• 55:14
  By what was barely there.
• 55:16
  This is, perhaps, the kind of reasoning the old
• 55:19
  Norse imagination loved.
• 55:21
  The kind of reasoning that says, the thing you
• 55:24
  cannot see is stronger than the thing you can.
• 55:27
  The thing that is barely there is the thing
• 55:30
  that holds.
• 55:31
  The lightest binding is, in the end
• 55:34
  the only binding that lasts.
• 55:35
  The Eddic poets did not write this down for
• 55:40
  us in so many words.
• 55:42
  But the listener, even the listener at the
• 55:47
  edge of sleep, can sit with the possibility.
• 55:50
  And the possibility is, in its way
• 55:53
  the most Norse of all the things in the
• 55:55
  story.
• 55:57
  The dwarves took the six things and they wove
• 56:01
  them into a single cord.
• 56:03
  And the cord, when it was done, was
• 56:08
  the texts tell us, smooth as a silken
• 56:11
  ribbon, light as a thread of spider's silk
• 56:14
  soft enough to be coiled into the palm of
• 56:19
  a single hand.
• 56:20
  It was so light that it seemed almost not
• 56:23
  to be there.
• 56:26
  It was so smooth that it seemed it could
• 56:28
  not possibly hold anything.
• 56:29
  This was Gleipnir.
• 56:31
  The deceiver.
• 56:32
  The open one.
• 56:33
  The one that catches.
• 56:35
  The dwarves gave it to Skírnir.
• 56:37
  Skírnir, the messenger, took the small soft ribbon in
• 56:42
  his hand.
• 56:42
  He looked at it.
• 56:43
  He must, the texts hint, have wondered how this
• 56:46
  small thing was meant to hold the wolf.
• 56:48
  He must have wondered whether the dwarves had played
• 56:52
  some joke on him.
• 56:53
  But the dwarves, in the surviving sources
• 56:57
  gave him no further explanation.
• 57:00
  They said only: take it.
• 57:02
  Bring it to the gods.
• 57:05
  They will know what to do.
• 57:07
  And Skírnir, holding the small ribbon of impossible things
• 57:10
  in his closed fist, climbed back up the road
• 57:15
  from Svartalfheim.
• 57:16
  And he came home to Asgard.
• 57:18
  And he gave the ribbon to the gods.
• 57:20
  In the next chapter, we walk to the island
• 57:24
  where the binding will be made.
• 57:27
  Chapter Seven.
• 57:27
  The Ribbon in the Hand.
• 57:30
  When Skírnir came back to Asgard, the gods were
• 57:36
  waiting in their council hall.
• 57:38
  He set the small bright thing on the table
• 57:40
  before them.
• 57:41
  The texts give us the scene.
• 57:43
  The gods looked at it.
• 57:45
  They did not, at first, believe it.
• 57:48
  This, they said.
• 57:48
  This is what the dwarves made.
• 57:51
  Skírnir said: yes.
• 57:53
  This, they said again.
• 57:54
  This silken ribbon.
• 57:54
  This little soft cord that we could break between
• 58:00
  our fingers.
• 58:00
  Skírnir said: yes.
• 58:01
  They said it would hold him.
• 58:03
  There was, the surviving sources tell us
• 58:06
  a long silence in the council.
• 58:07
  The gods looked at the ribbon.
• 58:09
  They looked at one another.
• 58:12
  Some of them, in the slow way of the
• 58:17
  long-lived, took the ribbon in their hands and tested
• 58:22
  it.
• 58:24
  They pulled gently at it.
• 58:27
  They pulled harder.
• 58:29
  They strained against it with the strength of gods.
• 58:31
  The ribbon did not break.
• 58:33
  The gods, the texts say, were astonished.
• 58:37
  They tried again.
• 58:39
  The strongest of them, Thor was not yet
• 58:41
  at Mjǫllnir's side in this telling, but Thor was
• 58:46
  nonetheless there, with his bare hands and the great
• 58:50
  strength of his bare hands, Thor took the
• 58:53
  ribbon and pulled.
• 58:54
  The ribbon did not move.
• 58:56
  The ribbon did not stretch.
• 58:59
  The ribbon held.
• 58:59
  The gods began, slowly, to understand what the dwarves
• 59:03
  had given them.
• 59:04
  It was not a thing of weight.
• 59:08
  It was not a thing of mass.
• 59:12
  It was not a chain in the sense the
• 59:15
  gods had been thinking about chains.
• 59:17
  It was a binding made of qualities that had
• 59:20
  been taken out of the world and woven together.
• 59:24
  And the qualities, the silence of cats
• 59:29
  the softness of women, the steadiness of mountains
• 59:33
  the strength of bears, the patience of fish
• 59:36
  the quiet of birds, were not the kind
• 59:41
  of thing that strength could break.
• 59:44
  The strongest god in Asgard, pulling on Gleipnir
• 59:46
  was pulling against the deep order of the world.
• 59:50
  The gods, the texts tell us, were satisfied at
• 59:53
  last.
• 59:53
  But they were also, the texts tell us
• 59:57
  beginning to be afraid of how they would get
• 1:00:02
  the wolf to allow it to be placed on
• 1:00:07
  him.
• 1:00:07
  Because Fenrir was not, by this point in the
• 1:00:11
  story, a foolish child.
• 1:00:13
  He had been brought to Asgard as a small
• 1:00:16
  thing.
• 1:00:16
  He had grown in the high hall.
• 1:00:18
  He had watched the gods, one by one
• 1:00:22
  step back from him.
• 1:00:24
  He had felt their eyes change.
• 1:00:26
  He had broken Lœðingr.
• 1:00:28
  He had broken Drómi.
• 1:00:30
  He had heard, in his huge intelligent ears
• 1:00:32
  the conversations of the gods at council.
• 1:00:34
  He had seen, the texts hint, the messenger Skírnir
• 1:00:37
  come back from the deep places carrying something small
• 1:00:41
  in his closed fist.
• 1:00:42
  He had noticed.
• 1:00:44
  The wolf, by this point, was watchful in a
• 1:00:48
  way the gods could not have anticipated when they
• 1:00:52
  took him in.
• 1:00:54
  The wolf was, perhaps, even sad.
• 1:00:57
  The texts do not say.
• 1:00:59
  But the wolf was certainly suspicious.
• 1:01:01
  He knew that the gods were planning something.
• 1:01:04
  He knew that whatever they were planning involved him.
• 1:01:08
  And he knew that the small soft ribbon they
• 1:01:10
  had asked him to be tested with would not
• 1:01:14
  be the simple game the chains had been.
• 1:01:18
  The Æsir came to him.
• 1:01:19
  They came in their numbers this time.
• 1:01:22
  Not just one or two of them.
• 1:01:25
  Not just the messenger.
• 1:01:28
  They came in a small procession.
• 1:01:30
  Odin at their head, in his blue cloak with
• 1:01:33
  his hood drawn forward.
• 1:01:34
  Thor beside him, the great red beard catching the
• 1:01:38
  light.
• 1:01:38
  Skírnir holding the small ribbon.
• 1:01:40
  And, near the back of the procession, walking quietly
• 1:01:42
  Týr.
• 1:01:43
  They came to the wolf.
• 1:01:45
  They did not, this time, immediately go into the
• 1:01:48
  language of sport.
• 1:01:50
  They did not say, immediately, come try this against
• 1:01:53
  your strength.
• 1:01:54
  They paused.
• 1:01:55
  The texts give us the pause.
• 1:01:57
  They looked at the wolf, and the wolf looked
• 1:02:01
  at them.
• 1:02:02
  And there was, in the long moment before anyone
• 1:02:05
  spoke, the understanding on all sides that the game
• 1:02:09
  had moved into a different country.
• 1:02:11
  Then Odin spoke.
• 1:02:14
  He spoke, the surviving texts tell us
• 1:02:16
  in the easy voice the Allfather used when he
• 1:02:21
  wanted to make a thing seem smaller than it
• 1:02:24
  was.
• 1:02:24
  He said: Fenrir.
• 1:02:26
  We have come to you again with a binding.
• 1:02:29
  This one is small.
• 1:02:31
  As you can see.
• 1:02:33
  It is no more than a silken band.
• 1:02:36
  It has been made by the smiths of the
• 1:02:40
  deep country, and they have given it certain qualities.
• 1:02:43
  Will you not test it against your strength
• 1:02:46
  as you tested the others?
• 1:02:48
  Will you not break this little thing for our
• 1:02:53
  entertainment, and we will be done?
• 1:02:55
  The wolf looked at Gleipnir.
• 1:02:57
  The wolf, the texts say, was silent for a
• 1:03:00
  long while.
• 1:03:02
  The wolf, when he spoke, spoke quietly.
• 1:03:05
  He said: I see that this is small.
• 1:03:10
  I see that it is light.
• 1:03:12
  I see that it looks like a ribbon a
• 1:03:16
  child would tie in its hair.
• 1:03:17
  The gods waited.
• 1:03:19
  The wolf went on.
• 1:03:20
  He said: I see also that it has been
• 1:03:25
  brought from the deep country.
• 1:03:26
  I see also that the gods of Asgard
• 1:03:30
  who have failed twice now to bind me
• 1:03:34
  would not bring me a third binding unless they
• 1:03:38
  thought it would hold.
• 1:03:41
  I see also that you would not all of
• 1:03:46
  you have come to watch this small entertainment unless
• 1:03:48
  you thought there was something to watch.
• 1:03:52
  The gods, the texts tell us, did not answer.
• 1:03:56
  The wolf, in the silence that followed
• 1:03:59
  raised his enormous head a little.
• 1:04:00
  He spoke again.
• 1:04:01
  He said: there is no honor in my breaking
• 1:04:05
  of a thing that has clearly been made to
• 1:04:07
  hold me.
• 1:04:09
  There is no honor in pretending we do not
• 1:04:11
  all know what this is.
• 1:04:13
  I will not be made foolish by this game.
• 1:04:16
  The gods, the texts tell us, did not yet
• 1:04:21
  despair.
• 1:04:22
  They had expected this.
• 1:04:24
  They had thought, in their council, about what to
• 1:04:27
  do if the wolf saw through them.
• 1:04:31
  And they had a thing prepared.
• 1:04:33
  In the next chapter, we go to the test
• 1:04:36
  the wolf himself proposed.
• 1:04:38
  Chapter Eight.
• 1:04:39
  The Test the Wolf Proposed.
• 1:04:40
  The wolf, having seen through the gods' game
• 1:04:43
  made a counter-proposal.
• 1:04:45
  He said: I will allow you to place this
• 1:04:48
  ribbon on me.
• 1:04:50
  I will allow you to make the test.
• 1:04:53
  But only if one of you will put your
• 1:04:57
  hand into my mouth, and keep it there
• 1:05:00
  while the test is made.
• 1:05:02
  So that, if I am being deceived
• 1:05:05
  so that, if you have made a thing meant
• 1:05:10
  to hold me and you have brought it here
• 1:05:13
  to put it on me by trickery
• 1:05:17
  I will know that the cost of the trick
• 1:05:20
  will be the hand of one of the gods.
• 1:05:24
  The texts pause here.
• 1:05:26
  They give us the long quiet of the gods
• 1:05:30
  looking at one another.
• 1:05:33
  This is one of the most carefully constructed moments
• 1:05:35
  in all of Norse mythology.
• 1:05:37
  The wolf has not refused the binding.
• 1:05:40
  The wolf has not run.
• 1:05:41
  The wolf has not turned.
• 1:05:42
  He has, instead, set a condition.
• 1:05:45
  A condition that, on its face, sounds reasonable.
• 1:05:48
  He is willing to be tested
• 1:05:50
  but only with a pledge.
• 1:05:52
  A pledge in the form of a hand.
• 1:05:55
  The gods, the texts say, were silent.
• 1:05:58
  Because the gods knew, exactly and without any doubt
• 1:06:02
  what the wolf was asking for.
• 1:06:04
  The wolf was asking for a sworn oath.
• 1:06:08
  A pledge that, in the old Norse legal imagination
• 1:06:12
  would bind the entire community of the Æsir to
• 1:06:16
  the truth of what they were claiming.
• 1:06:19
  And the gods knew that they were lying.
• 1:06:23
  They knew that Gleipnir was meant to hold him.
• 1:06:26
  They knew that, when Fenrir failed to break it
• 1:06:30
  they would not release him.
• 1:06:32
  They would leave him bound.
• 1:06:34
  The trick was the whole point.
• 1:06:35
  So the wolf, by asking for the hand
• 1:06:38
  was asking for the gods to make a pledge
• 1:06:42
  they could not honor.
• 1:06:44
  And the cost of the failed pledge
• 1:06:47
  the cost the wolf was naming
• 1:06:50
  would be the hand of the god who put
• 1:06:54
  it in.
• 1:06:54
  The Æsir looked at one another.
• 1:06:57
  Odin, the texts tell us, said nothing.
• 1:07:00
  Odin, the wise one, the one who had given
• 1:07:03
  his eye at the well of Mímir
• 1:07:06
  the one who had hung nine nights on the
• 1:07:09
  world-tree, was not, even in his bravery
• 1:07:12
  willing to give a hand.
• 1:07:15
  He had given enough.
• 1:07:17
  Thor, the texts tell us, said nothing.
• 1:07:21
  Thor, in some readings of the surviving sources
• 1:07:24
  was not yet at the council when this was
• 1:07:27
  discussed.
• 1:07:27
  In others, Thor was there but did not speak.
• 1:07:30
  Thor was strong.
• 1:07:32
  Thor was loud.
• 1:07:33
  But Thor did not, at this council
• 1:07:37
  put his hand into the wolf's mouth.
• 1:07:40
  Heimdallr, the watcher of the bridge, said nothing.
• 1:07:43
  Freyr, the bright god of fertility, said nothing.
• 1:07:47
  Bragi, the god of poetry, said nothing.
• 1:07:51
  The texts walk us, one by one
• 1:07:54
  through the gods of the council.
• 1:07:56
  None of them spoke.
• 1:07:59
  None of them stepped forward.
• 1:08:00
  And then, the texts tell us, Týr stepped forward.
• 1:08:05
  Týr.
• 1:08:05
  The bravest.
• 1:08:07
  The just.
• 1:08:07
  The one who had fed the wolf in the
• 1:08:11
  high hall when no other god would walk to
• 1:08:16
  him.
• 1:08:16
  The one who had stood beside him daily and
• 1:08:21
  watched him grow and known what he was growing
• 1:08:27
  into and not turned away.
• 1:08:30
  Týr stepped forward.
• 1:08:31
  Týr said: I will do it.
• 1:08:33
  The wolf, the texts tell us, looked at Týr.
• 1:08:36
  There is, in this moment, something the surviving sources
• 1:08:39
  do not need to spell out.
• 1:08:43
  The wolf had known Týr.
• 1:08:45
  The wolf had eaten from his hand.
• 1:08:49
  The wolf, in the long quiet years of the
• 1:08:54
  high hall, had been fed by this god.
• 1:08:56
  Had been the recipient of his daily steady kindness.
• 1:09:00
  And now, in the moment when the wolf was
• 1:09:04
  asking for a pledge, the only god who would
• 1:09:07
  step forward was the one god who had not
• 1:09:10
  turned away from him.
• 1:09:11
  This is the cruelty at the heart of tonight's
• 1:09:15
  story.
• 1:09:15
  The bravest god, the god who had been
• 1:09:18
  most faithful to the wolf, who had been most
• 1:09:21
  willing, who had not withdrawn his hand
• 1:09:24
  was the one who would have to lie to
• 1:09:28
  him.
• 1:09:28
  Týr knew it.
• 1:09:29
  The wolf, the texts hint, may have known it
• 1:09:32
  too.
• 1:09:32
  We will return to that question in a moment.
• 1:09:36
  Týr walked forward.
• 1:09:36
  He came up to the wolf.
• 1:09:41
  He stopped at the wolf's great head
• 1:09:45
  which was at the level of his own chest.
• 1:09:48
  He raised his right hand.
• 1:09:50
  The right hand, the texts are specific
• 1:09:54
  the sword-hand, the hand that, in the old Norse
• 1:09:57
  imagination, was the hand of a warrior's identity.
• 1:10:01
  The hand that held the blade in battle.
• 1:10:05
  The hand that, on a warrior, was the hand
• 1:10:08
  he could least afford to lose.
• 1:10:11
  Týr raised his right hand.
• 1:10:13
  He put it forward.
• 1:10:14
  The wolf opened his mouth.
• 1:10:16
  Týr placed his hand inside.
• 1:10:19
  The texts pause here, in the way they do
• 1:10:22
  at the deepest moments.
• 1:10:24
  They give us, only: he placed his hand inside.
• 1:10:28
  The wolf closed his jaws.
• 1:10:30
  Not hard.
• 1:10:30
  Not yet.
• 1:10:31
  He closed his jaws gently around Týr's wrist
• 1:10:34
  and he held the hand there.
• 1:10:36
  Týr did not pull back.
• 1:10:38
  Týr did not flinch.
• 1:10:41
  In the next chapter, the gods make the binding.
• 1:10:44
  Chapter Nine.
• 1:10:46
  The Binding.
• 1:10:46
  The Æsir, with Týr's hand in the wolf's mouth
• 1:10:51
  came forward with Gleipnir.
• 1:10:53
  They came quietly.
• 1:10:54
  They did not laugh, the texts tell us.
• 1:10:58
  They did not joke.
• 1:11:01
  They did not now pretend, as they had in
• 1:11:04
  the binding of Lœðingr and the binding of Drómi
• 1:11:08
  that this was a game.
• 1:11:10
  The mood had passed beyond the language of sport.
• 1:11:14
  The mood was now, in the surviving sources
• 1:11:17
  the mood of an execution.
• 1:11:19
  A binding.
• 1:11:19
  A solemn thing.
• 1:11:21
  Skírnir, the messenger, held one end of the ribbon.
• 1:11:24
  Another of the gods held the other end.
• 1:11:28
  Slowly, slowly, they wound Gleipnir around the wolf.
• 1:11:30
  The wolf did not resist them while they wound
• 1:11:36
  it.
• 1:11:37
  He stood, with Týr's hand still in his mouth
• 1:11:42
  and he let the gods do the binding.
• 1:11:46
  He had to.
• 1:11:48
  He had made the pledge that he would.
• 1:11:52
  He had bound himself to the test by his
• 1:11:55
  own word.
• 1:11:56
  The gods wound Gleipnir around his legs.
• 1:11:58
  Around his chest.
• 1:12:00
  Around his neck.
• 1:12:01
  The ribbon, being light as a silken thread
• 1:12:04
  took only a few wraps.
• 1:12:06
  It did not feel heavy on him.
• 1:12:07
  It did not feel, the wolf would have said
• 1:12:13
  if he could speak in the moment
• 1:12:15
  like a chain.
• 1:12:16
  It felt like a thing a child had tied
• 1:12:20
  around him in a game.
• 1:12:22
  The gods stepped back.
• 1:12:23
  They had taken him to an island for the
• 1:12:27
  binding.
• 1:12:28
  The texts give us the name of the island.
• 1:12:30
  It was called Lyngvi.
• 1:12:32
  In Old Norse, the name comes from a root
• 1:12:35
  meaning heather or heathland.
• 1:12:37
  It was a small island in a lake.
• 1:12:42
  The lake itself was called Ámsvartnir.
• 1:12:44
  The black lake.
• 1:12:45
  The dark water.
• 1:12:47
  The island was in the dark water
• 1:12:49
  in the middle of the world, in a place
• 1:12:53
  the wolf could not easily walk back from even
• 1:12:59
  if he could break free.
• 1:13:01
  They had chosen the place with care.
• 1:13:03
  They stepped back.
• 1:13:04
  They let the wolf stand free on the island
• 1:13:06
  with the ribbon around him.
• 1:13:09
  They watched.
• 1:13:09
  The wolf gathered himself.
• 1:13:11
  He kicked once, as he had done with Lœðingr.
• 1:13:15
  The ribbon did not break.
• 1:13:17
  He kicked harder, as he had done with Drómi.
• 1:13:22
  The ribbon did not give.
• 1:13:24
  He pulled.
• 1:13:26
  He twisted.
• 1:13:26
  He threw his enormous weight against the ribbon.
• 1:13:29
  He brought to bear the strength that had broken
• 1:13:34
  the first two chains and that, until this moment
• 1:13:37
  he had not believed any binding could resist.
• 1:13:40
  The ribbon did not break.
• 1:13:41
  The wolf, the texts tell us, understood.
• 1:13:45
  He understood, in that moment, that he had been
• 1:13:48
  deceived.
• 1:13:48
  That the small soft ribbon was not a small
• 1:13:52
  soft ribbon.
• 1:13:54
  That it was a binding made by the dwarves
• 1:13:59
  of the deep country out of the qualities of
• 1:14:01
  the world.
• 1:14:01
  That the gods had brought it to him in
• 1:14:04
  trickery.
• 1:14:05
  That the test had not been a test.
• 1:14:07
  That the pledge had not been a pledge.
• 1:14:10
  And so, the wolf, doing what he had said
• 1:14:14
  he would do, closed his jaws.
• 1:14:17
  He closed them on Týr's hand.
• 1:14:21
  He bit through.
• 1:14:22
  Týr's right hand, his sword-hand, came off at the
• 1:14:26
  wrist.
• 1:14:26
  The texts give us this moment, again
• 1:14:30
  in very few words.
• 1:14:31
  They do not linger.
• 1:14:33
  They do not draw it out.
• 1:14:36
  They give us, only, what happened.
• 1:14:39
  The wolf bit through.
• 1:14:41
  Týr lost the hand.
• 1:14:43
  The Æsir, the surviving sources tell us
• 1:14:46
  did not laugh.
• 1:14:48
  They had bound the wolf.
• 1:14:51
  They had succeeded in the thing they had come
• 1:14:55
  to do.
• 1:14:55
  But they had paid for it.
• 1:14:58
  And they had paid for it through the body
• 1:15:02
  of one of their own.
• 1:15:03
  The bravest.
• 1:15:03
  The just.
• 1:15:04
  The one who had fed the wolf.
• 1:15:09
  Týr stepped back from the wolf, his right arm
• 1:15:13
  ending now at the wrist.
• 1:15:15
  He did not, the texts say, cry out.
• 1:15:20
  He did not, in the surviving sources, complain.
• 1:15:22
  He turned, and he walked back to the gathered
• 1:15:26
  company of the gods.
• 1:15:27
  And the gods received him in silence.
• 1:15:30
  And then the gods did the last of what
• 1:15:33
  they had come to do.
• 1:15:36
  They took a great sword.
• 1:15:38
  They drove its hilt deep into the ground at
• 1:15:41
  the wolf's feet.
• 1:15:42
  They placed the point of the sword in the
• 1:15:45
  wolf's lower jaw, and they propped his upper jaw
• 1:15:47
  open against the point of it.
• 1:15:50
  So that the wolf, from that moment on
• 1:15:53
  could not close his mouth.
• 1:15:55
  The wolf's mouth would not close.
• 1:15:59
  And from his mouth, from the open mouth
• 1:16:02
  of the bound wolf, on the island Lyngvi
• 1:16:04
  in the dark lake Ámsvartnir, there began
• 1:16:08
  the texts tell us, to flow a river of
• 1:16:11
  saliva.
• 1:16:13
  A long quiet steady flow.
• 1:16:15
  The river had a name.
• 1:16:17
  The river was called Vón.
• 1:16:19
  In Old Norse, Vón means hope.
• 1:16:22
  The river of hope flows still, the texts say.
• 1:16:25
  It flows from the mouth of the bound wolf.
• 1:16:28
  And there it will continue to flow until Ragnarǫk.
• 1:16:32
  Until the wolf, in some far-off cold morning
• 1:16:34
  finally pulls himself free.
• 1:16:36
  We will come to that morning in a later
• 1:16:39
  episode of this season.
• 1:16:40
  We will not come to it tonight.
• 1:16:43
  Tonight is the binding.
• 1:16:45
  The binding holds.
• 1:16:46
  In the next chapter, we sit a while with
• 1:16:51
  Týr.
• 1:16:51
  With what he lost.
• 1:16:53
  With what he became.
• 1:16:57
  Chapter Ten.
• 1:16:57
  The God Who Could Not Hold a Sword.
• 1:17:01
  Týr returned to Asgard with one hand.
• 1:17:03
  The texts do not tell us how he was
• 1:17:07
  received by the other gods.
• 1:17:08
  They do not give us a scene of welcome
• 1:17:12
  or of grief.
• 1:17:14
  They give us, only, that he came back.
• 1:17:17
  And that he was, from that day forward
• 1:17:20
  known as Týr the One-Handed.
• 1:17:22
  This is one of the quieter changes that the
• 1:17:24
  surviving Norse sources record.
• 1:17:25
  The change in what a god was called.
• 1:17:28
  Before the binding of Fenrir, Týr was Týr
• 1:17:32
  the just, the brave, the sky-god of the older
• 1:17:37
  Germanic religion, the one whose rune was scratched on
• 1:17:40
  the hilts of swords for good fortune in battle.
• 1:17:42
  After the binding of Fenrir, he was Týr the
• 1:17:46
  One-Handed.
• 1:17:46
  The texts had a new epithet for him.
• 1:17:49
  The texts noted, almost in passing, that he could
• 1:17:54
  no longer hold a sword in the way a
• 1:17:57
  warrior held a sword.
• 1:17:58
  He could not, the surviving sources hint
• 1:18:00
  hold a shield.
• 1:18:02
  He could no longer, in the simple physical sense
• 1:18:05
  be the warrior-god he had been.
• 1:18:08
  And yet.
• 1:18:08
  The texts continue to tell stories about him.
• 1:18:11
  He continues to appear in the council of the
• 1:18:15
  gods.
• 1:18:15
  He continues to be present.
• 1:18:17
  He continues to be, in some readings
• 1:18:19
  the figure the gods turn to when a hard
• 1:18:23
  thing must be done.
• 1:18:24
  Týr the One-Handed was, in the surviving Norse imagination
• 1:18:28
  no less a god than Týr the Two-Handed had
• 1:18:32
  been.
• 1:18:33
  He was, perhaps, more.
• 1:18:34
  There is a reason for this.
• 1:18:37
  There is a reason that, when the late Norse
• 1:18:40
  poets thought about Týr, they thought about him not
• 1:18:46
  in terms of what he had lost but in
• 1:18:49
  terms of what he had given.
• 1:18:51
  What he had given was his sword-hand.
• 1:18:54
  The surviving sources do not, in so many words
• 1:18:57
  tell us what was in Týr's mind when he
• 1:19:00
  stepped forward.
• 1:19:01
  They tell us only that he did.
• 1:19:03
  They tell us that he placed his right hand
• 1:19:07
  in the wolf's mouth, and that the wolf
• 1:19:10
  when the binding held, closed his jaws on it.
• 1:19:14
  The texts are spare.
• 1:19:16
  They do not give us his thoughts.
• 1:19:20
  But what we can see, from the larger shape
• 1:19:23
  of the story, is this.
• 1:19:26
  Týr had stepped forward at the council when no
• 1:19:30
  other god would.
• 1:19:31
  He had walked to the wolf.
• 1:19:32
  He had placed his hand in the wolf's mouth.
• 1:19:37
  And the rest of the gods had
• 1:19:39
  in their council, already decided what was going to
• 1:19:42
  happen with Gleipnir.
• 1:19:44
  They had already decided that the binding was meant
• 1:19:46
  to hold.
• 1:19:48
  They had already decided that the test was not
• 1:19:51
  a test.
• 1:19:52
  They had already decided that the wolf would not
• 1:19:55
  be released.
• 1:19:55
  It is one thing to lose a hand by
• 1:19:59
  misfortune.
• 1:19:59
  It is another to lose it by knowing what
• 1:20:02
  you are walking into.
• 1:20:03
  The text does not put this in those words.
• 1:20:07
  But the situation, and the silence of the
• 1:20:10
  surviving sources, which is itself a kind of speaking
• 1:20:14
  invites us to ask whether Týr knew.
• 1:20:17
  Whether, when he stepped forward, he understood that the
• 1:20:21
  binding was meant to hold and that the wolf
• 1:20:25
  being honorable, would take what had been pledged.
• 1:20:28
  I believe, in my own reading, that he did.
• 1:20:32
  The figure who emerges from the larger Norse sources
• 1:20:36
  is not a god who would have been unaware.
• 1:20:39
  Týr was the bravest.
• 1:20:40
  Týr was the wisest in matters of right outcomes.
• 1:20:45
  Týr had been the one feeding the wolf
• 1:20:47
  and so Týr had seen, perhaps more clearly than
• 1:20:52
  any of the other gods, what the wolf was
• 1:20:55
  and what the binding would do.
• 1:20:58
  He was not, perhaps, the unlucky one.
• 1:21:00
  He was the one who had volunteered for the
• 1:21:06
  cost.
• 1:21:06
  The texts may not say it.
• 1:21:09
  But the texts may not need to.
• 1:21:11
  This is, in the long old Germanic religious imagination
• 1:21:15
  what justice looked like.
• 1:21:16
  Not the absence of cost.
• 1:21:18
  Not the avoidance of harm.
• 1:21:20
  Not the careful navigation of the rules so that
• 1:21:24
  no one had to pay.
• 1:21:26
  Justice was the willingness, when the cost had to
• 1:21:29
  be borne, to bear it yourself.
• 1:21:32
  And Týr, the brave Týr, the just Týr
• 1:21:36
  the god who had fed the wolf in the
• 1:21:40
  high hall, had been the one to bear
• 1:21:45
  it.
• 1:21:45
  The wolf had bound himself by his word.
• 1:21:48
  The gods had bound themselves by their word too.
• 1:21:51
  They had pledged.
• 1:21:51
  And the pledge was paid, not in some abstract
• 1:21:55
  way, not in some symbolic way, but in the
• 1:21:59
  actual hand of the actual god who had given
• 1:22:02
  it.
• 1:22:02
  The wolf, in his terrible moment, had been more
• 1:22:07
  honorable than the gods themselves had wanted to be.
• 1:22:10
  The wolf had honored the pledge by taking the
• 1:22:14
  hand.
• 1:22:14
  And Týr had honored the pledge by giving it.
• 1:22:18
  This is a strange thing to sit with in
• 1:22:21
  the modern ear.
• 1:22:22
  It is strange because the modern ear is used
• 1:22:25
  to mythologies in which the heroes are simply right
• 1:22:28
  and the monsters are simply wrong.
• 1:22:30
  The Norse myths do not work this way.
• 1:22:33
  The Norse myths give us a wolf who has
• 1:22:37
  been treated unjustly and who, in his treatment
• 1:22:39
  conducts himself with a kind of awful dignity.
• 1:22:43
  The Norse myths give us gods who
• 1:22:44
  in their fear of the future, do a thing
• 1:22:48
  the rules of their own justice condemn
• 1:22:52
  and who pay, through the body of their bravest
• 1:22:56
  the cost that justice demands.
• 1:22:58
  The Norse myths give us, in this single story
• 1:23:01
  a kind of moral honesty that the modern ear
• 1:23:06
  is not always ready for.
• 1:23:08
  Týr was the god who paid.
• 1:23:10
  The texts call him, in some of the older
• 1:23:14
  Eddic passages, the one-handed god of victory.
• 1:23:17
  This is, in its way, a strange title for
• 1:23:20
  a god who had just lost the part of
• 1:23:24
  his body most useful for fighting.
• 1:23:26
  But the title is honest.
• 1:23:27
  Týr was a god of victory because Týr had
• 1:23:30
  won the thing that needed to be won.
• 1:23:34
  The wolf was bound.
• 1:23:36
  The world was, for now, safe.
• 1:23:38
  Týr had paid for it.
• 1:23:40
  There is more to the figure of Týr than
• 1:23:46
  this one story.
• 1:23:48
  There are other tales of him in the surviving
• 1:23:51
  sources.
• 1:23:51
  Some of them are funny, Týr's father
• 1:23:53
  in some genealogies, was a giant of nine hundred
• 1:23:58
  heads.
• 1:23:58
  Some of them are quieter, Týr was
• 1:24:01
  in some readings, the god you called on when
• 1:24:05
  you needed a thing to be settled rightly between
• 1:24:09
  two parties.
• 1:24:10
  Týr was the god of the thing-meeting.
• 1:24:11
  The local council.
• 1:24:13
  The place where, in the old Scandinavian world
• 1:24:16
  free men gathered to decide questions of law.
• 1:24:20
  Týr, in this larger sense, was the god of
• 1:24:23
  right outcomes.
• 1:24:23
  Of binding agreements.
• 1:24:24
  Of the moment when a word, once given
• 1:24:29
  had to be honored.
• 1:24:30
  There is a small thing the surviving texts tell
• 1:24:34
  us about Týr that is worth pausing on.
• 1:24:36
  He was, the older Eddic sources hint
• 1:24:40
  the god of the thing-meeting.
• 1:24:41
  The thing, in Old Norse, þing
• 1:24:44
  was the local council of free men
• 1:24:47
  gathered at a set place at a set time
• 1:24:51
  of year, who decided the questions of law that
• 1:24:56
  had to be decided.
• 1:24:57
  Whether a debt was owed.
• 1:25:00
  Whether a wrong had been done.
• 1:25:01
  Whether a marriage was lawful.
• 1:25:04
  Whether a man, who had killed another man
• 1:25:07
  owed wergeld, the man-price, for the killing
• 1:25:12
  or whether he was to be made an outlaw.
• 1:25:17
  These were the questions of the thing.
• 1:25:19
  The thing was, in the old Scandinavian world
• 1:25:23
  one of the most ancient institutions.
• 1:25:26
  It predated, by a great deal, the coming of
• 1:25:29
  kings.
• 1:25:29
  It predated, by even more, the coming of Christianity.
• 1:25:34
  The thing was the place where the law was
• 1:25:37
  made, by the free men of the community
• 1:25:41
  in the open air, under the eye of whatever
• 1:25:44
  god watched over the giving and the receiving of
• 1:25:47
  words.
• 1:25:48
  That god was Týr.
• 1:25:49
  We can see this even in the modern map
• 1:25:51
  of northern Europe.
• 1:25:53
  The town in Denmark called Tinghøj.
• 1:25:55
  The Norwegian Tingvoll.
• 1:25:56
  The Icelandic Þingvellir, where the Alþing met for nearly
• 1:25:59
  a thousand years.
• 1:26:00
  The English place-names that end in -ting or -thing.
• 1:26:04
  All of these are the descendants of the old
• 1:26:07
  Germanic thing, the place where the people gathered
• 1:26:10
  under the sky-god, to settle their questions.
• 1:26:13
  The day of the week named for Týr is
• 1:26:16
  Tuesday.
• 1:26:16
  In Old English, Tīwesdæg, the day of Tīw
• 1:26:19
  who is the same god as Týr by a
• 1:26:23
  different name.
• 1:26:23
  In the modern Germanic languages we still say it.
• 1:26:27
  Tuesday in English.
• 1:26:29
  Tirsdag in Danish.
• 1:26:30
  Dienstag in German.
• 1:26:31
  The god of the thing, the god of right
• 1:26:34
  outcomes, the god who paid for the binding of
• 1:26:38
  Fenrir with his hand, that god is still
• 1:26:42
  in our calendar.
• 1:26:42
  Every week.
• 1:26:44
  Quietly.
• 1:26:44
  Unremarked.
• 1:26:44
  The way many old things still are.
• 1:26:47
  This is the figure that the surviving Norse sources
• 1:26:51
  give us, when we look at him in full.
• 1:26:53
  Not just the warrior who lost a hand to
• 1:26:59
  a wolf.
• 1:27:00
  But the older quieter sky-god of justice, who
• 1:27:03
  by the time the Norse texts were written down
• 1:27:05
  had been displaced from the center of the religion
• 1:27:09
  by his younger more cunning relative Odin.
• 1:27:12
  But who had not been forgotten.
• 1:27:14
  Whose rune was still on the swords.
• 1:27:17
  Whose day was still in the week.
• 1:27:20
  Whose name was still spoken at the thing.
• 1:27:22
  Týr, in this larger sense, was the god of
• 1:27:25
  right outcomes.
• 1:27:26
  Of binding agreements.
• 1:27:27
  Of the moment when a word, once given
• 1:27:31
  had to be honored.
• 1:27:32
  And it is fitting, in a way that the
• 1:27:35
  surviving Norse sources may have known and may have
• 1:27:40
  chosen, that Týr was the god who lost his
• 1:27:44
  hand in the binding of Fenrir.
• 1:27:46
  Because the binding of Fenrir was the moment in
• 1:27:51
  the deep Norse imagination when the gods themselves had
• 1:27:53
  had to step outside of right outcomes.
• 1:27:56
  They had had to lie.
• 1:27:58
  They had had to deceive.
• 1:28:00
  And the god of right outcomes had paid for
• 1:28:03
  it.
• 1:28:03
  That is the figure we should hold
• 1:28:06
  from this episode, in the back of the mind
• 1:28:09
  as we drift.
• 1:28:09
  Týr.
• 1:28:10
  The bravest.
• 1:28:10
  The one who paid.
• 1:28:11
  Chapter Eleven.
• 1:28:13
  What Was Lost.
• 1:28:15
  What Was Held.
• 1:28:17
  The wolf is bound on Lyngvi.
• 1:28:18
  Týr has gone back to Asgard.
• 1:28:21
  The gods have, by the end of this story
• 1:28:24
  gotten what they came for.
• 1:28:26
  The wolf will not roam free.
• 1:28:31
  The wolf will not, in the years between this
• 1:28:36
  story and Ragnarǫk, walk into the high hall and
• 1:28:40
  devour the gods one by one.
• 1:28:42
  The threat that the seers had spoken of has
• 1:28:46
  been deferred.
• 1:28:46
  The world has been given time.
• 1:28:49
  But the world has been given time at a
• 1:28:52
  cost.
• 1:28:53
  The cost has been Týr's hand.
• 1:28:55
  The cost has been the trust of the wolf
• 1:28:58
  which the gods had at first cultivated and which
• 1:29:01
  they have now broken.
• 1:29:03
  The cost has been the binding of Fenrir himself
• 1:29:07
  which was not justice in the simple sense.
• 1:29:10
  The wolf had not done anything yet
• 1:29:13
  when he was bound.
• 1:29:14
  He had not yet attacked the gods.
• 1:29:16
  He had not yet killed Odin.
• 1:29:18
  He had not, in the timeline of the surviving
• 1:29:22
  stories, committed any crime.
• 1:29:24
  He had been bound for what he would do.
• 1:29:26
  He had been bound for the prophecy.
• 1:29:29
  He had been bound, the surviving sources hint
• 1:29:32
  on the strength of a vision the seers had
• 1:29:37
  had, a vision of a far cold morning
• 1:29:40
  at the end of time, a vision of a
• 1:29:44
  wolf swallowing the sun, a vision of the death
• 1:29:47
  of the Allfather.
• 1:29:49
  This is a difficult thing to sit with.
• 1:29:51
  The Norse myths do not soften it.
• 1:29:54
  They do not tell us, in the way some
• 1:29:57
  other mythologies might, that the wolf was wicked and
• 1:30:00
  deserved his binding.
• 1:30:01
  They tell us, instead, that the gods bound him
• 1:30:04
  because they were afraid.
• 1:30:06
  They were afraid of what he would become.
• 1:30:09
  They were not, in the moment of the binding
• 1:30:13
  acting on what he was.
• 1:30:14
  The wolf had, at the time of his binding
• 1:30:17
  been a guest in their hall.
• 1:30:20
  He had eaten their food.
• 1:30:22
  He had grown among them.
• 1:30:25
  He had been kind, in the way a wolf
• 1:30:28
  can be kind, to the one god who had
• 1:30:33
  fed him.
• 1:30:33
  He had not, until the moment of the binding
• 1:30:36
  lifted a paw against any of them.
• 1:30:40
  And they bound him for what he would
• 1:30:44
  one day, do.
• 1:30:44
  There has been long argument among readers of the
• 1:30:48
  surviving Norse sources about whether this is a story
• 1:30:52
  of justice or of injustice.
• 1:30:54
  The argument does not, in the texts themselves, resolve.
• 1:30:58
  The Eddic poets did not, it seems
• 1:31:01
  want it to resolve.
• 1:31:02
  They wanted us, when we listened, to feel both
• 1:31:04
  sides.
• 1:31:04
  To feel the gods' fear and to feel the
• 1:31:09
  wolf's grievance.
• 1:31:09
  To feel that the binding was necessary and to
• 1:31:13
  feel that the binding was wrong.
• 1:31:16
  To feel that Týr was the bravest god and
• 1:31:21
  to feel that Týr had been forced into a
• 1:31:25
  betrayal of someone who had trusted him.
• 1:31:27
  This is what the Norse myths give us
• 1:31:31
  when they are at their best.
• 1:31:33
  They give us moral situations that do not resolve.
• 1:31:37
  They give us actions that have costs and that
• 1:31:39
  nonetheless had to be taken.
• 1:31:42
  They give us heroes who have paid prices that
• 1:31:46
  no fully just hero should have had to pay.
• 1:31:48
  The binding of Fenrir is, in this sense
• 1:31:52
  a story about the moral cost of the future.
• 1:31:55
  The gods bound the wolf because the future required
• 1:31:58
  it.
• 1:31:58
  The future, in the Norse imagination, was not a
• 1:32:02
  thing the gods could avoid.
• 1:32:04
  They could only meet it earlier or later
• 1:32:07
  sooner or later, on better terms or on worse.
• 1:32:10
  By binding the wolf, they were meeting the future
• 1:32:13
  earlier and on better terms.
• 1:32:15
  They were buying time.
• 1:32:17
  They were trading Týr's hand and the wolf's freedom
• 1:32:20
  for the deferral of Ragnarǫk by an unknown number
• 1:32:24
  of years.
• 1:32:25
  This was, in their reckoning, worth the cost.
• 1:32:29
  We do not have to agree with their reckoning
• 1:32:33
  to understand it.
• 1:32:34
  We can, in the long quiet evening of this
• 1:32:38
  episode, sit with the story as the Norse poets
• 1:32:40
  gave it to us.
• 1:32:43
  We can hold the gods and the wolf and
• 1:32:47
  Týr all in the mind at once.
• 1:32:49
  We can feel the strangeness of it.
• 1:32:52
  We can feel the weight of it.
• 1:32:55
  There is one last thing the surviving texts tell
• 1:32:57
  us, and we should not leave it out.
• 1:33:00
  The wolf, on Lyngvi, in the dark lake Ámsvartnir
• 1:33:04
  bound by the ribbon Gleipnir, with his jaws propped
• 1:33:08
  open and the river of saliva flowing from his
• 1:33:10
  mouth, the wolf is said to be growing.
• 1:33:16
  He is growing.
• 1:33:17
  The texts do not say this in many words
• 1:33:20
  but the suggestion is there.
• 1:33:23
  The wolf, even bound, is not still.
• 1:33:25
  The wolf is doing, slowly, what wolves do.
• 1:33:28
  He is increasing.
• 1:33:29
  His body is, year by year, becoming larger.
• 1:33:33
  The ribbon Gleipnir is, year by year
• 1:33:35
  accommodating his growth.
• 1:33:37
  The ribbon does not break.
• 1:33:39
  The ribbon holds.
• 1:33:40
  But the wolf inside the ribbon is
• 1:33:45
  by some long quiet measurement, larger than he was
• 1:33:50
  when the gods first bound him.
• 1:33:52
  This means that the binding is not
• 1:33:55
  in the long Norse imagination, a binding outside of
• 1:33:59
  time.
• 1:34:00
  It is a binding inside of time.
• 1:34:02
  It is a binding that exists while the world
• 1:34:05
  exists.
• 1:34:05
  And the wolf, inside the binding, is preparing
• 1:34:09
  slowly, patiently, year after year, for the day
• 1:34:12
  the binding will end.
• 1:34:14
  That day will be Ragnarǫk.
• 1:34:15
  We will not, tonight, walk into Ragnarǫk.
• 1:34:18
  Ragnarǫk has its own episode, much later in this
• 1:34:22
  season, when we will sit with the wolf again
• 1:34:27
  as he finally pulls himself free, and as the
• 1:34:30
  long quiet of his binding finally ends.
• 1:34:34
  Tonight we sit with the binding itself.
• 1:34:38
  With the long patience of the wolf.
• 1:34:41
  With the long patience of the gods who put
• 1:34:44
  him there.
• 1:34:44
  With the steady flow of the river Vón.
• 1:34:48
  The river of hope.
• 1:34:49
  The river that the wolf's open mouth feeds.
• 1:34:52
  It is a strange detail, the name of that
• 1:34:56
  river.
• 1:34:56
  Hope.
• 1:34:56
  The texts do not tell us whose hope.
• 1:34:59
  They do not tell us whether it is the
• 1:35:02
  gods' hope, that the binding will hold.
• 1:35:05
  Or the wolf's hope, that one day it will
• 1:35:08
  not.
• 1:35:10
  Or some older deeper hope, the hope of
• 1:35:14
  the world itself, that whatever comes at the end
• 1:35:18
  of time will, in some far-off form
• 1:35:19
  be made right.
• 1:35:21
  The Norse poets, when they named the river
• 1:35:25
  did not say.
• 1:35:27
  We can sit with the ambiguity.
• 1:35:30
  We can let it be what it is.
• 1:35:33
  In the last chapter, we say goodnight.
• 1:35:35
  Chapter Twelve.
• 1:35:36
  Goodnight.
• 1:35:36
  And the Wolf at the Edge of Time.
• 1:35:40
  It is late.
• 1:35:41
  Or it is, by now, perhaps, the very early
• 1:35:45
  hours of a new morning.
• 1:35:48
  If you are still awake, I'd like to draw
• 1:35:53
  you back, gently, from the island and from the
• 1:35:58
  lake and from the bound wolf.
• 1:36:00
  We are leaving Fenrir on Lyngvi.
• 1:36:02
  We are leaving Týr in Asgard with his one
• 1:36:06
  hand.
• 1:36:07
  We are leaving the gods at their council
• 1:36:12
  where they have done a hard thing and where
• 1:36:15
  they will, in the years to come
• 1:36:17
  have to sit with the cost of it.
• 1:36:21
  There is no neat closing to this story.
• 1:36:24
  The Norse myths do not close neatly.
• 1:36:27
  They open into other stories.
• 1:36:30
  They open into the long arc of the season.
• 1:36:33
  The wolf on the island is waiting.
• 1:36:36
  The trickster, who is the wolf's father
• 1:36:40
  is still in Asgard and is still
• 1:36:42
  though the gods do not yet know how
• 1:36:46
  preparing what will become his own long binding.
• 1:36:49
  The serpent in the sea is biting his tail.
• 1:36:53
  The daughter, Hel, is gathering the dead in her
• 1:36:56
  cold halls below.
• 1:36:56
  The world, in the long Norse reckoning
• 1:36:59
  is moving toward the cold morning that the seers
• 1:37:04
  had seen.
• 1:37:04
  But not tonight.
• 1:37:06
  Tonight, the wolf is on the island
• 1:37:09
  and the ribbon holds, and the river of hope
• 1:37:12
  flows from his mouth, and the gods sleep in
• 1:37:17
  Valhǫll, and Týr, the brave Týr
• 1:37:19
  the just Týr, the god who paid
• 1:37:22
  sits at the high bench with one hand resting
• 1:37:25
  on the table where, until recently, he had two.
• 1:37:31
  The world is, for now, held.
• 1:37:33
  This is one of the small gifts of the
• 1:37:37
  Norse imagination.
• 1:37:38
  It does not pretend that the holding is permanent.
• 1:37:42
  It does not pretend that the cost was not
• 1:37:45
  paid.
• 1:37:45
  It gives us, instead, the long quiet of an
• 1:37:48
  evening in which the thing that needed to be
• 1:37:51
  done has been done.
• 1:37:52
  And in which we, the listeners, can sit beside
• 1:37:56
  the gods at the long fire, and we can
• 1:37:59
  hear the wind outside, and we can know that
• 1:38:02
  for tonight at least, the wolf is not at
• 1:38:06
  our door.
• 1:38:07
  If you have been listening since the first episode
• 1:38:10
  you have come, by now, through a great deal
• 1:38:15
  of the shape of the Norse imagination.
• 1:38:17
  You have walked the nine worlds.
• 1:38:19
  You have followed the Allfather through his long search
• 1:38:23
  for wisdom.
• 1:38:23
  You have gone down with Loki into the dwarven
• 1:38:26
  country and seen the hammer made.
• 1:38:29
  And tonight you have sat with the gods at
• 1:38:32
  the council where the wolf was bound.
• 1:38:35
  You have seen, in this single season
• 1:38:37
  the structure of the world.
• 1:38:39
  The wisdom of its highest god.
• 1:38:42
  The making of its greatest weapon.
• 1:38:44
  The first of the bindings that the world depends
• 1:38:48
  on.
• 1:38:48
  There is a great deal still to come.
• 1:38:53
  There is the theft of Iðunn's apples
• 1:38:55
  which will be the next episode.
• 1:38:58
  There is the death of Baldr, which will be
• 1:39:02
  the most beautiful and the saddest of all of
• 1:39:05
  these stories, the story that the Norse poets themselves
• 1:39:08
  believed was the turning of the world.
• 1:39:12
  There is the long punishment of Loki
• 1:39:15
  who has been with us through every episode so
• 1:39:18
  far and whose own binding will, in its own
• 1:39:21
  way, mirror the binding of his son.
• 1:39:24
  There is the mead of poetry, which will be
• 1:39:27
  a lighter and a stranger and a kinder story.
• 1:39:30
  There is the second tribe of gods, the Vanir
• 1:39:33
  whom we will meet at last.
• 1:39:36
  There is the long human story of Sigurð and
• 1:39:39
  the dragon.
• 1:39:40
  And there is, at the end of the season
• 1:39:44
  Ragnarǫk itself.
• 1:39:45
  And then, after Ragnarǫk, the quiet morning of the
• 1:39:48
  new world.
• 1:39:49
  But all of that is for the weeks ahead.
• 1:39:54
  For tonight, we leave the wolf bound on Lyngvi.
• 1:39:59
  We leave Týr with his hand gone.
• 1:40:01
  We leave the gods in their hall
• 1:40:04
  looking at one another across the long fire
• 1:40:07
  knowing what they have done.
• 1:40:10
  If you have fallen asleep in the middle of
• 1:40:13
  this story, the river of hope is still flowing.
• 1:40:16
  The wolf is still bound.
• 1:40:20
  The ribbon is still holding.
• 1:40:22
  None of it requires your attention.
• 1:40:24
  It will continue without you.
• 1:40:27
  If you have stayed awake to the end
• 1:40:29
  thank you.
• 1:40:31
  I do not know who you are
• 1:40:34
  but I am glad to have walked this far
• 1:40:37
  with you.
• 1:40:39
  There will be another episode in a few days.
• 1:40:42
  And another after that.
• 1:40:44
  And another after that.
• 1:40:45
  The almanac is patient, and the almanac will continue.
• 1:40:49
  Sleep well.
• 1:40:51
  Let me, before we close, take you through one
• 1:40:53
  more long quiet round of the worlds
• 1:40:57
  so that you have the shape of the season
• 1:41:00
  in your mind as you drift.
• 1:41:02
  In the high hall of Asgard, the Allfather is
• 1:41:05
  in his seat.
• 1:41:06
  His ravens, Huginn and Muninn, have come home from
• 1:41:10
  their long day's flight across the nine worlds
• 1:41:13
  and they are perched, now, one on each of
• 1:41:17
  his shoulders.
• 1:41:17
  They are quiet.
• 1:41:18
  They have already told him everything they have seen.
• 1:41:22
  They will fly out again tomorrow.
• 1:41:24
  They will come home again.
• 1:41:27
  This is the long rhythm of the Allfather's days.
• 1:41:30
  In the same hall, at his own place
• 1:41:34
  Thor is sleeping.
• 1:41:35
  The hammer is on the bench beside him.
• 1:41:39
  The red beard rises and falls, slowly
• 1:41:42
  with his breathing.
• 1:41:43
  The hall is warm with the fires.
• 1:41:46
  The other gods are in their places.
• 1:41:49
  Heimdallr, who watches the bridge of burning light
• 1:41:53
  is at his post, the surviving texts tell
• 1:41:57
  us he is the watcher who needs the least
• 1:42:01
  sleep of any of the gods, but tonight even
• 1:42:03
  he is quiet.
• 1:42:04
  Freyr is in his own hall.
• 1:42:06
  Freyja in hers.
• 1:42:07
  Bragi is, perhaps, still awake, finishing a verse he
• 1:42:12
  has been working on.
• 1:42:14
  The hall is, for now, at rest.
• 1:42:18
  In a smaller seat off to one side
• 1:42:21
  Týr is sleeping.
• 1:42:24
  His right arm ends at the wrist.
• 1:42:25
  The wrappings have, by now, healed.
• 1:42:28
  The arm has its own way of resting on
• 1:42:32
  the bench.
• 1:42:34
  He has learned, over the long quiet years since
• 1:42:37
  the binding, how to live with one hand.
• 1:42:40
  He does not, in the surviving texts, complain.
• 1:42:44
  He sleeps the way a brave man sleeps
• 1:42:47
  who has done a hard thing and who is
• 1:42:52
  at peace with having done it.
• 1:42:54
  Outside the hall, the long night of Asgard stretches
• 1:42:59
  over the worlds.
• 1:43:00
  Bifrǫst, the rainbow bridge, glimmers faintly in the dark.
• 1:43:04
  The roots of Yggdrasill, the world-tree, descend into the
• 1:43:08
  wells beneath.
• 1:43:09
  The serpent Jǫrmungandr is coiled in the great sea
• 1:43:13
  his tail in his mouth
• 1:43:14
  asleep.
• 1:43:16
  Hel, in her cold halls below, walks among her
• 1:43:19
  quiet dead.
• 1:43:20
  And on the small island Lyngvi, in the dark
• 1:43:25
  lake Ámsvartnir, the wolf is bound.
• 1:43:27
  He is awake.
• 1:43:28
  Or he is asleep.
• 1:43:29
  The texts do not say.
• 1:43:31
  The wolf may, in the long centuries of his
• 1:43:35
  binding, have learned how to be both at once.
• 1:43:39
  To rest one part of himself while the other
• 1:43:43
  part watches.
• 1:43:43
  The river of saliva flows from his mouth.
• 1:43:46
  It has its name, Vón.
• 1:43:49
  Hope.
• 1:43:50
  The river flows toward whatever far place rivers flow.
• 1:43:55
  The mountains, which are no longer rooted to anything
• 1:43:58
  below, sit by their own weight in their old
• 1:44:02
  places.
• 1:44:03
  The cats walk silently in the empty halls.
• 1:44:06
  The women do not have beards.
• 1:44:08
  The fish breathe their small silent breaths in the
• 1:44:12
  rivers and the seas.
• 1:44:14
  The birds, in their light bodies, hold their small
• 1:44:17
  moisture inside their beaks.
• 1:44:19
  The world is, for tonight, held in the way
• 1:44:22
  it is held.
• 1:44:23
  With the cost paid.
• 1:44:25
  With the bindings in their places.
• 1:44:28
  With the gods asleep.
• 1:44:30
  With the wolf bound.
• 1:44:32
  With the long patient rivers running.
• 1:44:34
  If you have been listening since the first episode
• 1:44:38
  you have come, by now, through a great deal
• 1:44:41
  of the shape of the Norse imagination.
• 1:44:44
  You have walked the nine worlds.
• 1:44:46
  You have followed the Allfather through his long search
• 1:44:50
  for wisdom.
• 1:44:50
  You have gone down with Loki into the dwarven
• 1:44:54
  country and seen the hammer made.
• 1:44:57
  And tonight you have sat with the gods at
• 1:45:00
  the council where the wolf was bound.
• 1:45:02
  You have seen, in this single season
• 1:45:05
  the structure of the world.
• 1:45:06
  The wisdom of its highest god.
• 1:45:09
  The making of its greatest weapon.
• 1:45:12
  The first of the bindings that the world depends
• 1:45:15
  on.
• 1:45:15
  There is a great deal still to come.
• 1:45:18
  There is the theft of Iðunn's apples
• 1:45:21
  which will be the next episode.
• 1:45:24
  There is the death of Baldr, which will be
• 1:45:27
  the most beautiful and the saddest of all of
• 1:45:32
  these stories, the story that the Norse poets themselves
• 1:45:35
  believed was the turning of the world.
• 1:45:37
  There is the long punishment of Loki
• 1:45:40
  who has been with us through every episode so
• 1:45:44
  far and whose own binding will, in its own
• 1:45:48
  way, mirror the binding of his son.
• 1:45:50
  There is the mead of poetry, which will be
• 1:45:54
  a lighter and a stranger and a kinder story.
• 1:45:58
  There is the second tribe of gods, the Vanir
• 1:46:02
  whom we will meet at last.
• 1:46:05
  There is the long human story of Sigurð and
• 1:46:08
  the dragon.
• 1:46:10
  And there is, at the end of the season
• 1:46:13
  Ragnarǫk itself.
• 1:46:14
  And then, after Ragnarǫk, the quiet morning of the
• 1:46:17
  new world.
• 1:46:19
  But all of that is for the weeks ahead.
• 1:46:23
  For tonight, we leave the wolf bound on Lyngvi.
• 1:46:28
  We leave Týr with his hand gone.
• 1:46:30
  We leave the gods in their hall
• 1:46:33
  looking at one another across the long fire
• 1:46:37
  knowing what they have done.
• 1:46:38
  If you have fallen asleep in the middle of
• 1:46:43
  this story, the river of hope is still flowing.
• 1:46:45
  The wolf is still bound.
• 1:46:47
  The ribbon is still holding.
• 1:46:49
  None of it requires your attention.
• 1:46:51
  It will continue without you.
• 1:46:53
  If you have stayed awake to the end
• 1:46:58
  thank you.
• 1:46:58
  I do not know who you are
• 1:47:01
  but I am glad to have walked this far
• 1:47:04
  with you.
• 1:47:05
  There will be another episode in a few days.
• 1:47:10
  And another after that.
• 1:47:12
  And another after that.
• 1:47:14
  The almanac is patient, and the almanac will continue.
• 1:47:17
  Sleep well.
• 1:47:18
  The Allfather is in his hall.
• 1:47:21
  The hammer is at Thor's belt.
• 1:47:24
  The wolf is bound on the island.
• 1:47:26
  The river of hope is flowing.
• 1:47:28
  And the long quiet of the night is
• 1:47:32
  for once, held.
• 1:47:34
  Goodnight.