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Thor and the World Serpent · Norse Mythology Sleep Story · 3 Hours · The Sleeping Almanac: Sleep Stories for Adults from Myth and Fairy Tale

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Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.
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Tonight we tell the story of the god who went fishing for his oldest enemy and
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almost killed him.
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Of a small wooden boat on the cold sea at the very edge of the world.
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Of a hook baited with the head of an ox.
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Of two figures rowing out into water no boat had ever gone into before.
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Of one of those figures, very large, very tall, sitting in the back with his eyes
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on the horizon, knowing what he was about to do. Of the line that pulled.
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Of the head that rose. Of the eye that opened, and looked back at him.
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And of the moment, between the rising of the head and the falling of the hammer,
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when the god in the boat and the great serpent in the water looked at each other
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across the open sea, and each of them understood that they had been waiting for
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this meeting since the world began.
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We will tell this story tonight from the Poetic Edda, where it lives most fully in
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a poem called the Hymiskviða, the Lay of Hymir, which gives us the long version:
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the council of the gods, the journey east, the giant's grandmother with her nine
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hundred heads, the giant's mother with her gold-decked arms, the eight cauldrons
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that fell from a single look, the meal of three oxen, the cutting of the line, the
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breaking of the goblet, the chase home.
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We will draw also on the forty-eighth chapter of Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning,
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which preserves the central scene more compactly, and which gives us the moment we
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will return to tonight as the heart of the story, the moment when Þórr and the
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Serpent looked at each other.
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And we will draw on a much older skaldic poem called the Húsdrápa, composed by the
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poet Úlfr Uggason in the late tenth century for the wedding hall of Óláfr the
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Peacock in Iceland, which preserves an independent and older confirmation that this
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story was known to the old north long before Snorri wrote it down.
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Where the surviving sources are silent about what was said or thought or felt in
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any given moment, we will tell you we are imagining, and we will tell you so
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clearly. The story is more than old enough to bear the imagining.
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Tonight we go east. To a giant's hall at the very edge of the world. To a boat.
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To a hook.
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To the moment the line pulled, and the god in the boat braced, and the great
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serpent rose out of the sea. Settle in. Let your shoulders drop.
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We begin in the hall of the sea-giant Ægir, where the gods are gathered, and where
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the question that begins this whole story is being asked.
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Chapter One. The Cauldron That Was Not There.
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The hall of Ægir stood at the edge of the world.
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We have stood in this hall before, dear listener.
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We stood in it not long ago, in the story of Loki's binding, when the gods had
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gathered for a feast that turned cruel. Tonight's story is older.
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Tonight's story takes place before that night.
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Tonight's story is from the time when the gods still came gladly to Ægir's hall,
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when the ale was good and the company was kind and the world had not yet begun its
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long slow tilt toward the end.
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Ægir was a jǫtunn — but not the kind of jǫtunn the gods made war on.
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He was a sea-giant.
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His wife was Rán, who held a net at the bottom of the sea for the drowned.
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His daughters were the waves themselves, nine of them, each with her own name, each
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with her own way of moving across the water.
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Ægir was, of all the giants of the old north, the one closest to the gods.
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He hosted them. He brewed for them.
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He kept a hall at the edge of the world where the gods came to drink and to be glad.
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But on this night — the night where our story begins — Ægir had a problem.
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The Æsir had come to him in number. Not just Óðinn and Þórr. Not just a few.
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All of them.
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Every god of Asgard had crossed the long road from the high city and come down to
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the sea-cliff hall, and they had come hungry, and they had come thirsty, and they
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had come expecting ale.
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And Ægir, looking at the size of his company, and looking at the size of his
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brewing-cauldron, knew that he could not brew enough.
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He stood among them in his great hall, with his white hair and his sea-grey eyes,
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and he said: my friends. I cannot brew for you all. My cauldron is not large enough.
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There is no cauldron in all of Asgard large enough to brew ale for this company.
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Find me a cauldron, and I will brew. Until then, we drink what little I have.
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The gods looked at one another.
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Þórr — who had been silent, who was always silent until the work needed doing —
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Þórr said: I will find one. Óðinn looked at his son.
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Óðinn said: where will you find a cauldron larger than any cauldron in Asgard?
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And here a voice spoke up that had not spoken yet. The voice of Týr.
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The one-handed god.
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The one who had given his right hand to the wolf Fenrir when no other god would put
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a hand into the wolf's mouth, the one who knew what it was to keep a promise even
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when the promise cost you something you could not get back.
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Týr stood up at the long table and said: I know where such a cauldron is.
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The gods turned toward him. Týr said: my father has one.
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A small silence fell across the hall.
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Because Týr's father, in this telling, was not the All-father Óðinn.
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Týr's father, in this telling, was Hymir. A giant.
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A jǫtunn of the eastern marches, who lived far across the cold lands where the gods
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did not go.
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The relation is given to us in the Hymiskviða, the poem that preserves this story,
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and it is a strange relation — Týr, the one-handed god of the gods' war-oath,
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somehow also being the son of a jǫtunn who lived in the cold east.
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The Eddas elsewhere call Týr a son of Óðinn.
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The Eddas are not always consistent on these matters.
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Tonight, in this poem, in this story, Týr's father is Hymir.
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And Hymir, says Týr — my father — has a cauldron at the bottom of his hall that is
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a full mile deep. He calls it his brewing-vat.
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It is the largest cauldron in any of the worlds.
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If we can bring it back to Ægir, the brewing problem is solved.
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The gods looked at one another again. Þórr looked at Týr. Þórr said: then we go.
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And that was the beginning of the journey.
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Two figures — the strongest god of Asgard and the one-handed god whose father was a
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giant — leaving Ægir's hall at the edge of the world and turning east.
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East, into the cold lands where the jǫtnar lived.
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East, toward a hall on the very edge of the world where the ice never melted and
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the seas were full of things older than the gods. The hall they were going to.
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The hall of Hymir.
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Chapter Two. The Journey East. Þórr and Týr left at dawn.
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They did not take Þórr's chariot of goats. The Hymiskviða does not tell us why.
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We can imagine, from what the poem hints, that this was a journey that required
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quiet and not noise — that the chariot of Þórr, drawn by two great goats with
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brass-shod hooves, was a thing too loud for the country they were entering.
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Or perhaps Þórr simply wanted, this once, to walk. The Eddas do not tell us.
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We are told only that the two gods set out on foot, that they crossed the long
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plain east of Ægir's hall, and that they began the slow climb up into the cold high
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country where the jǫtnar lived. The land changed as they walked.
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The Æsir country was green.
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There were oak and ash, there were rivers, there were small farms scattered across
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the rolling country with little smoke-trails rising from the hearths.
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The gods passed these and the small farmers, who looked up and bowed, and the gods
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nodded back, and they kept walking. Then the green began to thin.
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The trees grew shorter. The rivers grew narrower.
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The grass turned silver and brittle. The wind picked up.
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The two gods, walking shoulder to shoulder, leaned forward against it.
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Þórr's red beard whipped behind him. Týr's cloak filled like a sail.
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Then the snow began. Not the gentle snow of a winter night.
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The hard sideways snow of the eastern wilderness.
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The snow that does not fall — that is hurled across the country by a wind that has
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been coming for a thousand years and is not stopping. Þórr lowered his head.
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Týr lowered his. They kept walking. The land grew rocks. Then more rocks.
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Then nothing but rocks. The grass was gone. The trees were gone.
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There were only the long grey ridges of jǫtunn country, the dark cliffs of stone
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that rose around them on every side, the high passes where the wind came through
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like a knife. They climbed for a long time.
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The Hymiskviða does not tell us how long.
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The poem moves quickly through this part of the story.
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It tells us that the two gods crossed the wide country, and that they climbed the
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high passes, and that at last they came down out of a high notch in the stones and
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saw, far below them, a great hall standing alone on a flat shelf of stone above a
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cold sea. The hall. It was vast. Larger than any hall in Asgard.
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Larger than any hall the two gods had ever stood in.
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Its roof-beams were great whole trees laid across each other.
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Its walls were stone — undressed boulders fitted together by a hand large enough to
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lift them like pebbles. Smoke rose from a hole in its roof.
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Around it, in a wide ring of trampled snow, the cattle of the giant grazed —
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enormous oxen, each one larger than any ox in any farm in Midgard, their breath
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rising in white clouds in the cold air.
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And the sea below the hall — that was Hymir's sea.
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The cold edge-of-the-world sea where no boat from Asgard had ever rowed.
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The sea that, somewhere out in its deep, held the Serpent.
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Þórr stood at the top of the notch and looked down at the hall and the cattle and
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the sea. Týr stood beside him. Týr said: that is my father's hall.
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Þórr said: are you ready? Týr said: yes.
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And the two gods began their long climb down toward Hymir's hall.
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Chapter Three. The Grandmother and the Mother.
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They entered the hall through its great open door.
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The Hymiskviða gives us, here, one of the strangest images in all the surviving
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Norse poetry.
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It tells us that the first person Þórr and Týr saw inside Hymir's hall was not
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Hymir. It was Hymir's mother. Týr's grandmother.
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And she was — the poem says — a thing of nine hundred heads. Nine hundred.
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The poem does not explain. The poem does not elaborate.
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The poem says only that there she was, sitting at the back of the hall, an old
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jǫtunn woman with nine hundred heads, each of them awful, each of them ancient,
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each of them turned toward the door as the two gods walked in.
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Some of the heads were sleeping. Some were watching.
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Some were looking past Þórr and Týr at nothing at all.
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The poem leaves her there as the bare strange fact of her existence — a creature so
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old and so monstrous that the human mind cannot quite hold her, but who is, all the
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same, Týr's own grandmother. Whom Týr has known. Whom Týr has visited.
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Þórr stopped at the threshold. Týr walked in, and bowed.
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The grandmother of nine hundred heads said nothing.
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And then, from another part of the hall, a different woman stepped forward.
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This was Týr's mother.
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The Hymiskviða describes her in a single line, and the line is the small jewel of
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this part of the poem. She is, the poem says, gold-decked.
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Her arms are bright with gold rings. Her hair is bright. Her gown is fair.
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Her eyes — the poem does not say, but the poem does not need to say — are kind.
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She looked at Týr. She had not seen him in a long time. She crossed the hall to him.
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She did not throw her arms around him. The poem does not give us that.
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The poem gives us only that she came to him, and stood close to him, and looked at
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him for a long moment without speaking, and then said: my son.
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Why have you come here. And Týr answered her honestly.
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He said: we have come to ask your husband for the cauldron. We need it.
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The gods need it. Ægir cannot brew without it. His mother lowered her head.
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She said: your father will not be pleased to find Æsir in his hall.
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Hide behind the great pillar at the back of the room.
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I will speak to him when he comes home.
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If he is in a good mood, he will give it to you.
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If he is not — if he is not, I will do what I can. The two gods understood.
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Þórr — the strongest god in Asgard, the god who had killed more jǫtnar than any
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other being in the worlds, the god whose hammer had cracked the world-rocks and
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whose anger had shaken the seas — Þórr crouched down behind a stone pillar at the
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back of his enemy's hall, on his enemy's orders, on his enemy's wife's orders,
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because the strangest thing about meeting a giant in his own hall is that you do
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not, even if you are Þórr, simply burst in shouting. You wait.
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You let the mother of the house speak first. Týr crouched beside him. They waited.
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The grandmother of nine hundred heads watched them from the back of the hall.
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She did not, the poem implies, give them away.
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Whether she would have, had Hymir asked her, the poem does not say.
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Chapter Four. The Return of Hymir. He came home at twilight.
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The Hymiskviða gives this scene one of the most evocative descriptions in the
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entire poem. We hear Hymir before we see him.
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We hear his footsteps on the long stone path that comes down from the high country.
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We hear the rattle of frozen branches being dragged behind him.
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We hear his breathing — the slow heavy breathing of a giant who has walked all day
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across the cold east and is now at last coming home.
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The door of the great hall darkened. He filled the doorway entirely.
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He had to bend to come through.
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When he stood up inside the hall, his head almost touched the roof-beams, even
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though the roof-beams were laid across the hall on poles thick as old oaks.
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He was older than Þórr. He was older than Týr.
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He was older than any jǫtunn the gods had met before. His hair was white.
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His beard was white.
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And from his beard, the poem says — and this is the image that the old north loved
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enough to repeat — from his beard the ice fell in cracking pieces as he stepped
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into the warmth of the hall. He had been hunting in the high country.
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His beard was so frozen that, as the warmth of the fire began to touch it, the ice
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cracked off in shards and fell to the stone floor of the hall.
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Hymir stood in the middle of the great chamber and shook off the cold.
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He did not, yet, see his guests. Týr's mother went to him. She kissed him.
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She said: husband. There are guests in the hall. Hymir turned his head.
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He looked toward the back of the hall, toward the great pillar where Þórr and Týr
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were crouched.
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And then — the poem tells us — and then a thing happened that the old north
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considered, in its memory of giants, one of the small great miracles of Hymir.
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Hymir's gaze fell on the corner of the room.
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His eyes — old, cold, accustomed to the high country — his eyes simply rested on
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the back wall for a moment.
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And from the rafters above the pillar where Þórr and Týr were crouched, eight
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cauldrons fell. Cauldrons that had been hanging there for years.
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Cauldrons used for brewing, for boiling, for storing.
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Each one had been fixed to its peg with iron rings. The iron rings broke.
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The cauldrons fell. One after another. Eight of them.
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They struck the stone floor and they shattered.
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The sound was like ice cracking in a deep winter wood. Hymir had not even glared.
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He had merely looked. And the cauldrons had fallen.
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Only one cauldron, the poem tells us, remained on its peg. The largest one.
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The one Týr had spoken of. The one a mile deep. That cauldron did not fall.
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That cauldron, the poem tells us, was made of metal too good to break.
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But the other eight broke. The hall heard them.
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Hymir's wife — Týr's mother — said: husband. Be kind.
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They are our son and his friend. They have come a long way. Hymir said nothing.
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He walked to the back of the hall. He looked down at the two crouched figures.
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He looked at Týr, his own son.
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He looked at Þórr, the red-bearded god of Asgard whose hammer had killed more of
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Hymir's kin than the giant could count. He looked for a long moment.
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Then he said: very well. He turned to his wife. He said: slaughter three oxen.
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And he went to sit at the head of his long stone table, and to wait for his dinner.
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The gods rose from behind the pillar.
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The grandmother of nine hundred heads watched them rise.
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Chapter Five. The Three Oxen. Hymir's wife brought out the meat.
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It was a great deal of meat.
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Three whole oxen, slaughtered that afternoon by Hymir's herdsman, roasted slowly
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through the long blue hours of the eastern dusk on a spit so long it took three
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poles to hold it. The smell filled the hall.
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The smell of roasting beef, of fat dripping into the fire, of charred bones and
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rendered tallow.
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It is the smell every hall in the long winter country of the old north must have
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smelled like, on a good night, when the hunt had been kind.
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It is the smell of survival in cold places.
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The two gods, sitting at the long stone table in their enemy's hall, would have
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known this smell in their own halls of Asgard, and would have known it in every
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farmhouse and feast-hall of Midgard, and would have known what the smell meant —
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that the night was going to be all right.
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That whatever the day had cost, the night would feed you.
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That you would sleep on a full belly. Hymir's wife — Týr's mother — carved.
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The Hymiskviða tells us — without any flourish, just as a small flat fact — that
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Þórr ate two of the three oxen at this meal. Two. Of the three.
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The third ox, the one not eaten by Þórr, was shared between Hymir, Týr, and Týr's
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mother.
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The fourth person at the table — Þórr — ate twice as much by himself as everyone
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else combined. This is, in the old north, one of the standard jokes about Þórr.
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He was the largest of the gods. He needed enormous amounts of food.
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The Eddas tell us elsewhere that he could empty a giant's mead-horn in three
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draughts — that he could eat an entire ox and ask for another.
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That his appetite was, in some way, part of his identity.
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Þórr was the god of the labouring people.
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Þórr was the god of those who worked the fields and rowed the boats and needed to
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eat enough to keep going.
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So the poet of the Hymiskviða, telling us that Þórr ate two oxen at this meal, was
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telling the old north something it already knew: that Þórr in a strange hall was
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Þórr being most himself, eating everything in front of him with a clean conscience.
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But Hymir — sitting at the head of his long table, watching this happen — was not
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amused. Hymir was a hunter. He had been out all day. He had walked the long miles.
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He had brought back the cold game. He had earned his evening meal.
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And now, in his own hall, this red-bearded son of Óðinn was eating two of his three
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best oxen in a single sitting. When the meal was done, Hymir stood up.
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He said, slowly, looking at Þórr: tomorrow, we will not eat what is in my pantry.
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Tomorrow we will eat what the sea gives us.
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If we are hungry, we will fish for our dinner.
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If the sea gives us nothing — we will go to bed hungry. Is this understood.
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Þórr said: yes. Hymir said: good.
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And he turned and went to his bed at the back of the hall.
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Týr and Þórr stayed at the table. Týr's mother began to gather the bones.
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She did not look at her son. She did not look at Þórr.
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She gathered the bones in silence, one by one, and dropped them into a great
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basket, and carried them away to the back of the hall where the dogs of the giant
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lived. The dogs ate the bones one by one.
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Their teeth — the Hymiskviða notes, without explaining — were as long as a child's
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arm.
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The cracking of the bones in their jaws was, for a while, the only sound in the
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hall. The fire crackled now and then. The wind, outside, moved against the shutters.
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The dogs ate. The bones broke. The marrow came out. The dogs swallowed it.
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The pile of bones, slowly, became a pile of nothing.
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The grandmother of nine hundred heads, at the back of the hall, did not eat.
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She did not move. She did not speak. Some of her heads slept. Some of them watched.
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The Hymiskviða does not tell us, in any of its surviving versions, what the
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grandmother ate, or whether she ate at all.
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The poem leaves her there as a presence the listener accepts and does not question.
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She was the oldest jǫtunn-being in the hall.
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She had been there before Hymir was a child.
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She would, in some way the Eddas do not explain, still be there long after he was
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gone. Some beings, the old north knew, did not require what other beings required.
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The hall went quiet. The fire died down. Þórr leaned back from the table.
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Týr looked at his friend. Týr said: my father said we are fishing tomorrow.
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Þórr said: yes. Týr said: do you know what he will be hoping to catch.
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Þórr looked at him. Þórr said: I have a guess. Týr said: and if he catches it.
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Þórr said: he will not be the one to pull it in.
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The two gods sat in the quiet of Hymir's hall.
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Outside, the cold sea was breathing against the rocks below the hall.
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Somewhere out in that sea, in water so deep that no light had ever touched its
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bottom, the Serpent was sleeping.
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The Serpent had been there since the first day of the world, when Óðinn had thrown
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it into the encircling sea. The Serpent had grown with the world.
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The Serpent had wrapped itself around all the lands of Midgard, biting its own tail
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at the eastern horizon, holding the world together with its own body.
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The Serpent was Þórr's old enemy.
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The Serpent was the thing Þórr was fated, at the end of all things, to fight and
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kill and be killed by. The Serpent did not know, that night, what was coming.
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The Serpent slept. Þórr did not sleep.
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Þórr sat at Hymir's table, in the dying firelight, and looked out the open door at
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the dark sea. And he listened to the sound of the waves. And he waited for morning.
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Chapter Six. The Bait. He went out at dawn.
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The Hymiskviða gives us, here, one of the simple striking images of the poem.
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Þórr — before Hymir had risen, before Týr had risen, before even Týr's mother had
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begun her morning work — Þórr was already up and outside the hall, walking the long
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ridge above the cold sea. He was thinking about bait.
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For the great fish of the deep, Þórr knew, you do not bait your hook with a worm.
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You do not bait it with a small fish.
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You bait it with something that the great fish of the deep will want — something
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big enough, something rich enough in blood and meat, that it will rise up out of
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its deep place to take. Þórr looked around at the country.
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He saw the cattle of Hymir grazing in the high pasture. The cattle were enormous.
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Each one as big as a small house. Their hides were dark and shaggy.
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Their breath rose in white clouds in the cold morning air.
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They moved slowly across the snow, pulling at the brittle grass underneath.
29:06
Þórr's eye fell on one of them. The largest. The black ox at the head of the herd.
29:13
Its horns were nearly as tall as Þórr himself. Its eyes were dark and patient.
29:19
The Hymiskviða gives this ox a name — Himinhrjóðr, the heaven-tearer, the
29:25
heaven-render.
29:26
The name had come, the old north said, from some ancient story about the ox having
29:33
torn at the sky itself with its horns in some quarrel of the giants.
29:38
The name had stayed with this particular line of cattle since.
29:44
Þórr walked into the pasture. The other cattle moved away from him.
29:49
The black ox Himinhrjóðr — perhaps because of his name, perhaps because of his
29:56
nature — did not move.
29:57
He looked at the small red-bearded figure walking toward him across the snow.
30:04
He lowered his head, slightly. He did not run. Þórr came to him.
30:09
He put one hand on the ox's neck.
30:12
And then — quietly, without ceremony — Þórr broke the ox's neck.
30:17
The Hymiskviða does not give us drama here.
30:20
The poem says only that Þórr took the ox down. The ox did not fight him.
30:26
The ox did not have time to. Þórr was Þórr. The ox was an ox. The thing was done.
30:33
Then Þórr, with both hands, tore the ox's head from its body.
30:38
He carried the head back toward the hall. A whole ox-head.
30:43
Black-furred, enormous, the horns curving up above Þórr's shoulders as he walked.
30:49
Blood ran down his arms.
30:51
His red beard, in the morning light, was the same colour as the blood.
30:57
He carried the head as easily as a man might carry a heavy basket. He did not hurry.
31:04
He walked steadily back across the long snow-field toward Hymir's hall.
31:10
Hymir was just stepping out the door as Þórr arrived.
31:14
The giant stopped in his tracks. He looked at Þórr.
31:18
He looked at the head of his finest ox, dangling from Þórr's hand, the eyes still
31:25
slightly open, the tongue lolling. The giant said nothing.
31:30
The poem records no words from him.
31:33
The poem says only that Hymir's face — old, cold, accustomed to giant-country anger
31:40
— Hymir's face went very still.
31:42
The way a man's face goes still when he has seen, in a moment, more than he had
31:49
bargained for in the day ahead of him. Þórr lifted the head a little.
31:54
Þórr said: bait. Hymir looked at him. Hymir said, finally: get in the boat.
32:00
And the two of them walked down to the cold sea, where Hymir's small fishing-boat
32:07
was pulled up on the black rocks. Týr came down behind them.
32:12
The poem does not tell us whether Týr came on the boat or stayed on the shore.
32:18
Most of the surviving versions imply he stayed. The boat, after all, was small.
32:25
Two passengers — a god and a giant — was already a great deal of weight.
32:31
Three would have been more than the small craft could bear.
32:36
Þórr put the ox-head in the bottom of the boat. He picked up the oars.
32:41
Hymir sat in the back, where the fishing was done.
32:45
He had two long lines, two great iron hooks.
32:49
He had — somewhere out in the deep beyond the rocks — a place he liked to fish, a
32:56
shallow bank where the flat-fish came up at certain tides. He pointed to it.
33:02
Þórr pulled at the oars. The boat shot away from the shore.
33:07
Týr stood on the black rocks and watched them go.
33:11
The cold wind blew his cloak straight out behind him.
33:15
The grey sea heaved under the small dark shape of the boat. Þórr rowed.
33:21
Hymir sat in the back. The boat got smaller. The wind got colder.
33:26
Týr stood there for a long time, watching them, until the boat was a black speck on
33:33
the water, and then until even the speck was gone, and then he stood for a while
33:40
longer just looking at the place where the speck had been.
33:45
He did not know — none of them knew, that morning — what they were going to find
33:51
out there.
33:52
None of them knew, as the boat pulled out of sight, that this was the moment the
33:59
world began its slow tilt toward Ragnarǫk.
34:02
They knew only that a god and a giant had gone out fishing, and that the cold sea
34:09
had taken them, and that the small boat was now somewhere out in water no one in
34:15
this country knew. Týr turned, eventually, and walked back up to Hymir's hall.
34:22
He sat at the long stone table, with his grandmother of nine hundred heads watching
34:28
him from the back of the room, and his mother working at the hearth, and the cold
34:35
wind rattling the door, and he waited for his friend to come back.
34:41
Chapter Seven. The Rowing Out. Þórr rowed.
34:44
The Hymiskviða gives this part of the story in the way the old north's poets did
34:50
their best work — quietly, with a small accumulation of detail, letting the
34:56
listener feel the weight of what was happening rather than telling them.
35:01
Hymir, in the back of the boat, was the giant who had fished these waters since the
35:07
world was young. He knew every bank. He knew every depth.
35:12
He knew where the flat-fish came up at certain tides, where the cod gathered in the
35:18
cool channels, where the herring ran in their long silver schools.
35:23
He pointed past Þórr's shoulder, toward a place perhaps a half-mile from the shore,
35:29
where the cliffs of the giant-country formed a low ledge under the water.
35:35
He said: there. The flat-fish come there. We will fish there.
35:40
Þórr did not stop rowing. Þórr passed the half-mile mark. The cliffs slipped behind.
35:46
The water under the boat got darker.
35:49
The bottom — which a fisherman could often, in shallower water, see as a green
35:55
shimmer below the keel — disappeared. The bottom was now too far down to see.
36:01
Hymir said: we have gone far enough. Þórr kept rowing.
36:05
The shore behind them grew smaller.
36:07
The cliffs of Hymir's country became a thin grey line on the horizon.
36:13
The sea around the boat became a great empty grey-blue plate of water, with no land
36:19
visible in any direction except behind them, and even behind them, the land was
36:25
thinning out. Hymir said: god of Asgard. We have gone too far. Þórr did not answer.
36:31
Þórr rowed. The strokes of his oars were not human strokes.
36:36
The poem does not pretend they were. Þórr was the strongest of the gods.
36:41
When he pulled at the oars, the small boat did not move the way a small boat
36:47
usually moves on a calm sea. The small boat shot forward.
36:52
The water rolled away from the bow in two long curls.
36:56
The wake stretched behind them in a straight white line as long as a king's hall.
37:02
With every stroke of Þórr's oars the boat leapt forward another length of itself,
37:08
and another, and another, and the shore behind them disappeared into the haze, and
37:14
the great grey plate of the sea opened around them.
37:18
The water under the boat changed.
37:21
Near the shore, when they had pushed off, the water had been green-grey, with the
37:27
green of the kelp-beds visible far below. Then it had darkened.
37:32
Then it had become the colour of slate.
37:35
Then, as they kept going, it had darkened again — to the colour of wet iron, to the
37:41
colour of old armour, to the colour of stone left out in winter rain.
37:46
And now, somewhere out under them, the water was a colour the old north did not
37:52
have a name for. A blue so dark it was almost black.
37:56
A blue that the eye could not look at for very long without feeling that something
38:02
was being held below it, very still, and very large.
38:06
The sea-birds that had followed them out from the shore — the gulls, the
38:12
kittiwakes, the small white birds of the coast — had thinned out.
38:17
Then they had stopped.
38:19
The last gull turned back somewhere over the half-mile mark and beat its way back
38:25
toward the safe shallows. There were no birds out here.
38:29
There were no birds, because there were no small fish here for the birds to eat.
38:35
There were no small fish here, because no small fish came this far out.
38:40
Only the great things of the deep came out this far.
38:44
And the great things of the deep did not need air.
38:48
They did not need to come to the surface.
38:51
They could stay down, far down, in the long blue dark, and that is where they
38:57
stayed. Þórr rowed. Hymir watched the water.
39:01
The Hymiskviða does not give us the giant's thoughts here, but the poem implies
39:07
them by the way his hands moved.
39:09
Hymir, sitting in the stern, had his hands clasped together in his lap.
39:15
He kept tightening his grip on one with the other.
39:18
The old joint of his right thumb cracked.
39:21
The cracking was the only sound in the boat besides the small clean noise of Þórr's
39:28
oars going in and out of the water and the long slow breathing of the sea.
39:33
Hymir said: stop. Þórr stopped. He let the oars rest on the gunwales.
39:39
The boat drifted in the long slow swell.
39:42
The two of them — the god in the bow, the giant in the stern, the small dark wooden
39:48
shape of the boat between them — sat in the middle of a sea no one in the worlds
39:54
had ever seen this far out. The water around them was the colour of old iron.
40:00
The sky above them was the colour of a wet stone. There was no horizon.
40:05
There was no land.
40:07
There was only the long grey breathing of the cold sea, and the small wooden boat,
40:13
and the two figures in it, and the silence.
40:16
Hymir said, very quietly: this is the Serpent's water. Þórr said: I know.
40:22
Hymir said: turn the boat. Now. Þórr did not turn the boat.
40:26
Þórr looked over the side, down into the dark. He could not see the bottom.
40:32
The bottom was a hundred fathoms below them, maybe a thousand, maybe more.
40:38
There was no measuring it. The light only went down so far.
40:42
After the light stopped, there was only the cold and the dark and whatever lived in
40:49
it. Þórr said: bait the hooks. Hymir, after a long moment, did.
40:54
Chapter Eight. The Whales. The giant fished first.
40:57
Hymir, in the stern, baited his two great hooks with whatever giants use for bait —
41:04
the poem does not tell us exactly, but the implication is something not unlike what
41:10
a giant would always carry on a fishing trip: long strips of dried fish, perhaps,
41:16
or whole small fish kept in a salt-barrel for just this purpose.
41:21
He cast the lines over the side. The hooks sank away into the dark.
41:27
For a long time, there was nothing. The boat drifted. Hymir watched the lines.
41:33
The poem does not give us his thoughts.
41:36
The poem gives us only that he sat in the stern, his old white beard catching the
41:42
salt-mist, his eyes fixed on the two lines as they hung down into the water, and
41:48
that he waited. Then a tug. Then another. Hymir's hands tightened on the lines.
41:54
He began to pull.
41:55
The poem tells us — and this is one of the small jewels of the Hymiskviða, one of
42:02
the moments the old north loved — that Hymir pulled up, in quick succession, two
42:08
whales. Two of them. From a single trip out to sea. From two casts of his line.
42:14
Whales.
42:14
Not the kind of whale the men of Midgard could ever have caught from a small boat —
42:21
these were not the great singing leviathans of the deep ocean, the kind the men of
42:27
Norway hunted in their long autumn hunts.
42:30
These were smaller whales — porpoises, perhaps, or pilot whales, the kind that
42:36
sometimes came close to a fishing boat on a calm sea. But two of them. Two.
42:42
From a single sitting.
42:44
Hymir hauled them, one after another, into the bottom of the boat.
42:49
The bottom of the boat became a sliding pile of grey-blue flesh and dark eyes and
42:55
small fins. The whales' breath had stopped.
42:58
Their bodies were warm against the cold wooden boards.
43:03
Hymir looked at Þórr, finally, with something like satisfaction in his old eyes.
43:09
He said: this is fishing. We can go home now. Þórr looked at the two whales.
43:15
Þórr looked at the giant. Þórr said: no.
43:18
He picked up the ox-head — Himinhrjóðr's great black head, with the horns still
43:24
curving up, the eyes now sunk and grey — and he threaded it onto his own great iron
43:30
hook. The hook was thicker around than a child's wrist.
43:34
The ox-head, on the hook, looked very small.
43:38
He took up the line — a line as thick as a ship's rope, twisted from the hair of
43:44
many cows — and he stood up in the bow of the small boat, with the boat rocking
43:50
under him, and he swung the baited ox-head once in the air, and twice in the air,
43:56
and then he let it go. The ox-head sailed out into the grey distance.
44:02
It struck the water with a sound like a stone falling into a deep well.
44:07
The line ran out. It ran out for a long time.
44:11
The line was almost a quarter of a mile long.
44:14
The whole thing went out of the boat, over the gunwale, down into the dark.
44:20
It paid out at speed. The wooden cleats it ran past whistled with the friction.
44:26
The line went on running for so long that even Hymir, in the stern, sat up and
44:32
watched it with attention. Then it stopped. The hook had reached the deep.
44:38
The ox-head was sitting on the dark sea-bed somewhere far, far below them, at a
44:44
depth no human-made line had ever reached. It was lying on whatever it was lying on.
44:50
The sand of the deep. The mud of the deep.
44:53
Or — perhaps — the back of the thing the deep belonged to.
44:58
Þórr held the line in his right hand. He sat down in the bow. He waited.
45:04
Chapter Nine. The Pull. Nothing happened. For a long time. The boat rocked.
45:10
The grey sea breathed. The cold wind pulled at Þórr's beard.
45:15
Hymir, in the stern, watched the god in the bow.
45:18
The god in the bow watched the line.
45:21
The line led down out of the boat, into the water, into the dark.
45:27
There was no movement on it. Þórr did not move.
45:31
The Hymiskviða is quiet about how long this took.
45:35
The poem gives us, here, a single pause. The poem says only: he waited.
45:40
The skaldic art knew that waiting was a thing you did not need to belabor.
45:46
The listener felt the wait without being told to.
45:50
But we, dear listener, can imagine it.
45:54
We can imagine Þórr sitting very still in the bow of the small boat, with the line
46:00
in his right hand and the oars resting on the gunwales.
46:05
We can imagine the long swell of the sea raising the boat and lowering the boat,
46:11
raising it and lowering it, slowly, in a rhythm older than the world.
46:17
We can imagine the small sound of the water against the planks — the soft slap,
46:23
slap, slap of the cold sea against the small wooden craft.
46:28
We can imagine the cold air, moving slowly past their faces, carrying the smell of
46:35
salt and of distance.
46:37
We can imagine Hymir, in the stern, breathing through his nose, his hands still
46:43
clasped, his old eyes watching the line where it disappeared into the dark.
46:49
And we can imagine that somewhere far below the boat — somewhere a long, long way
46:56
down, in water cold enough to slow even the blood of a thing as ancient as the
47:02
Serpent — there was, in that moment, a stirring.
47:06
A small movement of an old enormous body that had been still for a long time.
47:12
A turning of an ancient head.
47:15
A noticing of something on the dark floor of the deep that had not been there
47:21
before. A small dark shape. Round. Black. With a piece of iron through it.
47:27
The Serpent did not, the old north imagined, recognize the bait at first.
47:33
The Serpent did not know what an ox-head was.
47:37
The Serpent did not understand the difference between an offering and a trick.
47:43
The Serpent knew only that something had appeared on the floor of its deep place,
47:50
something with the smell of meat and the warmth of blood-and-bone in it, and that
47:57
it was small, and that it could be tasted. The Serpent moved.
48:02
In the dark of the deep sea, the great body of Jǫrmungandr began, slowly, to gather
48:08
itself. The vast coils that wrapped the world began to shift.
48:13
The Serpent that bit its own tail at the eastern horizon let go of its tail, for
48:20
one moment, for the first time in many ages, and turned its head toward the small
48:26
dark shape that had appeared on the sand. The Serpent opened its mouth.
48:32
And then — without warning, without preamble — the line moved. Not a small tug.
48:39
Not the gentle pulse of a small fish nosing a hook.
48:43
The line moved as if it had been seized.
48:46
As if some thing far below them had taken the bait into its mouth and turned and
48:53
begun to swim. The line, in Þórr's right hand, jumped. Then it ran.
48:58
The remaining slack jumped out of the boat in a single instant, snapping taut over
49:05
the gunwale. The cleats whistled again.
49:08
The boat lurched forward — not a small lurch, the lurch of a small craft being
49:15
pulled by a thing larger than it. Hymir, in the stern, said: gods.
49:20
Þórr did not say anything.
49:22
Þórr braced his feet against the bottom of the small boat.
49:27
He set his hand on the line. He began to pull.
49:31
This is the moment the old north remembered.
49:34
This is the moment the picture-stones at Altuna and at Ardre and on the Gosforth
49:41
Cross all preserved, in different ways, with the same image — the god of the gods,
49:47
in a small boat, his feet braced, hauling on a line, with the great head of the
49:54
Serpent rising in the dark water below him. Þórr pulled. The line came up.
50:00
The thing on the other end of the line resisted. It was not a small resistance.
50:06
It was the resistance of the entire weight of the sea.
50:11
Þórr's arms — which had lifted hammers, which had broken mountains, which had
50:17
thrown jǫtnar into the sky — Þórr's arms strained against the line.
50:23
The cords of his neck stood out. His face went dark with the effort.
50:28
He was not, the poem implies, struggling because he was weak.
50:33
He was struggling because the thing on the other end of the line was — for the
50:40
first time in his life — a thing that did not want to come up.
50:45
A thing that was pulling back.
50:47
A thing that, if it had wanted to, could have pulled Þórr straight out of the boat
50:54
and down into the sea. But Þórr was Þórr. He braced harder.
50:59
And as he braced, the Hymiskviða tells us — and the Húsdrápa tells us, in its
51:05
older, more dignified way — and Snorri in Gylfaginning ch. 48 tells us, in the same
51:12
language — Þórr's feet went through the bottom of the boat. Through the planks.
51:18
Through the wooden floor of the small craft.
51:22
The pressure of Þórr's bracing pushed his feet down so hard that the cedar planks
51:28
of the bottom of the boat split, and Þórr's feet went through, and his bare feet,
51:35
in their leather sandals, were now planted not on the boat's bottom but on the very
51:42
sea-bed below the boat. The cold sea was rushing up around his ankles.
51:48
The small boat was — and the poem does not bother to say it, because the listener
51:54
of the old north would have understood — the small boat was now held above the
52:01
water only by Þórr's own braced legs and the careful balance of his weight.
52:07
He was, in effect, standing on the floor of the sea.
52:11
He was, in effect, pulling on a line.
52:14
Hymir, in the stern, watched this with eyes that the poet of the Hymiskviða
52:20
specifically described — using the old Norse word for the fear of a man who has
52:27
seen something he should never have seen. Þórr pulled the line. The line came up.
52:33
And then, in the great grey plate of the sea around the boat, the water began to
52:40
lift. Not in a wave. In a slow upward swell.
52:43
As if something enormous, far below, were rising toward the surface — pushing the
52:50
whole weight of the sea upward as it rose. The water lifted. And then it broke.
52:57
Chapter Ten. The Eye. This is the heart of the story.
53:01
This is the moment the old north loved most about Þórr — more than the killing of
53:07
any other jǫtunn, more than the recovery of Mjǫllnir from the giant Þrymr, more
53:14
than any of his other adventures.
53:16
This is the moment the Húsdrápa preserved as worthy of being carved into the wooden
53:23
panels of a wedding-hall in Iceland in the late tenth century, long before any of
53:29
these tales were written down.
53:32
This is the moment Snorri Sturluson, two hundred years later, put at the centre of
53:38
his Prose Edda chapter on Þórr's labours.
53:42
This is the moment that exists, in its long silence, in the picture-stones of
53:48
Sweden and Gotland and the Isle of Man.
53:51
This is the moment the old north could not let go of. The Serpent rose.
53:57
Out of the sea, in front of Þórr's small boat, the great head of Jǫrmungandr lifted
54:03
itself above the water. It was vast.
54:06
The old north was very careful, in its descriptions, about not giving us a number.
54:13
The Serpent's head was — bigger than the boat. Bigger than Hymir's hall.
54:19
Bigger, perhaps, than any single thing the gods had ever stood before.
54:24
Its scales were the colour of cold steel.
54:28
Its eyes were old — older than the world, older than the gods.
54:33
They had been open since Óðinn had thrown the Serpent into the sea on the first day
54:39
of creation, and they had been open every day since.
54:43
The mouth of the Serpent had closed on Þórr's hook.
54:47
The ox-head of Himinhrjóðr was caught inside the corner of that mouth, the iron
54:54
hook hooked through the inside of the Serpent's lip. The Serpent was caught.
55:00
Þórr — standing in the boat with his feet through the bottom and his legs braced
55:06
against the sea-floor and his hands holding the line — Þórr looked up at the great
55:13
head. The Serpent looked down at him.
55:16
We do not know, the old north said, what the Serpent saw in that first moment.
55:22
The Serpent had never, before this, looked at a god.
55:26
The Serpent had been at the bottom of the deep since Óðinn had thrown it there.
55:33
It had grown there, slowly, generation by generation.
55:37
It had wrapped itself around the lands of Midgard, biting its own tail.
55:43
It had felt the world above it — the stamping of horses, the building of halls, the
55:49
rising and falling of small wars. But it had not seen these things.
55:55
The Serpent had not, until this moment, opened its eye and looked at a god.
56:01
Now it did.
56:02
The eye was — the old north said, in many different ways across many different
56:08
sources — green. Cold green.
56:10
The green of ice that has been under the sea for a long time.
56:15
The green of the deep aurora that hangs above the northern country in winter.
56:21
The green of certain old stones that have been polished by the long working of
56:27
water. The pupil of the eye was vertical. Like a snake's pupil.
56:33
Long and dark and very still.
56:35
And in that pupil — for the small moment they were holding each other — Þórr saw,
56:41
perhaps, the long dark of every place the Serpent had ever been.
56:46
The cold lightless trench at the bottom of the encircling sea.
56:51
The great slow turnings of the Serpent's body around the lands of men.
56:57
The long old waiting of an enormous mind that had nothing to do but wait.
57:03
Þórr saw, perhaps, his own future.
57:06
The day at the end of the world when this eye would be the last thing he would ever
57:12
see. And the Serpent saw, perhaps, what Þórr was. A small red-bearded god in a boat.
57:19
A hammer in his hand.
57:21
The thing that was, in the very far distance, going to kill it.
57:26
The moment, in the actual time of the world, did not last long. The eye opens.
57:32
The eye closes. The water rolls. The boat rocks.
57:36
The line trembles in the god's hand.
57:39
By any honest measurement of time, the looking lasted only as long as it takes a
57:45
person to draw one slow breath. Perhaps two. Perhaps three.
57:50
The Hymiskviða does not measure it. The Gylfaginning does not measure it.
57:56
The Húsdrápa does not measure it.
57:59
The picture-stones at Altuna and Ardre and the Gosforth Cross do not measure it
58:05
either — they freeze it, the way a piece of carved stone is meant to freeze a thing.
58:12
But the moment, in the way the old north measured the things that mattered, was
58:18
longer than that.
58:19
The moment, in the way the old north measured these things, was long enough to
58:26
contain a kind of recognition that does not happen in human time.
58:31
The Serpent had been alive since the first morning.
58:35
The Serpent had been at the bottom of the encircling sea for as long as there had
58:41
been a sea.
58:42
And in all of that time — in the long deep dark of the bottom of the world — the
58:49
Serpent had never, until this moment, looked into the face of the being who was
58:55
going to kill it. Now it had.
58:57
And Þórr — who had killed many giants, who had broken many of the great old enemies
59:04
of the gods, who had taken Mjǫllnir in his hand more times than even he could
59:10
remember — Þórr had never, until this moment, looked into the face of the being who
59:17
was going to kill him. Now he had.
59:20
Each of them, for the small space of three breaths, knew the face of the other.
59:26
The Serpent learned what Þórr looked like at close range — the red beard, the
59:32
strong square jaw, the dark eyes set deep under the heavy brow.
59:37
The shape of the man who would, at the end of the world, swing the hammer that
59:43
would end the Serpent's life. The Serpent looked at this man as if to memorize him.
59:50
As if the Serpent, sinking back into its deep place after this was done, would
59:56
carry the image of Þórr down with it, and would keep it for the long thousand years
1:00:03
between this looking and the next looking, and would hold it ready for the day the
1:00:10
two of them would meet again. And Þórr looked at the Serpent the same way.
1:00:16
He looked at the great cold green eye.
1:00:19
He looked at the scales the colour of old armour.
1:00:23
He looked at the long terrible body that he could see, in pieces, where the
1:00:29
Serpent's coils broke the surface of the water in different places around the boat.
1:00:35
He looked at the thing that was — in the very far distance of the cosmos, at the
1:00:42
end of all of time — going to spit its venom across half the sky and kill him.
1:00:48
He looked at it without fear. The old north was very careful to insist on this.
1:00:54
The old north did not give us a Þórr who was afraid in this moment.
1:01:00
The Hymiskviða does not give us a Þórr who flinched.
1:01:04
The Gylfaginning does not give us a Þórr who hesitated.
1:01:08
The picture-stones do not show a Þórr who looks worried.
1:01:13
The old north gave us a Þórr who looked at the Serpent the way a man looks at a
1:01:19
thing he has been waiting to meet for a long time. With curiosity. With patience.
1:01:26
With the small steadiness of a being who knew what was coming and was, in some
1:01:32
quiet way, glad to have seen it once before the end.
1:01:36
The old north was very careful, here, with what it said.
1:01:41
The poem does not tell us what the Serpent was thinking.
1:01:45
The poem does not tell us what Þórr was thinking.
1:01:49
The poem tells us only that the two of them looked at each other.
1:01:54
For one long moment, in the middle of the grey sea, at the edge of the world, the
1:02:01
great green eye of the Serpent and the small dark eyes of the god rested on each
1:02:07
other. They had been waiting for this meeting since the first day of the world.
1:02:14
They had known, both of them, that it was coming.
1:02:17
They had known it in the way the very old things know what is going to happen — not
1:02:24
as a thought, not as a plan, but as a certainty in the bones.
1:02:29
They were, the two of them, fated to fight each other at the end of all things.
1:02:35
They had been fated to it since they were both made. The Vǫluspá knew this.
1:02:41
The skalds knew this. The picture-stones knew this.
1:02:45
But the end of all things was not yet.
1:02:49
The end of all things was, the old north believed, still many slow generations away.
1:02:55
Naglfar, the ship made of the fingernails of dead men, was still being built
1:03:01
quietly by the slow work of the unkempt dead. The world was still turning.
1:03:07
The cloth of fate, woven by the three sisters at the foot of Yggdrasil, was still
1:03:14
being woven. It was not yet time.
1:03:16
But it was, the Serpent and the god both understood — looking at each other across
1:03:23
the cold grey water — it was, in some way, time enough to know each other's faces.
1:03:30
To see, once, the shape of what was coming.
1:03:33
To learn the eye that, at the end of all things, would be the last eye each of them
1:03:40
would see. Þórr did not strike yet. The Serpent did not pull yet.
1:03:45
The two of them — the god and the worm — held each other in their gaze for the
1:03:51
small space of time that, in the old north's memory, was the only space of time in
1:03:58
all the long histories of the gods when these two old enemies actually saw each
1:04:04
other clearly.
1:04:05
Then Þórr — slowly, carefully, deliberately — reached for the hammer at his belt.
1:04:12
He drew Mjǫllnir. He raised it. He brought it back.
1:04:16
He was about to bring it down on the head of the Serpent and end, three thousand
1:04:22
years before it was supposed to end, the slow countdown of the world toward
1:04:28
Ragnarǫk.
1:04:29
And in the stern of the boat — the part of this story the old north loved most, the
1:04:36
part that gave Hymir his place in the long memory of the north — in the stern of
1:04:42
the boat, Hymir the giant, who had brought the god out here, who had watched all of
1:04:49
this happen, who had spent his whole long life on the cold sea and knew what the
1:04:55
Serpent was — Hymir reached for the small knife at his belt. And cut the line.
1:05:02
Chapter Eleven. The Cut. The line went slack. Þórr's hammer was already coming down.
1:05:08
The Hymiskviða gives us this part of the story in a strange, almost stuttering
1:05:14
rhythm — as if the poet himself, in the long act of telling, could not quite decide
1:05:21
what to put first. The hammer falling. The line going slack.
1:05:25
The Serpent falling away. The god's roar.
1:05:29
What the poem agrees on, in every surviving version, is this: The line was cut.
1:05:35
The Serpent, freed from the hook, began to fall away from the surface of the sea,
1:05:41
back into the deep. Slowly, at first. The great head sinking. The neck following.
1:05:47
The vast body, somewhere far down, beginning to gather itself for the descent.
1:05:54
Þórr's hammer reached the place where the Serpent's head had been.
1:05:59
In Hymiskviða stanza twenty-three, the poet says: the hammer struck.
1:06:04
The hammer caught the Serpent on the side of the head as it sank.
1:06:09
The blow was so strong that the rocks of the eastern shore — far, far behind them,
1:06:16
miles back at the edge of Hymir's country — the rocks were said to have cracked.
1:06:22
In Gylfaginning chapter forty-eight, Snorri Sturluson is more careful.
1:06:27
Snorri says: many men say Þórr struck the head off the Serpent there in the deep.
1:06:34
But it is more true to tell, Snorri says, that the Serpent lives still, and lies in
1:06:40
the encircling sea.
1:06:42
The two versions do not, in the long view, contradict each other.
1:06:47
The Hymiskviða tells us what Þórr's hammer did to a thing that the Serpent could
1:06:53
put on as a face and then take off, the way the old north imagined the great
1:06:59
immortal beings could do.
1:07:01
The Gylfaginning tells us what the Serpent really was, underneath. Þórr struck.
1:07:07
Þórr struck hard enough to crack the rocks of the coast.
1:07:11
But the Serpent — because the Serpent was the Serpent — fell back into its deep
1:07:18
place and went on living, the way the Serpent had lived since before the gods were
1:07:24
named. The hook was lost. The bait was lost. The line was lost.
1:07:29
The Serpent was gone.
1:07:31
Þórr stood in the boat with his feet through the bottom and his hammer in his hand
1:07:37
and the foam of the broken sea still spraying around him, and he turned, slowly,
1:07:43
and looked at Hymir.
1:07:45
Hymir was sitting in the stern of the boat with the small knife still in his hand.
1:07:51
The two of them looked at each other.
1:07:54
Þórr — the Hymiskviða tells us, very quietly — Þórr did not say anything.
1:08:00
Þórr reached across the small boat with his left hand, and he took Hymir by the
1:08:06
front of his frozen white beard, and he lifted Hymir off the bench, and he held the
1:08:13
giant in the air for one moment over the side of the boat — and then he opened his
1:08:19
hand. Hymir went into the cold sea. He came up sputtering. He swam.
1:08:24
He swam for the shore, the long miles of the shore, with his great white beard
1:08:30
streaming behind him in the cold water, with his old eyes squinting against the
1:08:37
salt, with his ancient giant's body labouring against the cold of the sea he had
1:08:43
fished all his life. Þórr, in the boat, sat down. He took the oars again.
1:08:49
He looked once more at the place where the Serpent had been.
1:08:53
The water there was still rolling — the great swell of the Serpent's descent was
1:08:59
still settling itself.
1:09:01
The two whales Hymir had caught, slid into the bottom of the boat, were rolling
1:09:07
among Þórr's feet.
1:09:09
The boat, despite the holes in its bottom, was somehow staying afloat.
1:09:14
The poem does not explain why. The old north did not always explain. Þórr rowed.
1:09:21
He rowed back to Hymir's country.
1:09:23
He overtook Hymir in the water — the giant swimming, the god in the boat — and he
1:09:29
passed him without looking down. He pulled the small boat up onto the black rocks.
1:09:36
He stepped out.
1:09:37
He picked up the two whales — each one as long as Þórr was tall — and he carried
1:09:43
them, one under each arm, up the long path toward Hymir's hall. Týr was at the door.
1:09:50
Týr looked at his friend. Týr said: what happened. Þórr said: I had him.
1:09:56
Your father cut the line. Týr said: oh. Týr said: did you kill him.
1:10:01
Þórr said: not all of him.
1:10:03
The two of them stood together at the door of the giant's hall, with the two dead
1:10:09
whales at Þórr's feet, and the cold wind blowing past them, and the small distant
1:10:15
shape of Hymir still swimming for shore far out on the grey sea behind them.
1:10:21
The cauldron, the poem reminds us — almost as an afterthought, almost embarrassed
1:10:28
at having to remember it — the cauldron was still inside.
1:10:32
The thing they had come for. The thing this whole journey had been about.
1:10:38
The mile-deep brewing-vat that Ægir needed to make ale for the gods.
1:10:43
Þórr and Týr went inside the hall.
1:10:46
The grandmother of nine hundred heads was still watching from the back.
1:10:52
Týr's mother was at the hearth. She looked up at her son. She looked at Þórr.
1:10:58
She looked at the white salt drying in Þórr's beard.
1:11:02
She had heard, the poem implies, what had happened on the water.
1:11:07
She had heard the crack of the eastern shore. She had felt the boat coming back.
1:11:13
She said, very quietly: he will be angry when he gets home.
1:11:17
Þórr said: we will be gone by then.
1:11:20
He walked to the great pillar at the back of the hall, where the largest cauldron
1:11:27
in the worlds had hung since before the giant himself was a child. He lifted it.
1:11:33
He set it on his head — upside-down, the way men of the old north carried great
1:11:39
vessels — and the rim of it came down over his shoulders and rested there, and the
1:11:45
depth of it went up into the air above him like a great metal tower. He turned.
1:11:52
He walked to the door of the hall. Týr walked beside him.
1:11:56
Týr's mother watched them go.
1:11:58
The grandmother of nine hundred heads, in the back of the hall, watched them too.
1:12:05
None of her nine hundred faces moved.
1:12:08
The poem does not tell us whether she might, at the end, have wished her grandson
1:12:14
well. The poem does not tell us much about her at all.
1:12:18
It only tells us that she watched them go, and that they did not look back, and
1:12:24
that the great hall of Hymir was the last thing they saw of the eastern country
1:12:31
before the snow closed in behind them and they were on the long road home.
1:12:36
Hymir, the Hymiskviða tells us, came home to a hall with no cauldron and no Þórr
1:12:43
and no Týr.
1:12:43
He stood in his empty hall for a long moment, the cold sea-water still dripping
1:12:50
from his white beard, his old eyes moving from the broken hook on the pillar to the
1:12:56
empty space where the largest cauldron in the worlds had hung since before he was a
1:13:03
child, to the still-warm hearth where his wife had cooked the three oxen the night
1:13:09
before. He understood, slowly, what had happened.
1:13:13
He understood what the eating of the two oxen had been.
1:13:17
He understood what the rowing out had been.
1:13:21
He understood that the red-bearded god of Asgard had not, in any of the moments of
1:13:27
this whole long visit, been there for fishing. Hymir went to the door of his hall.
1:13:33
He called.
1:13:34
The Hymiskviða tells us he raised a small army of his giant-kin — the cousins and
1:13:41
brothers and grown sons of the eastern country, the jǫtnar who lived in the high
1:13:47
cold valleys around Hymir's hall — and he led them in pursuit.
1:13:52
They came down out of the mountains in a long ragged line.
1:13:56
Each one carried whatever weapon he had to hand. Some of them carried iron clubs.
1:14:03
Some of them carried axes.
1:14:05
Some of them carried only their own enormous hands, which for a giant of the
1:14:10
eastern country are weapon enough.
1:14:13
Þórr, on the long road west with the cauldron on his head and Týr at his side,
1:14:19
heard them coming. He set down the cauldron. He turned. He took up Mjǫllnir.
1:14:25
The Hymiskviða does this part of the story briefly — not, perhaps, because the
1:14:31
killings did not matter to the poet, but because the poet knew the listener had
1:14:38
already had the central scene. The hammer falling on the Serpent.
1:14:43
The eye looking up at the god. The line being cut. Those were the moments.
1:14:48
The rest was the long walk home with a borrowed cauldron and, after the walk had
1:14:55
been briefly interrupted, a hammer red with new blood. The pursuit was a coda.
1:15:01
The killings were a postscript.
1:15:03
They happened — Þórr killed every one of the giants who came against him on that
1:15:09
road — but they happened the way the closing of a feast happens, when the wine has
1:15:16
been poured and the great speeches have been given and what is left is simply the
1:15:22
small clearing of the table.
1:15:24
When it was over, Þórr lifted the cauldron back onto his head and Týr walked beside
1:15:31
him and the two of them went on west. They walked through the long grey afternoon.
1:15:37
They walked through the cold evening. They walked through the night.
1:15:43
They came at last to Ægir's hall in the dim before dawn, with the cauldron still on
1:15:49
Þórr's head, with the snow of the eastern country still in their cloaks, with the
1:15:55
salt of the cold sea still drying in Þórr's beard.
1:15:59
Þórr set the cauldron down at the door of the hall. Ægir came out to meet them.
1:16:06
The sea-giant — calm, old, white-haired, glad — looked at the great vessel his hall
1:16:12
would now be able to brew in, and he looked at the two gods who had brought it to
1:16:18
him, and he understood, without their having to tell him, that the journey had not
1:16:25
been only a journey for a cauldron. He looked at Þórr.
1:16:29
He looked at the small distance that was now in Þórr's eyes that had not been there
1:16:36
when Þórr had left.
1:16:37
He understood that Þórr had been somewhere a god does not often go.
1:16:42
That Þórr had seen something that not many beings in the worlds had seen.
1:16:48
Ægir said: come in. You will tell me what you saw. And Ægir brewed.
1:16:53
And the gods drank.
1:16:55
And the story of the fishing trip, the Hymiskviða tells us, became one of the
1:17:01
stories the gods of Asgard told each other in their cups for a very long time
1:17:07
afterward. The great head rising. The eye looking up at the god. The line being cut.
1:17:13
The small mercy of an old giant in the back of a boat, who at the last moment lost
1:17:20
his nerve and saved the world from ending three thousand years too early.
1:17:26
Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Wolf at the Edge of Time.
1:17:30
The story we told you tonight is one of the simplest in the old north.
1:17:36
A god went fishing. A giant went with him. A serpent rose to the bait.
1:17:41
The line was cut. The serpent fell back into the sea. That is all.
1:17:47
There is no death in the central scene. There is no marriage. There is no betrayal.
1:17:53
There is no transformation.
1:17:55
There is only a boat, and a hook, and the great head of an old enemy rising in
1:18:01
front of the god who would, at the end of all things, be the one to kill him.
1:18:08
But the old north loved this story.
1:18:10
The old north loved it more than it loved most of the other Þórr stories.
1:18:16
It carved it into wedding-halls. It painted it on picture-stones.
1:18:21
It told it in long winter halls and short summer nights, in Iceland and Norway and
1:18:28
Sweden and the Isle of Man.
1:18:30
The poet of the Hymiskviða gave it thirty-nine careful stanzas.
1:18:35
Snorri Sturluson gave it a full chapter.
1:18:38
The Húsdrápa, the older skaldic poem, lingered over it.
1:18:42
The old north loved this story because of what almost happened.
1:18:47
Because, for one moment, in the boat on the grey sea, the god of the gods had the
1:18:54
Serpent on the line. Had Mjǫllnir in his hand.
1:18:57
Had the bracing of his own feet against the sea-floor. Could have struck.
1:19:03
Could have ended, three thousand years before it was supposed to end, the slow
1:19:09
countdown of the world toward Ragnarǫk. And was prevented. By a giant.
1:19:15
By an old giant, sitting in the back of a boat, who had brought the god out here in
1:19:21
the first place and watched the whole thing happen and at the very last moment lost
1:19:28
his nerve. Hymir was not, in the end, a great villain.
1:19:32
Hymir was a hunter at the edge of the world, who had spent his life respecting the
1:19:39
Serpent's water and not going into it, and who, when the red-bearded god of Asgard
1:19:45
had finally pulled the Serpent up out of its deep place, had done what any creature
1:19:52
near the bottom of the food-chain of the worlds will do when faced with a thing
1:19:58
that big — he had cut the line. The Serpent went back into its deep place.
1:20:04
The Serpent is still there.
1:20:06
The Vǫluspá tells us, in its long Ragnarǫk vision, what will happen the day the
1:20:12
Serpent comes out for the last time.
1:20:15
The Vǫluspá tells us that on the day Ragnarǫk begins — on the day Loki tears
1:20:21
himself free of the cave and the great ship Naglfar comes loose and the wolf
1:20:27
Fenrir's bonds break — on that day, the Serpent will rise out of the encircling sea.
1:20:34
The Serpent will come on shore.
1:20:36
The Serpent will go to meet Þórr at the field where the world will be decided.
1:20:42
The Serpent will spit its venom across half the sky. Þórr will kill it.
1:20:48
Þórr will take nine steps. And then Þórr will fall.
1:20:52
That is how the meeting between the two of them ends. Not in the boat tonight.
1:20:58
In a field, at the end of the world, three thousand years from where we are sitting.
1:21:05
Tonight is only the first meeting. Tonight is only the introduction.
1:21:10
The looking-into-each-other's-eyes. The learning of the face.
1:21:15
Tonight is the practice for the day that will be the last day.
1:21:20
This is, in some quiet way, what the old north was telling itself when it carved
1:21:26
this story into the picture-stones at Altuna and Ardre and the Gosforth Cross.
1:21:33
The old north was saying: the great endings of the world do not arrive all at once.
1:21:39
They are practiced. They are rehearsed.
1:21:42
They are met halfway, in a small boat on a grey sea, by the same two beings who
1:21:48
will meet for real at the end. The world ends slowly.
1:21:53
The world has many small almost-endings before the real one.
1:21:57
The Serpent has risen before. The hammer has been raised before.
1:22:03
The line has been cut before, by an old giant in the back of a boat who lost his
1:22:09
nerve at the last moment. The carvers of the picture-stones knew this.
1:22:14
The picture-stone at Altuna, in Sweden, shows Þórr in a small boat with his feet
1:22:21
through the bottom and his hammer raised, the great Serpent rising out of the water
1:22:27
below him. The carver placed Þórr and the Serpent at the centre of the stone.
1:22:33
Everything else on the stone — the small surrounding decorations, the runes, the
1:22:40
borders — radiates out from this central image.
1:22:43
The carver knew, in the eleventh century when he made the stone, that this was the
1:22:50
moment to put at the centre. Not the killing. Not the binding. Not the death.
1:22:56
The almost. The looking. The recognition.
1:22:59
The picture-stones at Ardre, on the Swedish island of Gotland, do the same.
1:23:05
So does the Gosforth Cross, in northern England, carved by Norse settlers in the
1:23:12
tenth century.
1:23:13
So does a stone fragment at Hørdum, in Denmark, that shows Þórr's foot going
1:23:19
through the boat's planking with a kind of awkward energy that only an artist who
1:23:25
knew the story could have managed.
1:23:28
Across thousands of miles, across two centuries, the old Norse carvers and the old
1:23:34
Norse listeners kept returning to this single image. The boat. The line. The eye.
1:23:41
The hammer raised but not yet falling. It was the image of the moment before.
1:23:47
And we, the listeners of the old north — and we, dear listener, tonight — sit
1:23:53
between the almost-endings and the real one.
1:23:56
We do not know how many more times the Serpent will rise before the last time.
1:24:02
We know only that, every time it has risen so far, something has happened to send
1:24:09
it back. A line cut. A giant's hand on a knife.
1:24:13
A small mercy in the middle of a great fated story. That is what tonight's story is.
1:24:19
A small mercy. A line cut. A few thousand more years of the world.
1:24:24
We will tell you, next time, of the great hammer Mjǫllnir, and of the day it was
1:24:31
stolen from Þórr by a king of the giants named Þrymr, and of the strange thing the
1:24:37
gods of Asgard had to do to get it back. Of a wedding. Of a veil.
1:24:42
Of a god who had to put on a bride's gown and ride east in a borrowed wagon to a
1:24:49
hall where his hammer was waiting on a pillow.
1:24:52
We will tell you that story on Wednesday. But for now.
1:24:57
For now, the boat is back on the black rocks. The cauldron is on its way to Ægir.
1:25:03
The Serpent is in its deep place, asleep again, with the old bait still in the
1:25:09
corner of its mouth and the cold water closing back over its head.
1:25:15
Hymir is wringing out his beard on the shore. Týr is at his father's door.
1:25:20
Þórr is walking the long road west with the cauldron on his head and a small
1:25:26
private smile under his red beard. The world has another few thousand years.
1:25:32
The wolf at the edge of time waits. The great ship Naglfar is still being built.
1:25:39
Ragnarǫk is still far away.
1:25:41
Tonight there is only the cold sea, and the small boat, and the moment two old
1:25:47
enemies looked at each other across the open water and recognized, for the first
1:25:53
time, the face of the one they were waiting for. Goodnight, dear listener.
1:25:59
Wherever you are tonight. Whatever bed you are in. Whatever quiet room.
1:26:05
Whatever soft pillow you have laid your head on.
1:26:09
Let the picture of the god and the serpent be the last picture you carry into sleep.
1:26:15
Not the violence of the hammer. Not the cutting of the line. The looking.
1:26:21
The seeing. The recognition.
1:26:23
The small space of stillness, in the middle of a grey sea at the edge of the world,
1:26:30
when two beings who had been waiting for each other since the first morning finally
1:26:36
met.
1:26:37
And both of them, perhaps, were a little glad to have seen each other once before
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the end. Let the wolf at the edge of time wait.
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Let the great ship Naglfar wait in the cold east. Let Ragnarǫk wait.
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Tonight there is only the boat, and the line, and the sea, and the goodnight.
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And tonight there is only your bed, and your breath, and the room around you
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growing dark. Sleep.
1:27:06
The Sleeping Almanac will be here on Wednesday with another story from the old
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north. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday at eight o'clock in the evening.
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If the story carried you down into sleep, if the picture of the god and the serpent
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was the last thing you saw before the dark came, leave a quiet small note in the
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comments. We read every one. We tell each other, in the morning, who slept.
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Sleep deeply. Sleep without dreams. And wake into a quieter world.
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Goodnight, dear listener. From the long old north. From the boat on the cold sea.
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From the almanac that is keeping the slow count. Goodnight.