Horses of Norse Mythology

The best and most famous horse in Norse mythology is, of course, Sleipnir, The son of Loki* by the stallion Svaðilfari. After Loki gave birth to him, he made Sleipnir a gift to Odin. Sleipnir has eight legs, and according to Snorri he's grey in color.

Snorri also lists the other ten horses belonging to the Twelve** Aesir in the Prose Edda: Glad (Joyous), Gyllir (Golden), Glær (Shining), Skeidbrimir (Swift-Going), Silfrtopp (Silver-topped), Sinir (Sinewy), Gisl (possibly "Gleaming"), Falhofnir (Hollow-Hoofed), Gulltopp (Gold-topped) and Lettfeti (Light-Feet).

There are also Skinfaxi and Hrimfaxi, the horses which bring daylight and night, respectively. Skinfaxi posesses a brightly burning mane*** and Hrimfaxi sprinkles the ground with his spit and foam as he runs through the sky, which explains the source of dewdrops quite neatly.

Then there are Arvak and Alsvinn (not to be confused with Skinfaxi), who draw the chariot of the sun which is driven by Sol. These two also seem to be outfitted with an early air conditioning system -- bellows strapped beneath their shoulders to keep them cool (they are pulling the SUN, after all).

That Thor does not seem to have a horse is pretty telling, and makes sense in context with his position as god of the common man, in contrast with Odin, who is quite clearly a god of Noblemen and kings with his horse which is not only completely unique, but the best of the best. In fact, not only can Sleipnir travel to Hel and back, but Odin wagered his own head on Sleipnir's speed and raced him against the giant Hrungnir's horse, Gullfaxi (Golden-mane). Even when Thor wins Hrungnir's horse later (by dueling with the giant), he ends up giving Gullfaxi away (to his son, Magni), rather than keeping it for himself.

In the Skírnismál, Freyr also has a pretty fancy (but unnamed) horse** which is described in the eighth stanza of the poem:

"Then give me the horse | that goes through the dark
And magic flickering flames;"

And Freyja has a horse named Hofvarpnir****, which she rides on Frigg's business to the other worlds, and is capable of galloping across the sky and the sea.

By no means should this be considered a complete list of horses, but the last one I'm aware of  with any association to the DIVINE is Grani, a descendent of Sleipnir, and Sigurd's horse in the Saga of the Volsungs. Grani, as it happens, is also gray, just like his forefather, and he's described in the saga as "the best horse there ever was." Barring Sleipnir, of course, I'm sure.

*A man and his stallion were contracted to rebuild the wall around Asgard, and if he finished in a certain period of time, he was to be paid with the sun, the moon, and Freyja. When it looked like this guy was going to finish in time, Loki transformed himself into a mare in order to lure the stallion away, so his owner could not complete the wall. The gods only made the deal because Loki convinced them it would be impossible for the man to complete the task. But it turned out (of course) that the man was a giant, so after they cheated him, and he revealed his giant-nature, the gods just went ahead and let Thor kill him. Loki disappeared for a while after that, only to return with Sleipnir trotting at his heels.


**Snorri tells us that Thor himself, walks, but remember that Snorri's Twelve Aesir is actually Fourteen Aesir, so it makes me wonder who else catches a different ride to the root of Yggdrasil where they all meet up -- If Balder is dead, that would mean only one other person is left without transportation, but if he isn't, since Freyr gives up his sword in order to win Gerd as his wife, maybe he gave her his fancy-magic horse, too, while he was at it. In any event, the meanings of the horses' names came from the Grímnismál.


***Skinfaxi translates literally as "Shining-Mane" which I guess makes Hrimfaxi Frost-Mane or Foaming-Mane, which makes a certain amount of sense considering night is generally colder than day.


****Hofvarpnir's parents are Hamskerpir and Gardrofa.

Hel: Person and Place

Hel looks particularly sickly beside her brothers.

One of the monstrous children of Loki, according to Snorri in the Prose Edda, Hel is "half black and half flesh-colored." She was given the rulership of Niflheim and all those who die of sickness or old age -- meaning pretty much everyone who didn't die in battle and land in the promised land, with the possible exception of those who were lost at sea. The ideal death was in battle, to be swept up by the Valkyries, or perhaps Freyja and brought to Asgard to live on drinking and battling for funsies in Valhalla (with Odin) or Folkvangr (with Freyja) until Ragnarok. It was only the second class deaths that went to Hel* which was by most accounts a pretty dismal place, in particular this stanza in the Voluspa describing part of Nifleheim is pretty bleak**:


38. A hall I saw, | far from the sun,
On Nastrond it stands, | and the doors face north,
Venom drops | through the smoke-vent down,
For around the walls | do serpents wind.


I don't know about you, but with that as my other option, I'd be running myself into someone else's sword, too. Especially if the woman who greeted and embraced me was only half human flesh. Half-alive, even. But what if her appearance is more than just the indication of her monstrous birth -- the child of Loki and the Giantess, Angrboða -- and potential threat to gods? What if it signifies the grief of loss? Of the women who were left behind when their husbands went out as Vikings and never came home again?

Sure, the men went to Valhalla to be waited on by Valkyries, or got to dance their nights away with the goddess Freyja (by all accounts, very beautiful and some kind of addiction to the frost giants, who are obsessed with marrying her) but those women, who did not or would not die in battle had lost their men and sons for eternity. There was no hope of reunion when the dead were divided so absolutely in the afterlife. What if Hel is the representation of their heartbreak, their suffering, their grief, in knowing they will never embrace their loved ones again? For that matter, it could be the representation of all loss of that nature. The husband's loss of his beloved wife and child in childbirth -- when just hours earlier the world had been full of life and promise, now cruelly stripped away, there is only a half life left, while stumbling through grief.

It seems likely to me that  Hel, responsible for those kinds of deaths, would embody their suffering physically as well. But what a miserable existence, taking charge of so many forsaken spirits. And having been forsaken by the Aesir, to rot with Hel in Niflheim, is it any wonder that they rise up against the gods in Ragnarok? I can't really blame them, personally.

*In those days, a good many of those who would have died of sickness were probably women and children, most especially in childbirth. Norse women could and did go off to plunder and fight as vikings, with new evidence suggesting they were more prevalent in those parties than we previously thought, but childbirth was dangerous then, and there was no telling what was on the other end of a pregnancy -- life or death. The idea of Hel as half alive and half dead, then, is rather fitting. It almost seems to me as though every woman had one foot in the grave in those days, especially if she was married and bearing children. 


** This sounds to me like the place where Loki is bound, what with the venom dripping down into his face and eyes and the presence of the serpents. But there isn't any real specific information on where Loki was imprisoned, and since when he writhes against his bonds he causes earthquakes, it seems to me that implies he's trapped beneath Midgard somewhere. Maybe that's where Nifleheim is, though. It's hard to say how it all maps out.

Thor and Loki (No Footnotes, Just Gut)

A long time ago I posted about The Essential Thor -- that is the Thor I had come to know through reading the myths and researching him half to death (or possibly half to life) -- and today I want to kind of continue that thought.

So much of how I judge Thor is related to how he interacts with others, his relationships with the other gods, his loyalty to the people he loves. His relationship with Loki, of course, is at the center of a lot of this in the myths. Thor and Loki are always traveling together, always getting into mischief and bailing each other out of it, and until recently, I didn't really understand the dynamic between them. It is so easy for me to see Loki as the villain, the deceiver and the troublemaker, and so hard for me to see what Thor does in the myths: a companion and friend, someone worth seeking out for adventures, someone to keep at your back or turn to in a crisis.

Then it occurred to me that Loki was sometimes considered a blood brother to Odin, Thor's father. And Odin was king of the gods, king of Asgard, ruler and warrior. No doubt he was a very busy god. What if Loki stepped in where Odin did not have the time to spend? What if Thor had been raised from a young age to consider Loki as his uncle? What if that was the foundation of their relationship? It explains everything so perfectly, fits everything together like matching pieces in a puzzle.

Loki was the cool uncle who let Thor do all the fun stuff. Loki was the person who took him on adventures and rescued Thor from trouble at the last minute. We see it in the myths, too, that when Thor is in trouble, he goes to Loki first, not Odin. Just consider the cross-dressing Thor, incident. When the Mjollnir disappears, Thor doesn't race to his father, the man with the seat that allows him to see everything in the nine worlds, Thor goes to Loki. Thor goes to Loki because Loki has always gotten him out of scrapes in the past, and Loki isn't going to judge him, or give him a hard time, or punish him, the way a father might, for getting into the scrape to begin with. Even though Odin could have discerned the location of Mjollnir faster and more easily, Thor appeals to a different power for help.

We see in the myths that it is most often Loki leading Thor on these trips which always end in some kind of disastrous fix -- but why is Thor following along so blithely? Why is it so hard for Thor to see what's coming when he gets involved in these adventures? Even Thor isn't that dumb. I mean, sure, he isn't the brightest of the gods, but that's a whole different level of blind naivety. But if Thor was raised to trust him, raised looking up to him as his fun uncle, raised to trust that Loki will take care of him from childhood, it all makes so much more sense.

And it also explains how difficult it is for Thor to finally face the facts of Loki's nature, and just why Thor has given him forgiveness after forgiveness. It makes sense that in the Lokasenna, Thor blows a gasket even to see the uncle who betrayed him, betrayed his whole family, by engineering Balder's death. The first words out of his mouth are shut up, or I'll hammer your mouth shut -- and  after all the trouble Loki has gotten Thor into before now, after all the times Thor has just laughed and forgiven him, that kind of immediate response seems like a break in character. But Loki has finally crossed the line. His sins are too great to overlook.

Thor responds to Loki like a child who suddenly realizes the truth about his parent. Balder's death, his brother's murder, shatters Thor's ideal of who Loki is in a way nothing else could have. Suddenly, Thor is able to see clearly, man to man, god to god, giant to giant. Thor should have expected some kind of betrayal from Loki -- but he didn't. He couldn't see around the idea of the Uncle he had looked up to all his life to recognize the truth of his character. He couldn't see that the mischief hid malice, because he was a boy who saw the best in the uncle who had half-raised him.

Loki and Thor's relationship is tragic. It ends the way so many of Loki's adventures did -- in disaster. And when it really mattered, when it might have made all the difference, Loki went out of his way to be sure it couldn't be fixed.*

*Hermod went all the way to Hel and bargained to bring Balder back to life, and Hel promised Balder could return if everything in the world wept for him. Everything did, but for Loki, disguised as a Giantess who refused to mourn, and so Hel  refused to release Balder. Loki could have fixed everything, they all could have had a laugh over their mead and Loki would have been redeemed.