Margaret Clunies Ross
The plot of Þrymskviða is simple and the poem well-structured; artful repetitions build to two climaxes, one comic and one violent. Þόrr awakens one morning to find that his hammer, Mjǫllnir, is missing. Loki determines that it has been stolen by the giant Þrymr and will not be returned unless Þrymr is given Freyja as a bride. Although Freyja has a reputation for promiscuity, she will not lower her standards so far as to marry a giant, and so the gods dress Þόrr as a woman and send him/her to Þrymr accompanied by Loki who is also in drag, posing as Þόrr's serving-maid. The hammer is brought out to sanctify the marriage in giantland and thus Þόrr is able to seize it and destroy the giant threat.
How are we to read a poem in which the most manly of the gods, red-bearded Þόrr, dresses up, albeit unconvincingly, as a woman and sets off to marry a giant? Should we view the poem as a late, post-Conversion burlesque in which the pagan gods are made to look ridiculous? Damico argues for a purely parodie and farcical effect; McKinnell (1995) also reads the poem as comic. Or is the cross-dressing part of a ritual act of inversion, imbued with cultural significance? Does Þόrr’s loss of his hammer symbolise a loss of masculinity, a threat to the power that keeps the forces of chaos at bay? Clunies Ross here, and in the other works cited below, has argued that the underlying structure of Þrymskviða matches that of other myths in which the gods venture into the realm of the giants to retrieve a lost valuable (e.g. a kidnapped goddess such as Iðunn) or go on a raid to obtain a valued cultural good, such as when Óðinn gains the mead of poetry for gods and men. McKinnell (2000) reads the poem in Jungian terms as therapeutic, centering on the loss of social and sexual identity and their recovery through personal courage, exercise of the will and reconciliation between the sexes. Other scholars have identified analogues from other cultures and commented on the presence of Þόrr’s hammer as evidenced in archaeological finds (Perkins) or in later folklore (Davidson, Puhvel). Lindow (1988) notes the emphasis in skaldic poetry on Þόrr’s battles against female giants, which may explain’s focus on the destruction of Þrymr’s sister rather than the giant himself. Lindow’s 1994 article surveys the meaning of the hammer in the Old Norse mythological system; it is the only implement of the gods which humans crafted for themselves, suggesting a connection with smithing and linking the poem with Vǫlundarkviða, which follows it in the Codex Regius, and providing a transition to Alvíssmál, since dwarfs are traditionally the smiths of Old Norse myth. Taylor also notes the parallels in both theme and structure with Vǫlundarkviða, suggesting that both poems might have been reshaped by the compiler at the manuscript stage.
Carolyne Larrington
Clunies Ross, Margaret. Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse myths in medieval Northern society, I: The myths. The Viking Collection, 7. Odense: Odense University Press, 1994.
——. “Þόrr’s Honour.” Studien zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck. Ed. Heiko Uecker. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994: 48–76.
Damico, Helen. “Þrymskviða and Beowulf’s Second Fight: the Dressing of the Hero in Parody.” Scandinavian Studies 58 (1986): 407–28.
Davidson, Hilda Ellis.“Trior’s Hammer.” Folklore 76 (1965): 1–15.
Jakobsen, Alfred.“Þrymskviða.” Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf, with Paul Acker and Donald K. Fry. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993: 678–9.
Lindow, John. “Addressing Thor.” Scandinavian Studies 60 (1988): 119–36.
——. “Thor’s Hamarr.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): 483–503.
McKinnell, John. “Myth as Therapy: the Usefulness of Þrymskviða.” Medium Aevum 69 (2000): 1–20.
——. “Þόrr as Comic Hero.” Ea funzione dell’eroe germanico: Storicitá, metafora, paradigma. Philologia, 2. Rome: Il Calamo, 1995: 141–83.
Perkins, Richard. “Þrymskviða Stanza 20, and a Passage from Víglundar saga.” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 22.5 (1988): 279–84.
Puhvel, Martin. “The Deicidal Otherworld Weapon in Celtic and Germanic Mythic Tradition.” Folklore 83 (1972): 210–19.
Taylor, Paul В. “’ Vǫlundarkviða, Þrymskviða and the Function of Myth.” Neopbilologus 78 (1994): 263–81.
Þrymskviða, named for the giant Þrymr rather than his divine adversary in the poem, the god Þόrr,1 is one of the best-known poems of the Elder Edda collection. It has been much anthologised in Scandinavia and in other Western European countries including the English-speaking world.2 The poem’s modern popularity was clearly anticipated in the Middle Ages, both in the Icelandic rímur tradition and in ballads from Norway, the Faroe Islands, Sweden and Denmark. We may thus speak of an uninterruptedly appreciative reception of this poem from the Middle Ages to the present day in Scandinavia. Outside Scandinavia, too, the poem has been popular with those who have become acquainted with Old Norse literature, and it is easy to see why. Þrymskviða represents a single mythic narrative, told in economical and dramatic style, something that appeals to modern readers brought up on narrative fiction, but something in fact rather rare in Old Norse poetry.3 The poem is a sophisticated literary creation: it is spare but telling in its representation of the characters of the gods and giants, which are revealed through both their actions and their words. Its economical use of dialogue to further the action and present character has always been praised by critics. It draws on its medieval audience’s and our modern knowledge of the Norse mythic world and its inhabitants; they knew and we know that a state of ‘negative reciprocity’ existed between giants and gods.4 Each group was out to gain an advantage over the other, not by an orderly exchange of natural and cultural goods or of women in marriage, but by subterfuge and trickery. At the same time, in the chronological period of Norse mythic history when these actions take place, in what I have called ‘the mythic present’ (Clunies Ross 1994a, 237–8), the two groups are hierarchically unequal, with the gods dominating the giants. It is Þόrr’s job to keep the giants in subjection by physical force and the threat of death, which he often administers by bringing his hammer Mjǫllnir crashing down on giant skulls. He is both strong and brutal when necessary, and he does not respect oaths or legal agreements. As the god Loki is made to say ruefully, at the end of Lokasenna:
enn fyr Þér einom mun ec út ganga,
Þvíat ec veit, at Þú vegr. (64: 4–6)
(yet I will go outside for you alone, because I know that you will fight [or kill].)5
The composer of Þrymskviða plays on well-known traits of gods and giants in constructing the narrative action and its dénouement. The giant Þrymr, lusting like all giants after the gods’ women, is out to get the goddess Freyja for his wife; this is something he knows would normally be denied him by the gods. Therefore he needs to devise a stratagem to put the gods, and Þόrr in particular, at a disadvantage; he does this by stealing Þόrr’s hammer as it lies beside him while he is asleep. The stolen hammer then becomes a bargaining point with the gods: Þrymr will give Þόrr his hammer back if he gets what he really wants, the goddess Freyja as his bride. The rest of the action depends upon stereotypical reaction and counter-reaction on the part of each group. The gods cannot bear ‘their’ Freyja to pass out of their control and she protests rather too much about the damage her reputation for sexual respectability will suffer if she goes to giantland as a bride.6 Since sending Freyja to Þrymr is unthinkable, the god Heimdallr has the bright idea that Þόrr can dress up as a bride, with the epicene Loki as ‘her’ maid, and fool the giant into bringing out the hammer in a traditional marriage ritual in which the instrument was required to consecrate the bride.7 It was the custom to place the hammer on the bride’s lap; Heimdallr’s plan was evidently hatched to take account of the expected nature of this rite. After the divine bride’s inappropriately masculine behaviour almost gives the show away, the anticipated sequence of events occurs: the hammer appears, Þόrr snatches it up and smashes the skulls of both the giant, Þrymr, and his grasping sister, who has been itching to get her hands on the ‘bride’s’ dowry.
Another reason for the continuing appeal of Þrymskviða is its brilliant comic action, which works for us on several different levels and presumably did the same for its medieval audiences. In the first place the comedy is of a situational kind, but the full absurdity of Þόrr’s dressing up as a bride and travelling to giantland to ‘marry’ Þrymr depends upon our awareness of the transgressive nature of this action within societal expectations of the norms of sexual identity and of male and female behaviour, as reflected in Old Norse myths. The mythic narrative of Þrymskviða challenges such societal norms in a manner not dissimilar to the confusion and problematisation of gender roles in much of Shakespearean comedy, where cross-dressing is an integral part of the mechanics of the plot. Þrymskviða probes these issues by means of a startling plot which begins when a giant strips the sleeping Þόrr of the symbol of his virility and his masculine identity, an action which threatens both his own honour and status and that of the gods as a group. In order to recover Mjǫllnir, Þόrr has to act out his own féminisation so that he himself becomes the giant’s ‘bride’. Only when the marriage arrangements are about to be formalised through the ritual consecration with his own hammer placed on his apparently feminised lap can Þόrr break the illusion, recover his hammer and his virility and strike back, on his own behalf and that of the gods. In this myth, though Þrymr comes perilously close to destroying the social fabric of the mythic world which keeps the gods in power, Þόrr fights back and wins. The conclusion of Þrymskviða is thus satisfyingly positive for proponents of the social status quo and has no doubt contributed to its popularity both in medieval and modern society in reinforcing norms associated with male dominance and social hierarchy. The poem’s enacted anxieties about sexual identities are dissipated in grotesqueries which make us laugh: Freyja’s hall-shaking anger is absurd and flies in the face of what we know of her; Þόrr’s overde-termined masculinity as he eats and drinks voraciously and shoots fiery glances at his adversary Þrymr makes him as transparently manly as the cross-dressing male leads of British pantomime; Loki’s successful impersonation of a quick-witted maid underlines his androgynous character.
We have to understand the normal characters attributed to this myth’s protagonists if we are to relish their discomfiture and laugh at it. We need to know that Þόrr is normally terribly manly, physically aggressive and very strong, with a large appetite for food and drink. He uses his hammer to keep the giants in order and to keep them away from the gods’ women. Freyja, as we have seen, has something of a reputation for sexual promiscuity, while Loki is a shape-changer, often taking female form and in a few cases bearing children.8 Impersonating a woman is probably something he rather likes and is certainly good at, while for Þόrr it is anathema: he is an inept drag queen, for he cannot conceal his masculine identity even under his bridal veil. Þrymr behaves just as a giant should, trying to subvert the supremacy of the gods by taking away Þόrr’s weapon of power and then bargaining with the gods to gain Freyja as his bride. She is horrified at the prospect of being sent off to giantland, not only because of the implicit loss of status it would bring, but because of the frequently-expressed belief attributed to the Norse gods that giants had unbridled sexual appetites and, to serve them, she would herself be required to behave like them.9 And of course she is such a proper goddess!
There is no doubt that the struggles between gods, giants and other beings in the world of Old Norse myths had their counterparts in the world of medieval human society, while the conceptual similarities between the world of Norse myth and that of commonwealth Iceland are striking.10 To comprehend the full meaning of the comic nature of Þrymskviða, then, and to understand the serious issues the poem grapples with, we must examine the unstated assumptions underlying the poem’s actions and character relations, as well as the overt reasons for the protagonists’ behaviour.
Let us first look at the comic mode itself in Old Norse mythology and what it may signify. It has been customary for scholars of Old Icelandic literature to regard Þrymskviða as one of the youngest poems of the Elder Edda collection, partly because of its comic treatment of its mythic subject. In the past there has been a tendency to consider that comedy in the literary presentation of the Norse gods was incompatible with religious belief in them as deities with real powers in the human world. Therefore, the more comic the presentation of a particular myth, the more likely the text in question was to be a composition of an age in which faith in the pagan gods was losing its credibility or had in fact largely lost it. There may well be something in this hypothesis, though it is usually difficult to test because most of our texts of Norse myths were written down in the Christian period in Iceland. The earliest manuscript to record Þrymskviða, the Codex Regius of the Elder Edda, is usually dated to about 1270–80 on palaeo-graphic grounds (Heusler). We have no record of allusion to the myth or the poem in any earlier work, which is again a reason advanced by some scholars for suggesting it may have been the composition of an antiquarian mythographer of the Christian period during the twelfth or the thirteenth centuries.11
Many of the extant literary treatments of Old Norse myths are comic in nature, though they are by no means all as thoroughly burlesque as Þrymskviða. Comedy is especially evident in myths that deal with Þόrr’s encounters with giants and with other unruly creatures such as the World Serpent (Miðgarðsormr) and the supernatural being named Útgarða-Loki. The question that then arises is whether, as John McKinnell has put it recently,“deliberate comedy arises only from the detached amusement of christian poets and storytellers, or was already inherent in the pre-conver-sion cult of Þόrr” (1995, 143). Perhaps we should refer more exactly to comedy in the pre-conversion literary and artistic representations of Þόrr, since we do not know the extent to which these were connected with religious cults. McKinnell’s considered opinion is that there are indeed comic elements in myths about Þόrr which are told in skaldic poetry that is usually regarded as having been composed in the pre-Christian age,“including not only exaggerations of Þόrr’s heroic strength and mockery of his giant opponents, but also some exposures of the god to embarrassment of various kinds. With the coming of Christianity, comedy seems to have become more pervasive in stories about Þόrr …” (1995, 146). This is also the conclusion of Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (1986 and this volume), who analysed a number of different versions of the myth of Þόrr’s fight with the World Serpent, in the context of Viking Age pictorial representations of this popular myth.
After the conversion to Christianity, myths about Þόrr tended to include more comic and sometimes parodie elements; the purpose of the comedy was not to belittle or ridicule the god, but rather to reveal the limitations of divine power through his comic embarrassments and failures and, in McKinnell’s words again, to bid“a wry farewell to Þόrr as a god, an acceptance that he is, after all, no more than an enjoyable fiction” (1995, 180).12 Whether or not the composer of Þrymskviða was a Christian, it is certain that the compiler or compilers of the Codex Regius were. However, as I have argued elsewhere (1992) in connection with Snorri Sturluson’s prose mythological fictions in his Edda (also often narrated in a comic vein), though people no longer believed in the Norse gods as part of their religious faith in thirteenth-century Iceland, they continued to use myths about them as a vehicle for a whole range of social and intel lectual concerns. The gods and the conceptual world of Norse myth were part of the traditional culture of Iceland. It was not simply a matter of religious faith but of cultural recuperation that the old myths continued to have meaning in a Christian medieval context. In this sense, then, the comic treatment of Þόrr’s loss of his hammer and his subsequent recovery of it is likely to be part of a traditional approach to the subject of this myth, and not simply the independent invention of a thirteenth-century individual, as some scholars have surmised.13
In the late thirteenth-century form in which we have it, Þrymskviða uses comedy to explore some of thirteenth-century Iceland’s most profound social and intellectual concerns and some cultural anxieties surrounding them. These can be summarised as: interpersonal and hierarchical relationships between men (Þόrr and Þrymr) and their resolution through the control of women (Freyja); the nexus between social status and power of the group and the self-image of the individual; and the nature of male and female self-image and their definition. All these themes are familiar to readers of Old Icelandic saga literature. Þrymskviða’s plot tests the boundaries of these concepts and definitions, and it does so by means of comic exaggeration of character and situation. As Theodore Andersson has pointed out in a recent paper on Egils saga, caricature and overstatement are the hallmarks of Old Icelandic comedy. Þόrr’s situation in Þrymskviða is extreme; he loses his hammer while he is asleep, which deprives him literally of his abilty to control the giants and symbolically of his virility. The plot therefore requires him to be feminised symbolically but to remain very clearly a male. Hence the comedy springs from our perception of the gross and absurd discrepancy between the symbolic and the literal: Þόrr’s characteristically masculine traits are exaggeratedly portrayed at the same time as his situation is most dire. Although his discomfiture is meant to be taken seriously and to focus attention on what it is that makes him a man, the gods know and we know what the foolish giants do not: that Þόrr’s most dangerous moment, when he is ritually consecrated as the giant’s wife with Mjǫllnir itself, is to be his moment of reconstitution as a male being.
Þrymskviða has a truly brilliant plot and incorporates a marvellous joke, but like all jokes it has its serious side. In reading a literary work of a past age, we need to bring to its understanding as much contextual information as we can glean from external sources that may help us to realise how individuals of its age of composition might have understood it. In this case, our understanding of Þrymskviða is assisted by contextual information about the myth type and structure of the poem; about the social world of Old Norse myth, as revealed by a general study of the mythic corpus; about Old Icelandic concepts of male and female behaviour, and of honour and shame. We also need to understand the symbolism of some of the characters’ attributes and behaviour patterns.
Þrymskviða is one of a number of Old Norse myths about Þόrr’s encounters with giant antagonists and it seems likely that they were very popular with medieval Scandinavian audiences, for they outnumber most other myth-types in the corpus; they also inspired pictorial representations in many parts of the Viking world. Many of these myths assumed poetic form, and there are both eddic and skaldic examples. Snorri Sturluson gives prose versions of most of these myths in his Edda of c.1225, and in a few cases, such as the myth of Þόrr’s journey to the territory of Útgarða-Loki, he narrates myths that we do not know in poetic form. Oddly enough, Snorri makes no reference to the central myth of Þrymskviða. Nevertheless, its content and structure follow established patterns.
There are a number of extant myths in which Þόrr encounters and struggles with supernatural beings who appear to represent natural forces that threaten the world with disorder. These beings include the World Serpent, or Miðgarðsormr; the enormous and powerful Útgarða-Loki; and some of the god’s giant opponents, among them Geirrøðr, his two daughters and the giant builder who appears to offer his services to the gods in rebuilding Ásgarðr. Both male and female opponents feel the force of his hammer (Lindow 1988). Þόrr characteristically defends the ordered world of gods and humans from whatever is perceived to threaten it, though he does not always have complete success in overcoming the opposition. His failures, his embarrassments and the oath-breaking he often resorts to are among the indications that the Old Norse gods, though resourceful, cunning and intelligent, dominate their opponents with difficulty, and in respect of chaotic natural forces, only for a limited period of time. Most of the gods, including Þόrr, will die in combat with an assortment of monsters and fire-giants at ragna rǫk.
Þrymskviða belongs to a sub-set of Þόrr myths that examine one particular aspect of the gods’ and divine society’s vulnerability: their honour. I have earlier alluded to the way in which the gods retain their social dominance over the giants by refusing to let their own women marry giants. The sole exception to this unstated rule, which may nevertheless be inferred from a study of the whole mythological system (Schjødt; Vestergaard), concerns the Vanir group. Having taken them into Æsir society after the first war in the world, their superiors are keen to preserve the Vanir’s subordination by much the same means as they impose upon the giants: they prevent the male Vanir, Njǫrðr and Freyr, from taking Ásynjur brides, while they themselves enjoy Freyja’s sexual favours without paying for them through marriage (Clunies Ross 1994a, 95–101). The Æsir thus marry endogamously among themselves, the Vanir males marry giantesses, while the giants either marry giantesses (about which little is said in the myths) or, most frequently, try to steal the gods’ women. Thus the goddesses, whose circulation in mythic society was closely guarded, were the objects of intense desire on the part of the lowest-ranking males, the giants, who sought to obtain by prédation what they could not secure by exchanging women with the gods. This point of tension generated many important Old Norse myths and a high proportion of them involve Þόrr.
I have argued elsewhere (1994a, 103) that the existence of a large number of Old Norse myths about negative reciprocity and breaches of social norms reveals a fascination on the part of medieval Icelandic society with stratagems of cheating and trickery, which we also find in the plots of Icelandic sagas. Interestingly but not unexpectedly, when we recognise that the gods are stalking horses for human social concerns, there are clear winners and losers in the negative reciprocity stakes: the gods always outsmart the giants. However, other dimensions of these myths blur the black-and-white character of that outcome and make them comparable to the myths which pit the gods against supernatural representatives of disorder, where the gods are shown not to be in complete control. Hence myths like Þryms-kviða do not only show an interest in the illicit for its own sake, in the thrill of the stratagem that almost but not quite topples the system. They also explore the most sensitive site of divine vulnerability, the gods’ honour.
There is an extensive anthropological literature on the importance of the concept of honour and its opposite, shame, as expressions of the social evaluation of individuals and groups within small-scale societies, where face-to-face personal encounters rather than anonymous means of social ranking determine a person’s or a group’s relative worth. I have recently (Clunies Ross 1994b) suggested that another of Þόrr’s fights with a giant named Hrungnir needs to be understood in the context of the dynamics of honour and shame societies, in which an individual male’s concept of self-worth depends upon the ceaseless testing of his value as a man in comparison to other men and as a member of one particular social group in contradistinction to others. The concept of honour involves asserting an individual’s own sense of self-worth and his value in the eyes of his society. Conversely, dishonour derives from actual or perceived threats to a man’s value as an individual and a group member.
In honour and shame societies both men and women are considered to possess honour, but it is usually men who are charged with maintaining their own honour and that of their women. There is felt to be an intimate link between a man’s honour and that of the women for whom he bears public responsibility; if his women are dishonoured, he is shamed. Furthermore, female honour is largely defined in terms of approved sexual behaviour. The dynamic of this aspect of male-female relations means that the honour of women depends on their engaging only in socially-sanctioned sexual activities; virginity is a sought-after attribute of brides and married women are required to be faithful to their husbands. Hence women’s activities are usually closely invigilated by their male kin, whether husbands, fathers or brothers, because a violation of a woman’s sexual integrity is thought to reflect directly upon the honour of the man who is her guardian. A family’s honour in these circumstances may depend more on the sexual conduct of its women than on any other single factor; women are constrained in their behaviour but they also have power as the individuals whose actions have the capacity to maintain or destroy the family’s reputation. Concepts relating to the notion of cuckoldry (Blok 1981; Brandes 1981) play in a variety of stereotyped ways on the nexus between the supposed sexual dishonouring of a woman and the direct shaming and weakening of her husband as a consequence of her illicit sexual activities. However, the general evaluation of men in such societies, in terms of how well they control other men’s access to their women, extends more widely than to the figure of the cuckolded husband. A man’s control of his sister or his daughter may be at stake as often as his regulation of his wife’s sexual behaviour. Ultimately, a man’s ability to control the women of his household is an indication of his manliness in other spheres of life and of his superiority to other men.
There is much evidence that medieval Iceland was an honour and shame society. It was small-scale and individuals were very much dependent on their own efforts to establish their worth in the absence of externally sanctioned marks of social status and hierarchy (Meulengracht Sørensen 1983, 21; Miller, 29–34, 185, 303). Both saga literature and the medieval Icelandic law codes, as well as those of Western Norway, indicate that men were extremely sensitive to aspersions cast on their honour and usually responded to them with physical violence or with an act designed to humiliate their challenger. The preoccupation with male honour and its undermining is also to be found in Old Norse myth, to a greater extent than has yet been recognised, especially in myths of the sub-group to which Þryms-kviða belongs. This sub-group comprises several narratives in which Þόrr is obliged to fight or kill supernatural beings, usually giants but in one case a dwarf, who have threatened his honour directly through the attentions they have paid to his wife Sif or his daughter Þrúðr. I have argued elsewhere (Clunies Ross 1994b) that the myth narrated in the eddic poem Alvíssmál is of this kind,14 as are the myth of Þόrr and the giant Hrungnir. Also pertinent is a myth about Loki’s sexual enjoyment of Sif while her husband was away from home, which is alluded to in Lokasenna and is probably behind the enigmatic mythic vignette told in Snorri’s Edda about how Loki cut off all Sif’s hair and was forced to replace it with a golden wig. Þryms-kviða is also about a challenge to Þόrr’s honour, as both Meulengracht Sørensen (1983, 23–4) and Perkins (1988 and 1994) have already established.
There are two main reasons why Þόrr is so frequently involved in myths of this type. In the first place, he is above all the other gods the embodiment of divine virility, which is expressed both as physical strength and sexual potency. His hammer, Mjǫllnir, symbolises this latter quality, and as Perkins (1994) and I (1994b) have shown by reference to the shape of surviving amulets and pictorial representations of Mjǫllnir from the medieval period, its physical appearance was unmistakably phallic. In him the gods’ honour and their virility come together; this congruence is expressed through all his bodily attributes: his physical strength, his flashing eyes, his power of movement, his long hair and beard and his tremendous appetite for food and drink.15 In the second place, Þόrr is often away from Ásgarðr on giant patrol, and so his own women are vulnerable to abduction and rape. In Þrymskviða, unlike the other Þόrr myths of the subgroup, there is no immediate threat to the women of Þόrr’s nuclear family. Rather, Þrymr robs him of his hammer Mjǫllnir, which is both the weapon by means of which the god regularly keeps the giants in control and prevents them from enjoying goddesses and the symbol of his phallic power. This act, with which the poem begins, is both the direst threat to the physical safety of all the gods’ women, and therefore a direct threat to the gods’ honour and status, and a symbolic castration of Þόrr himself. The loss of his hammer while he is asleep and in a passive state is the cause of shame, and would have been equated by medieval Icelanders with homosexual rape. The god is ragr.16
It is for these reasons that Þόrr is in such a state of anger and consternation when in the first stanza he discovers that Mjǫllnir has gone. It is for these reasons also that the whole of divine society rushes to find a solution to the crisis, first by sending Loki in Freyja’s feather cloak (“fjaðrhamr”) to discover where the hammer is and what Þrymr wants in exchange for it, and then, when the awful truth of the giant’s plan to get Freyja as his bride in exchange for the hammer becomes known, by contriving to send Þόrr and Loki to giantland in the guise of Freyja and her maid. We have already seen that much of the comedy of Þrymskviða turns on the discrepancy between Þόrr’s normal manliness and the absurdly unconvincing female impersonation he carries out. Once at Þrymr’s hall, his enormous appetite and fiery eyes betray his real gender, even though the giant is too stupid to realise it and even though, as a joke beyond a joke, Loki explains these un-feminine qualities to Þrymr as manifestations of an excess of feminine desire for him which had prevented ‘Freyja’ from eating, drinking and sleeping (26: 5–8; 28: 5–8). On the other hand, Loki’s very success at impersonating a bridesmaid suggests his bisexual nature.
The dénouement of Þrymskviða turns on the ceremony of hallowing the false bride with the real hammer, Mjǫllnir, thereby giving Þόrr the opportunity to recover his hammer at the very moment of his ritual féminisation. Perkins (1994) has argued that in all probability the head of the hammer would have been directed at the bride’s reproductive parts by the male officiant at the wedding, in an action that mimicked sexual intercourse.17 He has also given a further depth of comic irony to the poem’s final stanzas, for he has shown that the scenario here probably reflects medieval Icelandic representations of the seated Þόrr holding Mjǫllnir, such as we find on the Eyrarland image now in the National Museum of Iceland.18 In this image the hammer’s head doubles as the god’s genitalia and is placed on his knees. Hence, as Perkins puts it,“the unwitting officiant is, as it were, slotting the Þόrr’s manhood back where it belongs” (1994, 661–2). Furthermore, Þόrr’s act of taking his hammer back by presumably grasping it with both hands also mimics the action of the Eyrarland image, in which the figure clenches the shaft with prominent knuckles. If such images were at all widely known—and the likelihood is that they were conventional—the audience of Þrymskviða would have registered a sense of the completeness of things when they heard how Þόrr got his hammer back:“Svá kom Óðins sonr endr at hamri”.
Þrymskviða explores some of the weaknesses of divine society, which in its denial of reciprocal exchanges of women in marriage always strove to keep the giants at bay through the gods’ strong man, Þόrr. It shows how the gods’ honour and status depended on Þόrr’s hammer, the symbol of his virility and the instrument with which he protected them and their women from marauding males and thereby ensured the retention of their dominant social status. The poem postulates what might happen if Þόrr lost his hammer and then goes on to represent a successful counter-stratagem for its recovery, which involves the god playing out his féminisation by transgressing (very reluctantly) normal gender roles. However, the poem not only allows the god to recover his hammer and his virility, but it also, through its very comedy, insists that Þόrr himself had never really lost his manliness. For him, as indeed for Loki when he changes gender,19 the assumption of attributes of the opposite sex is a source of strength, in that these actions enable him to achieve what he wants. There is, however, a difference between Þόrr on the one hand and Loki on the other. Loki is successfully bisexual, whereas Þόrr’s masculine identity is compromised but not obliterated by the loss of Mjǫllnir. In Þrymskviða the price of humiliation is success and the recovery of honour. By contrast, in Icelandic saga literature and probably in thirteenth-century society, the price of humiliation is usually dishonour. Thus mythic poems like Þrymskviða do not enact human social realia, though they often present a changed and enhanced image of them for the appreciation of their audiences.
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1. The poem’s title is found in the late thirteenth-century manuscript Codex Regius 2365 4to at the end of the first line of the Þrymskviða text (fol. 17r, line 13). It means ‘narrative poem (kviða) about Þrymr’. The technical term kviða is applied to other poems of the Codex Regius collection which have a largely narrative mode, e.g. Hymiskviða, Vǫlundarkviða, Atlakviða, Guðrúnarkviða. The title follows another apparent convention perceptible in the mythological poems of the Codex Regius, and one which has been little commented on, as far as I know. It is that, where the poem deals with an encounter between a god and a giant (or a dwarf in one case, Alvíssmál), it is the giant’s name and not, as might be expected, the god’s, that is a formative element of the title. Examples are VafÞrúðnismál, Hymiskviða, Alvíssmál and Hyndluljόð.
2. It has appeared in school anthologies in Norway and Denmark until quite recent times (Magerøy 1958, 256). English-speaking students often study it in elementary Old Norse classes, for it appears in Ε. V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse, first published in 1927. It is item No. XIII in the 2nd edition (1957), pp. 136–141. The first competent English translation of the poem appeared in William Herbert’s Select Icelandic Poetry, (1804), as“The Song of Thrym; or, The Recovery of the Hammer,” pp. 1–34, though there is an earlier, much less accurate version by Amos Cottle in his Icelandic Poetry (1797).
3. Heinz Klingenberg has discussed the rarity of extended narrative poetry in the eddic corpus. Lindow 1982 points to the narrative dimension of skaldic verse. Apart from Þrymskviða, Hymiskviða is the only other divine poem of the Elder Edda compilation which is predominantly narrative in mode, and there we find a certain amount of narrative embedding of other myths (for example Þόrr’s fight with the World Serpent Miðgarðsormr) within the main story-line of the quest of the gods Þόrr and Týr for a giant-owned brewing cauldron. See Clunies Ross 1989 for an analysis of the narrative structure and the themes of Hymiskviða.
4. I have explained this ‘negative reciprocity’ (a term I have borrowed from the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins) in greater detail in my book Prolonged Echoes. Old Norse myths in medieval Northern society (Odense, 1994), cited henceforth as Clunies Ross 1994a.
5. All quotations from Þrymskviða and other poems of the Elder Edda are from the edition of Neckel and Kuhn, 1983. Translations supplied by the author.
6. There is no doubt Freyja’s posturing in stanza 13 is to be understood as comic, if not burlesque. She claims she will get a reputation for being“vergjarnas-ta” (most crazy for men) if she goes to giantland. The fact is she already has that reputation, as numerous other references in Norse mythological texts attest. See, among others, Lokasenna sts. 29–32 and Hyndluljόð sts. 46–7.
7. We do not know very much about this ritual, which apparently formalised marriages in medieval times, but its operation is assumed knowledge for the poet and his audience. On this see Elgqvist, Bø and Perkins 1994, who gives a very plausible reconstruction of the ceremony. The symbolic significance of placing Þόrr’s hammer (or an image of it) on a bride’s lap is discussed further below and in an article (Clunies Ross 1994b) on the honour of the gods.
8. For a summary description of Loki’s feminised activities, see Simek, 193– 7. His child-bearing is a mythological reflex of the Old Icelandic legal concept of ýki or ‘exaggeration’ in the context of the general definition of níð, or defamation which has a sexual component. For a discussion of ýki, see Meulengracht Sørensen 1983, 16–17.
9. The clearest expression of this view in eddic poetry occurs in Skirnir’s threats to the giantess Gerðr made on behalf of his master Freyr in Skírnismál sts. 26–36. Unless she agrees to become Freyr’s bride, Skirnir says (st. 36.3–4), she will have only giants as sexual partners and be cursed with“ergi” (inordinate sexual desire),“œði” (frenzy) and“όÞoli” (unbearable sexual torment).
10. In the last decade a number of studies have examined the fit between the Norse mythic world and that of human society, as represented in Old Icelandic literature. For the conceptual parallels, see Hastrup, 136–154 and Lindow 1994; on bloodfeud and Norse myth, Lindow 1995; on honour, especially as it relates to Þόrr, Clunies Ross 1994b; on marriage Vestergaard; and for an extended study Clunies Ross 1994a.
11. A further argument in support of a late date for the composition of Þryms-kviða has been advanced by Alfred Jakobsen (1984 and 1993). Jakobsen finds many stylistic and verbal similarities between Þrymskviða and other eddic and skaldic poems. One cannot deny that the verse is often put together from conventional, formulaic elements, but that is not necessarily to say that the presence of such elements should lead us to conclude that deliberate, literary borrowing has taken place. Whatever the age of the various eddic poems in the Codex Regius, it is likely that all will have undergone some form of oral transmission and textual variation before they were written down. It is difficult to use arguments about literary borrowing as a means of dating this kind of poetry. On the formulaic nature of eddic verse, see Harris (esp. 111–126), Kellogg, Quinn and Acker.
12. It is impossible to do justice to the complexities of McKinnell’s arguments here. They are also to be found as Chapter 3 of his 1994 book on change and variety in late Norse heathenism.
13. For example, Hallberg, who proposed Snorri as a possible author of Þrymskviða.
14. [See also Acker in this volume. Eds.]
15. It is, of course, true that Óðinn is also associated with the concept of sexual potency, and that he is involved, far more than Þόrr, in sexual adventures with giantesses that often result in the production of children. Óðinn, however, does not maintain the gods’ honour as Þόrr does, and he is not involved in keeping the giants at bay. Þόrr expresses the protective and aggressive (to other males) aspects of male virility; Óðinn’s sexuality is directed to other ends, including the provision of divine heirs and the acquisition of natural and cultural resources which the giants often own. The two gods’ attributes are complementary.
16. The adjective ragr and its metathesised form argr mean ‘sexually perverse (that is, the passive partner in a homosexual relationship), unmanly, cowardly’. When Þόrr exclaims, as he is forced to dress up as a bride,“’Mic muno æsir argan kalla’” (the gods will call me unmanly; st. 17: 3–4), we perceive his statement as highly ironic, for he has already been made ragr at the outset of the action. This irony is underlined by the poet’s use in the previous line of the epithet Þrúðugr, ‘powerful, strong’, to describe the god; that is his normal condition, certainly, but his strength has been diminished through the loss of his hammer. Perkins 1988 has pointed to another stinging indicator of Þόrr’s condition, the fact that Loki can use the neuter plural form of the numeral two, tvau, (the form used to refer to two persons of opposite gender) to refer to himself (still dressed as a male) and Þόrr, attired in bridal gear (st.20: 5). In females, the counterpart to male ergi (the noun cognate with ragr) was expressed as nymphomania; hence Freyja’s concern for her reputation in st. 13 if she should have to travel to giantland to satisfy Þrymr’s lusts.
17. Perkins argues (1988, 660–1) that the officiant would most likely have been standing, so that the hammer would have been lowered from a vertical position onto the bride’s lap. It is equally possible, it seems to me, that the officiant would have been stationed in front of the bride, holding the hammer towards her in horizontal position.
18. Þjόðminjasafn Íslands, inv. 10880.
19. There are a number of myths in which Loki changes gender, usually to extricate himself or the gods from trouble. He changes into a mare to lure the giant builder’s stallion away from his task of rebuilding Ásgarðr, and later gives birth to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir. In the myth of the death of the god Baldr, as Snorri Sturluson tells it in his Edda, Loki assumes female form to find out from Frigg the secret of Baldr’s invulnerability (Gylfaginning, ch. 49).