Skadi, the giantess daughter of Thjazi, figured out that her missing father must have been slayed. Here she wears a helmet and coat of mail and carries her father’s shield and spear. She is ready for revenge against the Aesir.
Skadi, the giantess daughter of Thjazi, figured out that her missing father must have been slayed. Here she wears a helmet and coat of mail and carries her father’s shield and spear. She is ready for revenge against the Aesir.
High in Thrymheim, Skadi watched her father, the giant Thjazi, shape-shift into an eagle and chase after Loki. An eagle is stronger than a falcon. And Thjazi was accustomed to flying as a bird, while Loki was new to it. Thjazi would catch the wily Loki and bring back Idunn and her apples, and Skadi and her father would be forever young.
All Skadi had to do was wait. But she wasn’t good at waiting. So she wandered the mountain. The scree moved underfoot with a crunch, crunch, as broken rock does. The brightness of the sheets of snow made her squint. The damp seeped through her skin and deep into her bones. What a dreary wasteland this part of Jotunheim was. Skadi smiled. It made her giantess heart throb with love. Nothing was better than sharing a bleak day in Thrymheim with her father.
Only something was wrong. The hours passed, the night grew old, and still Thjazi didn’t come back. Skadi picked at her elbows, at her knees, at the bumps on her toes, as she imagined the gods of Asgard playing some rotten trick on Thjazi. They were a bloody bunch; nothing was beneath them. By the time dawn came, a rocklike certainty had lodged in her stomach: Her father was dead.
Skadi put on a coat of chain mail. She put on a helmet. She touched each red beak and looked into all the shining eyes of the bird heads inlaid on the hide of her father’s tough shield. She closed her fingers tight around the white ash shaft of his battle spear.
Winter Travel
Skadi zoomed across snow on skis; that’s how she hunted. The ski goes back in history farther than the wheel, perhaps more than 20,000 years. A cave drawing in Lyon, France, from Paleolithic times suggests that Cro-Magnon man hunted reindeer during the last ice age on snowshoes, skis, and sleds. Skiing spread from Europe to Asia and then into North America. After many years, the entire Northern Hemisphere used skis. Our word “ski” comes from the Old Norse skí, stick.
Finally, she hung at her hip her father’s sword. The giant Surt had a flaming sword that he would swing against the Aesir at the terrible final battle, Ragnarok. The god Heimdall had the sword Hofud that knew everything in his head and thus slashed with intelligence. The god Frey had a sword that fought all on its own. But Skadi’s father’s sword was even better. It was incised with a serpent that struck terror into an enemy heart just as surely as venom.
Well armed, Skadi headed for Asgard, her lips puckered for the sweet kiss of vengeance.
Heimdall saw her coming, of course; he did his job of guard well. He blew Gjallarhorn to call the gods together. When Skadi arrived at the foot of the bridge Bifrost, the gods had already assembled. They had no wish to see more bloodshed, so they offered Skadi gold in recompense for her father’s death.
Skadi shrugged. What good could gold do her? She owned a mountain of gold. But she looked across at those gods and noticed that some of them weren’t hard on the eyes. One, in fact, was like eye candy—a certain Balder (for this was before the fair Balder had been slain). Skadi was a hot-blooded giantess. Yes, she grieved for her father’s companionship. But that Balder—ooh—he would sure add a spark to the dank nights in Thrymheim. So she said, instead of making off with a sack of gold, she’d pick a husband. “Gentle. Wise. And I won’t leave until I’ve had a bellyful of laughter.”
Now Skadi was not bad-looking herself. And the gods had often taken giantesses as wives. So Skadi’s demand was not unthinkable. Still, Odin couldn’t help but see that Skadi’s eye had rested a little too long on Balder, and Balder was his favorite—it wouldn’t do to let Skadi make decisions that affected Balder’s life. So Odin agreed. “On one condition,” he said. “You must choose your husband by his feet. All the rest of him will be covered.”
That didn’t sound off to Skadi. After all, a man as meltingly gorgeous as Balder surely had caressable feet. So the gods covered themselves but for their feet, and Skadi chose easily.
The giantess Skadi wanted revenge for the death of her father, Thjazi. So Odin let her choose a husband as her repayment—but she had to choose him by looking only at his feet.
Only it turned out she had chosen Njord. Njord was a rather rough-and-tumble god. He was one of the Vanir originally and had been traded after the war, so now he lived among the Aesir with his son Frey and his daughter Freyja. He was the god of seafaring folk and he looked the part: weathered cheeks, sea blue eyes, sea salt in his hair. He wasn’t what Skadi wanted. No, not at all.
But before Skadi could protest, Njord held up a warning hand. “Harsh words have no place at the beginning of a marriage.”
“I’ve been tricked,” said Skadi.
“Better me than Loki, no?” answered Njord.
Odin nodded. “Gentle and wise. You’ve got your husband, Skadi.”
The giantess Skadi demanded that she be made to laugh before she would agree to marry Njord. So Loki told a joke so funny that Skadi couldn’t keep herself from laughing.
“But the bellyful of laughter? Where is that?” Skadi shook her head. “I’ll never laugh again.”
So Loki took over. The trickster liked to think of himself as a problem solver, after all. He told a bawdy story about a goat accompanying him to market and a tug-of-war that involved a lot of noise and no small amount of pain to Loki’s private parts, and in the confusion of telling it all, he fell back into Skadi’s arms. The giantess laughed in spite of herself.
And so Skadi had all that she had required. There was no way she could back out of the bargain now.
But Odin decided to sweeten the deal further. He took from his pouch two wet marbles. Skadi gasped as the eyes of her father stared at her. Odin flung them high so they clung to the sky, twin stars to gleam down on Skadi.
The god Njord loved his shipyard, and the giantess Skadi loved her snowy mountains. Though they were husband and wife, they couldn’t find any place to live that made them both happy.
Njord held out his hand, inviting his new wife to come live with him at his beloved shipyard, Noatun. Then began the first struggle of many between the newlyweds, for Skadi said she’d never live anywhere but Thrymheim. At last they agreed to spend nine nights in one home and then nine nights in the other. They began with Thrymheim, for Njord had a gentlemanly streak. But the god soon learned he hated those frozen mountains; they felt like death to him. The howling of the wolves kept him awake. After nine nights they went to Noatun. But the giantess soon learned she hated the sight of the boats rocking on the sea endlessly, endlessly. Worse was the whooping of the swans and the mewing of the gulls. She got no sleep, not even when Njord sang stories to her.
It wasn’t long before husband and wife parted, each to live in their own realm. Njord heard about Skadi often, and every now and then he saw her—a fleet figure skiing across the snowscapes, determined in her desolation.
Some marriages just aren’t meant to be.
