Idun

Also Known As: Old Norse Iðunn; also Idunn, Iduna, Ydun; the name is usually read as containing ið-, “again” or “anew”, though scholars have proposed “the rejuvenating one”, “ever young” and “again-love” without settling on one
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She keeps the apples the Aesir bite when age begins to reach them, and the biting undoes it.
Role in Mythos: She is the reason the gods of Asgard do not grow old, and the one thing about them a giant could think to steal.
Relation to Humans: No source has her answer a prayer, take an offering, or appear to anyone living. What she guards is the difference between the gods and everybody else, and the myth about her is the story of the week they nearly lost it.

The ox would not cook. Odin, Loki and Hoenir had come down out of the mountains hungry enough to kill the first animal they found, and the fire was going well, and the meat stayed raw. They scattered the embers and built it again. Still raw. Then a voice came out of the oak above them, and there was an eagle in the branches, and it was not a small one.

That is how the only story anyone tells about Idun begins, and she is not in it yet. The eagle offers to let the meat cook in exchange for its fill. It takes both shoulders and both hams at the first grab. Loki, furious, swings a pole at it, and the pole sticks to the bird and his hands stick to the pole, and he goes up into the sky with his feet knocking against rock-heaps and treetops and his arms nearly leaving their sockets. The eagle sets one price for letting him down. Loki is to bring Idun out of Asgard.

The oldest source for this is a shield poem. Around the turn of the tenth century the Norwegian skald Thjodolf of Hvinir composed *Haustlong* to describe the pictures painted on a shield he had been given, and half of it is this myth. His Idun is not called a keeper of apples. She is *the maiden who knew the age-cure of the Aesir*, and she is *the lady of Brunnakr’s brook*, a place-name that appears nowhere else in Norse literature and that nobody has convincingly explained. The apples arrive three hundred years later, in Snorri Sturluson’s hands. Whether he was recording something old or tidying a vaguer idea into a solid object, the apples are the version that stuck.

Snorri puts her in a wooden box. She is Bragi’s wife, and in her *eski*, a chest of ash-wood, she keeps the fruit the gods must taste when they begin to age, and then they are young again, and it will work that way until the world ends. Picture the lid coming up in a hall in the evening, the cold smell of the wood inside, one of the Aesir taking the thing in his hand without ceremony and biting it the way anyone bites an apple. There is no ritual in any account. It is simply what she carries, and they eat from it.

The Old Norse word Snorri uses, *epli*, did not mean what the English word means. It covered fruit and nuts broadly, and the cultivated apple reached Scandinavia late. Hilda Ellis Davidson connected the myth to the fruit and nuts found in early Germanic graves and in the Oseberg ship burial, where a bucket of apples went into the ground with the dead. Whatever the box held, it was understood as a thing that carried life forward.

Loki does his part with an apple-seller’s patter. He tells her he has found fruit out in a wood that she really ought to see, and suggests she bring hers along for comparison. She goes. Thjazi comes down in his eagle plumage and takes her north to Thrymheim, and in Asgard the effect is immediate and undignified. The Aesir go hoary. Thjodolf’s word for what they became is closer to “hideous” than “elderly”. They call a council and stand about in it grey and slack-skinned, working out who saw her last, and the answer is that she left with Loki.

Loki is threatened with death and offers to fetch her back. He borrows Freyja’s hawk-plumage, flies to Thjazi’s hall while the giant is out at sea, turns Idun into a nut and takes her in his claws. The eagle comes after him hard enough to make a roar with its wings. The gods pile wood-shavings along the wall of Asgard, and when the hawk drops inside they light them, and the eagle cannot pull up in time. Its feathers catch. They kill Thjazi at the gate, and Snorri says the killing was famous. Then Thjazi’s daughter Skadi arrives in armour to settle accounts, chooses a husband by looking only at feet, gets Njord instead of Balder, and is finally made to laugh by Loki tying a cord between a goat’s beard and his own genitals. Odin throws the giant’s eyes into the sky as stars.

Idun says nothing in any of it. She is lured, carried, turned into a nut, carried again, and set down where she started.

She speaks in exactly one place. In *Lokasenna*, at Aegir’s feast, Loki and Bragi are edging toward violence and she puts a hand out, asking her husband not to trade insults in a hall under truce. Loki turns on her at once: silence, Idun, of all women you are the most man-eager, since you laid your splendidly washed arms about your own brother’s slayer. No other text names that brother, or the slayer, or the quarrel. The line sits there, unattached, the loose end of a story that did not survive.

One more Idun exists and should be handled with care. The poem *Hrafnagaldur Odins* shows her fallen from the World Tree into the depths beneath it, which reads far more like Eve than like anything in the Eddas. Sophus Bugge argued in 1867 that the poem was written by a learned Icelander long after the Middle Ages, and Annette Lassen’s 2011 edition puts it after the rediscovery of the Codex Regius in 1643. It is a seventeenth-century poem wearing a tenth-century coat.

Her power is unusual in that she does not appear to exercise it. She does not heal, bless, curse, or grant. She holds a box, and the contents of the box hold back time, and that is the whole of it. Which makes her limits obvious. She has no weapon, no counter-move and no recorded ability to refuse. The one force in Asgard that can be walked out of the gate and stolen is her, and the gods let it happen because the person who suggested a walk was one of their own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Idun in Norse mythology?

Idun is a goddess of the Aesir, the wife of the poet-god Bragi, and the keeper of the fruit that keeps the gods from ageing. She appears in the Prose Edda, in the tenth-century skaldic poem *Haustlong*, and in the Poetic Edda’s *Lokasenna*. She is one of the eight goddesses named at Aegir’s feast.

What do Idun’s apples do?

They reverse ageing. Snorri Sturluson writes that Idun keeps them in an ash-wood chest and that the gods taste them when old age begins to reach them, after which they become young again, and that this will hold until the end of the world. Skaldic tradition calls them the age-cure of the Aesir.

Who kidnapped Idun and why?

The giant Thjazi, in eagle form, seized Idun and carried her to his hall at Thrymheim. He forced Loki to lure her out of Asgard as the price of releasing him after Loki had become stuck to the eagle in mid-air. Without her, the Aesir immediately began to grow grey and old.

How was Idun rescued?

Loki borrowed Freyja’s hawk-plumage, flew to Thjazi’s hall while the giant was at sea, transformed Idun into a nut and carried her back in his claws. The Aesir set fire to wood-shavings piled along the wall of Asgard, the pursuing eagle’s feathers caught alight, and they killed Thjazi at the gate.

Did the Vikings really associate Idun with apples?

Not necessarily with apples as understood today. The oldest source, *Haustlong*, calls her the maiden who knew the age-cure of the Aesir and never mentions fruit. The Old Norse word Snorri uses, *epli*, covered fruit and nuts generally, and cultivated apples reached Scandinavia late.