Andvari

The waterfall never stops. It comes down white and loud into a pool full of fish, and in the pool a pike hangs against the current, lean and still, until a salmon or a trout tumbles through the spray and the pike takes it. That is how Andvari eats. It is how he has eaten for a very long time, and when the gods finally come to his fall, he tells them plainly that he never chose it.

The Norse record gives him one story and tells it three times. The prose and verse of the Reginsmal, in the Codex Regius collection of Eddic poems, Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, and the Volsunga saga, set down in Iceland around 1270, all agree on the essentials. Andvari was a dwarf who had long lived in a waterfall in the shape of a pike, catching his food there, and the fall itself took his name: Andvarafors, Andvari’s force. He was not its only strange resident. Otr, a son of the sorcerer Hreidmar, spent his days in the same river in the shape of an otter, carrying fish up to the bank. The two shape-changed fishermen shared a pool, and neither of them would come out of the arrangement well.

Before that story, Andvari is a name on a list. The dwarf catalogue in Voluspa, the great sibyl’s poem that opens the Codex Regius, runs through dozens of dwarf names, and one line of it sets Andvari between Duf and Skirfir. Snorri copied the list into his account of how the dwarfs came to be, and sorted it: some dwarfs, he says, dwell in the earth, but Andvari is among those who dwell in the rocks. When Snorri later tells the ransom story, Odin sends Loki to the home of the swarthy elves to find him, and the gold is kept inside his rock. The meaning of his name is less settled than his address. It is usually rendered “the careful one”, and the old Icelandic dictionary of Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson records andvari as a name for a fish of prey, and in later Icelandic as a soft breeze and, figuratively, as watchfulness. A careful fish, then. The joke is older than anyone telling it now.

His origin is a single sentence of self-description. Andvari names his father as Oin, a figure who turns up nowhere else in the poems, according to Henry Adams Bellows, whose English translation of the Poetic Edda appeared in 1923. As for the pike’s shape, Andvari says an evil Norn doomed him to it in the early days, to wade forever through wet ways. No source says what he had done, or whether he had done anything at all. The Norns in these poems do not always need a reason.

The gods did not come looking for him on purpose. Odin, Hoenir and Loki were walking by the fall when Loki killed the otter with a stone, pleased to have taken an otter and a salmon with one throw. That night, Hreidmar recognised the skin as his son’s, seized the three of them, and set the price of their lives: the otter skin filled with gold and then covered over with red gold as well. Loki was sent to find it. In the Reginsmal and the saga he borrowed the net of Ran, the sea-goddess who gathers in the drowned, and cast it in front of the pike, and the fish swam straight in. Snorri’s Loki does not bother with a net. He catches the dwarf in his hands.

What follows is a strange conversation to hold with a fish in a net. Loki opens with a riddle: what fish is this, that runs in the flood and cannot save itself from harm? It must buy its head back from Hel by finding him the water’s flame, a poet’s word for gold. Andvari answers with his name, his father’s name, and the Norn’s sentence. Then, in two stanzas that Bellows thought had wandered in from a different poem, Loki asks what men must pay when they wound each other with lies, and Andvari tells him that liars wade long in the river Vadgelmir, a place named nowhere else in the record. It is a strange question to put to a prisoner, and a stranger one to put in Loki’s mouth.

Then the dwarf paid. In Snorri’s telling the two of them went into the rock, and Andvari brought out all the gold he owned, and it was a very large amount. The heap lay in the dark between them, heavy and dull until light caught it. The dwarf closed one hand around a small gold ring. Loki saw the movement and told him to open it. Andvari begged to keep that one thing, because with the ring, Snorri says, he could increase his wealth again. Loki told him he would not keep so much as a penny, took it, and walked out.

Andvari went back into his rock and cursed what he had lost. The sources phrase the curse in different ways. In Snorri the ring will be the bane of everyone who owns it. In the saga the dwarf cries out from a hollow in the rocks that the ring and all the gold together will be the death of every man who possesses them. The Reginsmal gives him a darker, more specific verse: the gold that Gust once had will bring death to two brothers and evil to eight heroes. Bellows could not say who Gust was, whether a former owner or simply another name for Andvari himself. Loki, for his part, was delighted, and promised to carry the curse to whoever received the gold.

He kept his word. Odin covered the otter’s last whisker with the ring, Loki recited the curse over Hreidmar’s head, and the killing began within the family. Hreidmar was stabbed in his sleep by his son Fafnir, who took the gold to Gnita-heath and lay on it as a serpent until Sigurd killed him. The treasure then passed to Sigurd, to Brynhild, to Gunnar and Hogni, and it left a line of dead behind it in every generation of the Volsung story. The ring itself has its own history, told under its own name, Andvaranaut.

Andvari does not appear again. No source says whether he went back to the pool, whether he ever gathered another hoard, or whether the Norn’s sentence was ever lifted. The German Nibelungenlied, which tells a southern version of Siegfried and the treasure, has no Andvari at all; the Victorian English edition of the Volsunga saga was already pointing out that the dwarf, the otter and the curse had simply fallen out of the German story. When Richard Wagner built his Ring cycle partly from the Icelandic material, the scene of a god and a trickster seizing a dwarf’s gold and ring, and the dwarf cursing it, went to his own dwarf, Alberich.

Andvari’s gifts are all in the water and the rock. He can hold the pike’s shape for as long as the story needs, he can feed himself from the fall, and he can gather gold in quantities that impress even gods paying a ransom. The ring, if Snorri is right, could have bred all of it back again. His one real weapon is his voice. The curse he spoke from his rock outlasted everyone who heard it.

His weaknesses are just as plain. He is bound to the water by someone else’s sentence, and a net or a quick pair of hands is enough to take him out of it. He cannot bargain with a god, cannot hide a ring in a closed fist from Loki, and cannot keep a single penny. The curse avenges him, but it never gives anything back, and nobody in the story thinks to ask what became of the fish.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Andvari in Norse mythology?

Andvari is a dwarf in Norse mythology who lived in a waterfall in the shape of a pike and owned a large hoard of gold. Loki caught him and forced him to give up the gold and a small ring to pay the gods’ ransom for killing Otr. Andvari cursed the treasure, and the curse drives the tragedy of the Volsungs.

Why did Andvari live as a pike?

Andvari says in the Reginsmal that an evil Norn doomed him in the early days to live in the water. He names his father as Oin but gives no reason for the Norn’s sentence. The waterfall where he lived was called Andvarafors, Andvari’s force.

How did Loki catch Andvari?

In the Reginsmal and the Volsunga saga, Loki borrowed the net of the sea-goddess Ran and cast it in front of the pike, which swam straight in. In Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, Loki simply catches Andvari in his hands. Either way, Andvari had to buy his life with all his gold.

What was Andvari’s curse?

Andvari cursed the ring Loki took from him, and in the Volsunga saga all the gold as well, to be the death of everyone who owned it. The curse is fulfilled through Hreidmar, Fafnir, Sigurd, Brynhild and the Gjukungs. In the Reginsmal the curse promises death to two brothers and evil to eight heroes.

Is Andvari the same as Wagner’s Alberich?

Andvari is not the same figure as Alberich, but Richard Wagner gave Andvari’s role in the story, a dwarf whose gold and ring are seized by a god and a trickster and who curses the ring, to his dwarf Alberich in the Ring cycle. The German Nibelungenlied, by contrast, has no Andvari at all.

Related Entries

Loki, Odin, Ran, Norns, Fafnir, Sigurd, Sigmund, Hel, Dvergr, Dwarf, Svartálfar, Draupnir, Brísingamen, Aegir