Angerboda (Old Norse: Angrboða; also Angrboda)

Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A jötunn of the Ironwood whose three children by Loki, the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Jörmungandr, and Hel of the dead, carry the doom of the gods.
Role in Mythos: She is the mother of monsters whose brood the gods seize and imprison after prophecies warn of the disaster the three will bring.
Relation to Humans: Angerboda has no direct dealings with humankind in any surviving source. Her offspring shape the human world all the same: her serpent encircles the lands where people live, and the wolves of her line are fated to snatch the sun that lights them.

East of Midgard the trees grow dark as bog iron, and the forest there is called Járnviðr, the Ironwood. An old giantess lives in it and breeds sons in wolf shapes, litter after litter, while on a grave mound at the wood’s edge her herdsman Eggthér sits striking a harp, glad, apparently, about his work. The voices of the wolves carry between the cold trunks. The poem that describes this place does not bother to name her. She is simply in aldna, the old one.

Her name appears exactly once in the Poetic Edda, in the verses known as the Short Völuspá: Loki begot the wolf on Angerboda. Old Norse angr means grief or sorrow, and boða means to herald, the same root that survives in the English bode. She Who Bodes Grief is less a name than a job description. It may also be a late one; the word itself was perhaps coined no earlier than the twelfth century, a label fixed onto a mother of monsters whose tradition runs older than her name.

Snorri Sturluson fills in the family. There was a giantess in Jötunheimar called Angerboda, he writes, and with her Loki had three children. The first was Fenrir, a wolf. The second was Jörmungandr, a serpent. The third was Hel, a daughter half flesh-coloured and half black. Loki had a lawful wife among the gods, Sigyn, who would stand by him through far worse. Angerboda was the liaison in Giantland, and hers were the children that prophecy worried about. The gods traced foretellings that from these three siblings great mischief and disaster would come, and they expected evil of them, first because of their mother’s nature, and worse because of their father’s. That is the only judgment any source passes on her character, and it comes secondhand, from the people about to take her children.

Odin had the three brought before him. The serpent he flung into the deep sea that rings all lands, where it grew until it circled the world of men and gripped its own tail in its teeth. Hel he cast down into Niflheim and gave her authority over the dead of nine worlds. The wolf the gods kept at home and fed, though only Tyr had the nerve to walk up with the meat, until the day they tricked Fenrir into a silk-soft band that no strength could break. Tyr left that meeting without his right hand.

Angerboda gets no lines, no protest, no recorded death. But Völuspá leaves the old one in the Ironwood, still raising the kin of Fenrir among troll-women the poets call Járnviðjur, and Snorri adds that from this clan will come a mighty one named Moongarm, sun’s snatcher in troll’s guise. He will fill himself with the lifeblood of the dying, swallow the heavenly bodies, and spatter heaven and all the skies with blood, so that the sun loses its shine in the summers after and every weather turns hostile. Whether the old one of the Ironwood and Angerboda are the same figure is never stated outright, but the wolves are Fenrir’s kind, and most who read the stanza put her there.

The Short Völuspá keeps one stranger verse in her orbit. Loki, it says, found a woman’s heart half-burnt in the embers of a linden-wood fire and ate it, and from that swallowed heart he grew pregnant, and from him came every ogress on earth. The verse never names the woman whose heart it was. Many readers have set Angerboda’s name into the gap, which would mean her monstrous motherhood outlived even the roasting of her own heart; others have folded her together with Gullveig, the witch the gods speared and burned three times at the start of the first war. The poems themselves stay quiet.

No surviving line describes her. Everything has to be assembled from epithets: old, eastern, a hag of the iron trees, mother of wolves. For a figure whose son could belt the planet, the silence has its own weight. Either the poets looked away, or the poem that looked at her directly did not survive.

Her power is fecundity of a kind that rearranges cosmology. She bears a wolf, a serpent, and a half-dead queen from a single union, and she breeds on afterwards in a forest east of everything the gods govern, beyond their fences if not beyond their fear. The limits of that power are just as stark. She could not keep her first three children, and nothing in the record says she tried; everything she does reaches the world through offspring, never through her own hands. At Ragnarök the brood finishes the work. Fenrir swallows Odin whole, and Jörmungandr kills Thor with venom even as Thor kills him. Their mother has been out of the story for the whole age of the world by then. The grief she boded arrives on schedule.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Angerboda in Norse mythology?

Angerboda (Old Norse Angrboða) is a jötunn, or giantess, who lives in Jötunheimar and is the mate of the trickster god Loki. She is best known as the mother of three monsters: the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jörmungandr, and Hel, ruler of the dead. She appears by name only once in the Poetic Edda and briefly in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.

Who are Angerboda’s children?

Angerboda bore Loki three children: Fenrir, the wolf who is fated to swallow Odin at Ragnarök; Jörmungandr, the serpent who encircles the human world and will kill Thor; and Hel, the half-dark daughter who rules the realm of the dead in Niflheim. The gods seized all three after prophecies warned of the disaster they would bring.

What does the name Angerboda mean?

Angerboda means roughly “she who bodes grief,” “bringer of sorrow,” or “harm-bidder.” It combines Old Norse angr, meaning grief or sorrow, with boða, meaning to announce or foretell. The name itself may be a relatively late coinage, possibly no earlier than the twelfth century, attached to an older tradition.

Is Angerboda Loki’s wife?

No. Loki’s wife among the gods is Sigyn, the mother of his sons Narfi and Vali. Angerboda is his jötunn mate in Giantland, and their union produced the three monstrous children that the gods feared and imprisoned.

Where does Angerboda live?

Angerboda is placed in Jötunheimar, the land of giants, and is widely identified with “the old one” of Járnviðr, the Ironwood, a forest east of Midgard inhabited by troll-women. There she raises wolf-shaped offspring of Fenrir’s line, including Moongarm, the wolf fated to swallow the heavenly bodies.