Apples of Idun

Also Known As: Old Norse epli, the fruit kept by the goddess Iðunn; the tenth-century poem Haustlöng names what she keeps only as ellilyf ása, the old-age cure of the Æsir
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A taste of the fruit reverses ageing in the gods, and Snorri Sturluson says it will go on doing so until Ragnarök.
Role in Mythos: The apples are the one thing standing between the Æsir and old age, which makes them the prize in the story of the giant Thjazi’s raid on Asgard.
Relation to Humans: No source lets a mortal eat from Idun’s store, and the apples are strictly food for the gods. Apples that do reach human hands in Norse tradition come by other routes, most famously the fertility apple a goddess sends to a childless king in Völsunga saga.

The box is made of ash. That is the first physical fact about the most valuable food in Asgard, and for a long while it is nearly the only one. Snorri Sturluson, writing in Iceland around 1220, says that the goddess Idun, wife of the poet-god Bragi, keeps in her eski, a chest of ash-wood, the apples the gods must taste whenever they begin to grow old. They taste, and they are young again, and so it shall be until Ragnarök. The listener in Snorri’s frame story says what anyone would say: that is a great deal to trust to one woman’s watchfulness. The answer comes with a laugh. It very nearly went badly once.

Snorri tells the whole thing in Skáldskaparmál, and here the apples do what a treasure does in any good story, which is leave. The giant Thjazi, in the shape of an eagle, has Loki stuck to the end of a pole and dragged across treetops and stony ground, and he names his price for letting go: Idun, brought out of Asgard, apples and all. Loki pays it with a salesman’s lie. He tells her he has found apples out in a wood that she would think precious, and suggests she bring her own to compare them. She walks out carrying the ash-wood box. The eagle takes her.

What follows is the only scene in Norse myth where the apples are felt by their absence. Snorri’s words are short. The Æsir were hard pressed by her disappearance and quickly grew hoary and old. There is a council of grey heads, a question about who saw her last, and a threat of death against Loki, who borrows Freyja’s falcon shape, flies north, turns Idun into a nut and carries her back in his claws. A fire of wood-shavings roars up along the wall of Asgard as the pursuing eagle stoops, the smell of scorched feathers on the air, and Thjazi dies inside the gate. The box, presumably, came home with her. No one thinks to mention it.

The oldest version of the story does not mention apples at all. Around the year 900 the Norwegian skald Thjodolf of Hvinir described the same raid in Haustlöng, a poem on the scenes painted on a shield, and his Idun is the maid who knew the old-age cure of the Æsir. John Lindow, in his 2001 handbook of Norse mythology, points out the gap: the cure is there three hundred years before the fruit is. Snorri, listing the poetic names for Idun, gives both. She is the wife of Bragi, the keeper of the apples, and the old-age cure of the Æsir. Whether the apples were an old part of the tradition that Thjodolf simply did not need, or Snorri’s way of giving a vague cure a shape a reader could hold, the record cannot settle.

Nothing in the texts describes the fruit itself. Snorri gives no colour, no count, no orchard and no gardener. No source says where they grow. The golden apples that fill modern picture-books arrive by two side doors. One is Skírnismál, an Eddic poem in which Freyr’s servant Skírnir tries to buy the giantess Gerd for his master with eleven apples, all of gold, and she refuses them flat. The poem never says they came from Idun’s box; Henry Adams Bellows, translating it in 1923, simply glossed them by pointing to her apples of youth, and the association stuck. The other door is Richard Wagner, whose Das Rheingold merged Idun into his goddess Freia and gave her golden apples that keep the gods young, so that when the giants carry Freia off the gods fade and age on stage. It is the Haustlöng story, rebuilt with better lighting.

Apples as such carry weight elsewhere in the Norse record, and Hilda Ellis Davidson spent much of her career on why. She noted apples buried in the ninth-century Oseberg ship grave in Norway, and fruit and nuts in early Germanic graves, and read Idun as a dim reflection of an older figure, the guardian goddess of the life-giving fruit of the otherworld. She tied the apples to the Vanir, the gods of fertility, through two passages. The Skírnismál gold is one. The other opens Völsunga saga, where King Rerir and his queen pray for a child. The goddess Frigg hears them (the old Morris and Magnússon translation calls her Freyja) and sends the daughter of the giant Hrímnir, dressed in the shape of a crow, to drop an apple into the king’s lap as he sits on a burial mound. He carries it home. The queen eats some of it and conceives, and carries the child for six winters before ordering it cut from her. The boy, already large, kisses his mother before she dies, and he is Völsung, grandfather of Sigurd.

There is a darker fruit in the corpus too. An eleventh-century verse by the skald Thorbjörn Brúnason, preserved in Heiðarvíga saga, speaks of Heljar epli, the apples of Hel, and Davidson read the phrase as a hint that apples could be the food of the dead as well as of the undying. The Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary records it under the plain word for apple, a few lines below Idun’s.

David Knipe, writing in History of Religions in 1967, set the Thjazi story in a wider family: the Indo-European motif of an eagle who steals the celestial means of immortality. In the Norse telling the eagle steals the keeper rather than the thing kept, which says something about how the apples work. They are not a spring anyone can drink from. They come in a box, in a particular woman’s hands, and when she is gone the whole supply goes with her.

That is the object’s power and its flaw in one. A bite restores youth, repeatedly, apparently without limit, and the effect is fast in both directions: the gods age quickly once the apples are gone. Yet the fruit protects no one who is not fed it, cannot defend itself, and has no guard but a goddess with no weapon. It can be carried out of the gate by anyone she trusts. It kept the gods young until the day one of them talked her into a walk in the woods.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the apples of Idun in Norse mythology?

The apples of Idun are the fruit the Norse gods eat to stay young. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, written around 1220, says the goddess Idun keeps them in an ash-wood chest, and the gods taste them whenever they begin to grow old and become young again. He adds that this will continue until Ragnarök.

What happened when Idun’s apples were stolen?

When the giant Thjazi carried Idun off, the gods quickly grew grey and old. Loki, who had lured her out of Asgard by claiming to have found better apples in a wood, was forced to fetch her back. He flew to Thjazi’s home in Freyja’s falcon shape, turned Idun into a nut and carried her home, and the gods killed Thjazi at the wall of Asgard.

Were Idun’s apples golden?

No Norse source says Idun’s apples were golden. Snorri Sturluson never describes their colour. The golden apples in Norse myth are the eleven offered to the giantess Gerd in the poem Skírnismál, and the image of Idun’s golden apples was popularised by Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, where the goddess Freia keeps them.

Are the apples in the oldest source about Idun?

No. The oldest source, the poem Haustlöng composed around 900 by the skald Thjodolf of Hvinir, calls Idun the maid who knew the old-age cure of the Æsir but never mentions apples. The apples first appear in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda about three hundred years later.

What other apples appear in Norse mythology?

Apart from Idun’s apples, Norse tradition has the eleven golden apples offered to Gerd in Skírnismál and the fertility apple in Völsunga saga, which the goddess Frigg sends to King Rerir so that his queen can conceive the hero Völsung. An eleventh-century verse also speaks of the apples of Hel, which Hilda Ellis Davidson read as food of the dead.