Draupnir

Also Known As: Old Norse Draupnir, “the Dripper”, from drjupa, to drip; anglicised Draupner
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: Every ninth night eight gold rings drip from it, each one the same weight as the ring itself.
Role in Mythos: It is Odin’s ring, the gift that lost a wager, and the thing he lays on his dead son’s pyre.
Relation to Humans: No mortal in the surviving stories ever holds it or is offered it, and it changes hands only among gods, giants and the dead. Its reach into human life is through poetry, where skalds learned to call gold the drop of Draupnir and the shower of Draupnir, so that every praise-poem about a generous lord borrowed the ring’s name without needing to explain it.

The bellows never stopped. That is the heart of it: a dwarf standing at the blast with blood running into his eye, working steadily while a fly bit at him, and gold lying in the hearth that would be ruined if the air failed for a breath. His brother had said as much before going out. What came out of that fire was a ring.

The reason any of it happened is smaller than the result. Loki cut off all of Sif’s hair for mischief, and when Thor found out he took hold of Loki and would have broken every bone in him, so Loki swore to go to the black elves and have hair of gold made that would grow like the real thing. The dwarves called Ivaldi’s sons made the hair. They also made the ship Skidbladnir and the spear that became Odin’s, Gungnir. Loki, who could never leave a good outcome alone, then wagered his own head with the dwarf Brokkr that Brokkr’s brother Sindri could not produce three treasures to match them.

Sindri took the bet in the plainest possible way. He laid a pigskin in the hearth, told Brokkr to blow and not stop, and walked out. A fly settled on Brokkr’s hand and stung him; he blew on, and the thing that came out was a boar with mane and bristles of gold. Then Sindri laid gold in the hearth and gave the same order. This time the fly landed on Brokkr’s neck and bit half again as hard as before. He kept blowing. Out of the coals came the ring called Draupnir. The third piece was iron, and the fly went for Brokkr’s eyelid, and the blood blinded him long enough that he swatted at it and the bellows sagged, which is why the hammer that came out had a handle a little too short. The fly is never named in the telling, though it turns up exactly where Loki’s head is on the table.

Brokkr carried all three to Asgard and set them beside Loki’s. Odin, Thor and Freyr sat as judges. Loki gave out the spear that never stops in its thrust, the hair that grows to the flesh, the ship that folds away like cloth. Then Brokkr gave Odin the ring, and told him what it did: eight rings of the same weight would drop from it every ninth night. He gave Freyr the boar and Thor the hammer, and the hammer won.

The ring did not win.

It kept working anyway, and its working is stranger the longer you look at it. Draupnir does not make treasure out of nothing so much as it makes copies of itself, gold begetting its own exact weight, eight identical heirs arriving on a schedule nobody can hurry. A hoard grows by nine-night steps whether anyone is watching or not. The poets took the idea and ran with it, so that gold in skaldic verse could be called Draupnir’s drop, or the rain and shower of Draupnir, a whole vocabulary of wealth built on one ring quietly leaking more of itself in the dark.

Nobody ever says what it looked like. The prose calls it a gold ring; the verse calls it only a baug, a ring, the ordinary word for a band of precious metal. That silence is worth more than a description would be, because it means the storytellers cared about the arithmetic and not the object. What mattered was that eight came off it, on the ninth night, every time.

Then Baldr died, and Odin put it in a fire.

The funeral is one of the loudest scenes in the whole corpus. The ship Hringhorni would not launch until the giantess Hyrrokkin came riding a wolf with a viper for a bridle, and she shoved it out at the first push so hard that flame burst from the rollers and the land shook. Nanna saw her husband carried aboard and her heart broke in her body, and she was laid on the pyre beside him. Thor hallowed the fire with Mjollnir and kicked a dwarf named Litr into it on his way past. Baldr’s horse was led up with all its harness. And Odin walked to the pyre and laid the ring on it, the thing that made him inexhaustible, and let it burn with his son.

It came back. Hermod rode nine nights through valleys so dark he saw nothing until he reached the river Gjoll and the bridge thatched with glittering gold, which thundered under one living rider more than under five companies of the dead. He argued with Hel for his brother and got a condition instead of a release. On his way out Baldr walked him to the door and put Draupnir in his hands to carry back to Odin as a keepsake, and Nanna sent Frigg a linen smock and sent Fulla a gold finger ring. The greatest treasure in the north made that whole journey and arrived as a memento.

After that the ring turns up once more, in the hands of somebody else entirely. Freyr’s servant Skirnir rides to Gymir’s house to bargain for the giant’s daughter Gerd, and when eleven golden apples fail he offers her the ring that was burned with Odin’s young son, from which eight of like weight fall on every ninth night. Gerd says no. In Gymir’s home there is no lack of gold, she tells him, and her father’s wealth is enough. Skirnir puts the ring away and draws a sword, and then a staff, and the poem turns very ugly very quickly.

That refusal is the closest thing Draupnir has to a weakness. It multiplies gold and only gold, at a fixed rate, in a fixed quantity, and it cannot buy back a dead son or talk a woman into a marriage she does not want. It lost a contest to a hammer with a short handle. It can be given away, burned, carried into the underworld and handed back. Note also that the poem which offers it never actually names it; it is Snorri’s prose that identifies the burned ring as Draupnir, and no source anywhere explains how Freyr came to have it. There is even a dwarf called Draupnir listed among those who dwell in stones, sharing the name with the most famous ring in Scandinavia and getting nothing else out of the arrangement.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Draupnir?

Draupnir is a gold ring belonging to Odin in Norse mythology, whose name means “the Dripper”. Every ninth night, eight gold rings of equal weight drip from it. It was forged by the dwarf Sindri while his brother Brokkr worked the bellows.

Who made Draupnir and why?

The dwarf Sindri made Draupnir, with his brother Brokkr blowing the bellows, as part of a wager. Loki had bet his own head that Sindri could not match three treasures already made by the dwarves called Ivaldi’s sons. Sindri produced the boar Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir and the hammer Mjollnir, and the hammer won the contest.

Why did Odin put Draupnir on Baldr’s funeral pyre?

The sources record that Odin laid Draupnir on the burning ship without explaining his reason. Baldr later sent the ring back from Hel with Hermod as a keepsake for his father, so the gift did not stay with the dead. Snorri’s account of the funeral is the only place the ring’s presence there is described.

Does Draupnir appear in the Poetic Edda?

A ring matching Draupnir appears in Skirnismal, where Freyr’s servant Skirnir offers Gerd the ring that was burned with Odin’s young son and from which eight of like weight fall every ninth night. The poem never gives the ring a name. It is Snorri’s prose Edda that identifies it as Draupnir, and no surviving source says how Freyr obtained it.

What is Draupnir’s weakness?

Draupnir produces only gold, only eight rings at a time, and only on a nine-night cycle that cannot be hurried. It cannot restore the dead or compel consent, and Gerd refuses it outright on the grounds that her father’s halls already have plenty of gold.