Geri and Freki

Also Known As: Old Norse Geri and Freki, both names meaning roughly “the greedy one” or “the ravenous one”; called Viðrir’s hounds in Eddic verse, Viðrir being a name of Odin
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Geri and Freki are the two wolves of Odin, fed by his own hand at the high table of Valhalla and named for their appetite.
Role in Mythos: They eat every scrap of food set before Odin, who lives on wine alone, and in the poets’ language they stand for all wolves that feed on the battlefield dead.
Relation to Humans: The wolves never deal with living people in any surviving story, but the men who fall in battle are, in skaldic verse, their meal and their drink. Poets used both names as plain words for “wolf”, so a warrior praised for feeding Geri was being praised for killing.

The meat arrives hot, and the god does not touch it. In the hall of the slain, where the roof is made of shields and the benches are crowded with dead warriors eating boar that was whole again by evening, Odin sits with a cup of wine and two wolves at his feet. Whatever is put on his table goes down to them. He drinks. They eat. That is the whole arrangement, and it has been running since before anyone thought to write it down.

Their names are Geri and Freki, and the names are the best description anyone ever gave of them. Both come from old Germanic words for greed. Geri is “the greedy one”, from a root that also turns up in Old High German and Old Swedish with the same sense. Freki is “the ravenous one”, from a word that in Old Norse could also mean brazen or gluttonous. They are less a pair of names than one name said twice, which suits two animals that nobody in the record bothers to tell apart.

The oldest telling is a single verse. In the Eddic poem Grímnismál, Odin has come in disguise to the hall of King Geirröðr, calling himself Grímnir, and the king has had him seized and set between two fires. For eight nights he sits there with his cloak scorching. Then the king’s young son Agnarr brings him a full horn to drink, and the stranger begins to speak, describing the homes of the gods one after another. When he comes to Valhalla he tells how the cook Andhrímnir boils the boar Sæhrímnir in the kettle Eldhrímnir, and then he says that the Father of Hosts, hardened to battle, feeds Geri and Freki, while he himself lives on wine and nothing else. The next verse turns to the ravens. The wolves get four lines.

Snorri Sturluson, writing his Edda in Iceland around 1220, turned the verse into a question and an answer. The traveller Gangleri has just been told about the endless boar, and he wants to know whether Odin eats the same food as his warriors. No, says the figure called High. The food on Odin’s table he gives to his two wolves, and he needs none himself, because wine is both meat and drink to him. Snorri then quotes the Grímnismál verse as his proof and moves on to the ravens, just as the poem does. He adds nothing about where the wolves came from, who their sire was, or how Odin got them. No one does. They are simply there, the way a king’s hounds are there.

Outside the hall they are less tidy. A second Eddic poem, the first lay of Helgi Hundingsbani, describes the moment a peace breaks down between the young hero Helgi and the sons of the man he has killed. The poet does not say that war began. He says that Viðrir’s hounds went ranging over the island, hungry for corpses. Viðrir is Odin, and the hounds are his wolves, let out of the hall and onto the wet grass of a battlefield where the dead lie cooling. This is the animal behind the table manners. A wolf fed on scraps at a feast and a wolf fed on the fallen are the same wolf, and the people who made these poems had seen the second kind.

The skalds used that without ceremony. In their verse, Geri and Freki stop being two particular animals and become two more words for wolf, to be dropped in wherever the metre needed them. Blood becomes Geri’s ale. A field of dead men becomes Freki’s meal, or Geri’s mouthful. Snorri lists both names among the terms a poet may use for a wolf, alongside the ordinary ones. A chieftain who was said to have fed Geri well had won a battle, and everybody listening knew what the wolf had been given.

There is one more turn to the name. In the prophecy of Völuspá, the refrain that marks the coming of the end says that the fetter will break and the freki will run free. There the word means Fenrir, the bound wolf who will swallow Odin at Ragnarök. So the god spends the ages feeding one ravenous wolf from his table and at the end is himself eaten by another that carries the same title. The scholar John Lindow has pointed out the irony. The poems leave it alone.

Nothing in the texts says what they look like. No grey coat, no yellow eye, no size beyond what a wolf has. Pictures are scarcer still. On a runestone of about 1050 at Böksta in Uppland, Sweden, a rider with a spear hunts an elk with two dogs running ahead and two birds overhead, and it has been suggested that the rider is Odin and the dogs his wolves. It is a suggestion. The stone carries no names for them.

What they can do is eat. No story gives them speech, cunning, or a fight of their own, and they run no errands the way the ravens do. Their one power is appetite, and it is bottomless, since the dish in front of Odin is filled again each night. Their closeness to him is the other thing they have: they are the only creatures in Valhalla fed directly from the god’s hand, and through them every wolf on every battlefield becomes, in the poets’ mouths, a hound of his.

Their limits are the limits of the record. They have no myth in which they act alone, no kill credited to them by name, no part given to them in the last battle. Fenrir has his day there, and so does the hound Garmr. Geri and Freki are not mentioned. Whether they die beside their master on the field or are simply still under the table when the hall burns, the sources do not say.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Geri and Freki in Norse mythology?

Geri and Freki are the two wolves of the god Odin. They sit with him in Valhalla and eat all the food placed on his table, while Odin himself lives only on wine. They appear in the Eddic poem Grímnismál and in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.

What do the names Geri and Freki mean?

Both names mean something close to “the greedy one” or “the ravenous one”. Geri and Freki come from old Germanic words for greed and hunger. Old Norse poets also used both names as ordinary words for “wolf”.

Why does Odin feed his wolves instead of eating?

According to Grímnismál and the Prose Edda, Odin needs no food because wine serves him as both meat and drink. He gives everything on his table to Geri and Freki. The texts give no further reason.

What happens to Geri and Freki at Ragnarök?

No surviving source says what happens to Geri and Freki at Ragnarök. Odin is swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, who is also called “freki” in the poem Völuspá, but Odin’s own two wolves are not mentioned in any account of the last battle.

Is Freki the same as Fenrir?

Freki, the wolf of Odin, is not the same animal as Fenrir. The word freki means “the ravenous one”, and Völuspá uses it as a title for Fenrir, so the two wolves share a name. Odin feeds one freki at his table and is eaten by the other.