Gleipnir

Also Known As: Old Norse Gleipnir, glossed “the open one”; the third and last of the fetters made for Fenrir, after Lædingr and Drómi
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: It cannot be broken, and it tightens the harder the thing inside it fights.
Role in Mythos: It holds the wolf Fenrir on an island until the end of the world, which is the only reason the gods have a world left to lose.
Relation to Humans: No mortal ever handles it, and Snorri gives it no cult, no charm and no human owner. Its whole bearing on human life is that it holds, because the day it stops holding is the day the wolf comes out.

What came up out of the dark country of the dwarves was not a chain. It was a band small enough to close in a fist, soft and smooth as a silk ribbon, and the gods who had already ruined two lengths of good iron stood on a stony shore passing it between them, pulling against it with their hands, unable to make it snap.

They had tried the obvious thing twice. The Æsir were raising the wolf at home, only Týr willing to walk up to him with meat, and every day he was bigger and every prophecy said the same thing about where that was going. So they forged a fetter called Lædingr and asked him to test his strength against it, which is a flattering way to phrase a trap. Fenrir looked at it, decided the odds were not overwhelming, and let them do as they liked. He lashed out once and it broke. They forged Drómi, half again as strong, and this time the wolf paused. He knew he had grown since Lædingr. He also knew that nothing famous ever came of refusing, so he lay down and let them buckle it on, then shook himself, dashed it against the ground and sent the pieces flying. Both fetters survived into ordinary Icelandic speech afterwards, the way a disaster sometimes does, so that a hard job was one you loosed yourself out of Lædingr or dashed yourself out of Drómi.

After that the gods stopped forging. Allfather sent Skírnir, who ran errands for Freyr, down into Svartálfaheim to certain dwarves, and what the dwarves made was Gleipnir. It was made of six things: the noise a cat makes in foot-fall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a rock, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird. Snorri lets the listener object before he can do it out loud. You have seen that a woman has no beard, says the voice telling the story, and no sound comes from the leap of a cat, and there are no roots under a rock, and everything else I have told you is just as true, even the parts you cannot go and test. It is a defence and a shrug at the same time, and it is the closest thing in the Edda to a wink.

Six impossibilities, then, spun into a thing that weighs almost nothing. Not one of the ingredients exists. That is the point of them: a rope made of what the world does not contain cannot be fought by anything the world does contain. It came back into the light looking like a hair ribbon, and the messenger was thanked warmly for his errand.

They took it out onto a lake called Ámsvartnir, to the island Lyngvi, and called the wolf across the water. The Æsir handed the ribbon around in front of him, each one straining at it, each one failing, saying it was stouter than it looked and that surely he could manage what they could not. Fenrir was not stupid. There was no glory in snapping a slender band, he told them, and if it was made with cunning and wiles then, however little it seemed, it was never going on his feet. Then he named his price. Someone was to lay a hand in his mouth as a pledge of good faith. Each god looked at his neighbour. The gods were lying, and they knew it, and none of them wanted to pay for it with an arm. Týr put out his right hand.

The wolf lashed out and the band hardened. The more he fought it the tighter it drew, which is the whole of its magic and the reason no amount of strength was ever going to matter. Everybody laughed except Týr, who was down a hand. Then the gods ran a chain called Gelgja from the fetter, threaded it through a boulder named Gjöll and drove the boulder deep into the earth, hammered a stone called Thviti deeper still to pin it, and jammed a sword upright in the wolf’s jaws when he snapped at them, hilt in the lower, point in the upper. He howls there with the slaver running out of his mouth in a river the Norse called Ván, hope, and he stays until the doom of the gods. They could have killed him. They would not spill his blood on holy ground, even knowing the prophecies made him the death of Odin, which is either piety or a failure of nerve depending on how the reader feels about Odin.

Gleipnir’s limits are the interesting part. It restrains and does nothing else. It does not weaken the wolf, does not age him, does not stop him growing, and it buys time rather than safety, since Fenrir lies in it only until the world ends and then does not. It could not be got onto him by force either. Six impossible ingredients and the finest work in Svartálfaheim still needed a lie and a severed hand to close the buckle.

One more thing about the ribbon is worth knowing: nobody but Snorri gives it a name. The older poetry knows the story perfectly well, and in Lokasenna Loki jeers at Týr about the right hand Fenrir tore off him while Týr counters that Loki is missing a bound son, yet no verse in that exchange calls the binding anything at all. The name belongs to the prose. Five centuries later an Icelandic tenant farmer called Jakob Sigurðsson, who copied manuscripts and drew in them, painted the scene twice in ink and coloured wash, once in 1760 and again in 1765 in the book that ended up in Manitoba and came home in 2000. In both drawings the catalogue records the same two things in the frame: the wolf, and the hand in his mouth.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Gleipnir?

Gleipnir is the magical fetter in Norse mythology that finally binds the wolf Fenrir. It is described as soft and smooth as a silk ribbon but unbreakable, and it was made by dwarves in Svartálfaheim after two iron chains failed.

What is Gleipnir made of?

Gleipnir was made of six things: the noise a cat makes in foot-fall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a rock, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird. Every one of these is something that does not exist or cannot be found, which is why the fetter cannot be broken by anything that does exist.

Who made Gleipnir and who ordered it?

Odin sent Skírnir, the messenger of the god Freyr, down into Svartálfaheim to certain dwarves, and they made the fetter. The gods had already tried two forged iron fetters, Lædingr and Drómi, and Fenrir had broken both.

How did the gods get Gleipnir onto Fenrir?

They lured the wolf to the island Lyngvi in the lake Ámsvartnir and dared him to snap the ribbon, but Fenrir suspected a trick and demanded that one of them place a hand in his mouth as a pledge. Týr laid in his right hand, the fetter tightened when the wolf struggled, and Fenrir bit the hand off.

Does Gleipnir hold Fenrir forever?

No. Fenrir lies bound by Gleipnir, chained through the boulder Gjöll and pinned by the stone Thviti, only until Ragnarok, when he breaks free and kills Odin. The fetter buys the gods time rather than a permanent solution.