Gungnir

Also Known As: Old Norse Gungnir, read as “the wavering one” or “the shaking one”; genitive Gungnis, as in the phrase Gungnis oddi, “Gungnir’s point”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A spear that can never be halted once it is driven home, and whose point carries carved runes.
Role in Mythos: It is Odin’s own weapon, won for him in a wager between dwarf smiths and carried at the head of the gods when they ride out at the world’s end.
Relation to Humans: Mortals never hold it, and no story has a hero borrow or inherit it. Its one appearance in Eddic verse is as a piece of rune-lore taught to a young man, so what passes to humans from Gungnir is knowledge rather than the weapon.

A spear point is a small surface to write on, and someone wrote on this one. High on Hindarfjoll, inside a ring of shields, a valkyrie wakes out of a sleep Odin laid on her, takes up a horn of mead, and begins listing the places where runes may be cut. The list is deliberately strange. On glass and on gold and on men’s amulets. In wine, in unfermented beer, on a favoured seat. On a Norn’s nail and on an owl’s beak. Wedged between the drink and the horse sits the point of Odin’s spear. That half-line is the only place in the whole of the Poetic Edda where the name Gungnir is spoken aloud.

Whoever did the cutting had to work small. Runes go into iron with a knife or a graver, a few short strokes at a time, and a spearhead offers you a hand’s breadth of flat metal between the socket and the tip. Fresh strokes catch the light differently from the polish around them, brighter and rawer, until the weather dulls them down. It is the least heroic image in Norse myth and one of the most domestic: a god’s weapon laid across somebody’s knees, being written on.

Everything else the spear does comes from prose, and from one Icelander. Snorri Sturluson tells its origin in Skaldskaparmal, and he tells it as a side effect of somebody else’s crime. Loki, for mischief, cuts off all of Sif’s hair. Thor catches him and would have broken every bone in his body, so Loki swears to fetch her hair of gold from the black elves, hair that will take root and grow like the real thing. He goes to the smiths Snorri calls Ivaldi’s Sons. They make the hair. They also make Skidbladnir, the folding ship, and a spear, and the spear becomes Odin’s, and its name is Gungnir.

Loki, who cannot leave a good outcome alone, then wagers his own head that Brokkr’s brother Sindri cannot match those three things. In the second smithy the air is close and the hearth is loud. Sindri lays a pigskin in the fire and tells Brokkr to blow and not stop. A fly settles on Brokkr’s hand and stings him. It returns for his neck, harder. The third time it bites his eyelid, and the blood runs down into his eyes, and for one breath he lets go of the bellows to sweep it away. Out of that hearth come a boar with mane and bristles of gold, the ring Draupnir, and a hammer, and the smith says the interruption came near to spoiling everything.

Then the Aesir sit down in the seats of judgment, and the verdict falls to Odin, Thor and Freyr. Loki lays out his three gifts and recites what each of them will do. Sif’s hair will grow to the flesh the moment it touches her head. Skidbladnir will find a fair wind as soon as its sail goes up, in whatever direction it is pointed, and folds away like a napkin into Freyr’s pouch. And the spear will never be stopped in its thrust. That is the wording, and it is worth keeping straight, because the version in general circulation has quietly upgraded it into a weapon that never misses. Snorri does not say the spear finds its mark. He says nothing halts it once it is driven.

There is a further gap underneath the story. To prove that Freyr owns Skidbladnir, Snorri quotes an older verse: Ivaldi’s offspring, in ancient days, went to shape Skidbladnir, foremost of ships, fairly for Freyr. The verse credits those smiths with the ship and stops there. The hair and the spear are Snorri’s own additions to their workshop, and no poem anywhere gives Gungnir a named maker. Whoever hammered it out is a plural noun.

The name points at movement rather than accuracy. It is read as the wavering one, or the shaking one, which suits a shaft balanced across a palm better than it suits a missile in flight. And the name is older than Snorri’s prose by two centuries and more. In the chapter where he collects the poets’ ways of naming Odin, he quotes a half-stanza by the tenth-century Icelandic skald Kormakr in which Hroptr, one of the god’s by-names, bears Gungnir along with him.

The most repeated Gungnir story in circulation is the spear cast that started the first war. In Voluspa the seeress remembers Odin letting fly and shooting into the army, and calls that the first tribe-war in the world. The poem does not say what he threw. The name arrives afterwards, from readers welding two passages that never touch, and the weld has held so well that the spear now seems to be standing in the stanza.

It is properly present at the end, though. When the last battle comes, Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn, the ash shivers from root to crown, and the Aesir and the einherjar arm themselves and ride for the field. Odin rides first, in a gold helmet and a bright mail coat, carrying the spear, and he goes straight at the wolf. A cold morning, ranked men behind him, an old god at the front of them holding the one weapon nothing stops. The wolf swallows him.

That is the limit of the thing, and it is a strange limit for a weapon to have. Gungnir is never broken, never stolen, never turned against its owner, and no giant or trick disarms him of it. It simply fails to change an ending that was fixed before the iron was heated. The record keeps almost nothing else about it, either: no length, no ash shaft, no named metal, no ornament, no weight in the hand. What survived instead is the point, and the fact that somebody once found it flat enough to write on.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Gungnir?

Gungnir is the spear of the Norse god Odin. Snorri Sturluson’s Skaldskaparmal says it was made by the dwarf smiths called Ivaldi’s Sons and given to Odin, and that it would never be stopped in its thrust. The name is usually read as “the wavering one” or “the shaking one.”

Who made Gungnir?

The smiths Snorri calls Ivaldi’s Sons made it, alongside Sif’s golden hair and Freyr’s folding ship Skidbladnir. No individual dwarf is ever named as its maker. The older Eddic verse Snorri quotes credits those same smiths only with the ship, so the spear’s attribution to them rests on Snorri’s prose alone.

Does Gungnir never miss?

No source says that. What Snorri says is that the spear would never be stopped in its thrust, which is a claim about nothing being able to halt the blow rather than about the weapon always finding its target. The “never misses” version is a modern tightening of the original wording.

Where is Gungnir named in the Poetic Edda?

Only once, in the rune-chant in Sigrdrifumal, where runes are said to have been cut on Gungnir’s point and on the breast of Sigurd’s horse Grani. Every other detail about the spear comes from Snorri’s thirteenth-century prose. Notably, when Voluspa describes Odin throwing a weapon to begin the first war, it does not name what he threw.

What happens to Gungnir at Ragnarok?

Odin carries it into the final battle. He rides at the head of the gods and the einherjar in a gold helmet and mail coat, with the spear, and advances on the Fenris-wolf. The wolf kills him anyway, which makes Gungnir a weapon that cannot be stopped and cannot alter the outcome.