Hymir

The icicles clinked when he came through the door. Hymir had been out since before light and the frost in his beard had set hard, so that the whole grey mass of it rang faintly against itself as he stooped under his own lintel. His wife met him with news: their son was home, and had brought a guest. Hymir turned his head toward the gable end where the two of them were hiding. The pillar in front of them burst apart. The cross-beam above it snapped, and the nine great kettles slung from it came down on the floor, and eight of them shattered. One survived, hard-hammered, and rolled clear. He had not yet said a word.

That look is the best portrait of him anyone left behind. The poem called the Lay of Hymir, preserved in the thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript that carries most of the old god-poems, is oddly uninterested in what he looked like. It calls him misshapen and hard of counsel, hoary, an ancient giant, all-wise in the sense of dangerously cunning rather than learned. It gives his beard a fine kenning, cheek-forest, and it tells you his skull is harder than glass. It never gives his height, and it never gives his face. What it gives instead is a catalogue of the things that break when he is in the room.

He lives east of the Elivagar, the cold rivers that mark the far edge of the ordered world, at what the poem calls heaven’s end. His wealth is cattle and iron. He keeps a herd that includes an ox black from nose to tail, and a hall hung with cauldrons, the largest of them a league deep, which is the sort of measurement a poet uses when he wants you to stop imagining and start being impressed. His household is worth pausing on. His mother has nine hundred heads and is loathsome even to her own grandson. His wife is golden and white-browed and brings beer to the door with her own hands, and she spends the whole visit quietly working against him. Where Hymir himself came from, no source says. He simply is, the way the mountains are.

The gods came to him because they were thirsty. Aegir, who keeps the sea and a good cellar, had been ordered to hold regular drinking feasts for the Aesir and had agreed on one condition: someone had to bring him a kettle big enough to brew for all of them at once. Nobody could find one. Then Tyr, who is a god of the Aesir and by this poem’s reckoning also the son of a giant, admitted quietly that his father owned exactly such a thing. That parentage is a genuine tangle. Snorri Sturluson’s handbook of poetry makes Tyr the son of Odin instead, and no one has reconciled the two.

Hymir’s hospitality was correct and grudging. He had three bulls beheaded and put in the cooking pit, which would have been generous anywhere else. Thor ate two of them whole before bed. The giant did the arithmetic on his remaining larder and announced that the three of them would be living on fish tomorrow.

They went out at dawn. Hymir would provide the boat if Thor found the bait, so Thor walked into the pasture, took hold of the black ox and tore its head off above the horns, which the giant received in the sour silence of a man watching his own livestock become tackle. Out on the water Thor kept calling for another stroke and another, further out than Hymir had ever cared to go, and the giant said plainly that he had no appetite for it. Then Hymir, alone and without help, hauled two whales over the side on a single hook. It is easy to lose that detail in what comes next. It should not be lost. Whatever else he is, the man can fish.

Thor baited his own line with the ox head and dropped it. Something took it from below, the thing the poem names as the girdle of all lands, and the god dragged it up venom-bright against the gunwale and brought his hammer down on it. Rocks rang. The old earth shuddered. The serpent went back into the sea. Snorri tells it differently and more famously: Thor braces so hard that his legs go through the hull and he stands on the sea floor, and the serpent glares up at him spitting poison, and Hymir, white with terror and watching his boat fill, gropes for his bait knife and cuts the line at the rail. Thor knocks him overboard with his fist and wades home. The two accounts disagree about almost everything except this. Hymir wanted to go back.

The rest of the day was a contest he kept losing. Thor carried the boat home with the bilge water still in it, oars and bailer and all. Hymir then declared that no man was strong who could not break his goblet, and watched with satisfaction as Thor hurled it clean through a stone column and a servant brought it back undamaged. His wife leaned in and told Thor where to aim: at Hymir’s head, harder than any cup. The skull came through it fine. The goblet did not. Something went out of the giant then, and he said the flattest, saddest line in the poem, that he would never again be able to say the words “ale, you are brewed.”

His powers are the ones his life has given him. He is strong enough to make a two-whale catch look routine, cold enough to walk home iced over without complaint, and old enough that his simple attention shatters carpentry. The name Hymir became a building block in the poets’ compound-words for giants generally, which is a kind of fame: he is what a giant is supposed to be. His weaknesses are equally his own. He is bound by the rules of hosting a guest he would rather kill, and everything he loses, he loses inside those rules. His hardness is what costs him the cup. His household betrays him at every turn. When he finally gathered a war-band of many-headed kin and came after Thor across the stone-fields to take the cauldron back, Mjollnir killed the lot of them.

Carvers on both sides of the North Sea kept returning to one moment out of all this, and it is not the cauldron and not the whales. On the Hordum stone in Jutland and on the fishing slab at Gosforth in Cumbria, a figure stands in a small boat with an axe raised over the taut line. He is about to cut it. Those stones are older than the poems by two or three centuries, which means the image of Hymir reaching for the blade was already familiar long before anyone wrote down why.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hymir in Norse mythology?

Hymir is a jotunn, or giant, who lives beyond the Elivagar rivers at the eastern edge of the world and owns a brewing cauldron a league deep. He is best known from the Poetic Edda poem Hymiskvida, in which Thor and Tyr come to take that cauldron so the sea-giant Aegir can brew ale for the gods. He also appears in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda as Thor’s companion on the fishing trip that hooks the Midgard Serpent.

Is Hymir the father of Tyr?

Hymiskvida says so directly: Tyr calls Hymir his father and names his nine-hundred-headed grandmother in the same breath. Snorri’s Skaldskaparmal contradicts this and makes Tyr a son of Odin. The two statements have never been reconciled, and Tyr’s position as a god of the Aesir with a giant father would be close to unique if the poem is taken at face value.

What happened when Thor went fishing with Hymir?

Thor tore the head off Hymir’s black ox for bait and made the giant row far out to sea, where Hymir first landed two whales on a single hook. Thor then hooked the Midgard Serpent itself. In the Poetic Edda he strikes it with his hammer and it sinks back into the water; in the Prose Edda, Hymir panics and cuts Thor’s line with his bait knife, and Thor knocks him overboard.

How did Thor break Hymir’s goblet?

Hymir challenged Thor to shatter a drinking goblet as a test of strength, and Thor threw it through a stone pillar without damaging it. Hymir’s wife then told Thor to strike the cup against Hymir’s own skull, which was harder than any vessel in the hall. The goblet broke apart and the giant’s head was untouched, and Hymir admitted he would never brew ale again.

Is Hymir shown in Viking art?

Very probably. Thor’s fishing expedition is one of the most frequently carved scenes in Norse art, appearing on the Altuna runestone in Uppland, the Ardre VIII stone on Gotland, the Hordum stone in Jutland and the fishing slab at Gosforth in England, and these range from the eighth to the eleventh century. The Hordum and Gosforth carvings each show a second figure raising an axe over the fishing line, generally identified as Hymir about to cut Thor loose.

Related Entries

Thor, Tyr, Jörmungandr, Jötunn, Ymir, Surtr, Loki, Odin, Ran, Hraesvelg, Lyngbakr, Kraken, Giant, Polyphemus, Antaeus