Magni

The plain at Grjótúnagardar smelled of wet clay and cracked flint. Thor lay flat on his back with a splinter of whetstone driven into his skull, and across his neck lay the leg of the giant he had just killed, stone-heavy and going cold. Thjalfi got a shoulder under it and could not move it. The Æsir arrived at a run, took hold of it together, and could not move it either. Then a child came through the dust, threw the leg clear, and apologised for being late.

He was three nights old. His name was Magni, which in Old Norse means something close to the strong one, from *magn*, strength or might, and the first words anybody records him saying are a complaint that he had missed the fight. See how ill it is, father, that I came so late. I would have struck this giant dead with my fist. Thor, pinned to the ground a moment earlier, got up and told the infant he would surely become great.

His mother was Járnsaxa, a jötunn with iron in her name, and the parentage is not incidental to anything that follows. Snorri Sturluson, listing the ways a poet may refer to Sif, offers co-wife of Járnsaxa, which is a tidy way of describing an arrangement nobody in the sources wants to discuss. Magni’s brother Móði is wrath and his half-sister Þrúðr is power, so Thor’s children read less like a family than like an inventory of their father’s qualities parcelled out and given legs of their own.

The name is older than the book that tells the story. Eilífr Goðrúnarson, a skald at the court of Hákon Sigurðarson in the late tenth century, calls Thor *faðir Magna*, the father of Magni, in *Þórsdrápa*, and the eddic poem *Hárbarðsljóð* reaches for the same phrase. Both stand two hundred years and more before Snorri’s *Prose Edda*. A kenning like that proves a son and nothing further. It shows that a hall full of listeners already knew who Magni was, and leaves what they knew entirely unsaid.

The fight that made him came out of Odin showing off. Riding Sleipnir into Jötunheim, Odin met the giant Hrungnir mounted on a horse called Gullfaxi, Gold-Mane, and wagered his own head that no steed in that country could match his. Hrungnir took the insult at a gallop and chased him all the way in through the gates of Asgard, where the Æsir, trapped by their own hospitality, handed him the flagons Thor drank from. He emptied them one after another and began announcing his plans. He would lift Valhalla onto his back and carry it home, sink Asgard, kill every god in it, and keep Freyja and Sif. Freyja was the only one willing to go on pouring. When the boasting became unbearable, somebody said Thor’s name out loud.

Thor arrived in a fury and was promptly talked into a formal duel on the border, Hrungnir having observed that killing an unarmed guest would earn him no praise at all. The giants, with their strongest fighter staking everything, built a second one out of clay, nine leagues high and three broad across the chest, and when no heart could be found to fit him they cut one out of a mare. Mökkurkálfi, as they named him, wet himself when Thor came over the horizon. Hrungnir had a head of stone, a shield of stone, a heart of hard stone with three corners, and a hone for a weapon. Thjalfi told him Thor was tunnelling in from underneath, so he stood on the shield and gave away the ground. He heard the thunder before he saw anything. The hone and the hammer met in the air and the hone burst in two: one half fell and became every flint in the world, the other half lodged in Thor’s forehead. Mjöllnir went on through Hrungnir’s skull and crumbled it, and the giant fell forward onto the god who had killed him.

Which is how a three-night-old came to own a famous horse. Thor got to his feet with the whetstone still in his head and gave Magni the dead giant’s Gold-Mane on the spot. Odin, who had started the entire business with a boast about horses, objected that a good animal should not go to the son of a giantess rather than to his father, and the line does not make clear whether he meant the horse was owed to himself or that Thor should have kept his own spoils. Odin was sulking about a horse. Nobody seems to have argued the point with Thor.

Nothing anywhere describes what Magni looked like. Not his height, not his colouring, not his face, not even whether an infant who can outlift the gods looks like an infant. What survives instead is a measurement taken from the other side of the problem: the weight that Thjalfi and then the whole company of the Æsir had failed to shift, moved by a pair of hands three days old. That absence is the shape of the record. The people telling this story were not interested in his appearance, only in what happened when he put his hands on something.

His strength is less a talent than a double inheritance, jötunn bulk from his mother and Thor’s own force from his father, and it arrives finished rather than growing into itself. John Lindow set him beside Váli, Odin’s son by the giantess Rindr, who was one day old when he killed Höðr and avenged Balder: two gods with giant mothers, both fully capable long before they should have been able to stand. The strength also has a destination. In *Vafþrúðnismál* the giant answering Odin’s riddles says that when Thor falls in the last battle, Móði and Magni will carry Mjöllnir, and Snorri repeats it in *Gylfaginning*. Two sons called Wrath and Strength take up the hammer, and whatever world comes out the far side of Surtr’s fire is guarded by them.

Set against that, the record is oddly bare. Outside the Hrungnir episode and that single line of prophecy, there is no story in which Magni does anything. He has no wife, no death, no rival, no second appearance, no dwelling of his own. Whatever Járnsaxa’s household was like, no one thought to write it down. Thor’s promise that the boy would become great is never shown coming true, because the future the poems give him is one sentence long and then stops. He is strength with almost no life attached to it, which is a strange end for a god whose one recorded act was the thing nobody else in Asgard could manage.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Magni in Norse mythology?

Magni is a Norse god, the son of Thor and the giantess Járnsaxa, whose name means “the strong one” or “the mighty one”. He is known for two things: freeing his father after the duel with the giant Hrungnir, and surviving Ragnarök. Skalds referred to Thor as “the father of Magni” as early as the late tenth century.

What did Magni do when he was three nights old?

He lifted the dead giant Hrungnir’s leg off his pinned father. Thor’s servant Thjalfi and then the assembled Æsir had all tried and failed to move it. Magni threw it clear and complained that he had arrived too late to fight the giant himself, and Thor rewarded him with Hrungnir’s horse Gullfaxi, or Gold-Mane.

Who was Magni’s mother?

Magni’s mother was Járnsaxa, a jötunn, or giantess, rather than Thor’s wife Sif. Snorri Sturluson records that a poet could name Sif as the “co-wife of Járnsaxa”. When Thor gave Magni the horse Gullfaxi, Odin objected specifically to a good animal going to the son of a giantess.

Does Magni survive Ragnarök?

Yes. In the Poetic Edda poem Vafþrúðnismál, Magni and his brother Móði are named as inheritors of Thor’s hammer Mjöllnir after Thor falls in the last battle, and Snorri Sturluson repeats this in Gylfaginning. They are among the small number of gods said to outlive the destruction and the fire of Surtr.

Is Magni mentioned anywhere outside Snorri’s Prose Edda?

Yes, and the mentions are older than Snorri. The skald Eilífr Goðrúnarson called Thor “faðir Magna”, the father of Magni, in Þórsdrápa in the late tenth century, and the eddic poem Hárbarðsljóð uses the same phrase. Vafþrúðnismál names him among the survivors of Ragnarök. None of these tells a story about him, which is why the fuller account depends on Snorri.

Related Entries

Thor, Hrungnir, Sif, Odin, Sleipnir, Ragnarök, Surtr, Æsir, Jötunn, Asgard, Valhalla, Freyja, Höðr (Hodr), Balder