Surtr

At the southern edge of everything, before there was an earth to burn, someone stood watch over a country made entirely of fire.

Snorri Sturluson puts it plainly in the *Prose Edda*. First of all the worlds was the one in the southern region called Múspell, light and hot, glowing and burning, impassable to anyone who is not native to it. And he who sits there at the land’s end to defend the land is called Surtr, and he brandishes a flaming sword. It is a strange job description. The world has not been made yet. Ymir has not been killed and quartered into mountains and sky, no gods have raised anything worth attacking, and there is nothing on the other side of that frontier to keep out. Surtr is a sentry posted against a future.

So he waits. Heat stands over the stone in visible columns; the rock ticks and shifts and never cools; the sword throws a hard white light across ground that has never known a shadow cast by anything else. Nothing comes for an age.

Almost everything else about him is missing, and the gap is worth sitting with. His name comes from *svartr*, black or swarthy, and John Lindow has suggested it may point to a charred appearance, though the texts never say so. There is no parentage. Ymir’s descendants crowd the frost-giant genealogies and Surtr appears in none of them; nobody records who made him or whether anyone did. There is no wife, unless one accepts an emendation of a corrupt line in the late poem *Fjölsvinnsmál* that would give him a companion named Sinmara, which is a lot of weight to hang on two words the manuscripts cannot agree about. No height, no face, no armour, no voice. He speaks not one line anywhere in Old Norse literature.

What the sources give instead is light. In *Völuspá* he comes from the south with fire, and the sun of the war-gods shines from his sword. Snorri, describing Ragnarök, says the sky will be cut open and the sons of Múspell will ride down through it with Surtr in front, burning fire before him and behind him, his sword so fine that light comes off it more brightly than off the sun. Their whole company, he adds, will be very bright. That is the entire portrait: a moving column of glare with a man-shaped absence at the head of it.

The end, when it arrives, is quick. Three winters run together with no summer between them, brothers kill each other for money, wolves swallow the sun and the moon, Fenrir slips his bond and the Midgard Serpent comes up out of the sea. Then the heavens split and Surtr rides. When his host crosses Bifröst the bridge breaks under them. The gods built that bridge, and it does not hold. In *Fáfnismál* the dying dragon tells Sigurd the same thing from a different angle: the island where Surtr and the Æsir will mingle sword-liquid is called Óskópnir, and on the way there the bridge will collapse and the horses will flounder in the river. They gather on Vígríðr, a field a hundred leagues on every side. Odin goes down the wolf’s throat. Thor kills the serpent and walks nine steps before the venom drops him. Freyr, whom *Völuspá* calls Beli’s bright slayer, comes against Surtr and there is a hard fight before he falls, and the reason he falls is embarrassingly domestic: he gave his good sword away to his servant Skírnir, years earlier, over a woman. Then Heimdall and Loki kill each other, and Surtr throws fire across the earth and burns the world.

He is not killed. Nobody defeats him, nobody outwits him, nobody even tries. The usual Norse method for handling a giant fails entirely here, because there is no story in which Thor can reach him with a hammer or Odin can beat him at riddles or Loki can talk him out of anything. There is no story about Surtr at all. There is only the end of one.

His fire does not finish the job either. *Vafþrúðnismál* asks who will rule the gods’ possessions when Surtr’s fire is slaked, and answers: Víðarr and Váli, who survive it, and Thor’s sons Móði and Magni, who inherit the hammer. Two people called Líf and Lífthrasir hide out the burning in Hoddmímir’s wood and live on the morning dew, and from them the world is peopled again. Snorri has the earth rise out of the sea afterwards, green and fair, bearing crops nobody sowed. Surtr’s flame turns out to be a boundary rather than a conclusion, which may be the most interesting thing about him.

The figure is old. Rudolf Simek points out that tenth-century skalds already used the name, that Eyvindr skáldaspillir could say “Surt’s deep vales” and expect his audience to hear “mountains”, and that the giants of Old Norse tradition are normally placed in the east while this one alone comes from the south, which surely has to do with fire and heat. Simek also thought Icelanders in particular understood him as the giant who ruled the volcanic fire under the ground. Andy Orchard has noted that Snorri’s watchman with the flaming sword owes something to the angel who guards Eden, and a century ago Bertha Phillpotts argued he was a volcano demon outright.

The Icelandic evidence for that is unusually physical. Around the end of the ninth century, just as Norse settlers were arriving, the Hallmundarhraun lava flowed across some ninety square miles of western Iceland, almost certainly the first eruption of its kind northern Europeans had ever watched. It left a two-mile lava tube that Icelanders named Surtshellir, Surtr’s cave. *Landnámabók* records that a chieftain’s son, Þorvaldr holbarki Þórðarson, crossed the uninhabited interior to recite a drápa, a formal praise poem, to the giant who lived in it. For a long time the strange things inside were put down to outlaws. Then Kevin Smith, Guðmundur Ólafsson and Albína Hulda Pálsdóttir published a reassessment in the *Journal of Archaeological Science* in 2021, and the outlaws thinned out. Three hundred metres in, well past any daylight, someone had built a boat-shaped enclosure of stacked stone. Heaped against it was a mound of domestic animal bone, sheep and cattle and horses, smashed into fragments and never burned or cooked. Around the structure lay jasper firestarters carried in from all over western Iceland, glass beads in green and blue and yellow, and flecks of orpiment, an arsenic-yellow pigment with no Icelandic source at all. In the middle sat four pecked and gouged lead weights that add up to about twenty-six grams, a legal standard rather than a trading one. People kept this up for more than eighty years, stopped within a generation of the conversion to Christianity, and then left the cave alone for six hundred.

Whether they were feeding the giant or arming his enemy is not something the bones will say. What is clear is that they went a very long way into the dark, in the cold and the wet, carrying animals that a subsistence farm could not spare, because the ground had opened and burned and the story told them who was responsible.

In November 1963 a volcano broke the surface of the sea south of the Westman Islands and spent three and a half years building an island out of ash and lava. The Icelanders called it Surtsey.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Surtr in Norse mythology?

Surtr is the fire giant who guards Múspell, the burning region at the south of the Norse cosmos, and who destroys the world at Ragnarök. He carries a sword that shines more brightly than the sun, leads the sons of Múspell into the final battle at Vígríðr, kills the god Freyr, and then throws fire over the whole earth. His name comes from an Old Norse word meaning “black” or “swart”.

What is the name of Surtr’s sword?

It has no name in any surviving source. The Eddas describe its light rather than its history: Snorri says light shines from it more brightly than from the sun, and *Völuspá* says the sun of the war-gods shone from Surtr’s sword. Named weapons are common in Norse myth, which makes the silence here conspicuous.

Does Surtr die at Ragnarök?

No. No text describes Surtr being killed, wounded or defeated, and no god is said to face him except Freyr, who loses. He simply sets the world alight and is not mentioned again, while the surviving gods and the two humans who hid from his fire go on to repopulate the reborn earth.

What does Surtr look like?

Nobody knows. No Old Norse source describes his body, his face, his height or his clothing, and the only visual details given are the fire that burns before and behind him and the blinding sword. Some scholars have suggested his name, which means “the black one”, may hint at a charred appearance, but that is an inference rather than a description.

Why is there a cave in Iceland named after Surtr?

Surtshellir, a lava tube in western Iceland, was named for Surtr after the Hallmundarhraun eruption at the end of the ninth century, and *Landnámabók* records a chieftain’s son travelling across the interior to recite a praise poem to the giant inside it. Excavations published in 2021 found a boat-shaped stone structure, heaps of sacrificed animal bone, imported beads and pigment and a set of lead weights nearly three hundred metres into the dark, used for over eighty years and abandoned soon after Iceland became Christian.

Related Entries

Freyr (Frey), Ymir, Jötunn, Fenrir, Jörmungandr, Loki, Odin, Thor, Heimdallr, Garmr, Sköll, Níðhöggr, Yggdrasil, Ifrit, Xiuhtecuhtli