Týr

The Æsir had raised Fenrir at home, fed him by hand, and watched the shoulders thicken until nobody volunteered to carry the meat. Two chains had already failed. He snapped Lœðingr like wet thread and kicked his way out of Drómi, and each time he rose out of the wreckage he understood a little more clearly what he was. So the gods came back a third time carrying a ribbon.

Gleipnir looked like nothing at all. Smooth, soft, no thicker than a silk band, the work of dwarves in Svartálfaheim, spun from six things that exist in no useful quantity: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird. They took it out to the island of Lyngvi in the lake Ámsvartnir and invited the wolf to test his strength against it, one more friendly wager among family.

Fenrir looked at the ribbon and saw the shape of the trick in it. If the thing was as weak as it appeared there would be no glory in snapping it, and if it was not, he would never stand up again. He would let himself be bound on one condition. Someone was to lay a hand between his teeth as a pledge.

Nobody moved. Then Týr did.

He put in his right hand, palm up against the ridged roof of the mouth, and held it there while the wolf hauled and twisted and the silk refused to give. Then the jaws came down. Snorri names the joint where they closed, the ulflið, which is why Icelandic still calls the wrist the wolf-joint. The gods had their prisoner. They ran the fetter Gelgja through a rock called Gjöll, hammered it deep with a boulder called Þviti, and propped the wolf’s jaws open with a sword when he would not stop snapping, and the saliva that runs from him became the river Ván. Everyone laughed, except Týr.

No account describes his face, his height, the colour of his hair or what he wore. Norse verse is content to define him by a subtraction. The Icelandic rune poem gives him three phrases and one of them is the wound itself: the one-handed god, the leavings of the wolf, the ruler of temples. Snorri’s poetic names for him run the same way, the one-handed god, the feeder of the wolf. A deity of victory is remembered chiefly for what a wolf took off him.

His name is not really a name. Týr descends from Proto-Germanic *Tīwaz, and behind that stands the ancient word that also produced Latin deus, Sanskrit deva, and the first syllable of Jupiter and of Zeus. It means, roughly, god. Old Norse poets used týr as an ordinary noun and stacked it into kennings for other deities, so Odin could be called the god of the hanged without anybody getting confused. The reading that makes Týr a fallen sky father, a Germanic Zeus elbowed aside by Odin, is a modern reconstruction built out of that etymology rather than out of any surviving story. Not one Norse source shows him ruling anything.

His parentage will not settle either. Snorri counts him among the sons of Odin. Hymiskviða, older and stranger, has him tell Thor that his own father keeps an enormous cauldron east at Élivágar, at the edge of heaven, and the father in question is the giant Hymir. The two of them go to fetch it and meet a grandmother with nine hundred heads, loathsome to look at, and then a mother with gold on her arms and a bright brow, who brings them ale in secret and hides them behind a pillar. Both accounts cannot be true. Nobody in the tradition seems to have felt any pressure to choose.

Sigrdrífumál preserves the practical version of him, the part that mattered to people who actually had to fight. Victory runes go on the sword: on the hilt, and on parts of the guard whose names no longer translate cleanly, and his own name is spoken twice while the cuts are made. A thumb braced on cold steel, a knife point walking the same short stroke twice for one letter, the whole business finished in the dark before the light came up. He was a god you invoked with a blade across your knees.

He is a great deal older than Iceland. Tacitus, writing about the Germanic peoples in the first century, says they honour Mercury above all others and give Hercules and Mars their permitted animal sacrifices, and the Mars in that sentence is generally taken to be *Tīwaz. The equation held long enough to survive into the calendar, where dies Martis became Old English Tīwesdæg and then Tuesday. The firmest physical trace of him sits on Hadrian’s Wall. At Housesteads, some time in the 220s or 230s, German soldiers from Twenthe serving with a Frisian unit raised an altar to the god Mars Thincsus and to two goddesses named Beda and Fimmilena. Thincsus ties him to the þing, the assembly where law was argued and judgment handed down.

That pairing is more or less the whole of him. Snorri says he is the boldest and most courageous of the gods, that he has great power over victory in battle, and that brave men do well to call on him. Then, almost in the same breath, that he is not called a reconciler of men. Loki makes the identical point less kindly in Lokasenna, jeering that Týr could never hold an even balance between two parties, and following it up with a boast about fathering a son on Týr’s wife and paying nothing for the privilege. Týr’s reply is only that he lacks a hand and Loki lacks his wolf. The wife is never named or mentioned again. That is the entire record of his marriage.

The cult of him shows up best in Danish ground. Tislund, Týr’s grove, recurs across the country; Tisvilde, Tibirke, Thisted and Tirslund all carry his name; and Tissø, Týr’s lake, has yielded a drowned arsenal of spearheads, axes and swords thrown into the water as offerings. Norway and Iceland preserve almost nothing comparable. Whatever he was, he was strongest where the assemblies met and the war gear went into the lake.

What he grants follows from all of this. Victory, though of the awarded rather than the seized kind, the outcome of a fight conducted under rules that both sides accepted. The binding force of an oath, which is exactly why his hand was worth putting up as security in the first place: a pledge from Týr carried weight even with a creature who trusted nobody. And courage of a specific, unglamorous sort, the willingness to be the one who pays for a plan everybody else agreed to.

The limits are just as precise. He cannot mediate, cannot smooth anything over, cannot be made whole. The hand does not grow back, and no story hands him a silver replacement or a second run at the wolf. He accepts no compensation for the injury done inside his own household, which for a god of law comes close to unbearable. At the end he gets no reprieve either. Garmr, the hound bound and howling at the mouth of the cave Gnipahellir, comes loose when everything else does, and the two of them meet on the field and kill each other. He fights it one-handed, which by then is simply how he fights.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tyr in Norse mythology?

Tyr is the Norse god of victory in battle and of oaths, pledges and lawful assembly. Snorri Sturluson calls him the boldest and most courageous of the gods and says brave men do well to invoke him, while noting in the same passage that he is not known as a reconciler of men. His name descends from Proto-Germanic *Tīwaz and originally meant simply “god”.

How did Tyr lose his hand?

Tyr lost his right hand to the wolf Fenrir. When the gods set out to bind Fenrir with the deceptively slender fetter Gleipnir, the wolf demanded that someone lay a hand in his mouth as security, and Tyr was the only one who offered. Fenrir bit the hand off at the wrist once he found the fetter would not break.

What is Tyr the god of?

Tyr governs victory in battle and the binding force of oaths and legal assembly. Victory runes were cut into a sword’s hilt and guard while his name was spoken twice, and a third-century altar at Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall names him as Mars Thincsus, linking him to the þing, the Germanic assembly. He is not a god of mediation or truce.

Who are Tyr’s parents?

The sources disagree. Snorri Sturluson counts Tyr among the sons of Odin, while the older poem Hymiskviða has Tyr name the giant Hymir as his father and describes both a gold-adorned mother and a grandmother with nine hundred heads. No Norse source reconciles the two accounts.

How does Tyr die at Ragnarök?

Tyr dies fighting Garmr, the hound bound at the cave Gnipahellir, and the two of them kill each other. He faces that fight one-handed, since the hand Fenrir took is never restored and no story gives him a replacement.

Related Entries

Fenrir, Garmr, Odin, Thor, Loki, Jörmungandr, Sköll, Surtr, Heimdallr, Balder, Freyr (Frey), Yggdrasil, Valkyrie, Nuada, Zeus