Víðópnir

Also Known As: also Viðófnir, Viðópnir; read as “tree-weeper” or “wood-crier”, or with the serpent-name ofnir as “wood-serpent”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A gold-gleaming cock who stands in the branches of the world tree Mímameiðr and can be brought down only by the weapon Lævateinn.
Role in Mythos: He is the central obstacle in the riddling approach to Menglöð’s stronghold, since his body holds both the only food that will distract the guard hounds and the only gift that will buy the weapon capable of killing him.
Relation to Humans: A mortal suitor is told exactly how to kill him and is left with a task that closes on itself. In the surviving story no one ever attempts it, and the gates open by other means.

He is the brightest thing in the poem. Everything else around that stronghold is cold or locked or lethal: a wall raised out of a dead giant’s limbs, a gate that clamps like a leg-iron on the hand that tries to lift it, two hounds who sleep in shifts so one of them is always awake and always hungry. Then the traveller tips his head back, looks into the branches above the wall, and asks what that is up there, burning. The watchman gives him a name. Víðópnir, who stands in the boughs of Mímameiðr and glows all over with gold.

That is close to the whole of what the Norse record says about him, and people have been arguing over it ever since the poem surfaced.

The tree is its own puzzle. Mímameiðr, Mimi’s tree, spreads its limbs over every land, and no one knows what roots it rises from. Fire will not take it. Iron will not bite it. Its fruit, laid on a fire, is supposed to bring out what a sick woman carries hidden inside her, which reads either as a charm for a hard labour or as something older that the verse no longer bothers to explain. Most readers take Mímameiðr to be Yggdrasil under another name. The poem never says so.

Against all that, the cock. His one line of description does most of the work by itself: he glows all over with gold, a bird high in a canopy that has no visible top, throwing light down through the needles onto a wall that has none of its own. The other word fastened to him is veðrglasir, storm-bright or weather-gleaming, which may belong to him or to the branch he stands on, and which has never been settled. His name is no clearer. Read one way it comes out as tree-weeper or wood-crier. Read another, with ofnir serving elsewhere in the poems as a serpent-name, it comes out as wood-serpent, which is a strange thing to call a rooster and has never been explained away. Past the gold there is nothing: no comb, no beak, no size, no wattle. Whatever he looked like went out of the tradition long before anyone wrote it down.

Standing is most of what he does. He holds his place on the branch while the wind works through the needles, and the gold coming off him slides down over the wall and the sleeping hound below, and the stronghold goes on being impossible to enter.

One verse says more, and it is the verse everyone fights over. In the usual reading Víðópnir holds Surtr and Sinmara in a single immense dread, the fire giant and his consort flinching at a bird because the world ends when he finally crows. That is how he is generally sold. The manuscripts do not quite support it: the words are damaged, the copies disagree, and the line can be turned inside out to mean the cock is the one living in dread of Surtr’s Sinmara rather than the reverse.

What the poem is certain about is the trap he sits inside. A young man calling himself Vindkaldr arrives at the gate wanting Menglöð, who rules the golden halls behind the flame, and the watchman Fjölsviðr answers each question by closing another door. Can a man slip past the dogs while they sleep? No, they sleep in shifts. Is there food that would occupy them? Yes, one food only: two cuts of meat lying in Víðópnir’s sides. Is there any weapon that could bring Víðópnir down to Hel? Yes, one weapon only. Lævateinn, the twig of harms, which Loki took beneath the gates of the dead and which lies now in an iron chest beside Sinmara under nine locks. Will she part with it? Only for a gift, and the gift is the bright sickle that lies among Víðópnir’s tail feathers.

So the bird can only be killed with a weapon that can only be bought with a piece of the bird.

The suitor asks his next question anyway, and is told that no living man may sleep in Menglöð’s arms except one called Svipdagr. At that he stops pretending, gives his own name, and tells the watchman to swing the gates wide. They open. The hounds come forward wagging. Nobody ever climbs the tree.

The whole episode reaches us through a thin and late channel. Fjölsvinnsmál is absent from the Codex Regius that carries the rest of the Eddic poems; it survives in Icelandic paper copies, the two principal ones written around 1675, and it now travels with a second poem, Grógaldr, that was only bolted to it in the nineteenth century. Sophus Bugge noticed in 1856 that a Danish ballad about a hero named Ungen Svejdal ran through the plots of both, and proposed reading them as two halves of one work, which he called Svipdagsmál. That title is his, not the tradition’s. Outside those pages Víðópnir barely exists: the Prose Edda’s lists of poetic synonyms file the name among words for a cock, and that is very nearly the end of it.

Roosters do have standing in this material. Völuspá sets three of them crowing at the end of the world in three directions at once: Fjalar, red as blood, over the giants in the gallows wood; Gullinkambi, golden-combed, waking the dead men in Odin’s hall; and a third, soot-black, calling from below in Hel. A bird that announces something is ordinary enough. A bird that has to be killed before a man can get through a door is not.

His gifts are mostly negative ones, which suits a creature built as an obstacle. Ordinary steel does nothing to him, and neither does anything else in the nine worlds except a single twig-shaped weapon made by the least trustworthy of the gods. He is the only light in a place that has none, and he is also a larder, carrying in his own body both the meat that turns the hounds and the object a giantess wants badly enough to trade for. He may or may not be holding Surtr’s household in fear. What he certainly does is stand between a man and the woman he was promised.

His limits mirror all of it. He can be made to sink down to Hel’s dwellings, and the poem says as much without flinching, so he is neither immortal nor a god. He is fixed to one branch; nothing in the verses has him fly, hunt, feed, or descend. His entire defence is a supply problem dressed up as a monster, and supply problems are the sort a sufficiently stubborn hero eventually solves. In the one story that contains him, nobody bothers to try. Svipdagr walks to the wall, is given the full sequence of impossibilities in patient detail, says his own name, and watches the gate open by itself. The golden cock is still up there in the branches, gleaming, unkilled, carrying a sickle in his tail for a customer who never arrived.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Víðópnir?

Víðópnir is a rooster in Norse mythology who stands in the branches of the world tree Mímameiðr and glows all over with gold. He appears in the Eddic poem Fjölsvinnsmál, where a watchman describes him to a traveller seeking entry to a guarded stronghold. He is one of several cockerels in Norse tradition, though he is the only one whose death is treated as a task for a hero.

Where does Víðópnir live?

Víðópnir lives in the high branches of Mímameiðr, a tree that spreads its limbs over every land and that neither fire nor iron can harm. No one in the poem knows what roots the tree grows from. Mímameiðr is usually identified with Yggdrasil, but the poem itself never makes that connection.

How can Víðópnir be killed?

Only one weapon can bring Víðópnir down to Hel: Lævateinn, a twig-shaped weapon taken by Loki beneath the gates of the dead. It is kept in an iron chest beside the giantess Sinmara behind nine locks, and she will surrender it only in exchange for the bright sickle that lies among Víðópnir’s own tail feathers. Killing the bird therefore requires a piece of the bird, which makes the task close on itself.

Does Víðópnir announce Ragnarök?

The claim is widespread but the text does not clearly support it. One verse is usually read as saying that Víðópnir holds the fire giant Surtr and the giantess Sinmara in enormous dread, which is often taken to mean they fear the crowing that will begin the end of the world. The manuscripts of that verse are damaged and disagree with each other, and the same lines can be read as the cock living in dread instead.

Is Víðópnir the same as Gullinkambi?

No. Gullinkambi is a separate golden-combed cock in Völuspá who wakes the dead warriors in Odin’s hall at the end of the world, alongside the red cock Fjalar and a soot-black cock in Hel. Víðópnir belongs to a different poem and a different situation, guarding a stronghold rather than sounding an alarm.