The Mead of Poetry

At a Glance

• Central figures: Odin, the Allfather; Kvasir, the wisest being ever made; the dwarves Fjalar and Galar; the giant Suttung and his daughter Gunnlod, who guards the mead.
• Setting: The nine worlds of Norse cosmology - Asgard, the mountain hall of Suttung, the farms of the jotnar, and the roads between them. Source tradition is the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda.
• The turn: Odin, disguised as a laborer named Bolverk, drills into Suttung’s mountain, seduces Gunnlod over three nights, and drains all three vessels of the mead.
• The outcome: Odin escapes as an eagle with the mead in his belly; the gods catch most of it in vats at Asgard’s gates, but a few drops fall to Midgard, giving ordinary mortals the gift of poetry.
• The legacy: The drops that fell to Midgard remain there still - the source of poetry and song among human beings.

The Mead of Poetry began as a peace treaty. When the war between the Aesir and the Vanir ended, both sides sealed the truce by spitting into a great vat. From that mingled spit they fashioned a being: Kvasir, wiser than any god or man, who walked the nine worlds answering every question put to him. He was the living proof that the war was over. He was also, for two dwarves with a knife, an opportunity.

Fjalar and Galar invited him in and cut his throat. They drained his blood into three vessels - Bodn, Son, and Odrerir - and mixed the blood with honey. What they brewed was the Mead of Poetry: a drink that made any who tasted it a poet, a skald, a speaker of truth. They told the Aesir that Kvasir had drowned in his own wisdom - that no vessel could hold what he knew. The Aesir believed them. For a while.

Fjalar, Galar, and the Giant’s Vengeance

The dwarves grew careless after that. They invited the giant Gilling to visit, took him out on the water, and capsized the boat. Gilling could not swim. His wife wept so loudly that Fjalar offered to take her down to the shore to see where her husband had drowned. When she stepped out of the hall, Galar dropped a millstone on her head from the roofbeam. The noise, he said, had annoyed him.

Word reached Suttung. He was Gilling’s son, and he was not the sort to weep. He came for the dwarves directly, carried them to the sea, and left them on a skerry - a flat rock that the tide would cover before nightfall.

Fjalar and Galar offered him everything they had. Suttung took the mead and left them to swim. He carried the three vessels back to his mountain and hid them in a chamber deep inside it, placing his daughter Gunnlod to watch over them. The mead was his now. He meant to keep it.

Odin heard about this.

Bolverk and the Servants

Odin put on the shape of a traveler and took the name Bolverk - “worker of harm,” though no one who met him on the road knew that. He came to the farm of Baugi, Suttung’s brother, and found it in disarray. Nine field hands lay dead in the grass, their throats cut. What had happened was this: Odin had passed them earlier, offered his whetstone to sharpen their scythes, and thrown it into the air among them. They had fought for it and killed each other.

He offered Baugi a deal. He would do the work of all nine men through the harvest season. At the end of it, Baugi would take him to Suttung and ask for a single sip of the mead as payment.

Baugi agreed. He had no field hands and the hay would not cut itself.

Odin worked the full season. When autumn came, Baugi went to his brother and asked. Suttung refused. Not a drop. Baugi came back and told Odin what had happened.

So Odin handed Baugi an auger and told him to drill.

The Tunnel into the Mountain

The auger was called Rati. Baugi worked it against the mountain’s face and bored inward. When he claimed the hole was finished, Odin blew into it and the chips came back out - Baugi had stopped short of breaking through. A second time, and the chips blew through the far end.

Odin turned himself into a snake and went in.

Baugi stabbed after him with the auger, but Odin was already through, moving in the dark toward the chamber where Gunnlod sat with the three vessels.

Three Nights with Gunnlod

He did not come in as a snake. He came in as a man - Bolverk still, or something like him. He spent three nights with Gunnlod, and by the end of them she trusted him, or felt enough for him that she gave him what he asked: three sips, one for each night.

Three sips, three vessels. Odin emptied Bodn, Son, and Odrerir completely and held all of it inside him. Then he was an eagle.

He burst out of the mountain and flew hard for Asgard. The sky above the mountain darkened as Suttung also took eagle-shape and followed. From the walls of Asgard the gods could see them both coming - the first eagle straining, the second closing the gap.

The Eagle Over Asgard

The gods had set vats out at the gates. Odin came over the wall and let the mead pour from his beak into the vessels below. Most of it landed clean.

A few drops fell short.

They fell down through the sky, past Bifrost, past the clouds, and touched the earth of Midgard. Those drops were not wasted. They settled into the ground and into the people who walked it, and after that there were mortals who could shape words into something that outlasted them - who could make a verse that a man on the other side of the world would still be repeating three hundred years later.

Suttung turned back when he saw Asgard’s walls. There was nothing for him there.

Gunnlod was alone in the mountain with three empty vessels.