Thor’s Duel with Hrungnir

At a Glance

• Central figures: Thor, the god of thunder, and Hrungnir, the strongest of the frost giants, whose heart, head, and shield were all stone; also Thjalfi, Thor’s servant, and Magni, Thor’s three-year-old son.
• Setting: Asgard and the boundary between Asgard and Jotunheim; the story comes from the Norse Prose Edda tradition of skaldic myth.
• The turn: Hrungnir, drunk in Asgard’s hall, boasts that he will kill the gods and take Freyja and Sif as trophies - and Thor, returning to the hall, demands a duel.
• The outcome: Thor kills Hrungnir with Mjolnir, though the giant’s falling leg pins Thor to the ground until Magni lifts it free; Odin objects when Thor awards Hrungnir’s horse, Gullfaxi, to the boy.
• The legacy: A shard of Hrungnir’s shattered whetstone lodged in Thor’s skull and could never be removed - a wound the thunder god carried for the rest of his days.

Hrungnir rode into Asgard on a horse he claimed was faster than Sleipnir. Odin found that interesting enough to test, so he raced the giant straight through the gates without mentioning where they were going. By the time Hrungnir realized he was inside Asgard itself, the Aesir were already pouring him mead.

The feast that followed was where the real trouble started.

Gullfaxi and the Gates of Asgard

Hrungnir was the strongest of the jotnar. His heart was stone. His head was stone. His shield was a flat slab of rock he carried like a board, and his weapon was a whetstone the size of a man. He rode Gullfaxi - Goldmane - the swiftest horse in Jotunheim, and he knew it, and he spoke of little else.

Odin’s race had been meant to put the boast to rest. It did not. Hrungnir arrived in Asgard with his pride intact and the gods’ best drink in front of him, and things went from there. The mead was good. There was a great deal of it.

The Threats in the Hall

Drunk, Hrungnir’s boasting turned dark. He would pull Asgard to the ground. He would kill every god he could find. Freyja and Sif he would take back to Jotunheim - not as guests.

The Aesir sat and listened. The laws of hospitality kept them in their seats. A guest under your roof, even a giant, could not be struck down. So they waited, and Hrungnir drank more, and the threats kept coming.

Thor was not at the feast. He came in later. He looked at Hrungnir, and then at the empty drinking horns, and asked who had permitted an enemy of Asgard to sit in the gods’ hall and speak threats over their mead.

Hrungnir sobered fast.

The Terms of the Duel

He tried to recover his dignity. He had been a guest, he said. It would be no honor for Thor to kill a guest who was unarmed for combat. If Thor wanted to fight, let it be a proper duel - single combat, at the border between Asgard and Jotunheim.

Thor accepted. He would have accepted any terms.

Hrungnir left and went back to Jotunheim to prepare. The other giants knew what was coming, and they were not idle.

Mokkurkalfi

The jotnar built Hrungnir a companion for the duel. They shaped a figure from clay - enormous, taller than most trees, broad enough to blot out the sky behind Hrungnir. They called it Mokkurkalfi. It had size, and it had mass, and it had one flaw: they could only find a mare’s heart small enough to fit inside it, and so Mokkurkalfi stood at the dueling ground and shook.

Hrungnir did not shake. He held his whetstone ready and his stone shield in front of him and waited.

Thor came in his chariot, his goats pulling hard. Thjalfi ran ahead on foot - faster than most things on two legs. Thjalfi reached Hrungnir first and told him, with some urgency, that Thor planned to attack low, coming up from underground to strike at the giant’s feet. Hrungnir believed him. He shifted his shield down to cover his legs.

It left his head and chest open.

The Whetstone and the Hammer

Thor came in fast. He threw Mjolnir. Hrungnir threw the whetstone at the same instant. The two weapons met in the air. The whetstone broke apart - fragments scattered across the ground, one shard lodging deep in Thor’s skull. Mjolnir did not break. It kept its line and hit Hrungnir in the head and Hrungnir went down, dead before he struck the earth.

Meanwhile Thjalfi dealt with Mokkurkalfi. It was not difficult. The clay giant’s mare’s heart failed it completely, and Thjalfi put it down without much trouble.

Thor, though, was not standing. Hrungnir had fallen across him, and the giant’s stone leg lay over Thor’s neck. The Aesir came to help and could not shift it. Strong as they were, the leg did not move.

Magni Lifts the Leg

Magni arrived. He was three years old, the son of Thor and the jotunn Jarnsaxa, and he walked up to Hrungnir’s leg and lifted it off his father.

Thor stood. He looked at his son for a moment. Then he said that Gullfaxi - Hrungnir’s horse, the fastest in Jotunheim - would belong to Magni.

Odin objected. A horse like that should go to a god, not to a child whose mother was a jotunn and not Sif.

Thor did not change his mind.

The shard of whetstone remained in Thor’s skull. A volva named Groa tried to sing it free, working her charms slowly, and it began to move - but Thor broke her concentration before she could finish, and the stone never came out. It stayed there, inside the bone, for as long as the stories remember him.