Thor’s Visit to Hymir

At a Glance

• Central figures: Thor, god of thunder, and Hymir, a powerful jotunn and legendary fisherman; also Tyr, god of war and Hymir’s stepson, and Jormungandr, the World Serpent.
• Setting: Asgard and Jotunheim, the land of the giants, where Hymir’s hall stands among frozen peaks. The tale comes from Norse tradition recorded in the Eddas.
• The turn: Thor casts his line into deep water and hooks Jormungandr itself - before he can kill the serpent, Hymir cuts the line in terror and sends the beast back into the sea.
• The outcome: Thor claims Hymir’s great cauldron, large enough to brew mead for all the Aesir, and carries it back to Asgard; the World Serpent survives, its fated battle with Thor still to come at Ragnarok.
• The legacy: The cauldron becomes the vessel used to brew mead for the gods’ feast - and the encounter with Jormungandr stands as the unfinished battle that Ragnarok will complete.

The gods in Asgard needed a cauldron. That was the start of it. They had food, mead, and the hall, but no vessel large enough to brew for all the Aesir at once. Tyr, who knew where such things could be found, told them about his giant stepfather Hymir - a jotunn of enormous size, cold temper, and legendary fishing skill, whose cauldron was wider and deeper than anything forged in Asgard. Thor heard this and was already reaching for his cloak.

The Hall Among the Frozen Peaks

Thor and Tyr made for Jotunheim together. Hymir’s hall sat high in the cold, cut from stone, and when they arrived it was Tyr’s mother who met them at the door. She was a giantess, and kinder than her husband. She warned them plainly: Hymir did not welcome strangers, and gods least of all.

Hymir came home at dusk. He filled the doorway. His eyes were the color of ice over deep water, and he looked at his visitors the way a man looks at weather coming in from the north. He did not attack them. Instead, he set a feast - cattle, bread, barrels of ale, enough for a hall full of men.

Thor ate two whole oxen before the meal was finished.

Hymir stared at the bones. He said, flatly, that if Thor ate like that, they would need to fish in the morning or the herd would not last another day.

Thor said he had no problem with fishing, but he would not be spending the day after minnows.

The Bait

Hymir refused to provide bait. He said nothing about why. He simply said there was none.

Thor walked to the pasture, found Hymir’s largest ox, and tore its head off. He brought the head back, swinging it by one horn. Hymir said nothing. They pushed the boat out into cold gray water as the sun came up, and rowed out past the shallows into the deeps.

Hymir fished first. He hauled up two whales, one after the other, clean and fast. He set them in the boat and looked at Thor.

Jormungandr on the Hook

Thor dropped his line - baited with the ox head - and let it sink into water black enough to have no bottom.

The sea changed. The boat pitched. Something seized the bait with a force that snapped Thor forward against the gunwale, and the line went taut as a drawn sword. He hauled back. The muscles in his arms pulled against something that did not want to come, and the ocean churned and boiled around them as he dragged it upward.

The head broke the surface.

Jormungandr, the World Serpent, the creature that circles the roots of the world with its own tail in its mouth. Its eyes were open and furious, and its coils were somewhere below in the dark, wrapping the sea. Thor had one hand on the line and the other on Mjolnir, and he was not afraid. He roared. He brought the hammer up.

Hymir cut the line.

The giant moved before Thor could stop him - knife already out, line already through. The serpent dropped back into the water and was gone. The sea went flat.

Thor turned on Hymir. He struck him hard enough to knock the giant into the side of the boat. Hymir said nothing after that. He picked up the oars. He rowed them back to shore.

The Stone Cup

At the hall, Hymir was not finished, or perhaps he was trying to salvage something from the day. He brought out a goblet - thick stone, old, worn smooth - and set it in front of Thor.

He said: break it, if you are as strong as you seem.

Thor took the cup, looked at it, and hurled it against the wall. The wall cracked. The cup was unbroken. He picked it up and threw it harder. Still nothing. Stone dust fell from the ceiling. The cup sat on the floor unmarked.

Tyr’s mother was watching from the far end of the hall. She spoke quietly.

“Strike it against Hymir’s head. Nothing in Jotunheim is harder than that.”

Thor looked at the cup, then at Hymir. He smashed it into the giant’s skull. The goblet came apart in his hands - shards of stone falling to the floor, nothing left but fragments.

Hymir sat very still. There was a mark on his forehead. The cup was dust.

He gave them the cauldron.

The Return to Asgard

Thor carried it back - wide enough to brew mead for all of Asgard, deep enough that a man could stand in it. Tyr walked beside him. They crossed back out of Jotunheim and brought it home to the gods.

The Aesir had their cauldron. The feast went ahead.

As for Jormungandr - it was back in the sea, which is where it would stay until Ragnarok, when it and Thor would meet again on the plain with no boat and no jotunn to cut between them. That meeting was still coming. It had always been coming. On that day, Thor would kill the serpent and then walk nine steps before the venom took him down.

But that was not this day. This day he came home with a cauldron, and the thunder rolled over Asgard, and the mead was brewed, and the hall was loud until morning.